Is time travel possible? – Colin Stuart

Is time travel possible? – Colin Stuart

Have you ever daydreamed
about traveling through time, perhaps fast forward in the centuries
and seeing the distant future? Well, time travel is possible, and what’s more, it’s already been done. Meet Sergei Krikalev, the greatest time traveler
in human history. This Russian cosmonaut holds the record for the most amount of time
spent orbiting our planet, a total of 803 days,
9 hours, and 39 minutes. During his stay in space, he time traveled into his own future by 0.02 seconds. Traveling at 17,500 miles an hour, he experienced an effect
known as time dilation, and one day the same effect might make significant time travel
to the future commonplace. To see why moving faster through space
affects passage of time, we need to go back to the 1880s, when two American scientists, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, were trying to measure the effect
of the Earth’s movement around the Sun on the speed of light. When a beam of light was moving
in the same direction as the Earth, they expected the light to travel faster. And when the Earth was moving
in the opposite direction, they expected it to go slower. But they found something very curious. The speed of light remained the same
no matter what the Earth was doing. Two decades later,
Albert Einstein was thinking about the consequences
of that never-changing speed of light. And it was his conclusions, formulated in the theory
of special relativity, that opened the door
into the world of time travel. Imagine a man named Jack, standing in the middle
of a train carriage, traveling at a steady speed. Jack’s bored and starts bouncing
a ball up and down. What would Jill, standing on the platform,
see through the window as the train whistles through? Well, between Jack dropping the ball
and catching it again, Jill would have seen him move
slightly further down the track, resulting in her seeing the ball
follow a triangular path. This means Jill sees the ball
travel further than Jack does in the same time period. And because speed
is distance divided by time, Jill actually sees the ball move faster. But what if Jack’s bouncing ball
is replaced with two mirrors which bounce a beam of light between them? Jack still sees the beam dropping down and Jill still sees the light beam
travel a longer distance, except this time Jack and Jill
cannot disagree on the speed because the speed of light
remains the same no matter what. And if the speed is the same
while the distance is different, this means the time taken
will be different as well. Thus, time must tick at different rates
for people moving relative to each other. Imagine that Jack and Jill
have highly accurate watches that they synchronize
before Jack boards the train. During the experiment,
Jack and Jill would each see their own watch ticking normally. But if they meet up again later
to compare watches, less time would have
elapsed on Jack’s watch, balancing the fact that Jill saw
the light move further. This idea may sound crazy, but like any good scientific theory, it can be tested. In the 1970s, scientists boarded a plane with some super-accurate atomic clocks that were synchronized
with some others left on the ground. After the plane had
flown around the world, the clocks on board
showed a different time from those left behind. Of course, at the speed
of trains and planes, the effect is minuscule. But the faster you go,
the more time dilates. For astronauts orbiting
the Earth for 800 days, it starts to add up. But what affects humans
also affects machines. Satellites of the global
positioning system are also hurdling around the Earth at thousands of miles an hour. So, time dilation kicks in here, too. In fact, their speed causes
the atomic clocks on board to disagree with clocks on the ground by seven millionths of a second daily. Left uncorrected, this would cause GPS to lose accuracy by a few kilometers each day. So, what does all this have
to do with time travel to the far, distant future? Well, the faster you go,
the greater the effect of time dilation. If you could travel really close to the speed of light, say 99.9999%, on a round-trip through space for what seemed to you like ten years, you’d actually return to Earth around the year 9000. Who knows what you’d see
when you returned?! Humanity merged with machines, extinct due to climate change
or asteroid impact, or inhabiting a permanent colony on Mars. But the trouble is, getting heavy things like people,
not to mention space ships, up to such speeds requires
unimaginable amounts of energy. It already takes enormous
particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider to accelerate tiny subatomic particles
to close to light speed. But one day, if we can develop the tools
to accelerate ourselves to similar speeds, then we may regularly send time travelers into the future, bringing with them tales
of a long, forgotten past.

100 thoughts on “Is time travel possible? – Colin Stuart

  1. If time travel were possible you wouldn't be asking the clickbait question — you'ld be traveling.

  2. Let's say you travel faster than the speed of light (Point B) away from the Earth (Point A), and then when you make it to a certain point (Point C) (let's say 10 light years away from the Point A that is still in motion). That would mean that your perception of the Earth would be 10 years in the past. Let's say, since space and time are theoretically one, what if there was a wormhole that connected Point A, the Earth, and Point C, 10 lightyears away. To accommodate for this perception of matter and time, when you travel through the wormhole, will it take you 10 years into the past to match the perception of matter and light at the entrance of the wormhole?

  3. The distance is the same, the man is relative to the bouncing ball that is why he sees up and down but in reality the ball is moving side to side, but not visibly to the man, the time and distance are the same to both.

  4. 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 speed = time travel

  5. your future doesn't exist yet it is being created so this isn't time travell this is more like time running faster for you

  6. This is how we get forward in time but how to go backward in time? Unless we can travel both in the forward and backward direction, we should not call it time travel, should we? Please answer my question.

