• Question: Is it true that there is some form of time travel?

    Asked by brooket__ to Franco, Koi, Mark on 23 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Franco Falcone

      Franco Falcone answered on 23 Jun 2016:

      Hi Brooket

      I am not a physcist so take my answer with a (large) pinch of salt. Time travel is possible according to scientists like Einstein, if you were able to travel with the speed of light from and back to earth, because time slows down when you travel at this speed. However there is no technology that can achieve such speed for anyy spaceship and it would not be tolerated by the human body.

      However time travel if possible would entail the well-known time paradox, of someone who travels back into the past, and accidentally kills one of his or her ancestors. Is this possible? If you kill your grandfather, when he was a child, one of your parents won’t exist, and you won’t exist, so you won’t be able to travel back in time to kill your grandfather. And so on. If you want to explore this line of thought, it has been solved by many science fiction authors such as Rene Barjavel or my favourite autthor Robert Silverberg (Child of Time, Hawksbill Station, Up the Line for examples) or Paul Anderson’s Time Patrol, all these authors have decsribed their own (sometimes very different version) of the consequeneces of space travel.
      Also it has been hypothesised that if you cling onto the edge of a black hole, time will be slower there, but I don’t know whether any of this is true, as no one has ever verified this with an experiment. And that’s what Biologists do, they do lots of experiments to validate their hypotheses.

    • Photo: Mark Booth

      Mark Booth answered on 23 Jun 2016:

      Hi Brooket

      We are all travellers through time. If you mean, is there the ability to move backwards or forwards at will, then maybe

      when we look at the stars in the sky we are looking at information from the past. We can pick and choose how far back into the past we look. What we can’t do is change the past. So we can travel but we can’t interact.

      we can look into the future by making predictions and projections. In our minds we can travel as far into the future as we want and interact with it. that is a form of time travel but not the same type as seen in Back to the Future. Imagine if it was possible – would we be even here because at some point somebody with an agenda could travel back and destroy us?

    • Photo: Arporn Wangwiwatsin

      Arporn Wangwiwatsin answered on 23 Jun 2016:

      Hi brooket,

      very interesting. I think we need to learn a lot more about time dimension and probably even more about the human sensory before we can reach that point. Then after we learn a lot about time, it will be a question whether we can develop a tool that will allow us to manipulate the time space without getting into the paradox that Franco has illustrated. …who know what the future may bring. 😉

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