Wednesday, 1 July 2009

Time Travel: Possible or a sci-fi myth? by Cameron Webb Time Travel, it is very easy, infact we do every single day but only in one direction! For thousands of years scientists and philosophers have refered to time as a river that flows steadly forward year after year, but the big question on their mind was if there was a way to swim against the flow of the river, like a salmon returning to their breeding ground or maybe a way to run down the bank ahead of the the river? Could we be able to journey back and forth in time? The funny thing is that the idea of "Time Travel" is not as absoured as it might sounds! If time machines are possilbe, it would be likely that someone in the future would have already consturcted one and might of already visted us in 2009! But like in Back to the Future, But happens if some one in the future invents a time machine and ventres through the river of time and mets his teenage mother and falls in love with her and as Dr Michio Kaku said "You're in deep do-do" but Dr Kaku and many other scienctists say that the river of time forks into two rivers and so you jump stream. This rules out the possiblity of you never being born in the future, as the woman that you have just met when you went back in time is genecticully the same as his mother, talks like his mother but it is NOT HIS MOTHER, as his mother fell in love with his father. So your "fake" mother is your mother in a pararell univeres. So you saved Steve Irwin from being stung from a Sting-Ray but this is not our Steve, history is our own history, you cannot change the past, but what you have done is changed some else's past in the Parallel Univeres. (phew) If humans do not step up to the task, then maybe creatures from other intelligent lifeforms may take a stab at it, like the Goulds in Star-Gate. They created a rotating Cylinder through time which enabled them to concour other planets and taking woman as hosts for thier creature in side of them called the Gould (very good series, I would advise you to watch it) This is what it looks inside the Stargate when all your matter is torn up and then put back together when you reach the other stargate (pretty awesome) So Far we have managed to avoid being visted from time travelling jockies for a very good reason, Time tourism is unlickly the poblem,: Theoretically time machines have a very limited capacity! End of Part 1, in part 2 I will continue this atricle and I my touch upon the three possible ways of time travel!

Friday, 26 June 2009

Time Time has been the study of many physicists over the past two centuries. Einstein was the first to really understand it by saying that it was a 4 dimensional object. In this post I will write about Time Dilation and what this has to do with a theory of time travel. As in the Google Video in the last post, up until Einstein people thought that time was the same everywhere in the universe and that everything else varied according to a velocity. Then Einstein came along and said the speed of light was always constant and that time was variable. This formed Einstein’s special theory of relativity and also explains time dilation. Let’s assume that there is a man who travelled at the speed of light for eternity. Let’s also assume that you have a twin brother who goes about living his ordinary life. Your brother lives for 80 years but you live on for eternity. The obvious question to ask is why? This is where time dilation comes in. Time dilation is based around Special and General Relativity. General Relativity explains gravity. A body of some sort, in Einstein’s view, curves the Space-Time Continuum. This curvature creates the affect that we know as Gravity. Time Dilation occurs in two ways. The first is to do with General Relativity. The less affect that gravity has on you, the slower time goes by. It varies in minute amounts but it still slows down. The second explains the brother example that I gave earlier on. It states that the faster you go, the slower time goes by. However, if an object were to travel faster than the speed of light, it would travel back in time. In the brother principle, the speed of light is in the middle where time stops. Hence, the first man never ages. This is one of the many time travel theories. If man could create a machine that could travel faster than light, we could time travel. However, this is currently an impossibility as the laws of physics don't allow us to do this. According to Einstein Special relativity theory, when an object gains a certain amount of energy, this energy converts into mass as explained by E=mc2. Another way to possibly time travel would be to use wormholes. Wormholes are like a shortcut through space-time. As in the diagram on the left, space-time sort of folds in half allowing two point that would usually be very far apart to come together. It may also help you travel in time. Look on Wikipedia for more advanced reading. `