  7. Well Might be possible but i believe we would only be able to observe and take a look at the past but wouldnt be able to interact and also traveling in the future is not possible.

  8. What if we do the timer experiment with the timer in the vehicle is connected to a monitor at the base and observe there?

  9. I don't know much about Physics and this is just kinda like a crazy idea but if someone can read this please think about it : Everthing acts as both particles and waves. Since there is time dilation, why don't we think about time in a little bit stranger way… I've been wondering what is past, present and future and if we actually experience time dilation then we actually go to the future or another present ? So a theory of mine is we are all waves existing at different time at another concept of dimension like an electron existing in different states at the same time. And thus, every presents co-exist and there is no past, present and future and we're technically time travelling every second now, and every presents is on a loop that only us in that moment can feel…

  10. I lost count on how many times I have watch time travel films, but Netflix's series "Dark" is the mother of all time travel I have watch so far.

  11. Ok so if your traveling at the speed of light towards another galaxy and time stays still at that speed technically you’ll get there in no time

  12. So what I still don't understand is why time is always calculated by instruments that only calculate time? No wonder no one's got anywhere. Present past and future are like pictures of everything combined not a word created that soon set a line or a sort of wall for scientific reasoning over and over again people explaining it with words but only conclusions made are within them. And surely a instrument that of are brain with enhancements would be the only thing continuing to work such a thought. But most are stuck within time calculation to every day life. Unrealized that time is a description that has multiple strong meanings just as the word god. So it continues to be harder to determine at points till you realize as your brain connects what the strongest point is and the also useful point in witch is used for other reasoning. Saying you can fly around a planet and time travel may be mathematically correct but for a true point in time it seems it would never happen again. And if it did u wouldn't know it even with proof your brain would also not comprehend such a feet and further more you would just be there in the present always. And this loop of scientific reasoning and not reasoning with all reality even every single theory and God alike only leads to more questions and answers for things that are absolute and time is not always absolute.

  13. What if the reason we never see time travelers in this era is because it is the decade of information and technology, meaning that everything is recorded? They have no reason to travel back in time because they know everything that has happened here. To solve that, what if we all of a sudden, stop recording information for a period of time like a week, and then come back, all of a sudden, with no indication of what happened? If they are anything like we are now, they would be curious on what happened and research and attempt to go back and find out. Then we would know for sure that time travel is possible.

    of course there is flaws, but eh thought experiment!

  14. so i can’t travel back in time to grace the world at the same time as freddie mercury okay that’s fine that’s completely fine

  15. Why not build a magnetic hyper train around the earth. That way you can get speeds that you need. Nah.. enjoy the present. The future is what you make of it.

  16. I wonder if i made a time capsule of sort convincing my future generation to travel back in time to 19/08/2019 to meet me, would it work?

    Also the time capsule should only be opened by the generation where time travel is made possible !

  17. This theory dilutes time and helps to travel in future, but what about past?
    Is relativity also explain time travel in Past?
    And How?
    Should we have to stand still and make whole world accelerate?
    Even if it is possible, it will only make world go faster in future with respect to us, But we will not be able to Go back from our current position.

  18. The only practical time travel is to create a virtual future and travel to now from that virtual future and change the real future from the virtual one.

  19. If Time Travel Is Possible We Can Break A Loophole or something like wormhole if we can make something go fast as mach 2

  20. Who's watching this in 2030?
    Iam From philippines an we are crisis free i travel back on 2019 to comment this comment and I have a proof that I can time travel
    December 25,2019 is Christmas am I rigth?
    Thankyou Godbless

  21. Think about it: If you travel to the past, that past becomes your future. And your former present becomes the past. Which can't now be changed by your new future…

  22. Time is an illusion because we have hippocampus which record our movements and also we can recall recorded movements so we call it memories. In fact no one had observed time as we know that there particules, waves, magnetism, electromagnetism. Nuclear forces (strong and weak). Any of those forces and particules do not need time to exist. However we use time as measurement unit like kg, mile, meter etc.

  23. Even if we are able to skip ahead to the future their is no way to know because they will not be able to report in the past

  24. Time travel is possible!..

    See.. now you are in the future!

    Your even further in the future!!

    Wow! You might as well be at least 5 seconds in the future from when you started reading this comment!!

  25. Time travel to the past should be possible in an infinite universe, by travelling to another exact replica of Earth which is at a different time, you could effectively go to another point in time. You wouldn't create any time paradox either because you wouldn't directly alter the past that led to you or your travel. You would alter that specific alternate Earth future though, turning it from an exact replica to a different one.

    Still practically impossible, and it requires a truly infinite universe. It isn't a true jump into the past, but if the past is gone and impossible to reach, it's probably the next closest thing. You could at least see what the past was really like by viewing another identical version.

  26. Because the Earth is flat it didn't matter and that's how they prove the Earth is flat those two scientists in the 1800's

  27. If you are watching this video in 2030, mentioned me in the comment and remind me of this video. I hope I will be alive.

  28. I'm from 999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,99999,999 watching this and which means the earth is still flat

  29. I want to go back in time when people in classrooms spoke understandable english 😉 Sorry i am just a bloody german kraut.

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