Sunday, July 18, 2010

Time Travel is not a science fiction anymore!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! -Part 1


Hi guys, I was absolutely spellbound watching this program in Discovery channel and thought of sharing with you. So let us "GO INTO THE UNIVERSE" with Stephen Hawking who  in the year 2009 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. 

I had a lot of doubts while watching the documentary and so did a bit of research online so that i can explain it clearly. (hope so :-) )
I will make this post as a personal interview with Stephen Hawking (;-0)

Me        : hello sir, we are baffled seeing the topic.. Is time travel possible?

Stephen : Yes. First, though, you have to get your head around the notion that time is a dimension, just like width, height and length. You are driving a car: You go forward. That's one direction. You turn left or right, that's a second. You journey up a mountain road, that's a third. The fourth dimension is time.

Me        : Enlighten us. 

Stephen : The laws of physics actually accommodate the notion of time travel, through portals known as wormholes.The truth is wormholes are all around us, only they're too small to see. They occur in nooks and crannies in space and time. Nothing is flat or solid. If you look closely enough at anything you'll find holes and wrinkles in it. It's a basic physical principle, and it even applies to time. Even something as smooth as a pool ball has tiny crevices, wrinkles and voids. Down at the smallest of scales, smaller even than molecules, smaller than atoms, we get to a place called the quantum foam. This is where wormholes exist. Tiny tunnels or shortcuts through space and time constantly form, disappear, and reform within this quantum world. And they actually link two separate places and two different times.The tunnels, unfortunately, are far too small for people to pass through -- just a billion-trillion-trillionths of a centimeter -- but physicists believe it may be possible to catch a wormhole and make it big enough for people, or spaceships, to enter.

Me         : That sounds complex. If i could travel in the past and do something that prevents myself from being born, how could I exist in the future to travel back in time?

Stephen : Exactly. We call this as the Time Travel paradox ( Grandfather paradox). Ultimately, scientists may find that only travel into the future is possible, as the laws of nature may make travel to the past impossible so the relationship between cause and effect is maintained.

Me         : We had always thought time is like a river which has an unidirectional flow???

Stephen : Indeed.. Time flows like a river and it seems as if each of us is carried relentlessly along by time's current. But time is like a river in another way. It flows at different speeds in different places and that is the key to traveling into the future. Albert Einstein first proposed this idea 100 years ago that there should be places where time slows down, and others where time speeds up. He was absolutely right.

Me          : We really appreciate the concept. It would be better if  we have a proof..

Stephen :  The proof lies in the Global Positioning System satellite network, which in addition to helping us navigate on Earth, reveals that time runs faster in space. Inside each spacecraft is a very precise clock. But despite being so accurate, they all gain around a third of a billionth of a second every day. The system has to correct for the drift, otherwise that tiny difference would upset the whole system, causing every GPS device on Earth to go out by about six miles a day. The clocks aren't faulty -- it's the pull of Earth that's to blame.
Einstein realized that matter drags on time and slows it down like the slow part of a river. The heavier the object, the more it drags on time, and this startling reality is what opens the door to the possibility of time travel to the future."

Me       : ????????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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