![]() ![]() ![]() So riddle me this, though, Clara: How can we travel into the past? That’s something so hard to do–effectively impossible, almost–that it’s scarcely worth thinking about. But if we drastically speed them up, like in a particle accelerator, we find they endure longer in proportion to how fast they’re going. Some of those particles have very short lifetimes, decaying almost instantaneously. Ergo, you just traveled to the future!īillings: Right, right, no one’s disputing any of that! We can even measure this sort of “time dilation” right now on Earth, not with starships, but with subatomic particles. That means that when you finally got back, maybe only a year would have passed for you, but a century could have gone by for your friends on Earth. To them, you’d be moving through time at a snail’s pace. Moskowitz: If you’re traveling in a starship at close to the speed of light, you’ll still experience the familiar one-second-per-second ticking of a clock– but an observer back on Earth would see your clock moving glacially slow. See, Einstein’s special theory of relativity shows that the rate time flows at depends on how fast you’re moving.īillings: Einstein strikes again, what a rascal. Moskowitz: But really, we can stay within plausible physics and still see how more extreme versions of time travel are possible. ![]() I’m less of a fan, though, of more speculative time travel, which is good fodder for goofy sci-fi stories, but in the real world it’s an implausible distraction. Lee, what do you have against time travel?īillings: So I love the idea of time travel! And in fact I do it all the time-like most everyone else I’m traveling into the future at one second per second. Moskowitz: We’re going to have a little friendly debate.īillings: Really? I came for a throwdown. Moskowitz: I’m Clara Moskowitz, and this is Cosmos, Quickly, the biweekly space podcast from Scientific American. A perennial – dare I say, timeless–topic of science fiction, but is it possible? Is there any chance at all that it could actually happen? Clara Moskowitz: We’re here today to talk about time travel. ![]()
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