• Question: can you make a time machine

    Asked by ed98 to Amit, Emily, Joanne, Martin, Paige on 12 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Emily Bullen

      Emily Bullen answered on 12 Mar 2012:

      I would LOVE to be able to make a time machine, but unfortunately not…
      Even better for me would be a teleporting machine… going through time would mess with my head a fair bit, but a teleporter would save me so much time, and allow me to see friends/family all over the world anytime, it would be amazing! 🙂

    • Photo: Martin Wallace

      Martin Wallace answered on 12 Mar 2012:

      This is a much more complex question than it seems. Time is a concept that is very difficult to understand and very few people really understand what it is. Albert Einstein and Prof. Stephen Hawking have given some very intelligent insights into time and space, but it is still a mystery.
      There are theories that astronauts on the space station experience time at a slightly slower rate due to the speed they are travelling, but it is too complicated for me to understand, let alone explain.
      So to answer your question, I can’t make a time machine, but that’s not to say we won’t be able to in the future, if we ever discover what time is.

    • Photo: Joanne Davies

      Joanne Davies answered on 12 Mar 2012:

      Yes…. a clock 😉

      Seriously, I think it’s something that all kids dream of being able to do and I know I certainly did; I probably still want to make one!

      I’m not sure it’s possible but I’m not ruling anything out…just in case. 🙂

    • Photo: Amit Pujari

      Amit Pujari answered on 14 Mar 2012:

      No, I dont think I will be able to make a time machine.
      As Martin says, time might sound simple but it is quite complicated thing to understand. The way we measure time here on earth, it is for our benefit. We base our time on ‘how much time the earth needs to complete one revolution’. Therefore it is 24 hours. Which is divided into day and night. So relative (in comparison) time on the sun would be different than on the earth.

    • Photo: Paige Brown

      Paige Brown answered on 18 Mar 2012:

      Maybe someday… using Nanotechnology!!!!

Comments

  • Photo: James

    James commented on :

    To add to Martin’s answer with some knowledge of Physics: If you’ve ever been nerdy enough to watch Star Trek you may have heard of the “Space-time continuum”. One of the best things about Science Fiction is that sometimes they describe real theories based on real science! Space and time really are a “continuum” and what that means is that you can’t separate them. They are the same thing. You can travel through space (by moving around) and you can travel through time. You’re doing it right now; you’re travelling into the future by one second every second. As Martin said Einstein realised this and he also realised that when you travel through space you travel slightly less through time and the *faster* you move through space the *slower* you move through time. Unfortunately you can’t go backwards in time because time only goes forward but by going slower you can travel into the future. By travelling really fast, what feels like only a month or so for you will mean hundreds of months will pass for everyone else (who isn’t going fast) meaning you’ll be in the future.

    This is not Science Fiction. Einstein came up with the theory and we have tested it countless times and proven it correct. In fact (to bring it back to Engineering) the GPS satellites that travel around the Earth move fast enough that we have to include corrections to how they count time because they count a second to be slightly less then what we say.

    So, yes , you can make a time machine. I car is a time machine, a plane is a time machine. How good a time machine? It depends on how fast they can go…