Ever since man has started pondering about Time and Space, he has always been intrigued by the fact that there might be some way to travel back into their past or future. It’s palpable that everyone will love to go to his or her past and start from a new beginning or will not reiterate the mistakes made before. This has been the interest of many science fiction writers. Each time when man attempted to figure out a way to travel back to travel back into the time, he has always encountered some serious tribulations. These tribulations are more often called as Paradoxes (which mean something absurd or contradictory). Suppose going back to your past when you are not born and you kill your parents. Now if you were not born that means neither you exist in the future nor in the past! That is something very contradictory and surpassing imagination.
It was 1905, when a clerk at Swiss patent office-Einstein revolutionized the way we see the universe. In his earth shattering paper he showed that time and position of an event are intimately blended with each other and they depend on how one moves. If two observers would assign time to an event they would disagree more, if faster their relative speed is. So one can ask, what speed one needs to attain in order that the time for one observer should go backwards relative to the time of other observer? The answer is that he needs to travel faster than the speed of light. Unfortunately, in the same remarkable paper of 1905, Einstein showed that it is impossible to attain the speed of light. He illustrated that it would take an infinite amount of power to accelerate a body past the speed of light. Einstein’s paper of 1905, seemed to rule out crave of those people who hoped to time travel. However, in 1915, Einstein showed in his paper that Gravity could be described by the distortion of space and time around a mass or energy. We can also observe this phenomenon in the apparent Position of a star behind our Sun. The light coming from the star is slightly shifted from its original path due to the distortion of space-time around the sun. Now we have experimental evidence that space and time are warped. So can space and time be warped enough to allow things like time travel, wormholes, etc. in the view of science fiction this all seems possible. After all today’s’ science fiction Is tomorrow’s science fact. So be optimistic that someday in future man will be able to TIME TRAVEL.
Written by: Syed Ehsan Ali
E-mail : aaliyasin@yahoo.com
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