Description: MIT 20.219 Becoming the Next Bill Nye: Writing and Hosting the Educational Show, IAP 2015. View the complete course: http://ocw.mit.edu/20-219IAP15.
Instructor: Kenneth Cheah
License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA
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PROFESSOR: All right. So effectively we'll start off by talking about why people think that time travel is not possible, all the supposed "theoretical" experiments that proved that it's not possible. And then we'll explore a little bit more into, like, what's the definition of time travel, because we can talk about time traveling, like we're traveling through time right now, it's just at, like, a pace of one second per second. So we can talk about time dilation and explore how we can travel at periods of maybe seven seconds per second.
And then after that, we go a little more in-depth in a bit more layman terms of how time dilation works. And then we ask, like, so if we can travel forward in time, can we travel backward in time? And that brings in the whole concept of, like, how you need more-- when you increase the speed of an object, the mass of the object increases, and then you also require more energy. And when you put in more energy, you may not necessarily increase the speed, and therefore it's still a big question whether time travel is actually really possible.