Time is a concept; one that has greatly confused scientists for years. Is the mystery of time already solved? Or in the progress of being solved? Or is it still waiting to be solved? What happens if you mess with time? Is it even possible to time travel? Before these questions can be answered, we must realize what time really is.
Of many people’s philosophies, they say time is the numbers shown on the clock, the minutes and seconds and hours waiting to be counted, and the nonstop, everlasting progress of the past, present, and future. In fact, my good friend Google describes time as, “the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole.” But what exactly does that all mean? Albert Einstein depicted time as another dimension, the 4th dimension. Even that doesn’t make sense, and as Einstein himself says, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
So essentially, all these sources of information are seemingly summing up to 1 point: time being the infinite process of the existence of the universe and the recording of events.
A question that many scientists and people think about: What is time travel and is it possible? Many fictional stories depict time machines as machines that allow people to go back or forward in time. For instance, the short story “A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury illustrates that a hunting company has a time machine that allows hunters to hunt animals in the past. But there is a risk to time traveling (if it is possible). If a detail in the past is altered, drastic measures of changes may occur. Bradbury’s short story shows that, and many scientists, after years of research, have also come to the same conclusion. In the story, the protagonist Mr. Eckels went along with the Time Safari and hunted, and there was an anti-gravity path designed so the past won’t be changed. However, Eckels stepped off the path and killed an ancient butterfly, and when they returned to the present, the whole future was changed. This story greatly encouraged the name for a paradox, the Butterfly Effect. This effect describes how 1 very minor change in the past can affect the future several times greater, depending on the time elapsed.
Simply put, if there is a scientist in the 22nd century with a time machine who baked an apple pie with his fully grown apple tree, who went to the past for some strange reason, and tripped and fell on his apple tree in the past when it was only a sapling and killed it, apple pie would never have existed.
You would say, how is time travel actually possible? There is a chance that time travel will happen in the future. There is a concept called “spacetime,” folding the 3 dimensions of space (length, width, height) and the 1 dimension of time into 4 total dimensions. If there is something with high gravity, say, a black hole, it would affect spacetime. Imagine a blanket and you drop a bowling ball on it, it would create a hole. That is very similar to what a black hole is, except the black hole is trillions of times greater in gravitational force, so much it would suck the light out. So now we know that gravity would affect time. If the gravity is greater, then the time would appear to move much slower because the gravitational force bends the spacetime. So if we launched a spacecraft with people on it and it managed to get back, the people on the spacecraft would experience time slower, and the people on Earth would look many years older.
For now, we can only hope that time travel won’t exist in the future. However, if it does happen, we must be very careful about our actions during time travel. So is the mystery of time solved yet? Depending on the time period of when you’re reading this text, we will never know the exact answer.