• Question: do you believe that in the future time travel could happen?

    Asked by biskinkiki1234 to Angus, Christian, Hannah, Laura, Simon on 17 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Angus Ferraro

      Angus Ferraro answered on 17 Jun 2013:

      It would be pretty cool, but a little confusing if I met myself from the future! I think it will be a long time before we get proper time travel.

      Time travel is possible though, and scientists have managed to do it for tiny particles (but only a very small time shift). If you travel really, really, really fast, time slows down. In other words, you can slow *your* time down, but I keep going through time as normal. If you go slower than me you end up behind me, so to me it looks like you’ve gone back in time.

      There are other really weird and complicated ways you might be able to travel forward or backward in time, but I don’t understand all of them! It’s all a bit brain-melting to be honest. Perhaps I should have paid more attention in my physics lectures!

    • Photo: Laura Roberts Artal

      Laura Roberts Artal answered on 17 Jun 2013:

      I don’t understand enough of the physics about how time travel would work to really be able to say one way or another.

      I’m not sure I would want to time travel. It’s exciting not knowing what will happen in the future and the temptation to change things I did in the past might be too great! Although, I’m sure given the chance…. I’d probably jump to it! :)!

    • Photo: Christian Maerz

      Christian Maerz answered on 17 Jun 2013:

      I guess the best way to answer this question is with yet another question: Would people 100 years ago have imagined that something like the internet could ever exist, or plains flying faster than sound, or a robot analysing rock samples on Mars? Technological progress happens so fast nowadays that in my opinion, we probably cannot even imagine what the next big thing will be in 100 years time. Time travel might be one of those things!

    • Photo: Simon Holyoake

      Simon Holyoake answered on 18 Jun 2013:

      It depends whether you want to go forwards or backwards!

      forwards is definitely possible, after all, we are all travelling forwards in time as we speak!

      There are two possible ways to travel forwards in time, by travelling really fast (above 90 percent of the speed of light, so *really* fast) or by sitting in a very strong gravity field (such as that around a black hole) both of these things slow time down in their immediate location, so if you were on a spaceship orbiting a black hole or flying around near the speed of light, you wouldn’t notice time slowing down, but the rest of the universe would be racing along, when you stepped out of your spaceship, you would essentially be standing in the future!

      In actual fact, the scientists on the international space station are experiencing time travel, as they are moving very quickly relative to earth, time is passing ever so slightly slower for them (it’s not much, it’s fractions of a microsecond slower)

      Reverse time travel is much more complicated, due to the whole causality problem (if you went back in time and hummed moonlight sonata to Beethoven, who actually wrote it??) but I believe the equations *do* solve in both directions, however it’s only theoretically possible at the moment in either direction due to the vast amounts of energy required!

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