Feature
Time Travel could be cool
Mainul Hossain
Time travel is one of my favourite topics! I read many time travel stories while in school. In most of these stories, the hero used a machine to travel in time and save the world. Ever since, I have wondered how great it would be if one could really travel in time. Many unfortunate guys would be able to prevent their affairs from coming to an end by travelling back in time. Also, one would be able to take the BUET admission test as many times as he/she wants. Wouldn't that be great?
Movies like Back to the Future trilogy and The Time Machine depict clearly how cool time travel can be.
I have continued to be inspired by this fascinating concept as the years have gone by (and I know I am not the only one).
Well, we all travel in time. During the last one year, I've moved forward one year and so have you. Another way to say that would be that we travel in time at the rate of 1 hour per hour.
But the question is, can we travel in time faster or slower than "1 hour per hour"? Or can we actually travel backward in time, going back say 2 hours per hour, or 10 or 100 years per hour?
It is a mind-boggling thought. What if you went back in time and prevented your father and mother from meeting? You would prevent yourself from ever being born! But then if you hadn't been born, you could not have gone back in time to prevent them from meeting. What do you think of
that?
Albert Einstein was the first to come up with the Theory of Relativity. The ideas of the theory are very hard to imagine because they aren't about anything that we may experience in real life.
According to this theory, anything that travels through space-time has a speed limit of 300,000 kilometers per second (or 186,000 miles per second), and only light travels at this speed. One will have to travel at the speed of
light to travel in time. Sounds romantic ?
It also says that surprising things may happen when your speed relative to other objects is close to that of light. Time dilates slower for you than for the people you left behind, but you won't notice this effect until you return to them.
Say you were fifteen years old when you left Earth, in a spacecraft travelling at about 99.5% of the speed of light and celebrated only five birthdays during your space voyage. When you get home at the age of 20, you would find that all your classmates are 65 years old, retired, and
enjoying their time with grandchildren!
In the past few years, scientists have thought about the ways time machines could work. Ideas like "wormholes," which are supposed to be shortcuts through space-time, seem wonderfully interesting, but no one knows whether it is possible.
In future if a scientist does manage to make time travel a reality, we would be able to do some awesome things like travelling back to the time of the dinosaurs or visiting wedding ceremony of our grand parents and doing so many other cool things. Till then though, we will just have to wait.
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