Defying the Laws of Time: Unleashing the Secrets of Chronokinesis Part - I

Do you believe in destiny? or maybe not, you may believe in karma. It doesn’t matter! Whatever you believe in is predestined. Well, that’s only one side of the coin named time. You might be wondering what am I talking about. Let’s use this temporal power to discover if time travel is possible.

Ever since I watched ‘Through the Wormhole - a Morgan Freeman Series’, I’ve always been optimistic about time travel and started questioning what time really is and whether is it possible to travel back and forth in time.

Before all of this crazy time travel stuff, what is time? Is it a physical thing (like we measure length with a ruler, similarly we measure time with a clock) or yet another abstract concept like feelings, or thoughts? Some common answers may be:

“Time is the difference between then and now.”

“Time is what tells us when things happen.”

“Time is money so leave me alone.”

So there are 2 major schools of thought, the first is more of a conventional view (sought of)- Time is linear i.e. it flows in only one direction - forward and we move with it, time once gone is gone it can’t be brought back, it only remains in our memories. Our future depends on what we do today and what we do today becomes our past. Simple, right? NO! How do we explain that our present affects our future? Things don’t always go the way we plan them in the first place. What is the point of the past if it has no significance in the present? Well, these are some philosophical questions, let's come back to science.

The other one says that our reality (what we experience every second) has already been planned. Our whole life is like a book, and each moment is like a single page of the book - everything that has happened, or is happening, or is going to happen is predetermined, we only live our lives just like one goes through the pages of the book. So by this definition, we can travel back and forth, up and down, turn our lives backward, even remove certain time frames like tearing the pages of a book and maybe even reorder it (who knows?)

Now both these seem to be quite different from each other, right? WRONG!

Imagine it like this:

According to the first one we can shape our future, we have to control our time, and how we want to spend it. Yet, time seems to fly by and we don’t realize until it's gone (you might want to disagree on the last one if you are from another planet but it happens with all of us humans here on Earth). Can you ask the clock to stop ticking so that you can quickly watch a series while your professor is scolding you? NO. In the second scenario as well we have no real control over time we only live through it.

So, is there a difference between the two, or just a matter of perception? Everyone perceives time differently, as said by Albert Einstein “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.” So, time is yet another relative concept that we don’t have a proper definition agreed upon by everyone. Our understanding of time is still incomplete, so it is premature to talk about traveling through it.

Still, that doesn’t stop us from thinking or discussing about time travel. According to Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity, time travel is possible by time dilation. He showed that time is not constant, but instead slows down as you move faster through space. This means that if you were to travel at speeds close to the speed of light, you would experience time much slower than someone who was not moving as fast. In other words, if you were to travel to a distant star at a speed close to the speed of light, you would return to Earth to find that many years had passed, while only a few years had passed for you. This is because the time that passed for you would have been dilated by the effects of your high speed. Of course, it is not possible to travel at speeds close to the speed of light with current technology.

Stay tuned for Part-II

Author: Harshit Agarwal

Editor: Saatvik Sachedva

Illustrator: Sanskar Srivastava