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Asked by collinsflinders to Ben, Clare, Ezzy, Mario, Sam on 13 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by arusa, hepworthandsimmons.
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Mario Campanelli answered on 12 Mar 2012:
probably not, but in any case not to places from which you could influence the present (so the “back to the future” scene where the protagonist meets his teenage mother would not be possible)
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Elizabeth Pearson answered on 12 Mar 2012:
Depends what you mean by time travel. For people it’s unlikely. We might be able to send the odd particle or a message back in time but currently it’s impossible. Shame though. I’d have liked to have seen a dinosaur. Guess it will have to be Jurassic Park time!
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Sam Vinko answered on 13 Mar 2012:
Thats a funny question. Our life, by definition, is time travel – we come from the past and travel through time during our life, until we ultimately die on a day in the future of when we were born… So ya, its clearly possible!
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Clare Burrage answered on 13 Mar 2012:
This is an exciting question, because it’s something I’ve been working on recently! I’ve been looking at new types of particles that might exist, and some of these may be able to go faster than light. In standard physics the fact that nothing can go faster than light is what allows us to seperate cause and effect, future and past. So if a particle can travel faster than light, it’s also possible that it might e able to travel back in time.
Being able to travel back in time is worrying! The classic example is what would happen if you went back in time and killed your grandfather? Would you still exist? And if you didn’t then who killed your grandfather? (I’m not going to do this, my grandfather is lovely!)
But what we find is that physics is very clever, and it is able to protect itself from these kinds of causal paradoxes. Being able to seperate cause and effect is something very fundamental in physics, and even if you can travel faster than light it looks like nothing can travel backwards in time.
Which is a shame! -
Ben Smart answered on 13 Mar 2012:
At the moment we don’t have a good enough understanding of how the universe works to know how time travel could be possible.
Einstein’s ‘theory of special relativity’ tells us that as you travel faster, time actually slows down for you (but not for everyone else). So if you got on a spaceship and travelled really really fast for a long while, you might only be aware of a few days passing (because time has slowed down for you, because you’re travelling really fast), but back on earth thousands of years may have passed. So you could use this trick to travel forwards in time, but you wouldn’t be able to go back in time again to when you set off.
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