From a philosophical point of view, TIME AND SPACE are the main forms of existence of matter. But philosophy is primarily interested in whether time and space are real or whether they are pure abstractions that exist only in the human mind. Some philosophers ignore the objective nature of time and space and make them dependent on the content of individual consciousness (Berkeley, Hume, Mach). Others emphasize the objective nature of time and space and deny timeless and extraspatial reality. Time and space are inseparable from matter. This demonstrates their versatility and universality. Space is three-dimensional; time has one, and only one, dimension. Space expresses the order of arrangement of simultaneously coexisting objects, while time expresses the sequence of existence of successive phenomena. Time is irreversible, that is, every material process develops in one direction - from the past to the future.
The development of natural science has shown the inconsistency of the metaphysical concept, according to which time and space exist independently of material processes and separately from each other, as independent entities.
Natural science of the 18th-19th centuries, speaking about the objectivity of time and space, considered them, following Newton, in isolation from each other and as something independent, existing completely independently of matter and movement. In accordance with the atomistic views of ancient philosophers (Democritus, Epicurus), natural scientists almost until the 20th century. They identified space with emptiness, considered it absolute, always and everywhere the same and motionless, and time as flowing evenly. Modern physics has discarded the old ideas about space as an empty container of bodies and about time as one for the entire infinite universe.
The main conclusion of Einstein's theory of relativity is precisely the establishment that time and space do not exist on their own, in isolation from matter, but are in such a universal relationship in which they lose their independence and act as relative sides of a single and indivisible time-space .
Science has proven that the passage of time and the extension of bodies depend on the speed of movement of these bodies and that the structure or geometric properties of the four-dimensional continuum (space-time) change depending on the accumulation of masses of matter and the gravitational field generated by them.
The ideas of Lobachevsky, Riemann, and Gauss played a large role in the creation of the modern theory of space and time. The discovery of non-Euclidean geometry refuted Kant's doctrine of time and space as non-experiential forms of sensory perception. Research by Butlerov, Fedorov and their followers discovered the dependence of spatial properties on the physical nature of material bodies, the dependence of the physical and chemical properties of matter on the spatial arrangement of atoms.
So, is it possible or not to create a time machine?
To answer this question, you must first determine:
1) What is time?
2) What should a time machine do?
3) What is space?
So time is:
1) A way to order events that occur
2) One of the spatial dimensions, represented by us in a special way.
Time machine is:
1) Some portal, entering which a person moves into the past; he can actively participate in the events of the past, change the past.
2) A device that allows you to only look at the events of the past.
3) A device that slows down or speeds up the passage of time.
4) A device that allows you to rewind time back/forward.
5) A device that allows you to travel only into the future.
If time is a way of ordering events, then any change in the past will inevitably cause a change in the future. Let's say a time machine is some kind of portal that moves you into the past (this is the most interesting option). Let's say a person travels back in time and makes it so that his parents do not meet. And he returns in a time machine back to his own time. But he has to disappear, right? Otherwise, there will be a violation of chronology, and moreover, the law of conservation of energy and mass in the Universe.
An interesting question also arises: after all, after the teleportation of this person, the flow of time does not stop. This means that we can assume the existence of “phases of time”: that is, there is a phase in which our ancestors live, and there is a phase in which our great-great-great-grandchildren already live.
That is, the future is in some time phase. Let’s say that one day such a machine will be invented. So why don't we see any changes in the world that would inevitably be caused in the present by "people from the future" who would travel through time? On the other hand, you often read in newspapers about anomalous zones in which miracles happen. For example, one person claimed that he saw the sinking of the Titanic in the recent past, that is, he witnessed a different phase of time. Somehow a “hole” has been created, allowing the past to be seen in the present. An eyewitness said that there were living people on the ship, begging for help. I wonder if an eyewitness had saved someone, would the rescued person suddenly disappear, “teleparting” to his hometown, and information about the rescued person would suddenly appear in old newspapers? Or would you go to your home yourself, but nothing has changed in the world around you? Or could the shipwreck only be observed? However, how reliable such information is is unknown. You can be skeptical about this.
