A team of physicists from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology have squashed every schoolboy’s dream and declared that time travel is impossible.
In work published in the US scientific journal Physical Review Letters they say that, as their research shows that photons cannot travel faster than light, then time travel is not possible.
This basically means they say that nothing can travel faster than light so Einstein’s ‘causality’ (an effect cannot occur before it cause) is confirmed.
I remember reading about people fearing that travelling in Stephenson’s rocket at 30mph would kill them by taking their breath away and that travelling to the moon was impossible.
But somehow or other we managed to overcome the proclamations of the experts. So there is ever hope that today’s ‘laws’ of physics become yesterday’s witch craft like beliefs.
One also doubts that this will do anything to quell the ever fertile imagination of the young and sci-fi writers alike. So there is still plenty of legs in the Doctor Who story. And I wonder how many of those researchers actually started out in physics on the back of works like HG Wells ‘The Time Machine’ and the time anomalies portrayed in programmes like ‘Star Trek’ and ‘Red Dwarf’?
This conclusion is also the best one for them to make. Because if they are wrong they can always go back in time and change the report! They could not do so if they said time travel was possible and it actually turned out not to be.
There is however one law in the universe that will never be broken. That is the law of ‘boom and bust’. After all, if Teflon Tony and Golden Brown couldn’t beat it then who can?
I like the way that their 'theory' that time travel is impossible only takes in to account the idea of time travel as a faster than light concept.
There IS such thing as faster than light, but it would require amazing amounts of gravity in order the 'warp' the universe to a point where things can travel between two points in less than the conceptual 'straight line'. A Wormhole as it's commonly known.
If that is possible, then the idea that time travel is only possible by travelling faster than the speed of light may not be correct.
Time travel is impossible only until it becomes possible.
150 years ago manned flight was considered impossible, and a century or more before that it was believed that it would be fatal for a man to travel at 50 miles an hour.
We are still living in pre-history. Disputes are solved by war, there is a great deal of hunger and poverty, still no instantaneous travel, and some people continue to believe that earth and the universe were made by a god.
7/30/11, Hello, I am very sure that these "Chinese Scientists" have never heard of Madman Michael Marcum. Only on our beloved American soil is where 'dreams' come true. The evidence is on the West Coast. If I only had it then I could publicly boast about it. Currently I can only give links on alleged black & white photos taken way back then. No one back then could figure out how or why this mysterious anonymous person appeared on a public beach, one thing though. He was horribly crushed. Question, where are his fellow classmates. A Conspiracy has been silenced by the mental retardation of the U.S. Citizens. later!
Interesting story. Never heard of Madman Michael Marcum (or is it Markham) before. Lots on Youtube.
I also love the story that, after he made his time machine and he disappeared, someone found a story and photo from the 1920s/1930s that local California police found a body crushed inside a weird tube with what was at the time called an unidentified strange device but looks like a modern cellphone.
http://jritchie.com/871
Can't find the photo though so I assume it's not true.
Good tale though.