TIME

TRAVEL
(WHAT IF I ALREADY KNEW ABOUT THIS
ASSIGNMENT ,WHAT IF I AM FROM FUTURE ? )

TARUN SINGH TANWAR

A2305214450
2CS7-(Y)

Topics to be covered :
1) The great time travel party
2) The great time travel party
2nd generation
3) The web approach
4) The science behind time
travel
5) My views

THE FAMOUS PARTY !

Yes you heard it right. The famous time travel
party is one the largest conducted experiment in
the field of physics.
One of the earliest well-publicized attempts at
finding time travelers was hardly scientific. (I'll
get back to the real scientists in a second, I
promise.) It happened in the early 80s, when
computers and consumer electronics started
merging science and science fiction in fascinating
ways. It was also when the first space shuttle,
Columbia, blasted off. These sorts of things got
people thinking.
A group of artist types in Baltimore acted on
these curiosities in 1982 with an event The New
York Times described as "an epidemic of
temporary lunacy." In March of that year, all nine
planets were as close together as they'd been in
almost 200 years, and a group that called
themselves Krononauts gathered together to
welcome "visitors from the futures." The Times
reports, "The Krononauts drank, danced, and
after midnight some of them took off their
clothes." No time travelers actually showed up,

but it sounds like everybody had fun.

Fast forward 30 years and a similaralthough
simultaneously entirely differentparty took
place in Cambridge, England. This time the
ringleader was not a wild pack of
twentysomethings but Stephen Hawking himself.
Hawking's party was wonderfully deliberate.
There was champagne and snacks in a fancy
room at Cambridge University, where a banner
had been hung: "Welcome Time Travellers."
Hawking had always suggested that time
traveling tourists could be proof that time travel
was possible, so he invited only them. Nobody
showed up.
It's hard to tell how tongue-in-cheek Hawking's
futurefest was supposed to be. On one hand,
Hawking believes time travel is feasible, so he
wasn't necessarily laughing at the idea. He
might've even expected someone to come. But,
in Hawking's words, "There's a twist." The sneaky
scientist didn't tell anybody about the party until
after it happened. Somebody in the future would
have to find out about the event after the fact
and hop in a time machine in order to hang out
with the famous physicist.

Still, there's a good chance that Hawking was just

trying to prove a point. As his friend and
contemporary Kip Thorne explains in his book
Black Holes and Time Warps, one of the most
feasible methods for building a time machine
would involve creating and manipulating
wormholes. But this would only allow people in
the future to travel back as far as the invention of
the time machine itself. So if this is indeed how
we might build a time machine and we haven't
built it yet, it would be impossible for people from
the future to travel back to Hawking's party.

The convention approach

A few years before Hawking's party, an ambitious
MIT grad student tried a similar but nerdier
approach. Instead of keeping the event a secret,
Amal Dorai organized a whole convention about
time travel and encouraged everybody to spread
the world.
Dreams do come true. The New York Times did
publish a report. NPR's All Things Considered did
a segment on the convention. Wired wrote a
story. Heck, even Tina Fey made fun of it on
Saturday Night Live.

The exposure makes pretty good sense. MIT is a

famous university that tends to attract media
attention anyway. The program was also filled
with famous professors talking about time travel.
And the premise itself, well, it makes for a pretty
fun headline!
It still didn't work. "The convention was a mixed
success," Dodai said in an update to the event
website. "Unfortunately, we had no confirmed
time travellers visit us, yet many time travellers
could have attended incognito to avoid endless
questions about the future." A similar sort of
event happened around the same time in Perth,
Australia, to the same disappointing end.
Now, one could argue that Dodai simply
underestimated the power of the internet. It
would've been hard to tell in 2005, when the
convention went down, but the internet won the
war against print. Dodai discouraged everyone
from publicizing on the internet, because, in his
words, "The World Wide Web is unlikely to remain
in its present form permanently." It's still ticking
in 2014.
There's probably a simpler explanation. It's the
one the MIT physicists came up with, and the
same one Hawking suggested: If we eventually

discover a particular way to build a time machine

that works, people would only be able to travel as
far back as when the time machine was built.

