Science Fiction or Fact: Is Time Travel Possible?

Adam Hadhazy, Life's Little Mysteries Contributor

Date: 09 April 2012 Time: 05:55 PM ET

"Are you telling me that you built a time machine ... out of a DeLorean?" CREDIT: Universal Studios View full size image

In this weekly series, Life's Little Mysteries rates the plausibility of popular science fiction concepts.
In the first "Back to the Future" movie, all it took to travel through time was 1.21 gigawatts and a flux capacitor (packed into a DeLorean sports car for style points). Despite centuries of dreams and decades of bona fide research, flux capacitors remain beyond our grasp, as do any other time travel-enabling devices.
From a pure physics point of view, travel into the future is not at all impossible and in fact happens all the . . . time. With all due respect to Doc Brown, however, backward time travel stacks up as a much tougher proposition.
"We can travel at different rates to the future," said Seth Lloyd, a professor of quantum mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "To go into the past and mess around with it, that's more controversial."

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