by Nish Laverz

Created on: February 17, 2010   Last Updated: February 20, 2010

Physicists have been working on finding a way to time travel for years. As far as we know without success. But will we ever break the time barrier or will it always be something we strive to do?

The English mathematician, Stephen Hawking once proposed a very interesting question on Time Travel. He asked: “If you could have time travel, wouldn’t they already be here telling us about it?”

With this one sentence he seemed to have solved the very question of time travel by basically saying that it must not be possible because we have never met anyone from the future.

So does this spell the end for the posibility of time travel being a reality in the future?

No, it does not as another scientist came up with a theory to fix the problem Hawking caused.

Frank Tipler stated that A device based on an artificially created black hole would only allow travel back to a period after it was created. This means it would not work straight away and that because we have not created one yet then no time traveler could get here. This keeps the idea alive.

Theories

To break the time barrier we may first have to break the light barrier and prove faster than light travel is possible, as this may be the key to traveling forward in time.

Experiments have shown that time is conceived differently by someone traveling in a plane to someone not moving on the ground, so if we could travel at the speed of light we in theory should be able to go to the future, breaking the time barrier.

Other experiments have shown that under the right conditions the flow of light can be slowed and even stopped. Could this pave the way for faster than light travel or even time travel or is it just a neat trick?

The experiment involves shining a light into a condensate (Bose-Einstein Condensate).The condensate causes the light's speed to slow and in the right circumstances even stop completely, causing some scientists to believe this could be a key to creating a time machine.

The way in which this works suggests that it could be used in the future to create a new form of camera, but not to facilitate time travel.

Other theories involve the use of wormholes, but these are theoretical and we may never find one to test these theories out.

In conclusion.

If in the future we break the light barrier and prove faster than light travel to be possible, then in theory we could also break the time barrier.

As long as there are people out there trying to break the time barrier then there is always that glimmer of hope that one day someone will do it and make time travel a reality.

So time travel could be possible in the future as long as the interest in it stays with us.

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