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How Time-Travel is Possible?

Mystery Of Time Machine

By Sanjay KumarPublished 2 years ago 9 min read
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Time-Travel Loop

Science has been always a mystery before it's secret is understood.

Science is the only way to time travel and it is possible, but probably not in the way you're thinking.

So,Is time travel possible? Simple answer is Yes.And you're doing it right now : hurtling into the future at the impressive rate of one second per second. You're always moving through time at the same speed, whether you're watching Netflix or wishing you had more hours to visit with your loved one from out of town.

But this isn't the kind of time travel that's captivated almost countless science fiction writers or spurred a genre so extensive that Wikipedia lists over 500 titles in the category "Movies about Time Travel." In the franchises like "Star Trek," and "Back to the Future", "Doctor Who" characters climb into some wild vehicle to blast into the past or spin into the future.And Once the characters have traveled through time, they grapple with what happens if you change the past or present based on information received from the future ,which is where time travel stories intersect with the idea of parallel universes or alternate timelines.

Although, many people are fascinated by the idea of changing the past or seeing the future before it's due but in history no person has ever demonstrated the kind of swap time travel seen in science fiction or proposed a method of sending a person through significant periods of time which wouldn't destroy them on the way. And, as physicist Stephen Hawking wrote in his famous book "Black Holes and Baby Universes" (Movie Bantam, 1994) that 'The best evidence we have that time travel is not possible, and it never will be, is that we have not been invaded by hordes of tourists from the future.

Science does support some amount of time-bending. For example, physicist Albert Einstein's Theory Of Special Relativity proposes : time is an illusion that moves relative to an observer. Further it adds :An observer traveling near the speed of light will experience time, with all its aftereffects (aging,boredom etc.) much more slowly than an observer at rest. And in realty ,That's why astronaut Scott Kelly aged ever so slightly less over the course of a year in orbit than his twin brother who stayed here on Earth.

There are other scientific theories about time travel, including some weird physics that arise around black holes ,wormholes and string theory. While the time travel remains the domain of an ever-growing array of science fiction books,video games , movies, television shows, comics and more.

Albert Einstein developed his theory of Special Relativity in 1905. Along with his later expansion(the theory of General Relativity) it has become one of the foundational tenets of modern physics. Special relativity describes the relationship between time and space for objects moving at constant speeds in a straight line.

The very short version of the theory is deceptively simple. It says, all things are measured in relation to something else — that is to say, there is no "absolute" frame of reference. And the speed of light is constant. It stays the same no matter what the medium is, and no matter where it's measured from. And third, nothing is or no can go faster than the speed of light.

Those simple tenets unfolds actual, real-life time travel.Further explaining the time travel , an observer traveling at high velocity will experience time at a slower rate than an observer who isn't speeding through space. While we humans don't accelerate to near-light-speed, and we do send them swinging around the planet at 28,160 km/h (17,500 mph) aboard the International Space Station.

Astronaut Scott Kelly who was born after his twin brother and his fellow astronaut, Mark Kelly. Scott Kelly spent 520 days in orbit while Mark logged 54 days in space. The real difference in the speed at which they experienced time over the course of their lifetimes has actually widened the age gap between the two astronaut.

Twin brothers Scott and Mark Kelly

Mark Kelly said in a panel discussion on July 12, 2020 that where I used to be just 6 minutes older, now I am 6 minutes and 5 milliseconds older .

While ,the difference that low earth orbit makes in an astronaut's life span may be negligible which might be better suited for jokes among siblings than actual life extension or visiting the distant future.But the dilation in time between GPS satellites flying through space and people on Earth does make a difference.

The Global Positioning System(GPS) helps us know exactly where we are by communicating with a networks of a few dozen satellites positioned in a Earth orbit. The satellites circle the planet from 20,100 km (12,500 miles) away, moving at the speed of 8,700 mph (14,000 km/h).

As per the special relativity: the faster an object moves relative to another object, the slower that first object experiences time. The GPS satellites which have atomic clocks, this effect cuts 7 microseconds or 7 millionths of a second off each day.

And according to general relativity principle,the clocks which are closer to the center of a large gravitational mass like Earth tick more slowly than those farther away. Now, because the GPS satellites are much farther from the center of Earth compared to clocks on the surface, that adds another 45 microseconds onto the GPS satellite clocks each day.So, Combined with the negative 7 microseconds from the special relativity calculation, the net result is added 38 microseconds.

This means that in order to maintain the accuracy of time-frame needed to pinpoint your car or phone or a military drone — and engineers must account for an extra 38 microseconds in each satellite's day. That's why the atomic clocks onboard don’t tick over to the next day until they have run 38 microseconds longer than comparable clocks on the Earth.