Is it possible to have a device that rewinds time?
Think about it, how will we determine that it has rewound? After all, we cannot remember what will happen in the future. The machine makes the present become the future and the past the present.
How will it even work?
Here it is turned on and has begun rewinding time. But in the near past it was turned off, which means that the rewind will end there. Such a device requires another dimension of time in which it will operate.
Regarding the fifth type, the answer is clear: yes.
We are always traveling into the future. Is it possible to speed up this process?
Certainly. Experiments are already being conducted that make it possible to freeze the human body with the aim of thawing it in the future.
If a time machine is a device that only allows you to look at the events of the past, then you can say that it was invented: record something on a video camera and play it back: you will see events from the past. But the disadvantage of such a “time machine” is that you need to make a recording first...
How can we review the events of those years when there were no video cameras?
It is also worth remembering that the speed of light is finite. Light from distant stars can take millions of years to reach us. When we look at such a star, we see it in the past. It may no longer exist at all, but the light from it has only just reached us.
Unfortunately, terrestrial events cannot be observed in this way, since this requires moving faster than the speed of light.
Is it possible to slow down or speed up the passage of time?
Modern science answers yes. Einstein, in his theory of relativity, described the phenomenon of time dilation, which manifests itself when moving at very high speeds. The so-called “twin paradox” is known, when one twin is left on Earth, and the other is launched into space on a spaceship. After returning from the trip, the twin who was in the spaceship turns out to be much younger than the one who remained on Earth. The slowdown effect is also observed at not very high speeds, but it is very difficult to notice.
The question arises: are space and time objective?
It is known that time flows differently for different living beings. For example, it seems to us that the turtle is very slow. But she doesn’t think so: it’s all about the perception of the turtle and the person. Why is it so difficult for us to catch a fly? Because her time perception is much faster than ours, about 10 times. For us, the movements we make seem abrupt. And the fly perceives them as smooth, from which it is easy to dodge. In cold-blooded animals, time perception can vary within fairly strong limits depending on temperature. A person’s perception of time can also be changed. But it will change only for one individual. For all others, time will pass the same way, which means it exists independently of the subject.
It can also be assumed that time is a spatial dimension. Let's say we have a body that moves uniformly in a straight line. The movement, as we see, occurs in one-dimensional space. However, if we supplement the coordinate axis with the time axis, we will already obtain a two-dimensional space, i.e. time can be thought of as a spatial dimension. Let's get a graph of the body's motion in coordinates t,X. The question arises: if we change the position of one point on the graph at some point in time, will other points change their position? No. Also imagine a film with a movie recorded on it: when viewed, it seems that the image of each frame depends on the previous one. In reality this is not the case: “redraw” one of the frames. Will others change? No.
It should be said that three-dimensional space is a set of two-dimensional spaces. Each frame on film represents a two-dimensional space. When reproduced on the screen, we observe how one space replaces another, i.e. we have a set of two-dimensional spaces - three-dimensional space. It is noteworthy that we can scroll the film in the other direction, slow down and speed up its movement, i.e., actually move along the “time” coordinate as we want.
online application . Difficult, but possiblePaul Davies
The famous novel "The Time Machine", written by H.G. Wells in 1895, has inspired many science fiction writers. Is time travel really possible? Will it be possible to create a device that could send a person into the past or into the future?
For many years, time travel did not fit into the framework of serious science. However, the topic has become something of a side hustle for theoretical physicists. Thinking about time travel leads to some pretty funny and at the same time very thoughtful conclusions. For example, the essence of a unified theory of physics, based on an understanding of the relationship between cause and effect, will have to be seriously reconsidered if free movement in time is even possible in principle.
