Time Travel

5 Things You Didn't Know: Time Travel

Time Travel:
5 Things Men Should Know

If you were to travel back in time and kill your grandfather, would you not then cease to exist, never having had the chance to be born?
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To traverse time, visit the past or to jump ahead to the future: These are concepts so fascinating that they grip the very mind itself, pulling at our imagination with relentless vigor. This might be the reason we are so willing to believe the recent findings (evidence?) of a time traveler talking on cell phone in 1928. This "evidence" can be found in the bonus features in a Charlie Chaplin DVD box set and has time-travel experts reeling.

Just imagine the possibilities: Would you revisit your childhood? Would you share a thought with Aristotle or a drink with Julius Caesar? Unfortunately, for the time being, these are questions that one can only imagine the answer to. However, great minds have doubted time travel in the past, only to admit that the possibility simply cannot be excluded. In fact, renowned physicist Stephen Hawking came to this exact conclusion. So, we're here to let you in on some of the futuristic possibilities with five things you didn’t know about time travel.

1- Stephen Hawking claimed time travel was impossible

One of the many theories of time travel states that the universe will protect itself from creating paradoxes (problems associated with time travel) by simply not allowing time machines to be made. “All time machines are likely to self-destruct the moment they are activated,” famed physicist Kip Thorne told Scientific American. While the idea of an unwilling universe seems a little far-fetched (one can’t help but picture the invisible forces at work in Final Destination), Stephen Hawking openly subscribed to this hypothesis, deciding that there ought to be a law banning time travel from the laws of physics. Hawking proposed the "chronology protection conjecture" as that law. In the years following his proposal, Hawking became increasingly frustrated that he could find no physical law that would prevent time travel. Unable to prove this impossibility, Hawking changed his mind, making headlines when he said, “Time travel may be possible, but it is not practical.”

2- The universe may not allow change when you time travel

It’s no surprise that Hawking once believed time travel to be impossible; there are simply too many paradoxes involved in the whole procedure. The most famous of these — the grandfather paradox — proposes the following conundrum: If you were to travel back in time and kill your grandfather, would you not then cease to exist, never having had the chance to be born? Since its mind-boggling inception, the grandfather paradox has seen many attempts to satisfy its confusion. Perhaps the most successful came from American physicist Hugh Everett III, who first proposed the many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of time travel. Though it has gone through several revisions, the MWI essentially states that many universes may exist, one for every possible outcome to every possible event. Therefore, if you were to travel back in time and kill your grandfather, the universe from which you traveled would remain unaffected and you would live on (albeit as a parricidal sadist) because the universe would shift to keep you alive, however possible.

While the MWI does theoretically seem in concordance with quantum mechanics, it certainly has its share of skeptics and, well, it just seems a little too convenient. A more recent model, however, by physicists Daniel Greenberger and Karl Svozil, allows quantum mechanical time travel along a single timeline while still overcoming the infamous grandfather paradox. According to Greenberger and Svozil, quantum objects exist as multiple component waves, with each wave following a particular path through space-time.

Time travel may have already happened and time machines may not be needed...


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