The official website of author Urania Sarri

Is time-travel possible?

Today I’m wearing my mad-scientist’s hat to explain the time travel theories in a way everybody understands. Read my article “Is time travel possible?” and see why I love the (futuristic) time travel genre so much!  If you have read my time travel, paranormal story “Gate Deadlock” you understand how inspiring I find the time-travelling hypothesis. Emma and Christopher have to overcome the obstacle time sets for them and it is of course a story, but it makes you wonder, What if…

Let’s start with a quote that I really find insightful:

‘Our heirs, whatever or whoever they maybe, will

explore space and time to degrees we cannot

currently fathom. They will create new melodies in

the music of time. There are infinite harmonies to

be explored.’

Clifford Pickover

Traveling between different points in time has been a popular topic for novels and films. From Mark Twain and H. G. Wells  to Doctor Who, Back to the Future and Star Trek or Terminator, some kind of time machine or portal takes the heroes  to new adventures in the past or the  FUTURE.

But how close are such stories to reality?                                                                                              To begin with, did you know that Albert Einstein proved that time is nothing but an illusion? That’s because time is relative: it either slows down or speeds up depending on how fast you move in relation to something else.

Do you find this confusing?  Let me help you.

Imagine you had a twin and that only you happened to be inside a spaceship which traveled almost as fast as the speed of light. When you got home you’d find that your twin has aged faster than you. Strange, huh? But you should know that gravity bends time. This theory has been proven by GPS satellite technology and space stations where clocks gain 38 microseconds a day!  So you, my lucky astronaut twin, would be a time traveler who would return to Earth younger than your twin! This is called the Twin Paradox. Pretty amazing, isn’t it? And do you realize what this proves? That time travel to the Future is possible! At least, it is theoretically allowed.

I’m afraid I cannot be as positive about traveling to the past. Science has shown that you would have to do this either travelling faster than the speed of light (186,282 miles per second), which the majority of scientists consider physically impossible, or through giant wormholes which is again unfeasible as such wormholes would collapse very quickly and would only be suitable for very small particles. Also, the technology needed to create a wormhole is far beyond anything we have today.

 The theory of Parallel universes fascinates me the most. With every decision you make a new universe is created.  In this version of time travel there are multiple coexisting alternate histories so that when the traveler goes back in time he ends up in a new timeline where historical events have different outcomes. This allows the time traveler to intervene. But as Steven Hawking wonders in A Brief History of Time (a must-read for fans of this genre), why haven’t there been problems with history such as a traveler going back to time and reveal the secrets of atomic bomb to the Nazis? This raises the issue of Ethics. Why didn’t I get my heroine to go back in time and save her father? Why doesn’t Christopher reveal the secrets of his world to her? Because this would change the flow of events and the repercussions could be catastrophic. As it is stated in The grandfather paradox, a time traveller cannot go back and kill his parents or his grandfather because he’d never be born. If that were to happen, some physicists say, he would be not be born in one parallel universe but still born in another. Others say that the photons that make up light prefer self-consistency in timelines, which would interfere with your evil, suicidal plan.

But then, would Christopher give Emma the cure should she suffer from a fatal disease? I strongly recommend reading Isaac Asimov’s The end of eternity for more ethical issues on time-travel.                                                                                                                                                           So, is time travel possible?                                                                                                                          Elizabeth Howell, SPACE.com Contributor concludes: “While time travel does not appear possible — at least, possible in the sense that the humans would survive it — with the physics that we use today, the field is constantly changing. Advances in quantum theories could perhaps provide some understanding of how to overcome time travel paradoxes.”

Keep being distracted by reading .