The most complete concept of time is given to us by Einstein's theory of relativity. Before its emergence, time was considered universal and absolute, the same for every observer, regardless of his physical state. In his special theory of relativity, Einstein proposed that the value of the time interval measured between two events depends on the way in which the observer moves. In other words, two observers moving differently will notice different lengths of intervals between the same two events.
Such phenomena are often called the “twin paradox.” Imagine that Sally and Sam are twins. Sally boards a spaceship and travels at high speed to the nearest star, then turns around and flies to Earth, where Sam is waiting for her. Let Sally's flight duration be, say, one year. When she returns, she will find that 10 years have passed during her absence from Earth, and she is 9 years older than her. It turns out that Sally's brother Sam is old and Sam are no longer the same age, although they were born on the same day.
This example illustrates one of the options for time travel: as a result of her flight, Sally moved 9 years into the future of the Earth.
Time shift
The time dilation effect occurs whenever one observer moves relative to another. In everyday life, we do not notice time distortions, since they only appear at near-light speeds. Even the speed of airplanes is so low that the time dilation of a typical air flight is only a few nanoseconds. Needless to say, the scale is far from Wellsian. However, atomic clocks are accurate enough to record this time shift and prove that time stretches as it moves. So, traveling to the future, even to the very near future, is a confirmed fact.
Three difficult stages of creating a tunnel time machine
1 First you need to find or create a stargate - a tunnel connecting two points in space. Perhaps such tunnels have existed since the Big Bang. Otherwise, you will have to deal with natural subatomic space-time tunnels that can appear and disappear everywhere, or artificial ones created with the help of particle accelerators. The microtunnels would need to be expanded to manageable sizes, likely using energy fields similar to those that caused space to instantly expand just after the Big Bang.
2 Then it is necessary to ensure the stability of the tunnel. Injecting negative energy into it, obtained by quantum methods using the so-called Casimir effect, will allow signals and material objects to painlessly pass through the stargate. Negative energy will prevent the tunnel from collapsing into a point of infinite (or almost infinite) density and becoming a black hole.
3 Now, using a spacecraft, it is possible to tow one of the tunnel entrances to the surface of a neutron star, which has incredible density and a powerful gravitational field that will slow down the passage of time. At the same time, at the other end of the tunnel, time will fly faster, and the entrances of the star gates will be separated not only in space, but also in time.
To observe truly noticeable time distortions, we will have to look beyond everyday experience. In large accelerators, elementary particles can be accelerated to speeds close to the speed of light. Some of the particles, such as muons, have a “built-in clock” because they have a certain half-life. Observations show that, according to Einstein's theory, muons moving at high speeds in an accelerator decay more slowly. For a stationary observer, cosmic ray particles also experience noticeable temporal distortions. The speed of movement of these particles is so close to the speed of light that from their “point of view” they cross the galaxy in a matter of minutes, although in the Earth’s frame of reference it takes tens of thousands of years. If time dilation had not occurred, such particles would never have reached the Earth.
Speed is one of the ways to move into the future. Another way is gravity. In general relativity, Einstein showed that gravity slows down the passage of time. The clock on the roof runs slightly faster than the clock in the basement, which is closer to the center of the Earth and therefore more strongly influenced by its gravitational field. Likewise, clocks in space run faster than clocks on Earth. The observed deviations are very small, but they were recorded by high-precision clocks. These time distortions were taken into account when the Global Positioning System (GPS) was created, otherwise sailors, taxi drivers and cruise missiles would constantly be thrown off course.
The gravity of neutron stars is so strong that time on their surface slows down by about 30% compared to time on Earth. Events occurring on Earth and observed from one of these stars will look like accelerated video. Black holes represent the ultimate version of time distortion: on their surface, time is frozen motionless for an external observer. This means that in the short time it takes an observer to fall onto the surface of a black hole, an entire eternity will pass in the rest of the Universe. Therefore, to an outside observer, the region inside a black hole is beyond the end of time. If a certain astronaut managed to approach a black hole at a short distance and then return alive and unharmed - undoubtedly a fantastic and also reckless project - then he could find himself in the distant future.
