Time Warp Wonders: A journey beyond the clock

By Sparsh Puri

Hey everyone! Imagine living in a world where you could just travel into the future – seems like Science Fiction, right? Well, according to scientists, it is possible! Without any hesitation, let’s dive into the adventure of Time Travel.

Twin Paradox: Our brilliant scientist, Albert Einstein, shook up the world with his extraordinary theories. One of them is the “Twin Paradox.” Sounds hi-fi, doesn’t it? Don’t worry; I will try my best to explain in simple words. Suppose there are two identical twins, let their names be X and Y. So, they both are of the same age, let their age be 13 years. One day, X went on an adventure in a spacecraft with super-fast speed, even faster than the speed of light. The trip was for 7 years. When X was leaving for the trip, he was 13 years old. When he returned, he became 20 years old. But when he saw his brother, he was shocked! Because his 13-year-old brother, who was expected to be 20 years old now, surprisingly was over 80 years old. Shocking, right? This is the basic concept of time when you travel faster than the speed of light. According to Albert Einstein and his smart ideas, if you’re moving really, really fast – like close to the speed of light – time starts to slow down for you compared to someone who’s not moving as fast. So, with respect to this theory, we can say that X traveled into the future. However, according to Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity – another super cool theory by a genius – objects with mass (like a human or a spacecraft) can never move at the speed of light. If they do, their mass would be infinite, and thus, infinite energy would be required to move. But still, our universe consists of limited energy, so it is not possible to move at the speed of light. In short, time travel is not possible by traveling with the speed of light yet.

Cool Giants – Black Holes: Before we dive into the adventure of Black Holes, let’s understand what Gravity is! You may think gravity is a strong pull that our Mother Earth exerts on us and the Sun exerts on Earth and other planets. Yes, it is indeed a strong pull exerted by planets and stars, but if we go deeper, we come to know that all objects, whether it is a football, human, or even the Sun, have a mass or what we call in simple words is weight. Some objects have a greater mass than other objects. But now you may wonder how mass is directly related to gravity. To answer this, Einstein said in his theory of Relativity that imagine space is a piece of cloth called the Space-time fabric. When there is nothing on the cloth, it is flat. But when a heavy ball is placed on it, it bends. Similarly, when there is nothing in space, the space-time fabric will be flat and will be called a Flat-Space. When there is a Planet or Star in space, the Space-Time fabric bends as much as the mass of the planet/star is. The more the bend, the more Gravity will be created, and the more the time will be slowed down. Wait! Does that mean humans also exert Gravity? Yes! They do, but the amount of gravity exerted by humans is comparatively very less than that of the Sun. Now that we understand what Gravity actually is, let’s see how we can use it to travel in time with the help of Black Holes.

Black Holes are basically a lot of mass squeezed into a tiny space. So much mass that the amount of Gravity produced by Black Holes is very strong, so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape its gravity. That’s why they are called Black holes because black is itself the absence of light. They bend the Space-Time so much that the time slows down near a Black Hole. Well, the amount of time slowed down depends on how much mass the Black Hole has. So, hypothetically, if a human went near a Black Hole and somehow did not let it attract him/her, the time for him/her would be slowed down compared to a normal human living on Earth. If we take two identical twins from the Twin Paradox, here as well, and X went near a Black Hole and spent 30 minutes there, interestingly when he returns to Earth, his brother will be almost 6 times his age, although it varies from Black hole to Black Hole. Like this, X traveled into the future. This is another way to travel into the future, but the problem with this way is that our nearest Black Hole is Gaia BH-1, and it is 1,560 light years away from us. So even if we travel at the speed of light (which is not possible yet), it will take us 1,560 years to reach there, and no human could live that much.

Conclusion: Traveling into the future is not possible yet. But who knows, it may be possible in a couple of years, and we would be able to meet our future generations and travel in the future. Although mass in this universe is limited, our ideas are unlimited! Till then, enjoy each and every moment of your present.