Let’s face it; people have always been intrigued by the idea of time travel. From back in the 1800s, with the publishing of HG Wells book: The Time Machine, to modern day science fiction books and movies, there have been countless stories about time travel.

This post will be focusing on two iconic time machines.

Since the early 1960s, Britain has been airing a television show loved by many a generation. Evil Villains, a Dashing hero, his lovely companions along for the ride, kooky plot lines; what’s not to love? One of the most iconic things of Doctor Who is the TARDIS. 

TARDIS, short for Time And Relative Dimensions In Space, is what the Doctor uses to travel through space, like a spaceship. It is also a time machine. It has seen the beginning of the earth all the way to the end of the earth. The TARDIS is able to travel in time by entering the Time Vortex and travelling back and forth through the vortex

Another famously known time machine is the DeLorean, from the 1980s Back to the Future Trilogy. The DeLorean time machine was created by Doc Brown so that he could travel through history. The DeLorean was powered by nuclear reactor on the back of the car that is fuelled by plutonium, this was used to produce 1.21Gigawatts that was needed to power the flux capacitor and time travel. To travel to the future or the past, the passenger of the machine must enter the date that they are trying to get to and then get the car to 88 miles per hour. When all of these were combined, the DeLorean was able to travel through time. In the three movies, it was only used to travel back to 1955, forward into the future once (To the year 2015) and back to 1985, then to 1885 and then returned to 1985 where it was destroyed on impact.  

Both series show the effects of traveling back in time and messing with history. Marty tried to change history, and as a consequence, almost erased himself from time. In Doctor Who, the Doctor makes sure that he doesn’t mess with fixed time. There are a few exceptions to this though, if there is an event in flux (this means that there isn’t a set occurrence, and things can be easily changed without creating paradoxes or problems), time can easily be rewritten.

The idea of travelling forward in time has been much more thought of than travelling back in time, and it is much more of a feasible idea. Einstein’s theory of relativity states that time appears to slow in the vicinity of a large gravitational force.

Another way people could time travel is to use worm-holes, or an Kerr Black Hole. Because Einstein and Rosen predicted that these bridges did not obey the laws of thermodynamics and physics they could be gateways to the future or the past. Kerr Black Holes are described as a black hole on one side, with a white hole on the other. The Black hole sucks up things, its white-hole counter-part somewhere else in the universe in another time or even in a parallel universe would spit out whatever the black hole had sucked up. It was later found that black holes have a singularity in the center of them where time effectively ceases to exist. (1)

Another way to travel that is much like a Kerr Black Hole is an Einstein-Rosen Bridge. An Einstein-Rosen Bridge, also known as a wormhole, can be described like folding the universe to connect two very distant points to travel instantaneously through. With this, people would be able to possibly travel into the past or the future depending on where, and more specifically when, they have connected to. (2)

There are many theories about travelling into the future, but travelling strictly into the past with knowing where and when you intend to travel is a much less scientifically studied process. Although one way to see into the past is to look up into the night sky. The stars that you see are images of what has happened millions of years ago and light years away. There is no way that scientists have come up with specifically travelling into the past itself.

When it comes to time travel, one thing you have to be careful of are paradoxes. One of the most famous time travel paradoxes is the Grandfather Paradox. If you are able to go into the past and you kill one of your ancestors before they have their offspring that leads to you, what happens to you? What happens in general? If you kill them, they aren’t able to have their children, to lead to your other ancestors, which in turn leads to you. You don’t exist, so you cannot go back into the past to kill them. (3)

Ender’s Game, one of the first science fiction novels I remember reading. It took me about a week to finish it, but by the time I was finished with the book I was hooked. This was my gateway book to higher levels of science fiction. 

Originally published in 1977 as a short story, Ender’s Game was so loved that readers wanted more. In January of 1985, Orson Scott Card released the first novel in the whole series.

In November of this year, Summit Entertainment is releasing Ender’s Game the movie. My hopes are that it is very much like the book, and they don’t butcher it much like other book-to-film movies.

In the series, communicating with places way far away is instantaneous. Not like from one continent to another, although yes, that is also possible, but this is on a large scale. Places that are light-years apart. Using a machine called the Ansible, people are able to communicate instantaneously over vast distances. The Ansible was first created by Ursula K LeGuin in her 1966 book, Rocannon’s World.

The original term of the Ansible is described as:

In the Ender’s Game series, the Ansible is a nickname for the Philotic Parallax Instantaneous Communicator. It is described as a process that Philotes to vibrate in space, which causes other counterpart philotes to also vibrate. Through this, they are able to make them vibrate in a specific way so that they are able to send messages instantaneously. (1)

Although at the time that the story was written, and up until very recently, being able to communicate instantaneously was unheard of except in science fiction. According to Orson Scott Card, the author of Ender’s Game, there was no theory or possibility of being able to communicate instantaneously at the time when Ender’s Game was written or any of the other books in the original series.

In the last 5 years though, research was done to try and create a way to communicate instantaneously or at least faster than light. One project that has been done in attempt to find a way to communicate instantaneously was done by A.Y. Shiekh using light particles. Using a single photon emitted by a light source, the photon is sent through all sorts of shifters and mirrors. If these shifters and mirrors are set up in a specific way the photon detector at the end of the course wouldn’t detect any photons. It seems I need to brush up on my particle physics to understand how this works. But all in all the experiment deemed this instance of instantaneous communication unfeasible. 

Over the last 50 years, communication has been getting easier to do. One of the things that makes communication super-fast, but not quite instantaneous, is the internet. To read more about how the internet works, here is a great link that will explain how it works in great detail. But when one is connected to the internet, much like you probably are now, packets of information are sent to your computer electronically. Originally, this had to be done with wires and cables, but nowadays, people are able to get information from what seems straight out of the air using WI-FI. Wi-Fi uses radio waves to be able to connect to a router, which using cables, is able to connect back to the internet. (2)

The communication in Ender’s Game and Ursula K LeGuin’s book, Rocannon’s World, revolutionized the way people thought about how to communicate written out messages.