The approach (2) :

You can probably already tell how this one's
going to end. Earlier this year, a pair of physicists
published the results of a pretty self-explanatory
study, "Searching the Internet for evidence of
time travelers." Instead of staging some sort of
event and counting on publicity to attract the
people of the future, these scientists went on the
hunt for evidence of where time travelers had
been online. In a sense, they were searching for
their digital footprints.
Robert Nemiroff and Teresa Wilson from Michigan
Technological University cast their net wide. They
searched Twitter. They searched Facebook. They
searched Google, Google+, and even Bing. But
they came up short. Between January 2006 and
September 2013, they couldn't find a single
mention of two terms from the future that people
would not have known during that time. None.

It was a good effort. However, given the

constraints of the experiment, they ended up
searching for a very specific sort of time traveler.
Why would that individual be doing putting words
from the future on the internet? "A time traveller
might have been trying to collect historical
information that did not survive into the future,
or might have searched for a prescient term
because they erroneously thought that a given
event had already occurred, or searched to see
whether a given event was yet to occur," the
paper explains.
That's a little bit silly, then, isn't it. It's no less
silly than throwing a party without inviting
anyone or hosting a convention celebrating
technology that did not yet exist. No wonder
these kinds of events ended up being fodder for
sketch comedy shows.
The fact of the matter
All that said, there does seem to be a pretty
concrete takeaway that's rooted in some widely
accepted ideas from theoretical physics. We have
not yet invented a time machine. If and when we
do, we'll enter a new era of time travel. We will
not, however be able to go any further back in
time than when that machine was built.

That's all assuming that this hypothetical time

machine can actually go back in time. Again,
that's really difficult.
Time travel is real, though. In a way, the
astronauts on board the International Space
Station time travel every day, albeit by a few
microseconds. The principles of relativity and the
very nature of space-time make it possible. So if
you really want to meet a time traveler, look no
further than your friendly neighborhood
astronaut.

WHAT IS BASICALLY TIME

TRAVEL ?
Time travel's been one of man's wildest fantasies
for centuries. It's long been a popular trend in
movies and fiction, inspiring everything from
Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol to H.G. Wells'
The Time Machine to the Charlton Heston shrine
that is The Planet of the Apes. And with the
opening of Interstellar todayn0t to spoil
anythingwe're about to fantasize about it even
more.
The most fantastic thing? It's probably possible.

What's almost impossible

Let's start with the bad news. We probably can't
travel back in time and watch the Egyptians build
the pyramids. In the last century scientists came
up with a number of theories that suggested it is
indeed plausible to take a leap into the future;
going back in time, unfortunately, is much more
complicated. But it's not necessarily impossible.
Albert Einstein laid the groundwork for much of
the theoretical science that governs most time
travel research today. Of course, scientists like
Galileo and Poincar that came before him
helped, but Einstein's theories of special and
general relativity dramatically changed our
understanding of time and space. And it's
because of these well-tested theories that we
believe time travel is possible.
One option for would be a wormhole, also known
as an Einstein-Rosen bridge. Along with physicist
Nathan Rosen, Einstein suggested the existence
of wormholes in 1935, and although we've yet to
discover one, many scientists have contributed
their own theories about how wormholes might
work. Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne are
probably the most well known. Thorne, a
theoretical physicist at CalTech, even helped

Christopher Nolan with the science behind

Interstellar.
So let's just assume that wormholes do exist. In
the late 1980s, Thorne said that a wormhole
could be made into a time machine. According to
Einstein's theory of general relativity, a wormhole
could act like a bridge though space-time by
connecting two distant points with a shortcut.
Certain types of wormholes, it's theorized, could
allow for time travel in either direction, if we
could accelerate one mouth of the wormhole to
near-light speed and then reverse it back to its
original position. Meanwhile, the other mouth
would remain stationary. The result would be that
the moving mouth would age less slowly than the
stationary mouth thanks to the effect of time
dilationmore on this in a second.
But there are several major caveats of traveling
back in time with this method. Chief among them
is the simple fact that we'd need a method for
creating wormholes, and once created, the
wormhole would only allow us to travel as far
back as the point in time when it was created. So
we'll definitely never be spectators to Great
Pyramids' construction.
The other really serious caveat is that we'd need

