Will Time Travel Ever Exist?

Time travel is a concept that has been around for thousands of years. It has featured in many ancient myths, from old Hindu stories to Buddhist fables and Japanese tales and is still used in many sci-fi stories and TV programmes today, such as the popular show, Doctor Who. The topic of time travel is very debatable and there are a plethora of reasons as to why it is possible and why it isn’t possible.

We all travel in time at about one second per second. If this sounds confusing, think about it like this: for every second that passes in time, one second passes for us. However, if this wasn’t the case and we did not travel in time, we would be a little stuck, both metaphorically and literally. We would move at zero seconds per second, which means that we would be still and nothing would ever happen in our lives whilst time passes on. In fact, we may even be immortal if we didn’t time travel, stuck in the same place, doing nothing forever.

Although this could be considered as time travelling, what people generally believe is that time travelling is when you are not travelling at one second per second. For example, if you were travelling at 0.65 seconds per second since you were born, then you would be only 65 years old when somebody born at the same time would be 100 years old.

You have probably heard of Albert Einstein and his famous equation, E= mc², but do you know what it really means? It refers to his theory of relativity. It is a very complicated theory, but I’ll just give you the main idea: space and time are related. According to Einstein, the speed of light (which is around 300,000,000 metres per second) is the maximum speed you can reach in the universe, and the closer you get to the speed of light, the slower time passes. This is similar to the concept of travelling less than the speed of one second per second.

There are other ways you can say time travel is possible. There are different time zones in different parts of the world, which allows a form of time travel to take place. The Concorde travelled from London to New York in just 3 hours, but the time difference is 5 hours. That shows that if you left London at 12:00, you would arrive at New York at 10:00, which means you have just travelled back in time by two hours.

Even if time travel in the way we imagine it is possible, like travelling back and forth hundreds, thousands, or even millions of years, there are some paradoxes. Paradoxes are statements that are seemingly strange and absurd, but they can be proved true if you think about it logically. Or, it can be the other way around: statements that are seemingly true, but they can be proved false. There are two main paradoxes about time travel. One of them is the grandfather paradox. This is when a time traveller goes back in time to when ther grandfather was child and killed him, therefore making their own birth impossible. So what would stop them from killing their grandfather? The other paradox is called the Fermi Paradox. This is if travelling back in time is possible, then why haven’t we seen any people from the future. Or are they in disguise, pretending to be from the current time period? These two paradoxes have confused many of the greatest minds and are truly baffling.

As I said at the beginning, time travelling is a very puzzling concept and everyone has their beliefs on whether or not time travel will ever exist. People used to say that it is impossible to be in two places at once, but scientists have found it is possible at a subatomic level thanks to quantum physics. Is it possible that scientists will find a way to time travel in the future. We can time travel, not how we want to, but who knows what the future holds for us? (Maybe a time-traveller in disguise does!)

By Rithwik Gururaj