Head is spinning
So far we have been talking about moving into the future. What about traveling back in time? Everything is much more complicated here. In 1948, Kurt Gaedel found a solution to Einstein's gravitational field equations that describe a rotating universe. By traveling through the space of such a Universe, an astronaut can reach his past. This occurs due to the influence of the gravitational field on electromagnetic waves. In such a Universe, light (and, accordingly, the cause-and-effect relationship between objects) will be involved in rotational motion, which will allow material objects to describe trajectories closed not only in space, but also in time. With a shrug, Gödel's solution was put aside as a mathematical paradox - after all, there is no evidence that our entire universe rotates. Nevertheless, Gödel's result showed that the theory of relativity does not exclude travel back in time. Moreover, Einstein himself was puzzled by this fact.
The biggest challenge in creating a tunnel time machine
is the construction of a space-time tunnel
Other scenarios for traveling back in time have been invented. Thus, in 1974, Frank J. Tipler from Tulane University calculated that a massive, infinitely long cylinder, rotating on its axis at near-light speed and twisting light around itself into a ring, could allow astronauts to get into their past. In 1991, J. Richard Gott of Princeton University predicted that cosmic filaments - structures that cosmologists believe formed early after the Big Bang - could produce a similar effect. And the most plausible time machine scenario appeared in the mid-80s. last century. It is based on the concept of a space-time tunnel.
In science fiction, space-time tunnels are often called stargates; they represent the shortest path between two points far apart in space. Once you enter a hypothetical space-time tunnel, you can emerge moments later at the other end of the galaxy. Stargate actually fits into the general theory of relativity, according to which gravity distorts not only time, but also space. This theory allows us to draw an analogy with a bypass road and a tunnel connecting two points in space. Mathematicians call such a space multiconnected. Just as a tunnel through a mountain range is usually shorter than a bypass road, a space-time tunnel can be shorter than a path in normal space.
A fantastic space-time tunnel is described in Carl Sagan's 1985 novel Contact. Inspired by Sagan, Kip S. Thorne and his collaborators at the California Institute of Technology decided to find out whether the idea of a stargate was inconsistent laws of modern physics. The starting point of their research was the assumption that the space-time tunnel should be similar to a black hole, being a body with a monstrous gravitational force. However, unlike a black hole, which offers an irrevocable journey to nowhere, a stargate must have not only an entrance, but also an exit.
In a loop
For a space-time tunnel to be traversable, it must contain, in Thorne's words, exotic matter. This must be something that creates an anti-gravity field and thereby prevents the massive system from turning into a black hole under the influence of its own gigantic mass. The source of antigravity, or gravitational repulsion, can be negative energy. As is known, negative energy states are inherent in some quantum systems. This suggests that the existence of Thorne's exotic matter does not contradict the laws of physics. However, it remains to be seen whether it will be possible to create enough anti-gravity material to stabilize the tunnel (see Lawrence H. Ford and Thomas A. Roman, "Negative Energy, Spacetime Tunnels, and "Warp Drive" (Negative Energy, Wormholes and Warp Drive) in the January 2000 issue of Scientific American).
Source of paradoxes
THE NOTORIOUS MOTHER PARADOX AND ITS SOLUTION
The notorious maternal paradox occurs when people or material objects enter their past and change it. A simple example: a billiard ball falls into a tunnel time machine. Flying out of it in the past, he collides with himself and prevents himself from entering the tunnel.
The solution to the paradox is simple: the behavior of a billiard ball should not contradict logic or the laws of physics. The ball cannot fly out of the tunnel in such a way as to prevent itself from getting into it. But he can go through the stargate in an infinite number of other ways.
Thorne and his colleagues soon realized that if a stable space-time tunnel was created, it could be used as a time machine: after passing through such a tunnel, it would be possible to end up not only at another point in the Universe, but also at another point in time - in the past or in future.
