Time travel, time machine…the coolest and highly
debated topic in the sci-fi world. Most of the conversations include going back
in time and killing Hitler to avoid World War II or for those who hate calculus
and physics – killing most prominent scientists. But the concept isn’t that
straight forward, it is rather one of the most complex topics to fit into the
existing laws of physics. Everyone in the entire world, one or the other time
have come across this subject. And have lost into deep thoughts about it.
Scientifically also the topic is quite a blur and debated based on the theory
to be followed.
Source:
Google Images
“Time Travel” the word
was first mentioned in the H. G. Wells’ sci-fi novel “The Time Machine” in
1885. It was after this that the concept became popular among the common
people. Not very long after that Albert Einstein came up with General Theory of
Relativity and Special Relativity. The equations proved that Time Travel into
the future is possible. According to it, if you move faster through space, the
time will, by a factor, move slower on comparison to someone static. Consider
yourself in a rocket going at a very fast rate going somewhere into the cosmos,
so when you return back on earth, you would have aged slower than those already
on earth, although the difference would only be a fraction of minutes. To get a
wider time gap like a year or a decade into the future you must travel faster
than the speed of light. A few of the geometric equations of special and general
relativity permit time travel into the past with very bizarre physical
conditions to be maintained while doing so and still it violates the basic
principles of physics. Even the well renowned physicist of our era Stephen
Hawking has agreed to this concept.
Other than from the physics point of view, there are many
different contradictions and paradoxes to the basic concept of Time Travel.
First of all travelling back or forward in time for example let’s say a year,
then you will feel like spending a year travelling even though your age
wouldn’t be affected and you can return back to the exact moment from where you
left off, yet it is very hard to imagine spending all that time in a Time
Machine. Another paradox for travelling back in time is called the Grandfather
Paradox, where if you invent Time Machine and travel back in time to good old
days of your Grandpa before he got married and accidentally killed him…which
will lead back to you not being born and thus not inventing the Time Machine
and thus your Grandpa stays alive which again leads to you being born and thus
inventing the Time Machine…so you notice the loop goes on and on, that is the
most infamous Grandfather Paradox.
Source:
Back to the Future (movie)
Also travelling back in
time and interacting with any of the events being conducted can throw the
Universe into a very different trajectory based on the upcoming chain of
events, and thus after inventing the Time Machine and multiple users using it
will create a chaos in the Universe. This type of situation is depicted in the
movie “Back to the Future”. This is one of the major problems in justifying
Time Travel. A more logical type of justification is seen in the movie “Harry
Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban” where if, during an event your future-self
interacts with you then, when the time comes, and when you go back in time, you
will perform the same task and the chain of events will carry on in the same
fashion without changing the course of history. A similar type of theory known
as Shakespeare Analogy states that the valuable literature published by the
great writer William Shakespeare was actually provided to him by his
future-self which would make him famous in the future, and hence the literature
was never written in the first place. Thus the question arises who actually
created the literature! (Note that the Shakespeare’s literature is only taken
as an example to understand the analogy)
Source:
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (movie)
Another paradoxical
theory that I call “YouTube catastrophe” is about the people being interviewed
who claim to be from the future and are stuck in the present due to their
“Broken Time Machine” which is widely popular on video streaming app called
YouTube these days. The popularity of the video leads us to draw the following
conclusions that the alleged time travellers in their future time would have
come across their own video on YouTube and still decided to come to the present
year and get stuck here which is just insane, or that the YouTube doesn.t exist
when the Time Machine will be invented during the year these “Time Travellers”
claim to be from, and the final one is that all those videos are a hoax. In my
personal opinion I believe in the third one as it seems the most likely right
now. I guess there is no way to know other than wait until the time comes.
Many factors and conditions to be satisfied, many
equations to be resolved without breaking a single law governing the Universe
and staying under the boundaries of Science is what makes this task of Time
Travel really a challenging one. Still there are many physicists and scientists
continuously trying to tackle the challenge and maybe will come up with a
solution in the near future. Or maybe, they might already have, you never know!