• Question: @Ciaran is time travel possible?

    Asked by sean and robbie to Ciarán, Áine, Eoin, Lydia, Victoria on 17 Nov 2014. This question was also asked by Emma The Penguin Lover.
    • Photo: Ciarán O'Brien

      Ciarán O'Brien answered on 17 Nov 2014:

      We’re travelling through time right now at the rate of one second per second! :p

      From what little I know of Einstein’s theories of Relativity, travel into the future is technically possible, but you’d have to be moving ridiculously fast to do it. The International Space Station in orbit around Earth moves at about 7.7 Km every second, pretty fast to me and you, right? Scientists found that after 6 months up on the ISS traveling at that speed, the astronauts on board were actually 0.007 seconds younger than they should have been. These astronauts traveled into the future, but it took them 6 months to travel 7/1,000 of a second further than everyone else on earth. Not very efficient 🙂

      Travel backwards through time appears to be impossible. At least until someone invents the quantum flux capacitor I saw in Back to the Future. But seeing as that’s a completely made up invention, it’s probably not going to happen 🙂

      You might get more detail out of a physicist, I’m sorry but as a microbiologist I don’t deal much with temporal physics 🙂

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