Does that mean traveling back in time is impossible? Some, like British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, have said so.
THE JOURNEY BACK TIME MACHINE SEQUEL HOW TO
Then again, even if we manage to bolt into the future, there remains the tricky issue of how to return by traveling to the past.Īccording to Einstein's theory, approaching the speed of light would theoretically slow time, traveling at the speed of light would make it stand still and traveling faster than the speed of light would reverse time.īut Einstein also showed that traveling at or faster than the speed of light is impossible because mass at these speeds becomes infinite. "There's no reason to discount the idea." "There's no reason to think that in the next few hundred years, we won't be able to reach these speeds," he said. Still, Paul Halpern, a physicist at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia and author of the book Time Journeys: A Search for Cosmic Destiny and Meaning, believes the prospect isn't so far off. The task would require intense levels of energy that we currently can't achieve. There are, of course, significant obstacles - namely building a spaceship that can travel at speeds close to the speed of light. That may not seem like much, but as Gott points out in his book, "the journey of a thousand years must begin with a fraction of a second." Avdeyev's prolonged travel made him a younger man - by about one-50th of a second - than those of us who have remained on Earth. Gott estimates that our best current time traveler is Russian cosmonaut Sergei Avdeyev who was in orbit for a total of 748 days during three space flights. Why does all this mean time travel is possible? Gott explains, the same principles that make the clocks tick slower on planes and low on Earth, should also work at extremes. They found the clocks at the base - closer to the mass of Earth - ticked ever more slowly than those perched high. They found the accelerated particles decayed slightly more slowly than ones that remained sitting in the lab.Īs for the effect of mass on time, scientists have measured the ticking of atomic clocks at the top and base of skyscrapers. In other experiments, scientists used particle accelerators to speed elementary particles to nearly the speed of light. When the airborne clock was returned to Earth, she compared its time with the one that hadn't moved and found that time had moved a fraction of a second more slowly for the clock on board the plane. In 1975 Carol Allie of the University of Maryland synchronized two atomic clocks and placed one on a plane and flew it around for several hours and left the other on Earth.
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