Our news director’s dream of one day traveling back in time and recovering the missing episodes of classic Doctor Who has hit a major speedbump.
Physicists at the Hong Kong University of Technology and Science have just proved that no machine will ever allow a person to travel through time because time travel is flat-out impossible. And it’s not just because we don’t yet have the tools to pull off time travel. Turns out those pesky laws of physics are what’s standing in the way.
In a study published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Physical Review Letters, Shengwang Du and his team measured the ultimate speed of a single photon and showed that it cannot move faster than the speed of light.
“The results add to our understanding of how a single photon moves. They also confirm the upper bound on how fast information travels with light,” Du said in a statement put out by the Hong Kong University of Technology and Science.
“By showing that single photons cannot travel faster than the speed of light, our results bring a closure to the debate on the true speed of information carried by a single photon.”
Personally, I’m disappointed that time travel has been shown to be impossible, but at the same time I’m invigorated that scientists were studying time travel as an actual possibility!
Proving something is impossible now is one thing. Proving something is forever impossible is another. It was once thought it was impossible to break the sound barrier. Proving that something will NEVER be possible is an impossibility in itself.
I absolutely love it when some scientist or even the whole scientific community say something is impossible based upon their current research and current level of knowledge and then someone always comes along and proves them wrong. God I love it when the impossible becomes a routine part of life.
“They” said the world was flat & could not be sailed around. “They” said if man was meant to fly he would have wings.
“They” said the sound barrier could never be broken. “They” said escaping Earth’s gravitational pull could never be achieved. “They” said building habitable space stations was not sound science. “They” said man could never build a craft to reach the moon, or Mars, or Venus, or any of the other planet in our solar system. “They” said no man made craft could ever leave our solar system and travel into interstellar space and continue transmitting a signal back to Earth.
“They” said…..I could go on if you like. The impossible has only one purpose – to prove it doesn’t exist anywhere but in the small minds of limited individuals.
And it was deemed “impossible” to be in a moving vehicle (early trains) that went faster that 50 mph because the air pressure would prevent you from breathing.
Probably not in our lifetimes, but NEVER?
A. Didn’t we already know this? Didn’t Einstein tell us nothing can go faster than the speed of light?
B. The laws of how the quantum and macro world actually interact are so poorly understood that we don’t know what potential “loopholes” might allow time travel and which ones are just fantasy.
I doubt that time travel will ever be possible;or more specifically,we might find time travel to be theoretically possible, but the energy requirements to do something which might allow time travel, like opening and maintaining a worm hole, might make it virtually impossible. One day we will have a definitive answer to this question, but that day hasn’t arrived yet.