Science: Back to the Future?

Science & technology at Portslade Aldridge Community Academy

I didn’t expect to go to the GCSE Science LIVE event in London and be told, in all seriousness, about the possibility of time travel by Professor Jim Al-Khalili. But then again, years ago, we would have laughed at the idea of travelling to the moon, at the concept of making babies in a test-tube (Professor Robert Winston was also there!) and at the existence of the invisible world of the micro-organisms (so vital to health and disease).
Al-Khalili explained that not only do the laws of physics allow for time travel but travelling to the future has been proven possible in many experiments.

Newton integrated time into his laws of motion and many of us imagine time as flowing at a constant rate, independent of space. However, Einstein, through his study of light, discovered that time and space are not independent but are linked as space-time; which he described in his special theory of relativity.
Einstein then detailed how gravitational effects of matter affect space-time in his general theory of relativity. For anyone that travels close to the speed of light, time runs more slowly. If you were to travel around the galaxy in a rocket for, say, four years and then return back to earth, forty years would have gone by. You would’ve literally travelled into the future.

Time travel into the past is, however, more tricky to explain – but can’t be ruled out. Al-Khalili used a scenario in which Leonardo da Vinci invents a time machine and sends a picture back in time to himself based on Mona Lisa. This is rather apt, since here at the STEM centre we are writing a script for a Dr Who play where we rescue Leonardo da Vinci and bring him back to the present.
To top it off, we have come across a 3d printer called ‘xyz da Vinci’, which is central to our plot, and we are busy trying to raise funds in order to buy it!