Time Travel. Oh and some Teleportation.

All the T's in this one. Teleportation. Time travel.

Two loved aspects of physics, that everyone expects to be simple, right?

"Time travel, oh- thats just where you get 

into a big machine and press a button."

Ignorant comments like that bug me, the physics that goes into Time Travel is astonishing. Its not just building a machine, to be honest its absolutely nothing like that. TV distorts our views of reality, it allows us to assume everything in life is very simple, and that life itself is simple; easy. Its not. Its hard, very hard.

Physics is possibly one of the most challenging subjects out there, if not the most challenging, in my opinion of course. People assume with time travel you can just zap out of reality and then back in, 30 years prior. Its nothing like that, to be honest we still aren't sure if we can travel backwards in time. Forwards though? Possible.

To get the perfect conditions to travel forward in time, you need a very very fast train, about 99.99% of c (Speed of Light), and something to travel around (i.e Earth). Then you need to travel around Earth at around 299,999,999m/s, circling it 7 times a second. The closer you get to c, the slower time affects you. When traveling at this speed only 1 year would pass for you (on the train), but 223 years back at the train station.

Time Travel happens all around us, even when in a car. The hand of a clock will tick slower than one 

which is stationary, but it is too slow for us to notice.

Now, Teleportation.  In 1998, physicists at Caltech (with two European groups) successfully teleported a photon, a particle of energy that carries light. The group were able to read the atomic structure of the photon, send this information across 3.28 feet of coaxial cable and create a replica of the photon. As predicted, the original photon no longer existed once the replica was made.

You may of noticed I underlined replica. It is not the same one. It is made up exactly the same, but is not the exact one. This is the problem of human teleportation, if we teleport someone, he is destroyed and then re-created. So is this the same person? Or a different person? How do we know that if we teleport someone, he wont come out evil? How will he sustain his memory?

These are the ethical questions about human teleportation. Even though it isn't possible at this current moment in time.

To conclude, what do you think? Do you think it would be right to teleport a human? Do you think he would have his memory from his past self? If you watched him teleport, you'd see him die, and be reborn. Will he be the same person as you knew before? And with time travel, do you think we'll ever be able to travel efficiently and effectively?

Thanks for reading, Ben.