Time Travel

This grandfather paradox – the notion that changing the past may alter the present conditions that motivated the time traveler in the first place – instills doubt in time travel. But, as this video explains, subatomic particles regularly do different things in parallel. So, what if the universe exists in two states: one where your grandfather is alive and another where he’s dead? Intrigued? Confused? Let the animations in this 2-minute video help you wrap your mind around the possibility.

While the author discounts the possibility of traveling to the past, it lays out five hypothetical modes of catapulting into the future: speed, gravity, suspended animation, wormholes, and light. Each has some scientific basis, but none are realistic for humans. Read the article to learn where they offer promise and where they fall short.

Are you thinking of writing a story that involves time travel? You might want to read this guide first. It offers questions to consider, mistakes to avoid and strategies to employ to ensure you avoid paradoxes, plot holes and implausibilities.

Take a step back with this 5-minute video that raises questions about the very existence of time. Does it physically exist, or is it just in our heads? Einstein’s theories of relativity, which explain the behavior of large objects, assert that time is a fundamental property of the universe. But, as physicists try to develop a Theory of Everything that explains the behavior of large and small things, they’ve begun to ponder if time might just be an illusion.

These hypothetical distortions in the fabric of spacetime may connect vast distances across or even between universes. While science fiction often portrays them as traversable tunnels, the energy and matter required to keep a wormhole open defy current physical understanding.

Albert Einstein's theories went beyond E=mc2 and gave us a new and exciting way to look at the universe. His ideas reverberate still, offering bizarre notions like black holes, bending of space and time, and the idea of the universe having a lifetime. ScienceNews explores how the German, one-time patent officer upended two centuries of Newtonian physics and more in this absorbing article.

This 8-minute video explores how time travel influences the narrative arc of several movies, books and video games, from Harry Potter to A Christmas Carol. (Warning: it contains spoilers!) J.K. Rowling and Charles Dickens set myriad parameters as they’re worldbuilding to avoid paradoxes and create quasi-logical timelines. By drawing diagrams as he’s speaking, the video breaks down how time works in some of popular culture’s most beloved fictional universes.

Axiogenesis suggests that a theoretical particle field that evolved after the Big Bang may have spun like a marble around a wobbly “Mexican hat” energy landscape, producing excess matter over antimatter. This theoretical particle—the axion—may also make up dark matter, solving an additional mystery in astronomy.

The grandfather paradox doesn’t exist, according to research out of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia in 2020. They ran some models to determine that, if one traveled back in time and made changes to the past, those changes couldn’t dramatically alter the present. The original outcome that propelled the time traveler to visit the past would still find a way to happen. If true, would this make time travel less intriguing? Less scary and more attractive?

We can travel forward and backward, up and down, side-to-side in space. So, why can’t we travel back in time? Why can we only move forward? This article takes us all the way to the beginning of time – the Big Bang – to explain why time only moves in one direction. And it raises the ominous question: If time has a beginning and only moves in one direction, does it have an end?