New Theory May Finally Put the Time Travel Debate to Bed
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]