You come out of your house. You see a beautiful time machine standing in front of you. You get inside the machine and see the options to set any time in the future or in the past. Would you like to time-travel? Where would you travel in time?

I have always been fascinated by the space-time concept and astronomy throughout my childhood. Who wouldn’t wonder about the mysteries of the universe?

Though time-traveling is still a mystery for us we all enjoy it through movies and science fiction. Moviemakers take us to different times with their amazing imaginations, isn’t it?

Time-Traveling in Movies

In the movie Back to the future, a teenage boy named Marty McFly travels back in time through the time-traveling car invented by a scientist whom he calls ‘doc’. The movie is based in 1985. He travels back to 1955 and meets his parents and certain events occur and he comes back to the present (1985). We can clearly see the Grandfather paradox in the movie. When Marty meets his parents he accidentally avoids the events of their first meeting. What if his parents hadn’t met? He wouldn’t have been born and he wouldn’t be there in the first place. Fortunately for Marty, the movie takes a different turn. He corrects his mistake and makes his parents meet and they go to the prom and have their first kiss.

H.G. Wells in the book “Time Machine” also explored time-traveling possibilities. The movie based on the same book was shot in 1960 but based on the 1900s. The plot goes like this: a scientist has built a time machine enough to carry a person. He travels forward in time and goes far, far, far into the future to about 802,701th year (oh boy!). Usually, time-traveling movies show the future to be a few decades ahead of us. But this movie went too far. The time traveler finds out that human civilization has been divided into 2 parts: Morlocks and Eloi’s, and has gone bad after the nuclear war. After coming back to the present (1900), he decides to again go to the future and change it.

If you are a Harry Potter fan, you wouldn’t have missed the time-traveling scene from Prisoner of Azkaban. Dumbledore gives a tiny time machine for Hermione to go back in time to save Buckbeak. In the movie, while the current events are taking place the future events also coincide. When Ron, Harry, and Hermione are hiding in Hagrid’s place, the future Hermione throws a tiny stone towards Harry. Does this event occur in the actual past? Or in the time-traveled past? Or are they both the same?

There are numerous movies and books about time traveling or about parallel universe such as Deja Vu, Adithya 369 (a Telugu movie which I had watched it in my childhood days), A German movie Run Lola Run which shows different variations of the same context. It’s an example depicting the dilemmas of life events.

Is Time-Traveling possible?

Wormholes, massive black holes and traveling at the speed of light are some of the ways that help travel through time.

Wormholes

Einstein came up with the concept of wormholes in his theory of relativity. It is also known as Einstein-Rosen bridges. Theoretically, wormholes are the gateways or passages in space-time which create short cuts through time in space. Ideally with the help of wormholes, one can travel to different places/universes in a short time. Mathematically wormholes exist, but none have been discovered so far. According to this video, https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2ysfia by Stephen Hawking wormholes exist at a microscopic level. If they did, could we inflate it one day so that it could carry a person who can then travel through time?

Blackhole

Blackhole is a region in space-time that prevents anything, even light, from escaping. If we had a space ship that had enough power to travel towards the black hole and managed to revolve around it by escaping from drowning itself inside it, we can experience time traveling. The space ship that is revolving around the black hole would experience time to be much slower compared to somewhere else (on earth). For example, if the time for the space ship to revolve around the black hole takes around 10 years according to earth time, it would have slowed down and people inside the space ship experience time to be just 5 years. So when they return to the earth everyone on earth would have been 10 years older than the people in a spaceship who traveled in time.

Speed of light

If we want to go to the future we have to travel faster, really faster and reach the speed of light. Scientists at CERN have conducted experiments on particles that accelerate at nearly 99.9% speed of light. Looks like those particles are actual time-travelers!

So, the real question is if you had a time machine

When would you have traveled to? What would you have done differently? Which event would you have altered?

As my husband and I reflected on what we might change in our past, we agreed even the smallest shift in our story, and we might never have ended up together!