• Question: Could time travel ever be possible?

    Asked by than520saps on 19 Dec 2024.
    • Photo: Caroline Roche

      Caroline Roche answered on 19 Dec 2024:

      Yes. It is possible to travel into the future, if you leave earth and travel at the speed of light, time will pass slower for you than those on earth. So that when you return you are now in earths future compared to when you left.
      It is a bit trickier to travel into the past (possibly even impossible) and one that people aren’t sure how to do. It also raises lots of questions on what happens when you go back and you change something i.e. does it affect the future you’ve come from or does it just generate a new timeline, can you ever return to your original time.

    • Photo: Rachel Findlay-Robinson

      Rachel Findlay-Robinson answered on 19 Dec 2024:

      I don’t know! I stopped doing physics at GCSE so I don’t know about the technical details of it – but it would be really cool if it was possible 🙂

    • Photo: Steve Potterill

      Steve Potterill answered on 9 Jan 2025: last edited 9 Jan 2025 10:52

      I’ve several answers to this:

      1) Philosophy/physics: If time travel ‘could ever be possible’, then logic dictates that it is possible now. (If someone/something ‘from the future’ were to travel back in time to now, then we would see/experience the effect/existance of the person/thing).

      2) Physics: if your question relates to the difference in experience of the passage of time, then Caroline Roche’s answer above “…time will pass slower … So that when you return you are now in earths future compared to when you left.” This effect is known as Time Dilation, was predicted by Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, and was then shown in particle accelerators in the 3rd quarter of last century as well as by comparing atomic (=very precise) clocks in Earth’s orbit and on the ground. (This effect is relevant to everyday life because time dilation has to be factored in to the operation of GPS satellites in order for them to be accurate on Earth)

      3) More physics: Time travel as seen in the movies is pretty much precluded by physics as we know it. There are some potentially unanswered questions about ‘quantum entanglement’ (the effect of which can be compared with time dilation) and what might happen in black holes, but otherwise time travel is considered solely in the realm of science fiction, and not science fact.

      3) Engineering/technology: if your question assumes that physics ‘permits’ time travel (which as I’ve suggested above, it doesn’t), and that achieving time travel is merely a question of discovering/developing the right technology, then perhaps such technology could be developed.

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