Time Travelling: Is it possible?

If you are fascinated by the idea of time travel, you are definitely not alone. Hungrily devouring the fictional tales of time-travellers thrown at us by popular culture, we are quite used to seeing a certain Time Lord who travels back and forth in time, in his TARDIS (Doctor Who). But, is time travel really possible? What are the chances that we might end up inside a time-machine as it takes us on a crazy journey, defying the laws of the cosmos, bending time and space? Let's find out.

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The scientific community stands divided when it comes to time travel. Backward time travelling, to be specific. The problems of causality associated with backward time travelling is called the 'grandfather paradox'. Imagine going back in time to kill your grandfather, before even your dad was born? What would happen? It would cause even the existence of the time traveller to fade, to disappear completely, and everything in the present would be affected because of it! And the universe would not allow such inconsistencies, which in short means that backward time travelling is basically impossible. But this is just one point of view, one way to look at things. For theoretical astrophysicist, Novikov, there is a way to escape this paradox, as Novikov self-consistency principle suggests the concept of 'many worlds'. Coming to Einstein, he was of the view that it maybe possible to fold space-time, and create a shortcut between two distant locations. His widely accepted three-dimensional model of space is linked to time, which is the fourth dimension. While the concept of 'wormholes' are exciting for the prospect of time-travelling, there is a possibility that these shortcuts might just collapse, or crumble, and that it would be physically impossible to pass through one. That's disheartening.

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As of now, the prospect of time travelling is bleak. But if the universe can expand instead slowing down thanks to the dark matter, who knows what new discovery awaits us? It's only a matter of time. In Neil Turok's words, who is the director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, "In quantum physics, nothing is impossible - particles travel through walls!"

Post Written by - Lopamudra