Time Out

          Imagine you’re out on your first date with a girl you really like.  You’ve got everything planned perfectly.  You’ve thought of the places you should go, the restaurant you’re going to eat at.  You’ve also planned the lines you’re going to say.  You both meet at AS and went for a ride on a jeep.  You wanted this date to be really special for her so you decided to pay for all the expenses.  But as you reach for your wallet at the back pocket of your pants, it’s not there!  You realized that you forgot your wallet at home.  Boom!  Everything falls apart.  You wish you could travel back in time but that’s impossible.  Wait, is it?

          When Albert Einstein formulated his Theories of Relativity (General and Special) during the late 19^th century, the world of Science was changed forever.  For the first time ever, it was realized that time was not absolute.  At speeds near the speed of light c, a consequence of the theory of relativity called “time dilation” occurs.  This means that at very high speeds, time moves slower.  So given two persons of the same age and let’s say that one went to space with a speed near c and the other one remained on earth, when they both meet, the one who went in space will actually be younger!  That in itself is already considered time-traveling.  But as of now, theories have been developed on our classic understanding of time traveling wherein you can actually go forward and back in time.  Modern scientists have thought of black holes as possible time-traveling devices since black holes are curvatures in space-time and they theorized that curvatures in space-time allows a “shortcut” in time which constitutes time traveling.

          There are actually a lot of theories concerning time traveling and as of now, there is no definite or experimentally proven way of time-traveling.  But I’m sure that in the near future, with the advancement in science and technology, scientists could find a way to make time traveling possible.  But great caution is needed though, if time traveling were to be possible; chaos can happen in the space-time continuum since traveling in time disrupts the continuum.  History can be changed, events could be altered and that could be a problem.  As much as we love the idea of traveling in time, I still think that we should be very careful, because if someone could actually hold the key to time, many things could be changed or even destroyed.

                                                                   -David Bryan Lao 2013-52731