If you had a time machine..?

I like a bit of sci-fi especially when time travel is involved. The possibilities that might present themselves if a time machine could actually be invented and used successfully would be endless and likely to have far reaching effects that we cannot even imagine.

The thing is...if a time machine could be invented, that would suggest that it has been invented at some point in the future. Now following that logic if the time machine has been invented then the possibility of someone travelling back in time is also probable and therefore wouldn't we know about it? Perhaps people are travelling back in time preventing bad things from happening in the world, keeping the human race on track (just). Perhaps someone travelled back in time and did something that prevented the time machine ever being invented. Wait! If that was the case then they wouldn't have been able to travel back in time to prevent it being built because it hadn't been built - a time paradox. Love them.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/hawking/strange/assets/images/ss.wormholes.jpg

One theory is that it is impossible to travel back in time to a time before the time machine is built. This gets round all these issues.

Stephen Hawking, the famous British theoretical physicist suggests that building a time machine could be theoretically possible. He suggests that a time traveller would have to travel across the 4th dimension, time. To do this he or she would have to bravely tunnel through time. Physicists believe that these tunnels already exist and they have called them wormholes.

A wormhole is tiny wrinkle in time, smaller than molecules, smaller than atoms in a place called quantum foam. It is here that these tiny wormholes exist, linking two separate places at two separate times. Way to small for humans to traverse but if they are made bigger, really big, trillions of times bigger then they could be big enough. Although theoretically possible Professor Hawking suggests that this type of time machine would produce many other issues that would make it unlikely for time explorers ever to be able to travel through them.

http://img7.uploadhouse.com/fileuploads/15767/15767807dfab7fae9987fda24ec78c085cdedb89.jpg

Stephen Hawking also suggests that travelling into the future would be easier if we could actually travel very fast, in fact near to the speed of light. 186,000 miles per second is the speed limit of the Universe, the speed of light. He suggests that you imagine a spaceship travelling near to this speed limit. Nothing can break the speed limit. Now imagine a child on the spaceship running up the ship towards the front. The child's forward speed is added to the speed of the spaceship. The total speed can't break the speed limit so to protect the speed limit everything on board the spaceship slows down. Time slows down. Its natures way of dealing with it.

It is calculated that for a spaceship travelling at 99% the speed of light a single day on board would be equivalent to a whole year on Earth. Therefore a spaceship flying around the Earth at this speed for one year would land back on the Earth approximately 400 years later.

A flight into the unknown with no return journey possible. Would you take the risk?

 

Comments

  1. Lt. Worf24 January 2013 at 11:02

    Hmmm, there is the theory of the Mobius, a twist in the fabric of space, where time becomes a loop..

    ReplyDelete
  2. Lt. Worf24 January 2013 at 11:02

    where time becomes a loop..

    ReplyDelete
  3. Lt. Worf24 January 2013 at 11:02

    where time becomes a loop..

    ReplyDelete
  4. Lt. Worf24 January 2013 at 11:04

    where time becomes a loop..

    ReplyDelete

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