To adapt a tunnel for time travel, one of its entrances must be towed fairly close to the surface of the neutron star. The star's gravity will slow down time near this tunnel entrance, so the time difference between the two entrances will accumulate. If you then place both inputs at the appropriate location in space, the time difference between them will remain fixed.
Let's assume that this difference is 10 years. Having passed through such a tunnel in one direction, the astronaut will be transported 10 years into the future. Another astronaut, passing through the tunnel in the opposite direction, will travel 10 years into the past. Returning at high speed to his place of departure through normal space, the second cosmonaut could be home even before the start of his journey. In other words, a spatial loop can become a time loop. The only limitation is that the astronaut cannot return to the period of time that preceded the creation of the space-time tunnel.
The biggest challenge in creating a time tunnel machine is building the space-time tunnel. Perhaps our space has been permeated with such tunnels since the time of the Big Bang. In this case, a highly developed civilization could use one of them. Space-time tunnels can also occur on microscopic scales and have dimensions on the order of an atomic nucleus. In principle, such a tunnel could be stabilized by an energy pulse and then somehow stretched to an acceptable size.
Prohibited by censorship!
Let us assume that the engineering difficulties are surmountable. Then the creation of a time machine opens a Pandora's box containing a host of causal paradoxes. Imagine a traveler who goes back in time and kills his mother, who was still a little girl at that time. Nonsense, isn't it? If the girl dies, then she cannot become the mother of our traveler. But if he was never born, then how did he go back in time and kill his mother?
Paradoxes of this kind arise whenever a traveler tries to make obviously impossible changes to his past. However, this does not stop someone from being part of their past. Suppose that, having traveled back in time, a traveler saves a young lady from murder, and she then becomes his mother. The causal loop in this case is self-consistent and does not look paradoxical. Thus, causal consistency may impose restrictions on the actions of the time traveler, but at the same time does not exclude time travel as such.
While not strictly paradoxical, time travel certainly remains mysterious. Let's imagine that a traveler finds himself one year in the future and in the latest issue of Scientific American gets acquainted with a new mathematical theorem. Having remembered its proof, he goes back in time and tells about it to a certain student, who then publishes an article about this theorem in the mentioned journal. Of course, this is the same article that our traveler read. The question arises: where did the information about the theorem come from? Not from a traveler, since he just read an article about the theorem. But not from a student who heard about the theorem from a traveler. It turns out that the information appeared out of nowhere and for no reason.
The unnatural consequences of time travel have led some science fiction writers to abandon the idea altogether. Stephen W. Hawking of the University of Cambridge has put forward the “chronology protection hypothesis,” which prohibits the existence of causal loops. Since the theory of relativity is known to allow travel into the past, then to protect chronology there must be some factor prohibiting such travel. What could be such a factor? Perhaps quantum processes will come to the rescue. The existence of a time machine would allow particles to travel back to their own past. Calculations showed that the resulting chain reaction would generate a diverging energy wave that would destroy the tunnel.
The chronology defense is still a hypothesis, so time travel cannot yet be considered impossible. Probably, the final solution to this problem will be possible in the event of a successful generalization of quantum mechanics and the theory of gravity using string theory and its additions (the so-called M-theory). It is possible that the next generation of particle accelerators will be able to create subatomic space-time tunnels, the stability of which will be sufficient for nearby particles to complete rapid time loops. This will be just an echo of Wells's vision of a time machine, which, however, will forever change our picture of physical reality.
Briefly about the article: Time travel is one of the most common themes in science fiction. Alexander Stoyanov in his article “Through Time” summarizes everything we know about the time machine - examples from literature and cinema, paradoxes of traveling into the past, Einstein’s theories, physicists’ experiments, clairvoyant predictions, flying saucers, the real possibility of getting into the future by freezing your body ... For the first time about the time machine - in the section that is named after this fantastic device!
Time is a friend of paradoxes
Time machine: problems of creation and operation
Time is an illusion, albeit a very intrusive one.
