Time Travel: Is it really possible?
Time Travel: Is it really possible?
Before I
travel time and write the article, I wanted to ask you one simple question;
do you think time travel is possible? You might have seen in various movies and
some cartoon characters that they travel time in a time machine into the past
or future. For example; this is a movie named The Time Machine where the
traveller/the hero makes a time machine and travels into the past. And some
cartoon characters like in Doraemon. So, is it really possible?
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| 1. The Time Machine Movie |
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| 2. Cartoon Series: Doraemon |
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| 3. Albert Einstein |
Albert
Einstein, in 1905, proposed the theory of relativity. And what theory of
relativity says that time and space are relative to each other in context to a
frame of reference. Which means if you ought to go move at the speed of light,
time will pass slowly in the gravitational field or reference to other people
i.e. other frame of reference which also lead to the famous equation e=mc2
Say you want to go to a space
voyage/journey in a spacecraft which travels at the speed of light i.e. 3 lac
km/s (299792458 m/s exactly) and when you left the earth you were 15 years old.
By the time when you return to earth if you are 20 years old, your friends
would have grown 65 years old. You will have experienced only 5 years, but your
friends will have experienced 50 years. This means you have travelled time.
Didn’t you?
Stephan
Hawking a well-known scientist said that if you would go around the earth at
the speed of light in an anti-clockwise direction of earth, you will find
yourself in future. And if you would go in a clock-wise direction, you will
find yourself into the past. Unless one can make such kind of machine which
travels at the speed of light and take humans too along itself.
LHC(Large
Hadron Collider) organised at Geneva Switzerland produces large amount of
energy when two protons or one proton and one neutron are collided at the speed
of light. If two small particles cam be moved at such a speed then perhaps in
near future it would be possible to move large machine can be invented.
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| 4. Large Hadron Collider, Geneva, Switzerland |
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| 5. Collision between the atomic particles |
Now, let’s
assume that in near future a genius scientist succeeded in making such type of
machine which would go at the speed of light around the earth. But, time
travelling will still be impossible because of some paradoxes, because of some
ambiguity in the nature’s behaviour. One of the famous paradox is the
grandfather paradox. Suppose you have a time machine and you decided to into
the past with a rifle in your hand to kill you grandfather as he was not there
to tell you fairy tales in your childhood. When you meet your grandpa you shot
him dead? The question here arises is that who killed the grandpa? If he was
killed, then your father would not have been born and so as you. That’s a
paradox.
Another
paradox is the twin paradox, where suppose there are twin brothers and one of
them decides to go into the future and when he returns after a year then the
other brother have grown old because time moved slowly with reference to the
first brother. So they are nit twins now. How is that possible?
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| 6. The twin Paradox Example |
Writer
Robert Heinlein in his short story “All You Zombies” perhaps proposed the
craziest paradox. Which is as below:
Reeling from these disasters, rejected by society, scorned by fate, "he" becomes a drunkard and drifter. Not only has Jane lost her parents and her lover, but he has lost his only child as well. Years later, in 1970, he stumbles into a lonely bar, called Pop's Place, and spills out his pathetic story to an elderly bartender. The sympathetic bartender offers the drifter the chance to avenge the stranger who left her pregnant and abandoned, on the condition that he join the "time travelers corps." Both of them enter a time machine, and the bartender drops off the drifter in 1963. The drifter is strangely attracted to a young orphan woman, who subsequently becomes pregnant.
The bartender then goes forward 9 months, kidnaps the baby girl from the hospital, and drops off the baby in an orphanage back in 1945. Then the bartender drops off the thoroughly confused drifter in 1985, to enlist in the time travelers corps. The drifter eventually gets his life together, becomes a respected and elderly member of the time travelers corps, and then disguises himself as a bartender and has his most difficult mission: a date with destiny, meeting a certain drifter at Pop's Place in 1970.
The question is: Who is Jane's mother, father, grandfather, grand mother, son, daughter, granddaughter, and grandson? The girl, the drifter, and the bartender, of course, are all the same person. These paradoxes can made your head spin, especially if you try to untangle Jane's twisted parentage. If we drawJane's family tree, we find that all the branches are curled inward back on themselves, as in a circle. We come to the astonishing conclusion that she is her own mother and father! She is an entire family tree unto herself.
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Robert Heinlein's Paradox
Unless these
paradoxes have a solution or an explanation, making a time machine and
travelling into the past of the future is impossible. But we know technology has been advancing day
by day so in the near future it may be possible to make time machine and it may
also be possible to travel time but you will not be able to alter any
happenings happened in the past or the future.
Bibliography:
http://newt.phys.unsw.edu.au/einsteinlight/jw/module4_twin_paradox.htm
http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/glossary/grandfather_paradox.html
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