Introduction
According to Handy, time travel is a concept that has provoked eternal debates, amazing science fiction movies, documentaries, and influenced our pop culture in more ways than one. Scientists have wild debates about traveling back in the past. The discussion gave birth to paradoxes and theories getting debunked by each other in an endless cycle. However, time travel to the future is a different story. Here are five ways you may be able to time travel:
The Technologies
- Velocity – Star Wars, Star Trek, and a bunch of other films have already shown it. According to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, when you travel at appreciable fractions of the speed of light, time slows down for you relative to the outside world. This isn’t just limited to theory but has been measured with twin atomic clocks.
One of the clocks was stationary on Earth while the other one was flown in a jet aircraft. The clock on the aircraft ticked slower compared to its twin on Earth since it was traveling at a relatively higher speed. This experiment showed a minuscule effect which could only be measured with atomic clocks. However, as you reach close to light speed, effects are drastic.
- Gravity – Yup, another theory from Einstein. He theorized that you feel time slower with stronger gravity. As expected, scientists have measured this too at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology a decade ago. Two atomic clocks were taken with one being 33 centimeters above the other. Unsurprisingly the lower one ticked slower due to stronger gravity.
For time travel using gravity, we need to find places in the universe with a strong gravitational pull. For instance, black holes are such sources, but they are dangerous and don’t have significant time dilation to be worth the risk.
However, the most mind-blowing thing isn’t the distance of thousands of lightyears we have to travel to reach the closest black hole. Instead, it is navigation systems that we need to build to account for time dilation and satellite positions depending on that time dilation.
- Wormholes – Wormholes can be considered as quantum bridges that allow us to take a shortcut from one point in spacetime to the other and cover massive distances of billions of lightyears. They have been theorized in Einstein’s theory of general relativity and according to renowned physicists like Stephen Hawking, they are constantly popping in and going out of existence at the quantum scale.
A theoretical way to time travel with wormholes is to capture one and rescale it to human levels. This has been theorized, however, the absurd energy consumption required to pull this off makes it impractical. Moreover, incompatibility between quantum physics and general relativity makes things even more difficult to prove or measure.
Conclusion
Handy believes that time travel is an intriguing concept that can even be a crucial step for human beings to become an intergalactic civilization. Let’s just hope that good guys have a great head start at researching the technology.
