Thursday, January 05, 2006

Time Travel

There are less ideas as fascinating as the concept of time travel. Time travel, or the ability to travel backwards or forwards in time at will, has fascinated everyone from researchers and students to fiction authors and anyone at all who has ever thought over such a possibility.

The theory of physics that comes the closest to saying anything about time travel is the theory of relativity. The theory of relativity was given by Albert Einstein and describes some extraordinary effects that become noticeable as a particle approaches the speed of light. The relativistic effect of time dilation, which describes a condition in which time appears to be moving at different rates for two observers in different reference frames, in one such counter-intuitive effect that comes close to time travel.

While there are many theories that support, or at least provide an argument, on how time travel might be possible, there are other counter-arguments that describe the paradoxes that the concept of time travel leads to. Some scientists use the concepts like wormholes, parallel universes and quantum entanglement to propose time travel mechanisms. However, another kind of arguments refutes the possibility of time travel by giving examples of paradoxes such as the grandfather paradox.

More to come...

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