Time travel is still very much science fiction, at least to us laymens.. But in the world of physics that’s not the case. However, now a new theory could change the way experts think about time relativity and they say it could prove traveling through time is an impossibility.
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00:00 Time travel is still very much science fiction, at least to us layman's, but in the world
00:07 of physics that's not the case.
00:09 However, now a new theory could change the way experts think about time relativity, and
00:13 they say it could prove traveling through time is an impossibility.
00:17 Matias Koivarova and two other physicists were looking at how light would slow when
00:21 passing through a magnetic field.
00:22 To come up with their new theory, the team first threw out convention and used an equation
00:26 that treated light's speed, albeit a constant in the universe, as an accelerating wave.
00:31 With Koivarova saying about that "aha" moment, quote, "The only assumption I needed was that
00:35 the speed of the wave is constant.
00:37 Then I thought to myself, what if it's not always constant?
00:40 This turned out to be a really good question."
00:42 While that initially didn't make any sense mathematically, when they decided to use an
00:45 accelerating wave of something else, say a spacecraft, against the constant of light's
00:49 speed, that's when everything fell into place.
00:51 And despite the equation's new form and novelness, they say it ended up having the same implications,
00:56 as relativity.
00:58 With Koivarova adding, "What we have shown is that from the point of view of the wave,
01:01 nothing happens to its momentum.
01:03 In other words, the momentum of the wave is conserved.
01:06 Which means that if the momentum is conserved, it is not altered in such a way as to be moving
01:10 in a different direction through time."
01:12 And this theory could mean, time travel is impossible.
01:15 [music]