Albert Einstein
Is it possible to travel in time? At will, can you be transported to the distant future, to the distant past and back? Make history and then watch the fruits of your work? Until now, such questions were considered “unscientific”, and their discussion was the province of science fiction writers. But recently, such statements can be heard even from the mouths of scientists!
What is the principle of the time machine? What does it take to get into the 23rd century? Talk to the ancient sages? Hunt dinosaurs or look at our planet when there was no life on it at all? Will such visits disrupt the entire subsequent history of mankind?
The beginning of literary time travel is considered to be H.G. Wells's novel “The Time Machine” (1894). But, strictly speaking, the pioneer in this matter was the editor of the New York Sun magazine, Edward Mitchell, with his short story “The Clock That Runs Backward” (1881), written seven years before Wells’ famous novel. However, this work was very mediocre and was not remembered by readers, so we usually give the palm in the matter of literary conquest of time to Wells.
A. Asimov, R. Bradbury, R. Silverberg, P. Anderson, M. Twain and many other authors of world fiction wrote on this topic.
Why is the idea of time travel so attractive? The fact is that it offers us complete freedom from space, time and even death. Is it possible to refuse even the thought of this?
Fourth dimension?
H.G. Wells stated in The Time Machine that time is the fourth dimension.
However, the very fact of time travel was of little interest to Wells. The author only needed a more or less plausible reason for the hero to find himself in the distant future. But over time, physicists began to take his theory into service.
Naturally, the fact of a person’s presence in a different time should affect world history. But before considering time paradoxes, it should be mentioned that there are cases when time travel does not create contradictions. For example, a paradox cannot arise if one simply observes the past without interfering with its flow, or if one travels to the future/past in a dream.
But when someone "really" travels into the past or the future, interacts with it, and comes back, very serious difficulties arise.
But I didn’t beat my grandfather, but I loved my grandfather
The most famous problem is the paradox of closed time processes. This means that if you manage to travel back in time, you may have the opportunity to kill, say, your great-great-grandfather. But if he dies, you will never be born and therefore will not be able to travel back in time to commit the murder.
This is well illustrated in the story by Sam Mines " Find a sculptor". The scientist builds a time machine and goes to the future, where he discovers a monument to himself for his first time travel. He takes the statue with him, returns to his time and builds a monument to himself. The whole trick is that the scientist must erect a monument in his time, so that later, when he goes to the future, the monument will already be in its place and waiting for him. And here one part of the cycle is missing - when and by whom was the monument made?
Greenwich Observatory is where time begins. |
But science fiction writers found a way out of this situation. David Daniels was the first to do this in the story " Branches of time"(1934). His idea is as simple as it is unusual: people can travel through time independently and completely freely. However, the moment they fall into the past, reality splits into two parallel worlds. In one, a new one develops universe with a significantly different history. It becomes a new home for the traveler. In the other, everything remains unchanged.
Slowly the minutes float into the distance...
Traditionally, we imagine time flowing uniformly from the past to the future. However, ideas about time have changed repeatedly throughout the history of mankind. For example, in Ancient Greece, three main views on this matter can be distinguished. Aristotle insisted on the cyclical nature of time, that is, our entire life will repeat itself an infinite number of times. Heraclitus, on the contrary, believed that time is irreversible and compared it to a river. Socrates, and then Plato, tried not to think about time at all - why rack your brains over what you don’t know?
There is ample evidence of random time travel. So, at the beginning of 1995, a strangely dressed boy appeared in a Chinese city. He spoke in an incomprehensible dialect, and told the police that he lived in 1695. Naturally, he was immediately sent to an insane asylum. The attending physician and his colleagues checked his psyche for a year and found out that the boy was completely healthy. Early the next year, the boy suddenly disappeared. When they found the monastery where this boy allegedly lived in the 17th century, it turned out that, according to old records, one altar boy suddenly disappeared in early 1695. And a year later he returned, “possessed by demons.” He told everyone how people live in the 20th century. The fact that he went back may well mean that the past and future exist simultaneously. This means time can be tamed. |
The most prominent Christian theologian Augustine Aurelius (345-430) was the first to divide time into past, future and present, and represented the flow of time itself as a flying arrow. And although more than one and a half thousand years have passed since Augustine’s life, religion still tries to make us believe that we are sailing into the future, and all objects that fall into the past are lost forever.
