[dropcap size=small]H[/dropcap]ow fascinating it feels when we think of time travel. It would be amazing if we could travel back in time, we could prevent major disasters from happening, like the 9/11 attack on World Trade Center or the 26/11 Mumbai terrorist attack. If a working time machine comes into existence someday, the world will become a completely different place.
This thing is not as simple as it looks like in most of the Sci-fi movies. Many of us think that time travel is possible someday, but the possibilities are ruled out by just one question of Professor Stephen Hawking [highlight ]“If time travel is possible, where are the tourists from future?”[/highlight] One of the most popular paradox that abolishes our dream to travel back in time is “Grandfather’s Paradox”.
[toggler title=”What is Grandfather’s Paradox?” ]Grandfather’s Paradox exemplifies the crunch in time travel. This paradox was first described by Nathaniel Schachner in his short story “Ancestral Voices”. This paradox is very simple, yet confusing. Suppose you successfully invented a time machine and you decided to get back in time to meet your grandfather before he met your grandmother, and you killed him. Now, if your grandfather was already dead before meeting your grandmother; it means you were never born. This forestalls the invention of time machine by you. Thus, preventing you to travel back in time to kill your grandfather. However, a number of theories are given to avoid this paradox such as past is unchangeable, so your grandfather somehow was able to survive your attempt of killing him. But these theories don’t look much convincing to me.[/toggler]
[toggler title=”Can we never go back in time?” ]The most convincing theory that may bring back the possibility of time travel is the theory of Parallel Universes. The creepy behaviour of quantum mechanics is majorly seen at atomic level but all its fuzziness seems to vanish as things increase in size. [highlight ]Quantum mechanics has always proven itself powerful and accurate but, scientists are still struggling to figure it out.[/highlight] The theory of parallel universes itself comes from the quantum mechanics. [highlight ]It states that all the possibilities of anything happening never do go away, instead they actually happen in other universes.[/highlight] Within these parallel universes, our wars have had different outcomes than the ones we know. Some species that are extinct in our universe may have evolved in others and in some of them, we may have become extinct.[/toggler]
Bringing back the Grandfather’s Paradox in this theory, we can say that you can kill your grandfather by travelling back in time into some other parallel universe where you were never born.
Now since we have removed the problem preventing us to travel in time, we can now bring up the main question – [highlight ]“How can we travel time?”[/highlight].
Since we haven’t cracked time travel yet, I have run out of time. We will talk about the ways in which we can travel in time in my next article. Thank you for reading.
