In my previous post I described how Time Dilation works (the faster you move through space, the slower you move through time.) This time round my endeavor is to show how one can use this method to time travel into the future.
In October 1971, Joseph C. Hafele, a physicist, and Richard E. Keating, an astronomer, took four atomic clocks aboard two commercial aircraft and flew them around the earth twice. They compared the clocks with two stationary clocks on the ground and found out that the clocks on the planes were 40 billionths of a second slower than the clocks on the ground, just as Einstein had predicted more than 60 years ago. This is a very tiny amount of time but we also have to realize that a commercial plane's maximum speed is only 885 km/h. This is less than 0.000001% the speed of light (1,080,000,000 km/h) which is required to completely slow down time.
Now, if you haven't read my post on Time Dilation I suggest you do that first before you continue further as the stuff below might get a bit confusing.
Let us explore and understand how Time Dilation works for Einstein's theory of Time Travel. Firstly, did you know that we are already time traveling, you, me, at this very moment! Yes, we are time traveling every second of our lives from when we are born until we die! I know this sounds weird but let me explain.
The Earth goes around the Sun at 30 km per second; 30km/s
The speed of light (c) = 300,000 km/s,
Hence, to find out the percentage of the speed of light at which the earth travels round the sun, we calculate thus:
30/300000 = 1/10000 i.e. 30/300000 = 0.0001 or 0.01%
Now imagine someone lived for 30,000 days or 82 and a half years on Earth and his cousin lived on for the exact age on a stationary planet far away (this is hypothetical; no planet has yet been found to be so). Since Earth is moving around the Sun at 30 km/s, the time slows down by 0.01% for people living on the Earth but it will continue its normal course of speed for people living in a stationary planet. We don't realize this is happening as we don't have a stationary planet in the Universe with people living on it. If the imaginary people on the stationary planet could communicate with us we would know that both cousins were exactly 30,000 days old yet the one on Earth lived 3 days longer than the one on the stationary planet because of Time Dilation. The inhabitant of the stationary planet will see this period as 30,003 days if recorded while actually for us on the earth it would mean only 30,000 days.
Some scientists say that if we can build a space ship to orbit a massive object like a star or a black hole at high speeds, maybe at 150,000 km/s (50% of the speed of light) it can travel through time. Five years on the space ship will be 10 years on Earth! Scientist are looking for other cost effective ways to do this and the space ship idea does seem kind of unrealistic as you won't go very far into the future and it will probably cost you millions of dollars.
I think we will just have to wait for new discoveries and hope that one day we will be able to time travel into the future. Exciting thought..
Now, if you haven't read my post on Time Dilation I suggest you do that first before you continue further as the stuff below might get a bit confusing.
Let us explore and understand how Time Dilation works for Einstein's theory of Time Travel. Firstly, did you know that we are already time traveling, you, me, at this very moment! Yes, we are time traveling every second of our lives from when we are born until we die! I know this sounds weird but let me explain.
The Earth goes around the Sun at 30 km per second; 30km/s
The speed of light (c) = 300,000 km/s,
Hence, to find out the percentage of the speed of light at which the earth travels round the sun, we calculate thus:
30/300000 = 1/10000 i.e. 30/300000 = 0.0001 or 0.01%
Now imagine someone lived for 30,000 days or 82 and a half years on Earth and his cousin lived on for the exact age on a stationary planet far away (this is hypothetical; no planet has yet been found to be so). Since Earth is moving around the Sun at 30 km/s, the time slows down by 0.01% for people living on the Earth but it will continue its normal course of speed for people living in a stationary planet. We don't realize this is happening as we don't have a stationary planet in the Universe with people living on it. If the imaginary people on the stationary planet could communicate with us we would know that both cousins were exactly 30,000 days old yet the one on Earth lived 3 days longer than the one on the stationary planet because of Time Dilation. The inhabitant of the stationary planet will see this period as 30,003 days if recorded while actually for us on the earth it would mean only 30,000 days.
Some scientists say that if we can build a space ship to orbit a massive object like a star or a black hole at high speeds, maybe at 150,000 km/s (50% of the speed of light) it can travel through time. Five years on the space ship will be 10 years on Earth! Scientist are looking for other cost effective ways to do this and the space ship idea does seem kind of unrealistic as you won't go very far into the future and it will probably cost you millions of dollars.
I think we will just have to wait for new discoveries and hope that one day we will be able to time travel into the future. Exciting thought..