But, no matter how sad the loss of the past is, linear time has its advantages. It provides for progress, freedom of thought, the ability to forget and forgive. It was this that allowed Darwin to create the theory of evolution, which loses its meaning if time moves in a circle.
Newton believed that time flows uniformly and does not depend on anything. But if we consider the second law of mechanics, we will find that time in it is taken squared, which means that using a negative value of time (time running backward) will not have any effect no influence on the result. In any case, mathematicians insist that this is true. Thus, the very idea of time travel does not even contradict the laws of Newtonian physics.
Guess my thoughts!
However, in reality, the reverse flow of time seems unlikely: try to collect a plate that was broken on the floor; will pass eternity until the scattered fragments gather again. And so physicists have put forward several explanations for this phenomenon. One of them is that a self-assembling plate is possible in principle, but the probability of this is infinitesimal (this way, in our world, anything can be explained - from the appearance of a UFO in the sky to green devils at the table).
For a long time there was another intriguing explanation: time is a function of the human mind. The perception of time is nothing more than a system into which our brain places events in order to make sense of our experience. But it is almost impossible to prove that a person’s emotional state or, for example, drugs affect the passage of time. We can only talk about subjective sense of time.
In 1935, psychologist Joseph Rhyne tried to prove the time perception hypothesis using statistical analysis. For the study, a deck with five symbols was used - a cross, a wave, a circle, a square and a star. Some of the subjects guessed from 6 to 10 cards. Since the likelihood of this is extremely low, Rhine and his colleagues concluded that the experiment demonstrates the existence of paranormal perception. Over time, the number of people wishing to repeat this experiment increased. At the same time, it was noticed that some subjects guessed not the “sent” card, but the next one after it. In other words, they predicted the future. It takes a second or two, but maybe you can see more?
Writer John Dunn expressed the idea in 1925 that providence comes in dreams. He notes that most people forget their dreams, and the familiar feeling ( deja vu) already seen may be caused by a prophetic dream. In his opinion, all dreams consist of randomly mixed images of the past and the future. The universe is, as it were, extended in time, but in the waking state the “future” half is cut off from the “past” by the sliding “present moment”. Many psychoanalysts take prophetic dreams quite seriously.
| Back to the Future |
The most famous film about time travel can rightfully be called Robert Zemeckis's Back to the Future trilogy (1985, 1989, 1990). This sci-fi comedy follows the incredible adventures of young Marty McFly and mad doctor Emmett Brown, who creates a time machine from a DeLorean car (equipped with a plutonium reactor). Friends travel to the past, the future, experience all imaginable and unimaginable paradoxes of time - and invariably come out of any troubles unscathed. This sparkling, bright, kind and unusual picture is an immortal classic of cinema, interesting to viewers even decades after its release. |
And even if you walk, you still sit...
It was once believed that Newtonian physics was capable of explaining any cause-and-effect relationship. If you know the laws of motion (and Newton was convinced he had them all), you can predict the future of a moving object given the initial conditions. But this situation creates a dangerous logical chain. If the laws of nature determine future events, then, having enough information at the time of the creation of the Universe, it is possible to predict any event in its future history. In other words, all life is subject to absolute predestination.
Fortunately, we now know that this is not the case. In the end, humanity has stepped over the laws of Newtonian physics: they work well in “our world” - cars and bicycles, but fail at large masses and speeds close to the speed of light. The man who turned all Newtonian physics upside down was Albert Einstein.
