( This might be my first article for a magazine (a children's magazine) .... My first ever published article !!!)
From Star trek’s “Warp Drive” to the “DeLorean time machine” in Back to the future, time travel has always been a fantasy in the minds of the curious. Some scientists have shrugged it off as fiction, only possible in movies, but no one knows for sure whether time travel will be possible. Time travel currently exists as a mere conjecture. So, will it be possible to go into the past and greet the ancient Egyptians? Have we reached a stage where we can develop a time machine, like in the movies or will it only be a distant dream for people like us, in the coming centuries? Let us look into the various technologies imagined by many futurists and scientists across the world.
Firstly, we need to understand how time itself works. Does it pass at the same speed everywhere or does it slow at some parts of the universe? Well, time is, frankly speaking, a very complex phenomenon. Time is the fourth dimension of the universe. But, unlike the other dimensions of the universe, you can only travel in one direction in time (the forward direction). But, the fascinating part is yet to come. It slows down near objects of very heavy mass. By heavy mass, I don’t mean a fat person or even a whale; instead I refer to a mass as heavy as the sun. Also, believe it or not, time will slow down in a vehicle when the speed of your vehicle nears that of light. These theories, no doubt fascinating, have been discovered by the genius physicist, Dr. Albert Einstein. Actually, we must thank Einstein for even raising a possibility of time travel.
So, what do I mean by “slow down” near a heavy mass or in a fast moving vehicle? I simply mean, if you circle around a very heavy mass, even heavier than the sun, or travel almost at the speed of light, time will be slower for you than the rest of the universe. For example, if I move at 99.99 % of the speed of light for a minute, the world might have gone ahead by an hour, by the time your one-minute journey is over. By now, you might have guessed how I’ll travel into the future. It will be by travelling fast. But is it possible for me to go at the speed of light? Remember, Einstein had also said that nothing in the universe can exceed the speed of light. You still can go near that limit, but it will cost you enormous amounts of energy. One of the ways of going that fast will be “Warp drives”. Warp drive essentially imagines contracting space ahead of you and expanding it behind you, making you go ahead (Alcubierre Warp drive).
So, this is how going into the future might be possible. But, when it would eventually happen, is an open question. Still, we haven’t talked about the most challenging part of time travel. This will be going into the past. Going into the past has one huge set of problems. This is called paradoxes. Imagine a situation where a mad scientist goes into the past with a gun to kill himself! He arrives in the past, with the gun, and when he sees his own self, he shoots him. What do you think, will the scientist be murdered by his own self from the future or such a situation is impossible to occur? This is a paradoxical question, which scientists have not answered yet and which also opens up the realms of parallel universe, a phenomenon existing only in Star Trek.
The area of time travel only exists in the imagination of humans. Theories on time travel currently reside mainly in comics and movies. Science has still not entered a phase where we can control time. Yet, looking into the past we realize humans have never bowed down to impossibilities. If we can conquer the skies with our jets, some day, we will also be able to conquer time and explore the universe, in a way we only dreamed about.
