Is time travel a possibility? We've all questioned this at some point in our lives. It is also one of the most difficult problems for physicists to solve. Many people have attempted to understand and explain this problem in their ways, from popular media to scientific journals.
Even Albert Einstein, the brilliant physician, took up the problem of figuring out how time works and built his general theory of relativity around it. In a nutshell, time travel is the most interesting yet perplexing mystery in existence. However, the theory of relativity does provide a little insight into whether time travel is truly conceivable or not. Continue reading to discover out.
In summary, determining whether it is doable or not presents two major obstacles. The first is technological advancement. Even if a physicist proves time travel is true using a brilliant equation, we will never truly know unless we can develop a machine capable of going across time using that equation.
However, to make the time machine in the first place, we would most likely require rare cosmic material and technology that we do not currently have access to. This has always been the way technology has progressed. The theory comes first, and then, as technology advances, hypotheses become reality. An excellent example is a virtual reality.
The second, and perhaps most crucial, difficulty for time travel is consistency. Consider the following. You discover a contraption that can transport you back through time. You utilized it and traveled back 10 minutes in time. You committed suicide after reaching the past. But now that you've committed suicide, you couldn't have found the time machine ten minutes later and went to the past to commit suicide. This is known as a paradox in physics. And the paradox is still one of the most difficult challenges to address in time travel.
The concept of parallel worlds has been around for a long. We know what many dimensions and parallel worlds look like thanks to scientist Michio Kaku's string theory and science fiction. Taking another hypothetical idea to establish the hypothetical difficulty of time travel, on the other hand, is not fair from a scientific standpoint.
As a result, we consider the general theory of relativity as a solution. Time, according to Einstein, is related to the observer's frame of reference. To put it simply, time is a point of reference rather than a thing that exists. So, whereas certain objects, such as mass, are constant and independent of their environment, the same cannot be said for time.
And here's how it explains the potential of time travel. According to relativity theory, the speed of light is constant, but time is only a reference. Furthermore, the speed of light is the quickest any object in the cosmos can move (based on our present knowledge). So, a person moving at the speed of light will experience time slower than others and will be traveling in the past relative to others.
Astronaut Scott Kelly, who was born six minutes after his twin brother Mark, is a wonderful illustration of this. Scott has now spent 520 days in space on the International Space Station, which is orbiting the Earth at a speed of 28,160 kilometers per hour. As a result, the time gap between the two brothers widened. "So, where[as] I used to be simply 6 minutes older, now I am 6 minutes and 5 milliseconds older," Mark stated during a panel discussion, according to Space.com.
