Time travel is possible! Meet Sergei Krikalev, the man who traveled through time
What if time travel was really possible? But what if we told you that it is not only possible, but also exists? Even more than that, did you know that there is at least one person who has actually succeeded in doing it?
You might think that these are just pipe dreams straight out of some overly imaginative sci-fi movie.
But I'm happy to tell you, it's very real!
When talking about time travel from a scientific point of view, we must first take the point of view of the scientific theory specialized in studying time and space and their relationship with matter, which is Einstein’s theory of relativity.
This theory tells us that the faster we move in space, the slower we move in time, and vice versa.
That is, if we have two people, and one of them is moving relative to the other, time will pass for him more slowly than for the other. In addition, relativity also tells us that gravity itself is equivalent to acceleration.
The greater the intensity of gravity, the greater the amount of equivalent acceleration. Since speed slows down time, an increase in gravity that equals an increase in acceleration will slow down time even more.
These effects of the slowdown of time must be taken into account when talking about time travel.
However, the theory of relativity tells us that we must travel at very high speeds, very close to the speed of light, in a vacuum, in order to begin to feel tangible effects of this kind, or to be next to very massive masses, such as being next to a black hole, for example.
The beautiful thing is that various experiments have confirmed the validity of the two previous predictions!
Time travel in science fiction
There are a large number of science fiction films and series that deal with time travel.
One of the most famous of them recently is the movie Interstellar.
In this film, humanity is forced to leave planet Earth as a result of a major environmental disaster that befell it.
Since there is no habitable planet that humans can reach with the level of technology shown in the movie, humans had to resort to unconventional methods to solve this dilemma.
Fortunately, an alien civilization has placed the mouth of a wormhole (a shortcut between two points in space or even two moments in time) near the planet Saturn, where humans can reach, so that they can leave Earth.
The film's hero's journey within it was the only part that was scientifically distorted in the film so that they could create exciting scenes. On the other side of the wormhole was the galaxy containing a planet suitable for human life called Planet Miller, but this planet is in orbit around a black hole called Gargandgiula. Because of the enormous gravity that the planet is subjected to from the black hole, we find that one year a person spends on it corresponds to seven years on Earth.
In this film, the hero of the story passes by this hole twice: in the first time, his daughter is a child when he leaves and she grows up to become a young theoretical physicist. The second time the father passes by the hole, the daughter grows so large that she becomes larger than him.
Perhaps less well-known than the previous film, we have a series of Star Gate films and series that, in Episode 16 of the second season of the SG-1 series, dealt with the topic of time travel in detail, and this episode was entitled “A Matter of Time,” in which it happened that a wormhole was opened.
The Earth arrives with a planet that everyone is surprised is about to be swallowed by a black hole.
With the team being unable to close the worm tunnel they opened for various reasons, the effect of time dilation begins to become clear and gradual, as the passage of a few hours in the lower floors of the base, which are close to the mouth of the worm tunnel, is matched by the passage of long days in the upper floors. It is truly one of my favorite episodes in this entire series, which I have passionately followed in all its films and series.
Sergey Krevalev
But, can we as humans really travel through time? In fact, astronauts on the International Space Station, for example, suffer from the two effects we talked about about time dilation: on the one hand, time slows down for them as a result of the speed of their movement relative to us, and on the other hand, they are in a less gravitational field than ours (because they are farther from The center of the Earth makes time pass faster for them than it does for us. However, as a result of the Earth's weak gravitational field, what prevails over them among the previous two effects is the slowing down of time due to their speed.
Here we come to the story of Sergei Krvalev. He was the longest human being in space, spending 803 days, 9 hours and 39 minutes, which made him travel to his own future by 0.02 seconds!