Numerous time travel plots can be found in literature, television, and film and they frequently appear in pop culture. However, the concept of Time Travel is surprisingly old with some claiming that Sophocles’ Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex, which was written over 2,500 years ago, is the earliest time travel tale.
No one has ever actually accomplished the kind of back-and-forth time travel seen in science fiction or proposed a way to send a person through a significant amount of time without killing them in the process, despite the fact that many people find the idea of altering the past or seeing the future before it happens to be extremely fascinating.
DISTANT REALITY
But there is some evidence that supports some degree of temporal dilation. For instance, the special relativity theory by physicist Albert Einstein assumes that time is an illusion that shifts with respect to the observer.
When compared to an observer at rest, an observer travelling close to the speed of light will experience time and all of its consequences boredom, ageing, etc. much more slowly. Because of this, astronaut Mr. Scott Kelly matured only a little bit slower than his identical twin brother who remained on Earth throughout the course of a year in orbit.
The second law of thermodynamics, which stipulates that entropy or randomness must constantly rise, is also broken by time travel. You cannot unscramble an egg because time can only flow in one direction. More specifically, when we go into the past, we are moving from the present, a condition with high entropy, to a period of time that must have had lower entropy.
The time-travel paradoxes, which we can potentially address if free will is a delusion, if there are several worlds, or if the past can only be seen but not felt. Perhaps the reason time must move in a linear fashion and we have no influence over it makes time travel impossible. Alternatively, perhaps time is an illusion and time travel is meaningless.
Without a doubt, if we had unlimited access to time travel, we would encounter paradoxes. The most well-known example is the “grandfather paradox,” which states that if one had access to a time machine, they could go back in time and kill their grandpa before their father was born, therefore preventing the possibility of their own existence. You cannot be both being and not existing logically.
Mr. Stephen Hawking, a theoretical physicist, hypothesized that there must be a “chronology protection conjecture,” a physical law that prevents time travel but is as of yet undiscovered. The premise behind Mr. Hawking’s theory is that we cannot obtain information from a black hole, hence we cannot know what happens inside. However, this justifies nothing, we cannot travel across time simply because we cannot.
A more fundamental hypothesis, according to which time and space “emerge” from something else, is being researched. Quantum gravity is the term used for this, yet it does not yet exist. So we cannot say time travel truly exists, but there is a high possibility in future.