Time Travel is Possible

  Time Travel is Possible 

Time Travel is Possible, Say Scientists

The subject of time travel has intrigued both scientists and science-fiction writers alike for centuries, but now scientists are suggesting that the concept is theoretically sound.

Back in September of this year, UK physicist, Professor Brian Cox, declared that time travel was certainly possible, but only to the future and not to the past.

"The central question is, can you build a time machine? The answer is yes, you can go into the future," the University of Manchester professor told the audience during a speech given at the British Science Festival. "You've got almost total freedom of movement in the future."

Professor Cox explained that time travel into the future should be achievable using Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, where the time traveler would need to be traveling close to the speed of light in order to jump forward in time. Cox, a particle physicist, suggested that it was much less likely to achieve time travel to the past, however, and would require a wormhole it order to facilitate the leap backwards in time. Even if a wormhole was discovered or created, there is no way to tell whether humans would be able to use it to time travel. Wormholes appear to be certain "locations" in space-time, such that, if you jump in, you'll emerge at some point in the past, and they seem to comply with our current comprehension of the laws of physics.

Even if it proved to be a possibility, traveling back to the past could be risky due to the potential to disturb future events, and there are two well-known paradoxes that detail the implications of dabbling with history:

1) The first and most famous is the "grandfather paradox," in which the time traveler goes back in time and kills her grandfather. If she is successful, then how was she born?

2) Secondly, there is the "Shakespeare paradox." That is, the time traveler reads the works of Shakespeare, writes them down and brings them back in time. Shakespeare then finds the information and writes everything down. Who then wrote the works of Shakespeare?