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Asked by Blobfish to Connor, Jillian, Lidunka, Sarah, Steven on 15 Jun 2015. This question was also asked by Alex, Charles.
Question: Is time travel possible?
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Lidunka Vocadlo answered on 15 Jun 2015:
That is a very interesting question. My initial response is no, certainly not yet. But there are some very weird consequences of physics that say if an electron changes its behaviour at one end of the universe, another electron will change it’s behaviour at the other end of the universe. How is that possible????
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Sarah Beasley answered on 15 Jun 2015:
Have you seen the bit in Big Bang Theory where Sheldon says if any of us have invented time travel then travel back to this point? Then they wait, and no one appears. I think that has some truth in it… if we’d invented time travel in the future then how come no one’s come back? There might be a law against it but surely someone would have! I hope it’ll be possible one day though, you never know.
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Steven Thomson answered on 15 Jun 2015:
Oh, I really hope it is! There are all kinds of great theories for it, but no one knows for sure.
The maths tells us that, yes, if you can go faster than the speed of light, you can travel in time, but the same maths also tells us that it’s impossible to go faster than light speed! Quantum mechanics, though, is full of little particles going in closed loops in time, or just plain travelling backwards in time. But quantum theory is incomplete, so our understanding of these particles might be wrong – we just don’t know yet!
It’s something I think about a lot, so if there really is a way to make time travel work, perhaps I’ll find it and let you know!
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Jillian Scudder answered on 15 Jun 2015:
My answer to this question is always yes- but we can only travel forwards. If you travel at speeds close to the speed of light for a while, you can effectively push yourself forward in time faster than people not travelling at those speeds – but as far as we know there’s no way to go backwards in time.
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