In a speech at the British Science Festival, Professor Brian Cox made a very controversial statement. The professor said that Time machines are altogether very possible. Fans of the science fiction show Doctor Who will be pleased to know that the professor believes that devices similar to the famous Tardis can exist. Professor Cox says that there is only one small problem with the building of what he thinks is an altogether possible time machine. He claims that time travel is unidirectional, that once you go into the future, you can’t come back.
Professor Cox suggests that researching the different phenomena at CERN’s large hadron collider may “uncover extra dimensions,” according to Yahoo’s UK News. Professor Cox gave a 60 minute speech, much to the delight of Doctor Who fans, about the show, taking the questions raised there from a strictly scientific perspective. He answered questions on the probabilities of extraterrestrial life, and travelling to other dimensions as well as time travel.
Einstein’s theory of special relativity allows for time dilation at speeds close to that of light. Professor Cox says that time travel has already been done, but on the scale of the particle. He does admit that travelling into the past is “impossible.” He comments, “You can travel into the future as fast as you like you can’t travel into the past.”
The professor’s speech went into physics and details like “wormholes,” which as sci-fi/fantasy tropes are used as portals from one place to another across the galaxy. Most physicists doubt that such a structure that is a “shortcut” through space and time can exists. Professor Cox debunks wormholes and cites Stephen Hawking’s “chronology protection conjecture,” which says that the physics of a wormhole – which aren’t fully understood – currently cannot be stable.
Professor Cox comments, “ We look for extra dimensions at the Large Hadron Collider. You can imagine extra dimensions in space, and that we are living on a sheet of higher dimensional space.” The Doctor Who fan will be delivering more science and physics based information in his speech on the 23rd.