In the world of science, time travel isn’t just a convenient plot device for Hollywood blockbusters; it is a legitimate consequence of our understanding of the universe. While we aren’t exactly building DeLoreans yet, the blueprints found in Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics suggest that time is far more flexible than our daily experience lets on.

 

Fast-Forwarding: We Already Know How to Do It

Travelling into the future isn’t just possible—it’s an experimental fact. According to Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, time is relative to how fast you are moving. This is known as velocity time dilation.

The faster you move, the slower time ticks for you compared to everyone you left behind.

Protons in the Large Hadron Collider zip around at 99.999999% the speed of light. For these particles, time slows down by a factor of about 7,000.

 Even at lower speeds, the effect is real. Astronauts on the ISS are technically time travellers; because they move fast and live in a weaker gravitational field, they return to Earth slightly younger (by fractions of a second) than their earthbound twins.

 

The U-Turn: Can We Go Backwards?

This is where the maths gets difficult. While moving forward is easy (just go fast), moving backward requires “shortcuts” through the fabric of space and time, known as Spacetime.

Wormholes: These are hypothetical tunnels connecting two different points in time and space. If you could stabilise one, you could theoretically enter one end and exit at an earlier point in history.

Alcubierre Drives: This theory suggests “warping” space—contracting it in front of a ship and expanding it behind. While it’s designed for faster-than-light travel, physics tells us that anything moving faster than light is essentially moving backwards in time.

What’s the catch? To keep these shortcuts open, you’d need “exotic matter” with negative energy, something we haven’t found in large quantities. This led Stephen Hawking to propose his Chronology Protection Conjecture, which basically suggests the universe has a built-in “security system” that prevents us from ever building a working back-in-time machine.

 

The “Grandfather” Problem

The biggest headache for scientists isn’t just the engine—it’s the logic. If you go back and prevent your grandparents from meeting, you are never born. But if you aren’t born, you can’t go back to stop them.

To solve this, physicists look to two main ideas:

The Self-Consistency Rule: You can go back, but you can’t change anything. Anything you do in the past was already part of history.

Parallel Worlds: Every time you travel back, you arrive in a brand-new timeline. You can change whatever you like there, but your original home remains exactly the same.

 

The Bottom Line

We are all travelling through time right now at a rate of one second per second. Science proves we can “speed up” that journey into the future if we have enough power. However, the door to the past remains a theoretical mystery, guarded by massive energy requirements and the confusing laws of cause and effect. Perhaps it is in art that we can truly explore the boundless possibilities of time. My painting, “Resurrection,” delves into this very idea, inspired by the cyclical nature of existence where nothing is truly lost, but merely transformed. It depicts a contemporary mansion, gradually consumed by a black hole in the medieval era, only to be resurrected as a formidable citadel. One half of the canvas, rendered in stark black and white, signifies an ending, while the other bursts with vibrant colour, celebrating the new life infused into ancient bricks. It’s a visual metaphor for the universe’s ceaseless dance of creation and recreation, much like the scientific theories exploring the endless permutations of time.

Sources:

Science Time (2023). “Is Time Travel Possible? The Science of Time Explained by Brian Cox & Neil deGrasse Tyson.” YouTube.

Wikipedia. “Time Travel.” Link.

Einstein, A. (1905/1915). Theories of Special and General Relativity.