a way to move one of the mouths of the

wormhole nearly the speed of light. In their
seminal 1988 paper on wormholes, Thorne and
his colleagues assumed that "advanced beings
[would] produce this motion by pulling on the
right mouth gravitationally or electronically." We
can't do that right now, however.
What we can do is travel into the futurebut only
by a little bit.
What's almost certainly possible
In recent years, we've seen some aspects of
Einstein's fanciful theories proven true. The latest
and perhaps most exciting theory is the
aforementioned effect called time dilation.
Though we've based technology on the theory for
decades, an experiment finally proved this year
that time dilation is absolutely a real
phenomenon. It's also a phenomenon that could
allow us to travel into the future.
Time dilation basically refers to the idea that time
passes more slowly for a moving clock than it
does for a stationary clock. The force of gravity
also affects the difference in elapsed time. The
greater the gravity and the greater the velocity,
the greater the difference in time. Black holes,

like the one depicted in Interstellar, for

instance,would produce a massive amount of
time dilation, due to their extreme gravitational
pull.
Thanks to the space program, we've actually
been dealing with this effect for many years. This
is why the clocks on the International Space
Station tick just a little bit more slowly than
clocks on Earth do. Since the space station is
moving so fast and is affected by less gravity,
time moves more quickly. It's also why no clock
on Earth is perfectly accurate, since the effect of
time dilation means that time moves more slowly
closer to the planet's surface. Okay, maybe one
is almost perfect.
A better example of time dilation at work
involves GPS satellites. The GPS chip in your
smartphone works because there are 24
satellites circling the globe at all times that
triangulate your location based on how long it
takes time-stamped information to travel to and
from the device.
However, scientists learned when building the
system that the atomic clocks on GPS satellites
do indeed run a little bit fast, since they're
moving 9,000 miles per hour in orbit. To be

specific, they lose 8 microseconds a day. That's

hardly perceivable, but it's enough to throw off
the location data. And so GPS technology makes
adjustments to the clocks on board to account for
the relativistic effects. The equation used is kind
of complicated.
The implications of all this are huge. What if you
took this to the extreme? If you jumped in a
spaceship that flew super fast, time would pass
more quickly for people on Earth. You could do a
lap around the galaxy and return to Earth in the
future. This is basically what happens in Planet of
the Apes. In effect, Charlton Heston's character is
a time traveler.
What's definitely possible (but kind of silly)
The question remains, can we really take it to
that extreme? And is it possible to go backwards
through time, too?
Once again, we don't really know. Einstein's
theories tend to rule out rewinding time, but
they're still theories. It's possible some future
discovery could prove them wrong. As for the
wormhole approach, we won't really know exactly
how that works until we try it, and at the
moment, we don't really have a feasible method

for building a wormhole in space.

Hence, one easy way to find out is simply to
search for time travelers walking amongst us. No
laboratory required! And that's exactly what
several zany scientists have done. (Spoiler: They
haven't found any.)
If you're really curious about time travel though,
go see Interstellar. The science behind it is sound
if sometimes a bit fantasticbut the movie
itself is very fantastic.

My views :
Well if I ever end up building a time machine in
the future, the first thing I will do is to hand the
time machine to myself in the past thus
eliminating the need to even build it up in the
future.

Well the time machine can even help me witness

the greatest nikloa experiment with his kites live.

We all have our small dreams and aspirations but

I believe that the time machine will help the
human civilization in a way that no other
invention could.
It has the power to stop wars, help those in need,
save an individual or the entire earth or maybe
the human race in the near future.
Even if it turns out that time travel is impossible,
it is important that we understand why it is
impossible.
So I will end this assignment with a question.
What if I already knew about this assignment? Or
what if I never wrote all this down? What if the
future me sent this assignment thus removing all
the hardwork of typing all this down by myself!