• Question: Thoughts on time travel?

    Asked by anon-199859 to Sylvia, Sumit, Martin, Kate, Bryony, Aryanne on 4 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: Martin McCoustra

      Martin McCoustra answered on 4 Mar 2019:

      It is possible…

      Travelling forward in time is easy. You just have to travel at a speed approaching a significant fraction of that of light and time dilation kicks in. Time will pass more slowly for you at that speed than for a stationary observer on Earth. There was an experiment with a pair of synchronised atomic clocks that confirmed this… one was flown into orbit and the other remained on Earth. When they were brought back together they were no longer synchronised.

      Going back in time is harder but there are solutions of the equations of relativity that allow it. All you have to build is a Tipler Machine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipler_cylinder)!

    • Photo: Sylvia Soldatou

      Sylvia Soldatou answered on 4 Mar 2019:

      I think it can happen if it hasn’t happened already and I would love to travel back on time!

    • Photo: Sumit Konar

      Sumit Konar answered on 5 Mar 2019:

      we are all travelling at the same speed forward; may be astronauts experience it differently.

    • Photo: Kate McGonagle

      Kate McGonagle answered on 5 Mar 2019:

      Madness. Time travel. I think we just discussed this in the live chat so I won’t bore you with answering again!

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