Time

It was my birthday yesterday! (well it was when I started this post!) So I'm officially an adult now which feels very odd when I think about it but then again I've been going through the whole maturity thing anyway because of this being the last year of school. I've never been so old before!

My friend bought me a time turner for my birthday and it is just the coolest gift ever! It is from the Harry Potter series and was used by a main character to go back in time so that she could do all of her lessons. It seems perfect and even though its half term, I still find myself wishing it could really work, there's never enough time!

Time travel definitely comes under physics territory so I started some research!

Firstly there is a cheats time travel using the theory of relativity. I first came across this at a course in Nottingham but I don't remember much about it because I was in a state of shock for a couple hours after I found out that time isn't constant. And then they had an experiment on bang goes the theory. Jem Stansfield took a very very precise clock and went on a very very fast aeroplane around the world. Because time goes slower when you travel faster Jem's clock was a fraction of a second behind an identical clock on the earth. I don't count this as time travel really because its on such a small scale even though it is the most realistic method!

I have just discovered gravitational time dilation. This is amazing because apparently gravity doesn't just pull space, it also pulls time :0:0!! Black holes are very heavy and so have the strongest gravitational pull so if you could orbit around one without falling in and time would pass approximately half the time on earth.

And then when people say that looking into the night sky is the same as looking into the past because the light has taken time to reach us its true but it still doesn't meet my idea of time travel...

A Kerr black hole is a theoretical idea of a rotating black hole and the centripetal force in this black hole would prevent it from having an infinite gravitational force at its centre like normal black holes. Therefore you could pass through it without being spagetified. And then there is some speculation (I'm not sure how realistic it is) that you could pass through the black hole and exit a white hole and who knows wheere that would be!

The next possibilty would be an Eistein-Rosen bridge, also known as a wormhole. This is a result of a combinations of curvatures of space time due to a group of very large mass such as blackholes. The tunnels created could transport you accross time and spcae, however they would be very unstable so would probably collapse before you made it through or you could artificially enhance the tunnel but run the risk of a radiation feedback destroying the tunnel...

I suppose nothing is ever going to compare with the practicallity of a TARDIS... There are several problems with time travel because it creates so many paradoxs which makes many scientists discount it as impossible but surely if it happens in Harry Potter it has to be possible?!