Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Practical Seven (TIme travel)

Although this Practical is titled Measurement of Time, i will be writing about Time Travel and will also include some videos and also photos, as everyone knows, time travel had always been debunked by many scientists, however, the discovery of it is getting closer and closer to us, one day, we may even be able to see our great great grandparents by jumping through a worm hole! Read on to find out more! The following is a video by National Geography, showing you the possibilities of interstelar travel.


 I hope you had fun watching this video, now i will start explaning the possibilities of time travel. So what is time travel? Time travel is the concept of moving between different points in time in a manner analogous to moving between different points in space, either sending objects (or in some cases just information) backwards in time to some moment before the present, or sending objects forward from the present to the future without the need to experience the intervening period (at least not at the normal rate). Although many people have thought that time travel was 100% impossible, it has been proved to be possible given the phenomenon of time dilation based on velocity in the theory of special relativity as well as gravitational time dilation in the theory of general relativity, theories by Einstein. However, Einstein did not manage to find out whether the laws of physics allowed backward time travel.
If you want to advance through the years a little faster than the next person, you'll need to exploit space-time. Global positioning satellites pull this off every day, accruing an extra third-of-a-billionth of a second daily. Time passes faster in orbit, because satellites are farther away from the mass of the Earth. Down here on the surface, the planet's mass drags on time and slows it down in small measures.
We call this effect gravitational time dilation. According to Einstein's theory of general relativity, gravity is a curve in space-time and astronomers regularly observe this phenomenon when they study light moving near a sufficiently massive object. Particularly large suns, for instance, can cause an otherwise straight beam of light to curve in what we call the gravitational lensing effect.
What does this have to do with time? Remember: Any event that occurs in the universe has to involve both space and time. Gravity doesn't just pull on space; it also pulls on time.  
You wouldn't be able to notice minute changes in the flow of time, but a sufficiently massive object would make a huge difference -- say, like the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A at the center of our galaxy. Here, the mass of 4 million suns exists as a single, infinitely dense point, known as a singularity [source: NASA]. Circle this black hole for a while (without falling in) and you'd experience time at half the Earth rate. In other words, you'd round out a five-year journey to discover an entire decade had passed on Earth

Speed also plays a role in the rate at which we experience time. Time passes more slowly the closer you approach the unbreakable cosmic speed limit we call the speed of light. For instance, the hands of a clock in a speeding train move more slowly than those of a stationary clock. A human passenger wouldn't feel the difference, but at the end of the trip the speeding clock would be slowed by billionths of a second. If such a train could attain 99.999 percent of light speed, only one year would pass onboard for every 223 years back at the train station

In effect, this hypothetical commuter would have traveled into the future. But what about the past? Could the fastest starship imaginable turn back the clock?

We've established that time travel into the future happens all the time. Scientists have proven it in experiments, and the idea is a fundamental aspect of Einstein's theory of relativity. You'll make it to the future; it's just a question of how fast the trip will be. But what about travel into the past? A glance into the night sky should supply an answer.


The Milky Way galaxy is roughly 100,000 light-years wide, so light from its more distant stars can take thousands upon thousands of years to reach Earth. Glimpse that light, and you're essentially looking back in time. When astronomers measure the cosmic microwave background radiation, they stare back more than 10 billion years into a primordial cosmic age. But can we do better than this?

There's nothing in Einstein's theory that precludes time travel into the past, but the very premise of pushing a button and going back to yesterday violates the law of causality, or cause and effect. One event happens in our universe, and it leads to yet another in an endless one-way string of events. In every instance, the cause occurs before the effect. Just try to imagine a different reality, say, in which a murder victim dies of his or her gunshot wound before being shot. It violates reality as we know it; thus, many scientists dismiss time travel into the past as an impossibility.


Some scientists have proposed the idea of using faster-than-light travel to journey back in time. After all, if time slows as an object approaches the speed of light, then might exceeding that speed cause time to flow backward? Of course, as an object nears the speed of light, its relativistic mass increases until, at the speed of light, it becomes infinite. Accelerating an infinite mass any faster than that is impossible. Warp speed technology could theoretically cheat the universal speed limit by propelling a bubble of space-time across the universe, but even this would come with colossal, far-future energy costs.

But what if time travel into the past and future depends less on speculative space propulsion technology and more on existing cosmic phenomena? Set a course for the black hole.

Imagine space as a curved two-dimensional plane. Wormholes like this could form when two masses apply enough force on space-time to create a tunnel connecting distant points. 
 Now, i would specifically talk about wormholes, i wont ention about black holes or cosmic strings. So
theoretical Kerr black holes aren't the only possible cosmic shortcut to the past or future. As made popular by everything from "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" to "Donnie Darko," there's also the equally theoretical Einstein-Rosen bridge to consider. But of course you know this better as a wormhole.

Einstein's general theory of relativity allows for the existence of wormholes since it states that any mass curves space-time. To understand this curvature, think about two people holding a bedsheet up and stretching it tight. If one person were to place a baseball on the bedsheet, the weight of the baseball would roll to the middle of the sheet and cause the sheet to curve at that point. Now, if a marble were placed on the edge of the same bedsheet it would travel toward the baseball because of the curve.

In this simplified example, space is depicted as a two-dimensional plane rather than a four-dimensional one. Imagine that this sheet is folded over, leaving a space between the top and bottom. Placing the baseball on the top side will cause a curvature to form. If an equal mass were placed on the bottom part of the sheet at a point that corresponds with the location of the baseball on the top, the second mass would eventually meet with the baseball. This is similar to how wormholes might develop.

In space, masses that place pressure on different parts of the universe could combine eventually to create a kind of tunnel. This tunnel would, in theory, join two separate times and allow passage between them. Of course, it's also possible that some unforeseen physical or quantum property prevents such a wormhole from occurring. And even if they do exist, they may be incredibly unstable.

According to astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, wormholes may exist in quantum foam, the smallest environment in the universe. Here, tiny tunnels constantly blink in and out of existence, momentarily linking separate places and time like an ever-changing game of "Chutes and Ladders."

Wormholes such as these might prove too small and too brief for human time travel, but might we one day learn to capture, stabilize and enlarge them? Certainly, says Hawking, provided you're prepared for some feedback. If we were to artificially prolong the life of a tunnel through folded space-time, a radiation feedback loop might occur, destroying the time tunnel in the same way audio feedback can wreck a speaker.

You can just imagine the wormhole like a peice of a3 paper, the a3 paper seems to be very long and Einstein have said that space is in relation to time, so when you fold that peice of a3 paper into half, theres the top and bottom pages, one facing the top and the other facing the bottom, just likt the picture on top, now what does a wormhole do in time travel? It shortens your passage, the top and bottom sides of the wormhole are connecting different universes together, if you jump in fromt eh top side, you will end up at the bottom side. Its as simple as that! It acts as a long tunnel where you just slide through and end up at a different universe.

Now, after having explained all the facts behind the wormhole and time travel theory, there is another video i want all of you to watch, after which i would end this interesting post on time travel. Note that this post is related to Practical Seven. (Measurement of Time)

Hope you had enjoyed these videos! Look on for more posts!

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