Time Travel is a subject that has puzzled humans for millennia. In recent history, that subject inspired multiple movie creators and authors. The possibility of traveling through space and time in both the past and the future would lead to an infinite number of possibilities for mankind.
One of the main premises of time travel is that you have to go faster than the speed of light (300,000 km per second). However, we are extremely far from even nearing that speed, as the fastest-going man-made object traveled at only 150 km per second.
A recent question asked six experts in astronomy, astrophysics, and physics if going faster than the speed of light is possible, and the answers were intriguing.
Einstein introduced the concept of temporal relativity.
A 1971 experiment (dubbed the Hafele-Keating experiment) discovered that a clock flying on an airplane traveling at the speed of light falls behind clocks that stay on the ground.
Recently-made precise atomic clocks have been proven to run at various speeds when one is moved relative to the other.
As Einstein explained, the process is known as “time dilation.”
Dr. Sean Matt, an expert in astronomy and astrophysics of the University of Exeter in the UK, said:
“If one travels close to the speed of light, time behaves differently than we are used to, and in this way, one can move forward in time faster than those left behind. So it is theoretically possible to travel to the future, but one could not return.”
All experts agreed upon the fact that you can’t go faster than the speed of light, which is also mentioned in Einstein’s theory.
Dr. Eric Tittley, an expert of astronomy and astrophysics from the University of Edinburgh, explained that no object could go faster than the speed of light.
“It is not a question of not having enough energy to push it that fast. From an external perspective, any extra energy added to a body to get it to and past the speed of light just asymptotically accelerates it to the speed of light,” he said.
The reason why objects can’t travel faster than the speed of light is that, as objects go faster, they also get heavier, which means that light is the only entity that can travel at that speed because it has no mass.
Therefore, the conclusion was that you could indeed travel at a very high speed, asymptotically close to the speed of light, which would change your experience of time, but there is no way you can travel faster than the speed of light.
