I love a good time travel story. There's something about the possibility of leaping far into the future, traveling to the past, experiencing famous events live, and turning regretted mistakes into something better. (That's never wrong…)
I've been thinking a lot about time travel lately. After reading two of his paperbacks related to that concept. Scout Comics” forever forward The film follows a group of friends who become stranded after traveling through time, hoping to find a futuristic society with the technology to send them back again.And of course, Marvel works too. X-MEN: Days of Future Past: Doomsday This is a sequel/prequel to one of the best time travel stories ever written in the comics medium.
But unfortunately, I don't believe that time travel can actually exist. Well, the truth is, we're all time traveling right now. It's just always moving in one direction and usually at a constant speed. Of course, what I mean is that I don't think flying into the distant future or traveling into the past is possible and will never happen. And as a physicist, I have my reasons.
Remember how we said that we “normally” travel at a constant speed through time? Einstein's special theory of relativity states that objects (including humans) accelerated to speeds close to the speed of light , which explains how time passes more slowly than for objects that actually remain in place.
For example, a person who accelerates the speed of light to 99% would only age by one day, but anyone remaining on Earth would age by a full week. This way you jump forward in time. forever forward – In theory, it could actually happen. This idea is commonly called the twin paradox.This was a narrative element in Christopher Nolan's film interstellar.
The problem is that accelerating a human being (in a spaceship) to the required speed would require an overwhelming amount of energy that we currently do not have access to, and perhaps You will no longer be able to access it. Therefore, such a leap in time will probably never occur.Still, this just works forward to make it in time.
More stories, latest articles and more flash The movie uses Einstein's special theory of relativity to argue that traveling faster than the speed of light allows a person to travel backwards in time. However, this is just science fiction. Special theory of relativity clearly states that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. sorry.
But Einstein's other theory of relativity, general relativity, explains that both space and time can be curved by large amounts of mass or energy. You can also imagine space-time being extremely curved and time looping back.
In fact, the famous mathematician Kurt Gödel actually discovered a solution to Einstein's so-called field equations that made looping timelines possible. In such a Gödel universe, every point in spacetime has a timeline that connects it to other points in spacetime, whether that point is in the future or the past. That is, you can move from any point to any other point.
The problem is that Gödel's solution has nothing to do with the nature of the universe we live in. Gödel's solution describes a rotating universe, but our universe is expanding. And even in such a Gödelian universe, the amount of energy required to travel back in time would be astonishing.
Back in our universe, it would take an extreme amount of energy (see a pattern here?) or a very massive object to bend spacetime to the extremes needed to imagine extraordinary time jumps. One of these is required. A black hole is an extremely massive object that bends space-time to the limits of what physics can understand.
But that's a bit of a problem. Physics still cannot explain what happens inside a black hole.I know Matthew McConaughey's character interstellar Travel to the solar system to send a message to the past, then return to the solar system. But in reality, you will die long before entering the black hole.
Therefore, many science fiction stories base their time travel stories on the principles of physics, especially Einstein's theory of double relativity, all of which have been all but eliminated by the current state of science. But it's still fun to imagine the possibilities of time travel in books, movies, and comics. In this four-part series of his, we look at the main ways time travel is depicted in science fiction. We will then see whether such time travel could logically exist, assuming it is physically possible.
AIPT Science is co-hosted by AIPT and New York City Skeptics.
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