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Feasibility of Time Travel |
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USEM7B+W Gil Harel The Physical Feasibility of Time Travel As a very popular science fiction topic and inevitably controversial subject, time travel has been the focus of many debates. I shall define time travel as the ability to visit past, prior events that have occurred years ago, or the ability to travel significantly into the future. ... Having now defined time travel, I can say unequivocally that I believe that time travel, in either direction, whether through wormholes, black holes, cosmic strings or any other proposed method, is completely impossible. Though the idea has been around for a long time, the first person to seriously propose it in the form of a novel was H. ... Wells, when he wrote The Time Machine in the late 19th century. In his story, the time traveler traverses eons using a “polished brass machine” with all kinds of fancy knobs and levers to choose the era he wishes to visit (Kaku, 1994, 232). ... Within the next thirty years, however, science - and the physics world in particular - would be shaken up tumultuously, changed so dramatically, that even the staunchest critics in the science community would be considering the physical possibilities of time travel. ... One discovery in particular startled many, for in a very limited sense, it allowed one to travel into the future. Einstein proved that for an object traveling at a very high speed, time beats slower (as would be observed by a stationary observer on Earth). He called this time dilation, and we know now that it is a very real fact of nature. ... This relationship between time slowdown and velocity applies not just to mechanical or atomic clocks, but to circadian rhythms and biological clocks as well. The closer a body is to the speed of light, the more significant the time dilation is experiences. The equation for time dilation is: g = 1 / [1 – (v^2/c^2)] ^ (1/2) where v = the speed of the traveler, c = the speed of light, and g (gamma) = the factor by which time slows down compared to a stationary observer So a human aboard a space ship traveling at 99% of c (speed of light, or approximately 300,000 kilometers per second) would experience a very significant time slowdown (again, a slowdown compared to those stationary on Earth; to the traveler, time would tick normally). ... In this sense, he has time traveled into the future. There is a problem with this theory that precludes it from happening any time in the foreseeable future. ... We know that time dilation exists, but to experience it appreciably, we’d need some means of propulsion that we can only dream about today. I agree with Professor Paul Davies, author of How to Build a Time Machine, who said in an interview with Science International, “It’s been tested many times in the lab, but doing it with a human being means you need some sort of propulsion system to get you close enough to the speed of light. ... In sum, one could ostensibly travel into the future through time dilation, but in a very limited sense. Furthermore, since they do age as they are “traveling”, this form of time traveler does not fall into the parameters of my definition. Another leading theory that allows for time travel into both the past and the future involves black holes. Black holes are enigmatic distortions of space-time that result when large stars collapse at the end of their stellar evolutionary cycle. ... Interestingly enough, some of their solutions allow for time travel through the black hole. ... According to some, not only could black holes behave as gateways to other universes or time epochs, but they would also allow us to circumvent the speed limit set by Einstein (i. ... , nothing can travel faster than light). ... If you could create a tunnel between the two sides of the sheet, you’d have yourself a wormhole, and could travel between space-time coordinates while significantly eliminating a portion of the journey. |
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Title: Feasibility of Time Travel
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