why haven't we met a single time traveler yet?
And if we did meet one,
how would we know they weren't faking it?
In 1998, a gentleman
by the name of John Titor
arrived from the future.
Or so he said.
In his timeline, as he claimed,
General Electric had managed to invent
time travel in the year 2034.
He even showed and described
his time traveling device in great detail.
And then Titor vanished,
as abruptly as he appeared.
Did he finish his mission?
Or was he real at all?
If we were able to prove
that someone has traveled
from a different time,
it would be very cool for science.
Although it might overwrite
Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.
Einstein approached time
as a fourth dimension.
Space is a three-dimensional spectrum
that provides us with length, width and height.
Time offers direction.
Together, they form a space-time continuum.
And it can be affected by gravity.
According to Einstein's theory of relativity,
gravity is a curve in space-time.
And technically, because
space and time are one,
gravity could bend time as well as space.
But you'd need something really, really big
to notice any changes in
the movement of time.
If you somehow managed
to get yourself close to a black hole,
like Sagittarius A,
you'd be experiencing time at half-speed
compared to people on Earth.
This is because Sagittarius A
packs a mass of four million suns
into an infinitely dense point,
creating a very strong
gravitational field around it.
Another way to travel in time
is to move really fast.
The closer you get to the speed of light,
the slower time passes for you.
If you were a passenger on a train
that somehow could travel
at 99% of the speed of light,
for every year you spent on the train,
223 years would have
passed back at the station.
That would make you a
time traveler into the future.
Titor claimed that this little machine
is what made time travel
possible in any direction.
The C204, as he called it, allowed him
to manipulate gravity with the help
of two microsingularities
that were packed inside.
It also had gravity sensors
to lock the machine and time traveler
in a fixed place in space.
Titor had this machine installed in a car,
pretty much like the good old,
time-traveling DeLorean did.
But it would only take him as far as
60 years from his time.
Proving that someone really is a time traveler
might be even harder than time travel itself.
Time travelers could make
predictions about the future,
show their futuristic technology,
or even undergo some genetic testing
to support their story.
Maybe the best way to
prove time travel is real
would be to take you with
them on their next adventure.
Of course, there are easier ways
to prove the possibility of time travel.
In 2009, the world-famous
theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking
threw a party.
Not just any party,
but one to which only future
time travelers were invited.
Hawking didn't send off
invitations until after the party.
He believed that if travelers from the future
arrived before the invitation was released,
that would prove that time travel
will become possible one day.
He sat there waiting for hours,
but nobody showed up.
That doesn't mean time travel is impossible.
There is a chance that time
travelers from the future
will learn to use wormholes,
or "bridges" in space-time.
We haven't seen one of those yet, but...
the theory of general relativity
predicts that they exist.
The biggest problem with wormholes
is that they're microscopic
and collapse too quickly
for a human traveler to go through.
But maybe the reason nobody
attended Hawking's party
is that time traveling
might not be that precise.
Maybe the guests from the future did arrive,
but they were too late for the party.
Or maybe going back in time
is strictly prohibited for time travelers,
because if they do,
they might change their timeline completely.
Perhaps they are just trying to avoid the risk
of spreading any diseases
from the far future onto us.
Or maybe the information
about time traveling
is so highly classified that
only a few people would be trusted with it.
Maybe traveling back into
time isn't possible after all.
Maybe time can only move
forward and never backwards.
Maybe John Titor was one big lie.
We have a few more years
until 2034 to find out.
In a way, we already have time
travelers in our lifetime.
Astronauts on the International Space Station
are moving at 8 km/sec (5 mi/sec).
This makes them age slower,
although the difference is measured
in hundredths of a second.
But if you're listening,
you're invited to a reception for time travelers
hosted by Stephen Hawking.
The party will take place at
the University of Cambridge, UK,
on June 28, 2009.
No RSVP required.
And hey, if you have a chance
to jump in a spaceship
and enjoy the time traveling
effects of a black hole,
Just make sure to not fall into
that gravitational monster.
But that's a story for another WHAT IF.
No comments:
Post a Comment