Is time travel possible?
The Inquiry
BBC
4.6 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 6 June 2019
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ever wanted to meet your historical heroes or explore the inventions of the future? Travelling in time has long been a dream of writers and filmmakers, but what does science tell us about how possible this would be to achieve in real life?
We explore how physics shows us that time runs at different rates depending on where we are and how we’re moving - time goes more slowly for astronauts on the international space station for example. We hear about the very dangerous ways we could possibly exploit this to skip forwards through time and into Earth’s future, and we do the maths on wormholes, to see if they offer a possible portal to our past.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the inquiry on the BBC World Service with me Kate Lamble. |
| 0:04.6 | Each week one question for expert witnesses and an answer. It's June 28th 2009. In Cambridge, England, a party is just about to start. In a small room at the university there are colourful balloons. |
| 0:25.2 | Canopays are laid out. Champagne is being poured, but no guests have arrived. |
| 0:31.2 | The party's host, physics professor Stephen Hawking, waits and waits. |
| 0:39.4 | The banner hung at the back of the room gives us a clue as to why the event is so unpopular. |
| 0:44.8 | Welcome time travellers it reads in huge block letters. |
| 0:52.2 | Hawking has told no one about his plans. |
| 0:55.0 | It's not until the next day that he sends out the invitations, |
| 0:59.0 | asking any time travellers to meet him in the past. |
| 1:03.0 | Does the fact that no one came to this party mean time travel never becomes a reality? |
| 1:10.0 | Or did time travelers simply have better things to do than hang out with one of the world's greatest scientists that day? |
| 1:20.0 | This week the inquiry is asking is time travel possible. |
| 1:27.0 | Part 1, a brief history of time travel. I always especially loved time travel stories because there's something extra twisty about them. |
| 1:46.5 | Our first expert witness, James Glick, spent most of his career writing about science and technology. And somewhere along the line, I discovered something that surprised me about the history of time travel as an idea. |
| 1:59.0 | Something that surprised him so much he wrote a book about it. |
| 2:03.0 | Time travel, a history. |
| 2:05.0 | You think, well, time travel has to be an ancient idea. |
| 2:08.0 | Surely there must be Greek myths or Shakespeare plays that involve time travel, but really there's none of that. |
| 2:14.7 | It was almost literally created by H.G. Wells in his first novel, The Time Machine, in |
| 2:21.9 | 1895. |
| 2:23.0 | Night coming like the turning out of a lamp. |
| 2:26.0 | Now almost immediately day, laboratory faint, black. |
... |
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