Scientists Explain Why Time Travel Is Possible (2024)

FAQs

Scientists Explain Why Time Travel Is Possible? ›

Relativity means it is possible to travel into the future. We don't even need a time machine, exactly. We need to either travel at speeds close to the speed of light, or spend time in an intense gravitational field. In relativity, these two acts are essentially equivalent.

What did Albert Einstein say about time travel? Einstein stated that it is possible for one to travel into the future if one travels at the speed of light. If this were to occur, the individual would age slower than those on Earth, traveling at its speed.

According to Stephen Hawking, time travel is possible, and not just in the way we might think. Backward time travel is not supported by Hawking's theories, because new matter (a new you) would need to be created – one existing in the past and one in the present, traveling back in time.

Conceptually, it is possible to do something similar with humans. To visit the Earth in the year 3000, it is necessary only to hop in a spaceship that can travel at 99.995% of the speed of light.

In fact, according to Albert Einstein's famous equation, E = mc² , time travel is possible, at least in one direction. Going the other way — back to the past — presents a trickier challenge.

Many in the scientific community believe that backward time travel is highly unlikely to be possible. Any theory that would allow time travel would introduce potential problems of causality.

There are many questions about traveling to the past that do not yet have solid answers in science. However, in all time travel theories that seem to be allowed by real science, there is no way a traveler can go back in time to before the time machine was built.

According to NASA, time travel is possible, just not in the way you might expect. Albert Einstein's theory of relativity says time and motion are relative to each other, and nothing can go faster than the speed of light, which is 186,000 miles per second. Time travel happens through what's called “time dilation.”

The second law of thermodynamics states that things in the universe can either remain the same or become more disordered over time. It's a bit like saying you can't unscramble eggs once they've been cooked. According to this law, the universe can never go back exactly to how it was before.

"The range of mathematical processes we discovered show that time travel with free will is logically possible in our Universe without any paradox."

Has anyone built a time machine? ›

Although many people are fascinated by the idea of changing the past or seeing the future before it's due, no person has ever demonstrated the kind of back-and-forth time travel seen in science fiction or proposed a method of sending a person through significant periods of time that wouldn't destroy them on the way.

Will time traveling be possible in the next 50 years? Almost certainly not. Our current understanding of the laws of physics tells us that time only moves in one direction, and there is no serious scientific theory regarding time travel, nor any scientific research pursuing the objective of time travel.

Einstein's special theory of relativity governs our understanding of both the flow of time and the speed at which objects can move. In special relativity, the speed of light is the ultimate speed limit to the universe. Nothing can travel faster than it.

Einstein's famous equation, E=mc^2, is not a proof of time travel. In fact, the equation itself has nothing to do with time travel. Instead, it is a formula that expresses the relationship between energy (E), mass (m), and the speed of light (c).

Albert Einstein didn't think so. His idea was that, theoretically, the closer we come to traveling at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second), the more time would appear to slow down for us from the perspective of someone who, in relation to us, was not moving.

Time seems to follow a universal, ticktock rhythm. But it doesn't. In the Special Theory of Relativity, Einstein determined that time is relative—in other words, the rate at which time passes depends on your frame of reference.

Essentially, Einstein thought space and time were intertwined in an infinite “fabric,” like an outstretched blanket.

Did you know that Russian Cosmonaut Сергей Авдеев ("Sergei Avdeyev") is considered Earth's first significant time traveler? During his active years as a cosmonaut (1992-1999), he set a record for cumulative time in space. Across 3 visits to the Mir station, he spent an astonishing 747 days in low Earth orbit!

Newton argued that space, time and motion were absolute, that is, that the entire universe was a single, uniform inertial frame and that time passed equably throughout it according to an eternally fixed, immutable and inexorable rate, without relation to anything external.