Time Travel – Myth or Realty?

Parallel Universe

Time travel has been one of the fascniating subjects that I’ve ever come to know yet. When I think of Time Travel the first thing that comes to my mind is Terminator 1, the very first movie that made me familiar with the concept. The concept of time itself is something that is very hard for me to understand and comprehend.

Time Travel is a concept in which one moves between different moments in time i.e. traveling to ones future or past. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had a chance to go back in time and correct all the mistakes we did? Or go into the future to see how our world looks? Yeah yeah, I got inspired by “Heroes”, so what? Time Travel is not a reality yet but it is proven that it is possible at least on paper. Time Dilation is a concept that explains that time travel is indeed possible and it is derived from Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.

Now, nobody has ever known how did the time originate? Or is there an end to time? What do we understand by Present, Past and Future? What we call our present is not even lasting for a moment. Each letter I am typing in this blog entry is continuously converted into my Past. As I said earlier Time itself is a very hard subject for me to understand.

Heroes Has It All

We know time as something that we measure in seconds, minutes or hour. But there is another face to the concept of ‘Time’. It’s also defined as the fourth dimension of our universe. The other three dimensions are of space, the usual stuff that we learned in our 10th grade, the XYZ axes. Time cannot exist without space and vice versa. This relationship of time and space is defined as ‘Spacetime Continuum’. What it essentially means is that any event in the universe involves both space and time.

Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity states that time slows as an object approaches the speed of light. This leads to the conclusion that traveling faster than the speed of light could open up the possibility of time travel to the past as well as to the future. Now here is the problem. Speed of light is believed to be the highest speed at which something can travel and as an object nears the speed of light, its relativistic mass increases until, at the speed of light, it becomes infinite. Accelerating an infinite mass any faster than that is impossible, or at least it seems to be right now.

That’s not the end of it mates! Time Travel is supposed to happen in a very natural way as Hiro Nakamora does it elegantly in the hit series Heroes. Scientists believe that the existance of Black Holes is the key to Time Travel. When stars more than four times the mass of our sun reach the end of their life, they would have burned up all of their fuel and they would collapse under the pressure of their own weight. This implosion creates “Black Holes,” which have gravitational fields so strong that even light cannot escape it’s gravity. Anything that comes in contact with a black hole’s event horizon will be sucked in.

Enter White Holes

If ‘Black Holes’ exists it might be possible to pass through them and come out of a ‘White Hole’. A ‘White Hole’ would have the reverse action of a black hole i.e. instead of pulling everything into its gravitational force, it’ll push everything out and away from it. These white holes would be the way to enter other times or other worlds. This is just one theory. There are two more, the Wormholes and the Cosmic Strings. I know you probably didn’t understand anything, neither did I. Just scribbling fellas !