China bans time travel, America still working on it


In their latest effort to uphold the country’s values and not dare promote anything that would re-write history, Chinese censors told the film and television industry no more fictional time travel in the media. They should have waited a little while. Over here in America, physicists believe they have proved time travel is not even possible.

The Chinese government imposed a ban on all films centered on time travel, expressing that such films “Casually make up myths, have monstrous and weird plots, use absurd tactics, and even promote feudalism, superstition, fatalism and reincarnation” reports the National Post.

Meanwhile, physicists from the University of Maryland have created a specialized kind of material, called a ‘metamaterial,’ that mimics the mathematics of the Big Bang (theory, not television program) when light is beamed through it, reports wired. In a simulated Big Bang experiment they found that circular orbits of light, needed for time travel as we believed it to be, were not possible. That pretty much rendered time travel impossible too.

Actually, science fiction fans who live in China will probably be OK with all this. They can’t see time travel in films or television anymore but it really never existed before anyway and now we know it. Or so we think.

Don’t tell the physicists at Vanderbilt University time travel does not exist. Last month Gadling reported that Vanderbilt physicists set to prove time travel did exist using a different approach. Using world’s largest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, they plan to cause matter to travel backwards in time.

“One of the major goals of the collider is to find the elusive Higgs boson: the particle that physicists invoke to explain why particles like protons, neutrons and electrons have mass. If the collider succeeds in producing the Higgs boson, some scientists predict that it will create a second particle, called the Higgs singlet, at the same time.” reported Vanderbilt’s research news.

Professor Tom Weiler and graduate fellow Chui Man Ho think these singlets should have the ability to jump into an extra, fifth dimension where they can move either forward or backward in time and reappear in the future or past.

While they doubt a person could travel through time, they thought messages might be sent successfully.

“Because time travel is limited to these special particles, it is not possible for a man to travel back in time and murder one of his parents before he himself is born, for example. However, if scientists could control the production of Higgs singlets, they might be able to send messages to the past or future.”

Related Stories