Given the above numbers, it would take more than seven years for the atomic clock (in a GPS satellite) to not occur together itself from an Earth clock by a blink of an eye.

So,This kind of time travel may seem you as negligible as the Kelly brothers' age gap but given the hyper-accuracy of modern GPS technology, actually it does matter. If it can communicate with the satellites rotating overhead then your phone can nail down your location in space and time with pin-point accuracy.

According to NASA ,The Theory of General Relativity might also provide some scenarios that could allow travelers to go back in time.But the physical reality of time-travel methods are not a piece of cake.

Wormholes are theoretical tunnels through which the fabric of space-time could connect different moments or locations in reality to others.This is also known as White Holes ,Einstein-Rosen Bridges, as opposed to black holes, speculation about wormholes abounds. But no wormholes of any kind have been identified in real life despite taking up a lot of space or space-time in science fiction.

Stephen Hsu, a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Oregon said that the whole thing is very hypothetical at this point and no one thinks we're going to find a wormhole anytime soon in the future.

Primordial wormholes are predicted to be just 10^-33 centimeters (10^-34 inches ) at the tunnel's mouth. In past, they were expected to be too unstable for anything to be able to travel through them ,however a new study claimed that this is not the case.

The new theory was described by physicist Pascal Koiran which suggests that wormholes could work as viable space-time shortcuts. Koiran used the Eddington-Finkelstein metric, as opposed to the Schwarzschild metric which has been used in the majority of analyses in the past. Koiran’s paper was published in the Journal of Modern Physics D in October 2021.

Einstein's theories appear to make time travel difficult while some researchers have proposed other solutions that could allow jumps back and forth in time. But these alternate theories share one major flaw-that there's no way a person could survive the kind of gravitational pulling and pushing that each solution requires.

Astronomer Frank Tipler proposed a mechanism which sometimes also known as a Tipler Cylinder where one could take matter that is 10 times the sun's mass and then roll it into a very long but very dense cylinder. A time travel research organization which described the cylinder as "a black hole that has passed through a spaghetti factory." And after spinning the black hole spaghetti with a billions of revolutions per minute, a spaceship nearby follows a very precise spiral around the cylinder — which could travel backwards in time on a "closed, time-like curve,"

The major problem with Tipler Cylinder to become reality is that the cylinder would need to be infinitely long or be made of some unknown kind of matter.Now, for the foreseeable future, endless interstellar pasta is beyond human reach.

Theoretical physicist Amos Ori, Israel, proposed a model for a time machine made out of curved space-time which is a donut-shaped vacuum surrounded by a sphere of normal matter.

He added that the machine is space-time itself and If we were to create an area with a warp like this in space that would enable time lines to close on themselves it might enable future generations to return to visit our time(in past).

While ,there are a few caveats to Ori's time machine. First-earlier than the invention and construction of the time donut ,visitors to the past wouldn't be able to travel to times . Second and more importantly- the invention of this machine would depend on our ability to manipulate gravitational fields at will — an achievement that may be theoretically possible but is certainly beyond our current reach.

POPULAR MOVIES ABOUT TIME TRAVEL

1.Tenet (2020)

2.Palm Springs (2020)

3.Zach Snyder's Justice League (2021)

4.The Tomorrow War (2021)

5.Doctor Strange (2016)

6.A Wrinkle in Time (2018)

7.The Last Sharknado: It's About Time (2018)

8.Avengers: Endgame (2019)

9.Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989)

10.Groundhog Day (1993)

11.Galaxy Quest (1999)

12.The Butterfly Effect (2004)

13.13 Going on 30 (2004)Planet of the Apes (1968)

14.Superman (1978)

15.The Lake House (2006)

16.Meet the Robinsons (2007)

17.Hot Tub Time Machine (2010)

18.Midnight in Paris (2011)

19.Looper (2012)

20.X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)

21.Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

22.Interstellar (2014)

23.Time Bandits (1981)

24.The Terminator (1984)

25.Back to the Future series (1985, 1989, 1990)

26.Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

BEST TIME-TRAVEL TELEVISION SERIES

1.Lost (2004)

2.Phil of the Future (2004)

3.Steins;Gate (2011)

4.Outlander (2014)

5.Loki (2021)

6.Doctor Who (1963)

7.The Twilight Zone (1959))

8.Star Trek (multiple series)

9.Samurai Jack (2001)

POPULAR GAMES ABOUT TIME TRAVEL

1.Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack In Time (2009)

2.Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time (2013)

3.Dishonored 2 (2016)

4.Titanfall 2 (2016)

5.Outer Wilds (2019)

6.Chrono Trigger (1995)

7.TimeSplitters (2000-2005)

8.Kingdom Hearts (2002-2019)

9.Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (2003)

10.God of War II (2007)

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