Part II – Time: The Shadow of our life.
What is time? No one can definitely say what time is. In this article, we tackle time from physics point of view. We all experience the effect of time. Time is one physical quantity that can never be reversed. A broken plate can never be mended by reversing time.
However, mass and length and many other physical quantities can be changed. We live in the three dimensional world. Everything we see has length, breadth and height no matter what the size of the object is. However there is a fourth dimension – time. We can travel through the other three dimensions, but is it possible to travel through time? Scientists have speculated for a long time and have finally found different ways to travel through time. Which is the smoothest thing you have seen? A snooker ball? But keep in mind that even those smooth balls are rough and have grooves & ridges in them or we wouldn’t have been able to hold them.at that minute level, we know that the electrons exist.
But there are gaps between these particles which are generated and destroyed every millisecond. These gaps are what scientists call wormholes and they are our ticket to the future. If somehow we can enlarge a wormhole and freeze it, it can transport us to past present or future who knows? However, they create what is known as the mad scientist paradox or the grandfather paradox. Here’s what it does. A scientist, say builds a portal to exactly one minute into the future. He sets up a gun, in the next moment, to shoot himself from the past. In one foolhardy attempt, he kills himself. Now, an interesting thing happens. The scientist from the past would have died even before setting up the gun. The effect would have occurred even before the cause. He can never shoot himself, in this case, which means he can never die. But he is already dead. Therefore, this never happened!
It never exists, because an effect similar to that of the resonance occurs here. It causes the radiations from the past and the future mix up in the wormhole, increasing the intensity as each moment passes until it blows up the whole universe. Therefore, wormholes are not possible, thankful for the historians and a disappointment for the scientists. To prove it, you can perform a simple experiment. Set up a party but do not reveal it until the hour has passed. Reveal the address and the date of the party the next day.so, the time travellers shall enter your party at that moment. Bu this never happens. Therefore, travelling to the past is out of question. There are many ways of travelling into the future. A lot of people say that time is faster in space, but that does not seem to make any sense. On the other hand, it is absolutely true.
The earth is massive. We know that more massive a particle is, more particles it attracts toward itself. There is no restriction for the gravity. It can suck all physical quantities. Even the light is sucked in a black hole. So why should time be a restriction? Earth slows time around it. Not only the earth but also big buildings such as the white house of Washington DC and the pyramids of Giza. However it only slows it down by a billionth of a second so we hardly notice. A big difference in time is caused when we move near the black hole. Being very massive, it sucks more time. To stay in the orbit and not get sucked into the black hole, a very high velocity is required and at the right point, the rocket should enter the orbit tangentially. Once it does that, time slows down inside the rocket. There is no feedback as in case of the wormhole, so it is perfectly safe. For every thirty minutes in the rocket, sixty minutes would have passed on the earth. But a lot of effort is wasted in travelling not into very distant future as a lot of time is required to go into distant future. There lies one last method to travel into the future. It is the most hopeful method and can be achieved some day.
The key to time travel is speed. This is where the magical speed comes in. 3 x 10^8 m/s. it is impossible to reach the speed of light because, on applying E = MC2, we get that the total energy possessed by the body on reaching the speed of light is a constant. On increasing the speed further, the mass of the body changes disintegrating the body. So only 99% the speed of light could be reached. Let us imagine a train moving at a speed near to that of the speed of light. As it moves faster, time slows down inside it preventing it from reaching the speed of light. Which is why, a person moving in the train would automatically be slowed down. For every one week on the train, a hundred years would have passed outside. After travelling for just a week, we could end up in a new century. This is practically possible and the example lies right in front of our eyes. The Sern particle accelerator in Geneva, Switzerland, accelerates particles known as muons to 99% the speed of light. So instead of getting disintegrated after a millionth of a second, it lasts for more than a second.
They are real life time travellers. If we can achieve this, we could go to the end of our galaxy in only 75 years. We could explore the space more than the capacity of the mankind. We only need a rocket which is able to withstand that stress and consumes fuel efficiently. Maybe man will achieve it someday… in the future. . . .
Bibliography
Stephen Hawking’s Universe by Discovery. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. Dead Famous – Einstein and his inflatable Universe by Mike Goldsmitt
