A Time Traveller's Journal

by Unknown 6/06/2015 10:44:00 pm 0 comments technology travel

Recently, I stumbled upon a quite unique and incredible movie, Predestination. The concept of the movie was so unreal yet unambiguous. The explicit details the story covers are indeed mind boggling and leaves quite an impression on you. To give you a small excerpt from the movie, it is based on the much debated concept of time travel which also includes a generic secret government organization which prevents crimes before they even take place. Interesting, huh! I can’t tell you about any more details as it would ruin your experience if you haven’t yet watched it.

Anyway, coming to the point, the movie actually made me wonder is time travel really possible? Is it indeed possible to alter your present by changing the past? Can you avoid an apocalyptic situation if you could glance into the future? There are so many questions that linger around and I am not the first one to ask them as well.

According to the string theory, there exists eleven different dimensions in the Universe. Let me tell you how it works. We live in a three dimensional world. We have shapes, sizes and we can easily alter the matter to take different shapes and sizes. We can travel through space, from one place to another without any rocket science applied to it. That’s what third dimensional people are restricted to! Actually, we also know about the fourth dimension, that is, time. But since we are a 3-D planet, we are clueless on how to bend time and travel across it.

In a 4-D world, time travel would be a piece of cake! Suppose you flunk an examination, you can easily go back and tell yourself not to make the same mistakes again. Maybe it won’t be as easy as I made it sound but it certainly would be possible. Suppose we take an eleven dimensional planet, we couldn't even imagine what all they would be able to alter! Maybe they would change the state of matter without the use of heat. Maybe they could convert matter into energy or vice versa with a click of a button. I am just speculating here but it could be easily true. And that’s what we can only do, speculate. Just like a man in the two dimensional world, could only move sideways and would never enjoy the luxury of a panoramic view.

Coming back to time travel, all my research says that theoretically time travel is very much possible. Let’s talk about the concept of time. Time is not the same for all of us as we have seen in the movie Interstellar. The Christopher Nolan narration showed a snippet of it when time was relatively slow on a newly discovered planet than in the spaceship that they travelled in. All this looks amazing and enthralling to watch onscreen but is impractical in reality. Did you know that the satellites orbiting Earth who travel at more than twenty thousand kilometres per hour are actually moving a little into the future? Each day the time is about 50 microseconds slower in the satellites that gives them a fractional peek into the Earth’s future.

Speed is the one and only cause for this kind of dilation. If we do travel with the speed of light, we could make everything around us slower than we are, and consequently, travel into the future. How easy, huh! Although, when we do tend towards the limit, our body mass could go up indefinitely. Hence, the energy needed to keep us moving would be infinite too. No bike, no car, no aeroplane nor a spacecraft could do that if it used the entire energy source of the planet, or maybe even the Sun. Maybe we could get atomic particles seconds into the future, but not enough to make a significant difference to normal life.

Now that was all about travelling to the future! Is there a way to go back as well? Well, theoretically as well as in the movies, everything is possible. Though finding cosmic lines left after The Big Bang or the discovery of a wormhole could make that a reality, we are nowhere close to finding a real solution.

And then there comes another problem, the paradoxes! Predestination paradox is something that was discussed in the movie but I wouldn't discuss it because of the aforementioned reason. I will talk about the Grandfather Paradox. If you travel into the past to your grandfather and shoot him, he would not have been able to give birth to your father which in turn would not have led to the creation of you. So, that means you could not have come into the future to kill him because otherwise you wouldn't exist. Freaky, isn't it? There are innumerable situations you could discuss when it comes to paradoxes of travelling into the past.

Time travel, if at all possible, is only possible forwards. You could slow down the forward movement or fasten it, but you cannot reverse it. Maybe if could invite a species from the fourth dimensions for dinner and ask him how.

But for time travel enthusiasts, here’s an awesome tip. If you really do want to gaze into the past, look up at the sky. The ocean of twinkling marvels, is your complete timeline of the history of planet. The light that we see presently of minutes, months, years, decades, centuries and sometimes millenniums old. You gaze at Alpha Centauri and you look back four years into time. You look at Andromeda and it takes you back 2.2 million years, the time the human race was evolving. 

Everything about time, space and energy is fascinating. The more you read, the more you wonder. The more you wonder, the more you read. And there continues the vicious cycle!