• Question: In the future would it be possible to have teleportation machines and/ or time machines?

    Asked by anon-186306 to Verity, Trystan, Raquel, Danny, Catherine, Andy on 11 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Danny Ward

      Danny Ward answered on 11 Nov 2018:

      A time machine to the past is against the laws of physics and so would not be possible. A time machine to the future however could potentially be feasible….you technically can already do it! If you fly close to a black home, you will actually time-travel in to the future. Time can warp in space and do really strange things.
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      As for teleportation machines, its not against the laws of physics but it would be one of the most challenging things to invent for humans. We have to remove every single atom and put it back together again somewhere else. Some scientists have done a thing called quantum entanglement where they were able to “teleport” some photons but beyond this, we really don’t have anything!

    • Photo: Verity Hill

      Verity Hill answered on 11 Nov 2018:

      I really want to see teleportation like in Star Trek, that would be very cool. But I think in that, they even say that they disassemble the persons molecules and reassemble them on the other side. I think the main difficulty would be that you could never really test it? It would be too dangerous and high risk to test it on people, because if it went wrong it could be really unpleasant. So I think even if the tech was available, you’d maybe only be able to use it on objects rather than people.

    • Photo: Trystan Leng

      Trystan Leng answered on 12 Nov 2018:

      It’s an interesting debate whether backwards time travel is theoretically possible under the laws of physics. Some of Einstein’s equations for the theory of general relativity seem to allow time travel into the past, but other things we believe to be true in physics suggest it isn’t possible. As far as I know, there are no serious suggestions as to how we would time travel backwards in practice.

      Time travel forwards is definitely theoretically possible. We know this because of Einstein’s theories of relativity. If we were to travel away from, then return to the earth at a very high speed, the time elapsed on Earth would be longer than the time elapsed for the traveller. The main challenge for this is a practical one – forward time travel in this manner would take an incredible amount of energy.

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