Time Travel

Doc Brown’s De Lorean, the Doctor’s TARDIS, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. What do they all have in common? Besides the fact that they’re all a work of fiction, they also deal with time travel.



Charlie McDonell famous internet vlogger
demonstrating the concept of wormholes. 
To many of us time travel seems like something that can only exist in the world of science fiction, but recent studies have shown that time travel is possible. One way of travelling through time is by using a wormhole. Most of you have probably heard the term wormhole before but what you may not know is that physics allows the possibility of actual wormholes. The idea is that in the world that we live in space and time are intrinsically linked to create what is called spacetime. If we take our three-dimensional universe (represented by the piece of paper on the right) and bend it to create an invisible fourth-dimension so that two different pieces of spacetime are pressed together. The point where these two pieces meet is a wormhole. The only problem is that in order for someone to travel through a wormhole from one point of spacetime to another, you would need the amount of energy comparable to a star exploding which a lot of energy. But by the laws of physics there is no rule saying that we could not time travel. Time travel is not impossible just very, very improbable.
Charlie showing the wormhole. 

 Even though we may not be able to time travel just as yet, it’s always fun to think about what the rules of time travel could be. One idea is that time is flexible and can change. Take Back to the Future for example. Marty McFly goes back in time and saves his dad, George McFly, from getting hit by a car thus preventing his parents from ever meeting. He has changed the course of history and created a paradox. He has to try and get his parents back together before he starts to disappear. Another idea is a fixed unchangeable timeline. Take Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. When Harry and Hermione go back in time to save Sirius Black, Harry realizes that it was him that conjured the patronus that saved him and Hermione from the dementors.


One thing I learnt from watching science fiction is that there are fixed points in time. A fixed point in time is an event or person that makes a long-standing impact on a timeline that it would be dangerous to change them. Like the eruption of Vesuvius or the NASA moon landing. In a most recent episode of the science fiction series Doctor Who, one of the characters changed a fixed point in time. This made time collapse and all of history was playing out at once, but reality was slowly dying. The opposite of a fixed point is a fluxing point. This is a point in time that can change and the rest of history would change around it. For example, if someone goes back in time and changes a decision they made their entire timeline would pivot around that point in time. 


To most of us time travel just seems like something that can only happen in the future, but some people claim to have gone back in time through the phenomenon called a time slip. This is when a person or group of people travel through time via unknown means. The earliest case comes from two English women, Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain who claimed they slipped back in time to the gardens of the Petit Trianon at Versailles from the summer of 1901 to the period of the French Revolution in 1789. Another case involves two English couples who were driving through France to a holiday in Spain. They claimed to have stayed overnight at a suspiciously old-fashioned hotel and decided to break their return trip at the same hotel but were unable to find it. Photographs taken during their stay were missing, even from the negative strips, when the pictures were developed. On both accounts the people claimed that the experiences felt too real to be a dream. 


With all this information I given you, I leave you with a quote by Michio Kaku: “Once confined to fantasy and science fiction, time travel is now simply an engineering problem.”