Experiencing time travel – the future at a glance

Astrophysicists today say it’s possible for astronauts to travel through time, despite the idea belonging to science-fiction movies.

According to scientists, time travel could be technically feasible if the space ship aiming for this goal could move away from our planet at the speed of light. Consequently, the crew could theoretically move faster into the future when compared with the people still on Earth.

The pioneer of the idea was Albert Einstein, who initially advanced this theory stating that such speeds would slow down time for the traveler, therefore the clock will go slower while the traveler would go faster ahead.

“We cannot avoid moving into our futures, but we can control the rate that we move through time. This is a consequence of another lesson from relativity: Not all clocks are the same. If you could build a big enough rocket to provide a constant acceleration of 1g (9.8 meters per second; the same acceleration as provided by the Earth's gravity at its surface), you could reach the centre of the Milky Way galaxy — a healthy 20,000 light-years away — in just a couple decades of your personal time.”

“You could stop for a few hours, have a picnic near Sagittarius A* (the black hole at the centre of the galaxy), and then hop back in to your rocket and come back to Earth. By the time you return you'll be eligible for retirement benefits, if the institution providing those benefits is even around, because while you only traveled for a few decades according to the clock on your ship, about 40,000 years would've passed on the Earth,” Paul Sutter, astrophysicist at Ohio State University explains.

On the other hand, traveling back in time it is highly unlikely for humanity, despite general relativity theoretically allowing this to happen. The explanation resides in the entropy law of thermodynamics, with time flowing naturally from the past to the future, just like any other closed system cannot order itself back when unordered.

 

Source: express.co.uk