Essay in national newspaper calls time travel “a genuine possibility”
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0223
An online Barnes and Noble listing for Brian Clegg’s forthcoming How to Build a Time Machine enthuses ‘Forget fiction: time travel is real.’ Clegg ‘holds a physics degree from Cambridge,’ reports the Wall Street Journal , which on 3 December gave him a quarter of a page to argue that time travel is ‘far from impossible under the principles of modern physics.’
The online book listing requires quoting:
Clegg provides an understanding of what time is and how it can be manipulated. He explores the remarkable possibilities of real time travel that emerge from quantum entanglement, superluminal speeds, neutron star cylinders and wormholes in space. With the fascinating paradoxes of time travel echoing in our minds will we realize that travel into the future might never be possible? Or will we realize there is no limit on what can be achieved, and take on this ultimate challenge?
The blurb’s writer couldn’t resist adding one more sentence, giving a twist to an old cliché: ‘Only time will tell.’
In the newspaper essay, Clegg emphasizes that ' ‘real’ time travel . . . would look quite different from the version that we’re used to seeing in books and movies.’ He describes an ‘everyday sort of time travel’ that is explained by special relativity: ‘Whenever something moves relative to Earth, its time runs more slowly than stationary clocks, thus taking it into Earth’s future.’ In ‘real’ time travel, he writes, you ‘don’t dematerialize and reappear; you travel through time AND space to your destination.’ He conjectures that it ‘might be possible to collect 10 immensely dense neutron stars in deep space, form them into a cylinder, spin it at high speed and thus warp time.’
At the end, Clegg considers the paradoxes that enliven fiction and movies about time travel—for example, the notion of traveling back in time to stop someone from being born. ‘Though some argue that such paradoxes mean that trips into the past are impossible,’ Clegg asserts, ‘it’s more likely that the paradoxes would resolve themselves or shift the traveler into a parallel universe.’
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for Science and the Media . He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.