A Take On Time Travel

Time Travel. An idea that has baffled, amazed and intrigued people for years. Something that has had so much work put into it, hours of research, and yet we are still no closer to the answer. We still have no facts. Everything is just a ‘what if’.

Humans have all ways had a need for the facts about time travel, like we do most things. However in this situation, the solid proof has not been available and so it’s times like this when we do the next best thing. We imagine. Have you ever read the classic ‘Time Machine’ by HG Wells or watched an episode of ‘Doctor Who’? Those are both the products of the human mind wondering, dreaming of the idea that we can travel through time and space to strange new worlds and have amazing adventures.

How would you start to describe time travel? Time. What exactly is time? The Oxford English Dictionary defines time as "a limited stretch or space of continued existence”, or “as the interval between two successive events". We glance at our wristwatches or that clock on your wall and notice the slowly turning hands counting each passing moment. That’s something that’s all ways interested me. The fact that every moment that passes, you take a breath, you blink your eyes, you might scratch an itch or lick your lips, you won’t ever do it the exact same way again. It’s gone forever except for that one moment in time. But what if you could? What if you could re-live moments of your life, turn back the hands on your wristwatch or that clock on your wall and that moment would repeat its self?

People get confused by this idea and I can see why. For example, if we could travel through time, imagine what would happen to a time traveller if he/she travelled back in time and killed their own grandmother at birth. In theory the time traveller will therefore never be born, so the journey could never have been made in the first place; but if the journey never occurred then the grandmother would be born which means the time traveller would have been born and could make the journey… and so on and so on.

Confused? Ok. Maybe I’m jumping ahead of myself here. Perhaps people were never meant to understand or ultimately achieve time travel. What if everything that ever happens in the universe was all mapped out before anything else existed, like an instruction manual to the existence of the earth, and no matter what happens there is no way to change those set events. Yes, that must be it. Humans can’t travel through time, people have proved that many times before. But then again, I’m just a 13 year old girl. What do I know?...