Time travel
The ability to jump forward and backwards in time has long fascinated science fiction writers and physicists alike. So, is it really possible to travel into the past and the future?
In movies about time travel in franchises like Doctor Who, Star Trek, and Back to the Future, characters climb into some wild vehicle to blast into the past or spin into the future.
In the TV show, it shows the doctor travels through time in the TARDIS, an advanced craft that can go anywhere in time and space. Famously, the Tardis defies our understanding of physical space. It’s bigger on the inside than it appears on the outside. A doctor who has a fairy tale quality and doesn’t aspire to be realistic science fiction. But what about the real world? Could we even build a Time Machine? And travel into the past or forward to see our future perspective, answering this question requires understanding how time actually works, something physicists are far from certain about. Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, which set out a description of space, time, mass and gravity. A key outcome of relativity is that the flow of time isn’t constant. Time can speed up or slow down, depending on the circumstances.
This is where time travel can come in, and it is scientifically accurate, and there are real-world repercussions from that, says Emma Osborne, an astrophysicist at the University of York, in the UK.
In our everyday lives, these relativistic effects are too tiny to be noticed, but they do affect the satellites that we use for the Global Positioning System. The clocks above click faster than the clocks on Earth. And must be constantly readjusted, says Osborne, if we didn’t, Google Maps would be wrong, but wrong about 10km a day.
Relativity means it’s possible to travel into the future. That’s why astronaut Scott Kelly aged slightly less over the course of a year in orbit than his twin brother, who stayed here on Earth. We don’t even have a Time Machine, exactly. We need to either travel at speeds close to the speed of light or spend time in the intense gravitational field. In relativity, these two acts are essentially equivalent. Either way, will experience a relatively short amount of subjective time, while decades or centuries pass in the rest of the universe. In contrast, going backwards in time looks far, far harder.
It may or may not be possible, says Brank Shoshany, a theoretical physicist at Brock University in st Catherine’s, Canada. What we have right now is just insufficient knowledge, possibly insufficient theories.
“In theory, it is possible for space time to be folded like a piece of paper, allowing a tunnel to be punched through.”
And as Stephen Hawking pointed out in his book black holes and Baby Universes. “ The best evidence we have that time travel is not possible, and never rule be, is that we have not been invaded by hordes of tourists from the future.”
Evidence for time travel
Each time someone spots the evidence and the Internet dives everyone with curiosity. But perhaps the evidence that time travel actually exists is hiding in plain sight, in museum collections around the world. And the below given are six instances, in works from the ancient to disturbingly modern, that were accidentally recorded for prosperity, but which gave a question mark for time travel existence while looking now.
- In this Funerary relief, a little girl looks as all the whole world is holding a laptop up to the deceased, represented on a throne to signal her status.
- Turkic Seamstress mummy, the Turkic seamstress, were uncovered by herders in Mongolia in 2017 and restored by the centre of cultural heritage of Mongolia. She wore some fashion-forward gear. The stripes are strikingly like those on adidas footwear, even though the German company was founded by Adi Dassler only centuries later, in 1949, according to the official account, anyway.
- Ventura Salimbeni's painting in the church of St Peter in Montaciano, in Siena, Italy, isn’t even subtle about its anachronistic technology. The large spherical object is the creation globe, and the protrusions held by Jesus and the Heavenly Father are wands symbolising their power.
- But the device bears an eerie similarity to another celestial instrument. This replicates the first artificial satellite placed in outer space, launched by the soviets in 1957, making it clear why this artwork is popularly referred to as the Sputnik’s monument. It’s even the right size, almost two feet in diameter, nice and shiny.
- Pieter de Hooch’s man handing a letter to a woman in the entrance Hall of a house, held in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, has such an innocuous, everyday title that it would easily through any casual observer off the trail to time travel evidence. Looking closer at the letter, in the man’s hand and trying to make sense of how this 17th-century courier had an iPhone hundreds of years before anyone else.
- Ferdinand George Waldmüller’s The Expected One is a classic genre painting from late in the Austrian painter's career, showing an enormous young man in his Sunday clothes, waiting with a flower for the object of his affections, who has yet to see him. According to the experts at the Neue Pinakothek in Munich, where the painting hangs, that’s because she’s engrossed in a hymnal. Or it’s really because her attention is fixed on an item in her hands that looks suspiciously like a mobile phone.
God, idols, and time travel
The concept is actually science fiction, but it also relates to Hindu mythology. As it’s full of fascinating tales where time flows differently, kings return to divine realms to find centuries have passed, sages live across ages, and gods appear in different yugas.
The Tale of King Kakudmi: a divine time lag
One of the clearest forms of explanation of time travel in Hindu texts is the story of King Kakudmi. Found in the Bhagavad Puranam, this story is about how the king went to meet Brahma to find a suitable groom for his daughter. The journey, however, was an ordinary pilgrimage.
By the time Brahma finished listening to a musical performance and turned to address the king, many ages had passed on earth. When Kakudmi and Revathi returned, their kingdom had vanished, civilisations had changed, and human beings had evolved differently.
This isn’t just about long life spans or the concept of heavenly time. It fits well with Einstein's theory of time dilation, where time slows done in higher dimensions or faster speeds. In the Mahabharata, one also glimpses the altered time perception.
In one lesser episode, Arjun is taken to the heavens by Indra to receive celestial weapons. He spends what seems like a few days there, but when he returns, many years have passed on Earth. Again, this brings up the possibility of time working differently across dimensions, which physicists believe may be possible new black hole or a wormhole hypothetical passage in space-time.
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