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Time Travel is a concept that has always fascinated people and has left everybody scratching their heads wondering if this is possible or not. Well! Time Travel has occupied a substantial place in fiction for quite a long time. You must have read various books or even watched movies that talk about the concept of time travel. However, hold on! Before we jump into whether time travel is possible or not, we need to understand what it is. Although there is no such entirely adequate definition of ‘Time travel’ in the literature nonetheless we can understand it by the concept of movement between numerous points in space by an object or an individual, generally with the use of a hypothetical device known as a ‘time machine’. It is a widely recognised notion in philosophy and fiction, specifically in science fiction. Adding on, the idea of a time machine was popularised and came into being by H.G. Wells’ novel ‘The Time Machine (1895).
Whether Time travel is a real thing or not has always been a question since ancient times. Do you know that there is a very famous ‘Grandfather paradox’ which convinced many people that backwards time travel is impossible? Talking about the same, back in 1943 Barjavel came up with the concept of the grandfather paradox. it is a potential practical problem that might arise if a person travels to a time before his/her grandfather had children, and murders him, as a consequence of which, it would make that individual’s birth impossible. To this, many philosophers argued and even answered this paradox. They affirmed that there might be a probability that backward time travel could be possible but it would be impossible to change the past in any way.
Turning pages of history, probably more than a hundred years ago, Albert Einstein came up with an idea about how time works. He named this theory ‘relativity’ and this asserts that time and space are linked together. Einstein also explained that our universe has a speed limit i.e. nothing can travel faster than the speed of light (which is 186,000 miles per second). So, according to this theory, the faster you travel, the slower you experience Titan. Many scientists and researchers have performed various experiments to prove that this is true.
For instance, There was this one experiment in which two clocks were taken, set at the exact time. One clock stayed on Earth, whereas the other one flew in an aeroplane (moving in the same direction as the Earth rotates). After the aeroplane flew around the world, scientists compared both clocks. The clock which was on the fast-moving aeroplane was slightly behind the clock which was on the ground. So, they concluded that the clock on the aeroplane was travelling slightly slower in time than 1 second per second.
Although we humans can’t just jump into a time machine and travel to the past, we are aware of the fact that clocks on planes and satellites do travel at different speeds than those on Earth. Mathematics of time travel do affect the things we use every day but we must understand that we can’t use a time machine and travel hundreds of years into the past or even future. You can see this kind of time travel only in movies and books.
So is time travel a real thing? The answer is Yes! It is no doubt a real thing but usually not what is shown in books and movies. However, under specific circumstances, it is possible to experience time passing at a different rate than 1-second per second. We need to know this real-world form of time travel and bust the myths.