He started with the fact that the speed of light is constant, without worrying at all about how light could come to you in the same amount of time, regardless of the direction of travel. Following this, SRT (special theory of relativity) was formulated. In its most general form, its meaning boils down to the fact that the speed of light is always constant and nothing can exceed it. The concepts of time and space were combined and called continuum. According to Albert's theory, it turned out that if any object reaches the speed of light, then for it time will practically stop.
With this postulate, SRT theoretically allows one to travel in time. This was first expressed by Einstein himself and developed in his twin paradox. In this scenario, one of the two twins becomes an astronaut and is sent into space on a ship that travels at close to the speed of light. The second brother remains on Earth. When the astronaut returns to Earth, he will find his brother considerably aged (if the earthling even lives to meet his brother).
For a long time there was a hypothesis that there are certain particles ( tachyons), which have already exceeded the speed of light and it is the lower limit of their speed. According to SRT, such particles always travel into the past. Their discovery would mean an almost complete time machine. However, after fruitless searches, it was decided that even if these particles existed, they could not be detected.
It is worth noting that SRT only involves traveling to the future. The past is closed to her.
The most famous film time traveler. |
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From time to time, reports appear in magazines and the media that, they say, we know how to build a time machine, just give a couple of million for the project. The newly minted inventors claim to use the work of Einstein, modern quantum mechanics and other advanced scientific achievements.
However, the very idea of time travel cannot be denied just because it is unrealistic in our time. Would you try to tell a resident of the 19th century that people will be able to safely move through the air and fly into space...
If something is possible in principle, then sooner or later it will be invented. But one very important question is connected with the time machine - any ingenious invention can be turned into a weapon. Just remember the atomic bomb: a single discovery put the whole world on the brink last war. The same thing can happen with a time machine (if it is built). Maybe it would be better if time travel forever remains a topic for science fiction writers?
For thousands of years, humanity has been at war with time. Preventing the aging process, finding out the future - all this pushes humanity to think about how to make a time machine. The brightest minds of humanity have worked on this issue, both in the past and in the present. Writers who are famous for their fantastic stories and directors who make films about traveling in time capsules make us believe in the implementation of the idea of creating a machine capable of transporting people through time.
History of attempts to create a time machine
Physicists such as Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel worked to create a machine that could transport a person through time into the past or future. The theory that Einstein put forward is based on the control of the Universe. Or rather, to derive the equation of its gravitational field. The scientist believed that the Universe is a rotating body. And light is an element that enters the trajectory of its rotation. Thanks to this, you can fly through space-time rings that are created by the rotation of the Universe and light particles, thereby seeing your past.
The theory of relativity has always caused conflicting opinions among mathematicians and physicists. After all, if scientists believe in its veracity and accept it, they will automatically agree that time travel is by no means a fairy tale, but a very real possibility.
There is another opinion that exists among scientists who want to conquer time. It consists in the fact that time can be influenced, like everything else. The fact is that time is the same component of our world as space. It can be changed or distorted by the pressure of gravity. At the same time, time turns from a straight line into a loop through which you can travel. You just need to pick up a certain speed.
But that’s why it’s a theory, it’s not confirmed by practice. And the question of how to invent a time machine remains just a question, although there are many not entirely substantiated claims that such a machine has long existed.
Modern attempts to create
Projects to create temporary tunnels have been carried out in the United States of America. All of them were developed in order to confirm the possibility of time travel. Although some sources confirm that during such experiments it was possible to get into the future. The paradox is that all the subjects who confirmed such “breakthroughs” were considered simply crazy. This begs the question: why were experiments carried out that were previously recognized as invalid? For example, a secret project called "Phoenix", during which it was established that time loops exist. Participants wanted to find out how possible the theory of temporary movement is in practice. Unfortunately, those who answered positively were sent to places for the insane.
Nobody knows whether a time machine will be invented. Or maybe it already exists. Some mysteries always remain unsolved. It is possible that even a positive answer to this question will not satisfy scientists; it will only make them understand that they have sacrificed their entire lives on the altar of science, solving a riddle that has already been solved in the distant past or future.