Science Explains Time Travel6

By Ariel Nishli, Nov 09, 2011 in Offbeat, Pop Culture

Responsible parents are dutifully prepared for the day their curious young ones will ask one of three pivotal questions:

• Where do babies come from?
• Storks. This is the tried and true answer that will buy you about three years before any follow-up questions (pending aggressive sex-education policies at school).

• What happens when we die?
• Heaven. This answer casts a wide net and lets them sleep at night.

• How does time travel work?
• Oh, well that’s… umm… DeLoreans? Awkward.

Don’t let your kids watch you stumble headfirst into ignorance! We’re going to breakdown the basics of time travel for you with this easy-to-remember guide.

Time Travel to the Past

Do you yearn to know how the pyramids were built? Are you eager to witness the Gettysburg Address? Perhaps you’re hung-over and want to lecture your college freshman self about the dangers of mixing tequila and Jägermeister? Time travel is the answer. Here’s a simple tutorial to get you started.

Wormholes

Wormholes are essentially shortcuts in our universe, bridging one end of the space-time continuum to another. Here, light, matter, and time are sucked through a “tube” held steady by negative energy or “exotic matter.” The layman’s visualization for this fourth dimension theorem (that cannot actually be seen) utilizes a flat piece of paper representing space-time. Go ahead and grab one – quantum physics and arts & crafts are not mutually exclusive.

Fold the paper onto itself and punch a hole right through both layers, then lay the paper flat. You’ve just created the entrance and exit to a wormhole on opposite sides of spacetime. When the paper is folded back onto itself, traveling through one end of the wormhole to the other allows you to instantly traverse the entire swath of paper – time and space.

Wormholes are commonly used in science fiction to allow characters – many of whom happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time – to time travel without the use of a time machine. The series Chutes and Ladders, for instance, tells the story of brother and sister, Alejandro and Olivia, who find a wormhole right in their kitchen pantry. They hop into the past and unravel a mystery surrounding their mother’s untimely death.

Chutes & Ladders – The Forest

Faster-Than-Light Travel (FTL)

The award for best FTL has to go to Superman, aka Clark Kent, for an epic display of faster-than-light travel in his eponymous 1978 classic film. In a bid to save beloved Lois Lane from a car wreck, the Man of Steel flies circles around the earth so fast as to actually reverse the earth’s rotation and turn back the clock to before the accident.

Skeptics contend that the earth merely rotating in the opposite direction is not enough for time to follow suit. They’re not wrong, but their eyes deceive them.

Take the following proposition: Someone at point A sends a package travelling faster than the speed of light to a recipient at point B, whose frame of reference is different than the sender’s. To the recipient experiencing time at a normal rate, limited by the speed of light, the package would arrive before it was even sent, hence having travelled backwards in time. In the case of Superman, the earth wasn’t rotating backwards, it only appeared to do so from Superman’s point of view because he was flying around it faster than time itself was moving.

Time Travel to the Future

Can’t wait to see Velcro conquer the fashion world? You can put the plutonium away. It’s only a theoretical concept. Here’s a real way to travel to the future.

Time Dilation

Travelling into the future was famously posited by the twin paradox, the seeds of which were planted with Albert Einstein’s research on special relativity. It states that if an identical twin was to travel away from earth and back again on a five-year journey at the speed of light, he would return to find his stationary brother an old man. The traveling brother would scarcely have aged at all.

This is due to the theory of time dilation, a difference in the elapsed time as measured by observers moving relative to each other. The principal can be visualized – again, for demonstrative purposes only – by having one twin wave the other off on a light-speed train. If a lamp were fixed to the floor of the train, the traveling twin would observe a ray of light travelling from the bulb to the train’s ceiling and back to the bulb in a straight line – deceptively characterizing light as stationary. However, the brother watching the moving train at a standstill sees the same ray of light traveling at an angle from the bulb to the ceiling and back to the bulb at another angle. This is because the light must cover a farther distance to catch up with the moving train.

Importantly, Einstein revealed that the speed of light is constant with his famous E=MC2 formula, from which you can extrapolate that the traveling brother perceives no distance traveled for the light. Therefore it would take more time for the light to travel that same distance as observed by the stationary brother than it would as observed by the traveling brother. The train’s time has been dilated so that each brother has observed the same event occur over different spans of time.

If you just fried a chunk of brain cells trying to visualize that, check out this handy children’s book version of time dilation. We won’t hold it against you.

Now that your children’s minds are at ease, you may be wondering why mankind has not yet achieved time travel. According to world-renowned theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking, if time-travel were a reality, we should have already witnessed tourists visiting us from the future. However, Hawking holds that the furthest back one could travel is to when the time machine was first built, and we’re not there yet. Just in case, keep an eye out for picture snapping families decked out in an awful lot of Velcro.

Chutes & Ladders – The Spot

Chutes & Ladders – Olivia

Watch more episodes of time-traveling mystery CHUTES & LADDERS

Ariel Nishli has a big apple in his heart but moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in the entertainment industry after graduating from Vanderbilt University in 2007. He started in the motion picture literary department at ICM before moving on to feature film development at Parkes/MacDonald Productions. Ariel’s wardrobe has steadily devolved from designer suits to worn out slippers, as he now focuses on screenwriting and freelance writing.