The concept of time travel is one that has been debated for years and has been explored in countless movies and TV shows.
While the likes of Back to the Future Make it look simple enough, time travel in real life is a very different story.
And it seems that the current story will forever remain the same scientists they have essentially ruled out time travel for good.
The assumption was made by a well-established phenomenon: what happens when light passes through an interface? This can be anything glass or water.
While the solution to this has been well known for a long time, scientists have now found something rather peculiar that happens in the middle.
When light passes through the interface, we know that the speed changes frequently – although this does not explain what is actually happening at the interface itself.
An equation was proposed in the case of a universe with a spatial dimension and a time dimension.
Lead author of the study Assistant Professor Matias Koivurova, from the University of Eastern Finland, said: “Basically, I found a very neat way to derive the standard wave equation in 1 + 1 dimensions. The the only assumption I needed was that the speed of the wave is constant. So I thought to myself: what if it is not always constant? This was a really good question.”
The team working on the study, which was published in full in the newspaper Opticsprovided the expected solution on either side of the interface.
But there was a crucial requirement to achieve this… it needs time to move forward alone.
While the equation may only be one-dimensional, it has resolved a long-standing controversy that has stumped scientists for many years.
Study professor Marco Ornigotti explained: “There is this very famous debate in physics, which is called the Abraham-Minkowski controversy. The controversy is that when light enters a medium, what happens to its momentum? Minkowski said that the momentum increases, while Abraham insisted that it decreases.
“We found that we can assign a ‘proper time’ to the wave, which is entirely analogous to the proper time in the general theory of relativity.”
While the results may be a great advance, we can almost say goodbye to the possibility of time travel in the past.
This is because if the arrow of time is always in one direction, it would be impossible to go back in time.
Outstanding feature