Veils of Time...

Most people think that time is like a river; flowing swiftly and surely in one direction, but I tell you, they are wrong! Time is an ocean in a storm!

Where did all this start in the first place? No one really knows who the first person to suggest time travelling was, but the first one to mention a time traveller in English Literature was Samuel Madden in his book ‘Memoirs of the Twentieth Century’, first published in 1733. The book talks about a series of letters from English ambassadors in different countries to the British ‘Lord High Treasurer’, all written (of course according to the book) between 1997 and 1998. The interesting part however, is that these letters were given to the narrator by his guardian angel at night in 1728. Since this story, time travelling stories slowly grew in popularity, for example ‘The Time Machine’ by H. G. Wells (1895) and several others. This concept was soon introduced in movies, like the ‘Back to the Future’ series, and later on in games like ‘Prince of Persia’, giving the stories a very interesting twist! But what’s the science in it?

There are several theories, all of which have been given an endless amount of thought. The most plausible theories for travelling through time involve, travelling faster than the speed of light, using black holes or wormholes. Just looking at these “requirements” one might say “It’s hard, but not impossible”. That’s what you think? One step at a time then; ‘Faster-than-the-speed-of-light’ – Albert Einstein once came up with a theory that explained that a body’s mass increases as its speed increases. Years later, a device that accelerated particles was invented, the Cyclotron. It was found that the particles exiting the Cyclotron were indeed larger, proving Einstein’s theory correct. But the most interesting fact about this theory is that once a body reaches the speed of light, it achieves infinite mass… now that’s off the charts! Black Holes: this is an easy one, a point in space that has an insanely high gravitational field, enough to crush stars! I’m not going anywhere near it! Next, Wormholes! A wormhole is a hypothetical feature of the space-time continuum, which is a form of mathematical term that merges space and time together. There have been theories of building machines on such wormholes to use them to traverse the barriers of time. Although the theories seem very plausible, the machines would need the “faster-than-light” attribute and also, wormholes are hypothetical, no one knows if they really exist or if so how big they are, and their position in space might prove hard to reach or build a suitable machine over it.

So it appears that building machines that travel through time is simply unattainable. But there seems to be way around this problem that we are not noticing, time dilation. Again, a theory concerning Albert Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity, they state that time moves slowly for quick-moving bodies and for bodies which are deeper in a gravity well. Therefore with this theory, time around a large body with a great gravitational pull and very fast spin (like Jupiter; huge mass and gravitational field, and a spin of about 10 hours) would be really slow when compared to Earth. Also, when a body travels in space, time moves slower on that body. Why is this? It’s hard to explain, but in a simplified manner, it involves theories tied to gravitation. But this is not really moving through time, it’s just a form of … distortion.

An interesting argument against time travelling is talking about tourists from the future; I seem to fail to spot any, oh wait, maybe it’s because there are none! It is a good argument against time travelling but doesn’t really prove anything. This brings us to the time line, the all-famous time line. Many people believe that past present and future are all written, that it’s ‘destiny’, making the idea of time travelling plausible. That’s all crap! We make our own destiny, nothing is written, nothing is ‘meant’ to happen, you are what you decide to be! You don’t like how things are turning out? Do something about it, you always have a choice! Now I have to go, I’m late for La Vallette’s 13th birthday!

James Ciarlo`