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ARTWORK: Maddy Brown
Is time travel in 4-D space logically possible? Martha Reece The idea of time travel has been explored in science fiction countless times over the last century. Authors have fantasised about visiting the future and changing the past. The development of general relativity revealed the real scientific possibility of time travel in our universe. However, considering the universe in a realistic manner places some constraints on actual time travel, and there are many paradoxes which suggest logical inconsistencies in the concept of time travel. We can consider some of these constraints on time travel in four-dimensional space by expanding upon the time travel presented in some works of pop-culture such as Terminator and Harry Potter.
We must firstly build a strong concept of what time travel in four-dimensional space would look like. Below is an illustration of the ‘block universe’ theory, which depicts a ‘block’ that contains every event in space-time that has and will ever occur. (Note, the real ‘block’ is four dimensional.) A main requirement is that the past and future we are traveling to must actually exist. Time is a space-like dimension. So while we may intuitively believe that time is somehow fundamentally distinct from space, we should instead treat time as the fourth dimension of space.
