By BELLA PAPPAS
Sheridan High School Student
Editor’s Note: The Sheridan Student Column is brought to readers by Sheridan High School’s 10th grade English class, taught by Abby Williams.
Time travel is an activity you may have seen in a science fiction movie, and thanks to modern technology and mathematics, it may not be fictional anymore! Recently, physicists have been looking into the currently impossible idea, and many say that with further research it could be possible.
In 1905, Albert Einstein developed the theory of relativity. In short, it states that everything is measured in relation to something else and that the speed of light is constant and nothing can travel faster than it.
The theory explains that if something were to travel at a high velocity, it will experience time more slowly, and if something were to travel at a low velocity, it will experience time more quickly. This has been tested and proven to be true in an experiment using clocks. According to NASA, scientists set two clocks to the same time. They left one on Earth and put the other in an airplane to travel around the world. When the second clock came back, it was slightly behind the first clock, proving that the faster an object travels, the more slowly it experiences time.
You may be familiar with the complications of time travel in entertainment, such as paradoxes and contradictions. Getting around these events may be difficult for scientists. Thankfully, a student at the University of Queensland, Germain Tobar, thinks he may have found a way to time travel without the risk of paradoxes. Tobar stated that space-time may be able to adapt itself to avoid these complications.
For example, if someone were to travel back in time to prevent a disease, it wouldn’t be there to prevent it in the first place. According to Tobar, the said disease would still spread, removing the paradox. Tobar’s work proves the closed time-like curves of the space-time continuum, which Einstein predicted. These curves can fit into the rules of free will and classic physics.
Although many believe it is possible, some scientists are still skeptical of time travel. For example, Stephen Hawking mentioned in his 1994 book, Black Holes and Baby Universes, that if time travel were possible in the future, people would have already come from then to visit our time period. This isn’t necessarily a true statement, though.
Author Margaret Peterson Haddix wrote The Missing from 2008 to 2015. This was a middle-grade novel series about famous children who were stolen from the past to sell in the future. The main characters of the series were among a handful of people to know about the time travel agency that was present in the book. Considering the way time travel has been portrayed in entertainment, such as in Back to the Future, bad things could happen if the wrong people have access to it. Wouldn’t that mean it should be kept secret or not widely available to the public, like in The Missing? Just because time travel could be potentially discovered in the future doesn’t mean it is frequently used.
As of now, there isn’t a ton of scientific evidence supporting the idea of time travel. Scientists have come up with many theories, but most of them have not yet been proven. Until further information is gathered, individuals will have to decide if they believe the classic science fiction idea of time travel is possible or not.