Time travel is still very much science fiction, at least to us laymens.. But in the world of physics that’s not the case. However, now a new theory could change the way experts think about time relativity and they say it could prove traveling through time is an impossibility.
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00:00Time travel is still very much science fiction, at least to us layman's, but in the world
00:07of physics that's not the case.
00:09However, now a new theory could change the way experts think about time relativity, and
00:14they say it could prove traveling through time is an impossibility.
00:17Matias Koivarova and two other physicists were looking at how light would slow when
00:21passing through a magnetic field.
00:23To come up with their new theory, the team first threw out convention and used an equation
00:26that treated light's speed, albeit a constant in the universe, as an accelerating wave.
00:31With Koivarova saying about that aha moment, quote,
00:34The only assumption I needed was that the speed of the wave is constant.
00:37Then I thought to myself, what if it's not always constant?
00:40This turned out to be a really good question.
00:42While that initially didn't make any sense mathematically, when they decided to use an
00:45accelerating wave of something else, say a spacecraft, against the constant of light
00:49speed, that's when everything fell into place.
00:52And despite the equation's new form and novelness, they say it ended up having the
00:56same implications as relativity.
00:58With Koivarova adding,
00:59What we have shown is that from the point of view of the wave, nothing happens to its
01:03momentum.
01:04In other words, the momentum of the wave is conserved, which means that if the momentum
01:07is conserved, it is not altered in such a way as to be moving in a different direction
01:11through time.
01:12And this theory could mean time travel is impossible.