One consequence of this is there is no guarantee the clocks will tick at the same rate. In fact, many clocks will tick at different rates.
Even worse, the faster you travel relative to someone else, the slower your clock will tick compared to theirs.
Spoiler alert: this article explains a key plot point, but we don’t give away anything you won’t see in trailers. Thanks to reader Florence, 7, for her questions.
At the beginning of the new Disney Pixar film, Lightyear, Buzz Lightyear gets stranded on a dangerous faraway planet with his commanding officer and crew.
Continue reading “Is time travel real? What Pixar’s movie Lightyear shows about Einstein’s theory” »
After some serious number crunching, a UBC researcher has come up with a mathematical model for a viable time machine.
Ben Tippett, a mathematics and physics instructor at UBC’s Okanagan campus, recently published a study about the feasibility of time travel. Tippett, whose field of expertise is Einstein’s theory of general relativity, studies black holes and science fiction when he’s not teaching. Using math and physics, he has created a formula that describes a method for time travel.
“People think of time travel as something as fiction,” says Tippett. “And we tend to think it’s not possible because we don’t actually do it. But, mathematically, it is possible.”
Time travel into the past is a tricky thing. We know of no single law of physics that absolutely forbids it, and yet we can’t find a way to do it, and if we could do it, the possibility opens up all sorts of uncomfortable paradoxes (like what would happen if you killed your own grandfather).
But there could be a way to do it. We just need to find a wormhole first.
Dr. Michael Salla
This is the official trailer/short film for the “Time Travel, Temporal Warfare & Our Future” webinar to be held on July 2, 2022. Covers the historical development of time travel technology in Germany and the United States, and how it has been used in a temporal war by different factions of humans and extraterrestrial organizations. Explains how humanity was manipulated through time travel technology, and how that is about to end as we enter a new period in human development due to the arrival of ET Seeder races.
Time travel makes regular appearances in popular culture, with innumerable time travel storylines in movies, television and literature. But it is a surprisingly old idea: one can argue that the Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex, written by Sophocles over 2,500 years ago, is the first time travel story.
But is time travel in fact possible? Given the popularity of the concept, this is a legitimate question. As a theoretical physicist, I find that there are several possible answers to this question, not all of which are contradictory.
The simplest answer is that time travel cannot be possible because if it was, we would already be doing it. One can argue that it is forbidden by the laws of physics, like the second law of thermodynamics or relativity. There are also technical challenges: it might be possible but would involve vast amounts of energy.
An international group of astronomers led by Benjamin Thomas of The University of Texas at Austin has used observations from the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) at the university’s McDonald Observatory to unlock a puzzling mystery about a stellar explosion discovered several years ago and evolving even now. The results, published in today’s issue of The Astrophysical Journal, will help astronomers better understand the process of how massive stars live and die.
When an exploding star is first detected, astronomers around the world begin to follow it with telescopes as the light it gives off changes rapidly over time. They see the light from a supernova get brighter, eventually peak, and then start to dim. By noting the times of these peaks and valleys in the light’s brightness, called a “light curve,” as well as the characteristic wavelengths of light emitted at different times, they can deduce the physical characteristics of the system.
“I think what’s really cool about this kind of science is that we’re looking at the emission that’s coming from matter that’s been cast off from the progenitor system before it exploded as a supernova,” Thomas said. “And so this makes a sort of time machine.”
“If one made a research grant application to work on time travel it would be dismissed immediately,” writes the physicist Stephen Hawking in his posthumous book Brief Answers to the Big Questions. He was right. But he was also right that asking whether time travel is possible is a “very serious question” that can still be approached scientifically.
Arguing that our current understanding cannot rule it out, Hawking, it seems, was cautiously optimistic. So where does this leave us? We cannot build a time machine today, but could we in the future?
Let’s start with our everyday experience. We take for granted the ability to call our friends and family wherever they are in the world to find out what they are up to right now. But this is something we can never actually know. The signals carrying their voices and images travel incomprehensibly fast, but it still takes a finite time for those signals to reach us.
Have you ever made a mistake that you wish you could undo? Correcting past mistakes is one of the reasons we find the concept of time travel so fascinating. As often portrayed in science fiction, with a time machine, nothing is permanent anymore – you can always go back and change it. But is time travel really possible in our universe, or is it just science fiction?
Our modern understanding of time and causality comes from general relativity. Theoretical physicist Albert Einstein’s theory combines space and time into a single entity – “spacetime” – and provides a remarkably intricate explanation of how they both work, at a level unmatched by any other established theory.
Continue reading “There’s One Way Time Travel Could Be Possible, According to This Physicist” »
We can travel in time, just not like in the movies Earendel was observed using an effect where the fabric of space-time is warped by gravity – a phenomenon predicted by Einstein. This causes light to bend as it passes by objects with large masses, like planets, suns, or even galaxies, allowing us to see around and even behind these objects.
