Skip to main content

What if I told you...

 What if I told you that time-travel exists?

You may think I'm crazy, but actually, I'm being serious.

Now, before you start plotting your trip back in time, there's something you should know. When I say time-travel, it's not quite what you think. It's completely possible to travel into the future, but it is unclear as of today whether it is possible to travel back in time. Lots of scientists believe that it won't be possible to travel back in time, but there is a way that it may still be possible.

The reason I can make these statements is because of one guy. An absolute legend. A person who single-handedly changed the course of history by discovering one of the most mind-boggling theories of all time. And that man is none other than Albert Einstein.

Let's get the basics out of the way. At it's heart special relativity, the topic of today's article, hinges on one simple fact: the speed of light in a vacuum is constant for all observers, regardless of their frame of reference. You may think this sounds like a fairly straightforward assumption with minimal consequences, and you'd be wrong.

 That is actually quite a loaded statement, so let's look at an example to figure out what it actually means. Consider the following experiment: Say you and your friend are throwing a ball back and forth. For the sake of this example, we'll assume that you are capable of throwing the ball at a speed of 1 meter per second (written as 1 m/s). Now, if you started running at your friend at 1 m/s and then threw the ball at him/her, they would observe the ball as traveling at 2 m/s. This is a fairly basic principle and as far as Newtonian mechanics goes, it's almost axiomatic in that everyone knows how it works. The problem comes in when we try to repeat the same experiment with some photons (the "particle" that carries electromagnetic radiation, which is what light is). If you shone a light at your friend while standing still, they would observe the photons as traveling at about 300,000,000 m/s. Now, even if you started running at them at 1,000,000 m/s, they would still see the light coming at them at 300,000,000 m/s. It doesn't matter how fast you run, the light will always have the same speed and all observers will agree on that speed, no matter what.

You might now say: "So what? Light always travels at the same speed. Big whoop!" But actually, it turns out, this is the exact reason why time travel is possible. You see, the mere fact that all observers measure the same speed of light means that any time you are moving relative to a stationary observer, time dilation occurs. This means that if you had a clock strapped to your chest whilst running at your friend, they would see that clock slow down as you sped up. Conversely, if your friend had a clock strapped to their chest, as you sped up, you would observe their clock speeding up. In our every day lives, and at the speeds we normally travel, the effects of special relativity are negligible. The faster you travel, however, the more pronounced these effects become. Close to the speed of light, they actually become extreme enough that if you got on a rocket that could travel at relativistic speeds, you might experience the passing of time several times more slowly than the people back on Earth. It could be so extreme that a few days might pass for you, yet back on Earth, months or even years may have gone by. That, my dear friends, is time travel, and it's real!

 This may all sound like something scientists have made up so writers can write science fiction novels, but due to the effects of relativity, it's actually necessary for GPS satellites to correct for the difference in the passing of time as experienced by them versus us. Now, granted, the bigger effect at play in the case of GPS is the gravitational well caused by the mass of the Earth, but that's a topic for another day. Suffice it to say that time travel is a very real phenomenon and you experience it every single day without even knowing it.

As for traveling back in time, there is a way this might still be possible. It involves worm holes and some other very sci-fi sounding concepts, but that is a topic for a different article.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Public Key Cryptography: The Mathematics of RSA

 Initially, when I created this blog, I stated that only opinions would be contained here. However, it has become very clear to me that I am obviously better at explaining things than I am at expressing complex opinions. And beyond that, the articles I enjoyed writing the most were the explanations about topics in computer science. That brings us to now. Moving forward, I'd like to shift my focus toward explaining topics I am interested in as well as continuing to express my concerns and opinions. I am, however, going to try to move more toward opinion articles that require some explanation as to the principles at work. On to the Maths!  Note: If, at this point, you haven't read my article on public-key cryptography, I would highly suggest that you read it before continuing. You can find it here . In this article, I will be explaining the mathematics of RSA. RSA is but one example of public-key cryptography and there are many out there, but today we'll only be looking a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The case for unmanaged programming languages: data management

 Welcome back! This is the second and final part in a series of articles about why unmanaged programming languages are the best. In this article, I will be covering the ways in which unmanaged programming languages, such as C++, are far superior to managed languages when it comes to data management and manipulation. Pointers Pointers are literally the best thing since sliced bread...  They seem like such a simple concept, but oh man are they powerful! Basically, a pointer is a variable that holds a memory address. It's actually a little more simple than that. A pointer, at it's lowest level, just holds an integer. This means you can do integer arithmetic with it. It might not be immediately obvious why this is useful, but I'll get to that in a minute. The first thing pointers allow you to do that is pretty neat is to change the data type of a variable very easily. Now, this isn't strictly speaking converting the data to another ty...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why you (yes, you!) should be using Telegram

 If you've not been living under a rock these past few months, you will have heard about the (now postponed) changes to WhatsApp's privacy policy. There are some problematic things about their privacy policy already, but I'll not be spending your precious time discussing legal and bureaucratic nonsense. Instead, I want to talk about and highlight some things that may or may not allow you to come to the (obviously correct) conclusion that you should be using an open-source messaging app like Telegram or Signal. Disclaimer: I am not sponsored by, nor was this article commissioned by, Telegram, LLC or any other company. I just happen to really like open-source software and think that Telegram is a great app. Now, as for why you shouldn't be using WhatsApp. Proprietary software is hazardous at best. In general, there are two types of software: proprietary and open-source. Proprietary being software where the underlying source code is not available to the end-user. Open-sour...
1 comment
Read more
Creative Commons Licence
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.