Time Travel: Myth, Movie or Reality
Below is an article I had the privilege of writing for Playbill for one of the Alliance Theatre’s productions. You can find more information on the production here. You can also find the article here. This is my first published piece of writing, and so I wanted to share it here as well.
Ever since humans have understood the concept of time, there has always been an obsession with it. How much time do we have? When is the right time for this thing? How do we get back time lost? The Greeks were so obsessed with time that they gave it human personifications: Chronos and Kairos. Chronos, the old-man time god, represented the linear idea of time; one event led to the next, so people’s lives weren’t random moments but rather building blocks that distinguish the past from the present from the future. Kairos, the young-man time god, represented opportunity and the right moment, even though they may be fleeting. Although it may be hard to picture a world where time meant so much that we needed gods to define it, we may not be so far from that.
Constantly, as a people, there is a consistent questioning of how to use the most of our time. Whether it is how to use our time wisely to get the most out of a vacation, or how to get the most work done in-between 9 am and 5 pm, the pressure remains present. Very often, people end up feeling like they have lost time, missed something, or regret something they did at that random age, so they want to go back. After seeing countless movies like Back to the Future, Avengers Endgame, and Interstellar where time travel is accessible, the thought of defying the current timeline by hopping to the past or future has crossed my mind a few times too. But, I always come back to the question “is it possible?” Much to my surprise, the answer is yes. Well, kind of.
According to Nasa Space Place, we know that time travel is possible because of Einstein’s theory of relativity, which is the theory that time and space are linked together. This theory claims that the faster you travel, the slower you experience time. Skeptical scientists tested this theory by placing one clock on a plane that flew around the world while another one stayed on earth. When comparing the clocks, they found that the clock that stayed on earth had gotten ahead of the clock on the fast-moving airplane by less than a second. So yes, there is a form of time travel that happens. However, their research also states that we cannot time travel in everyday life as that is something that only appears in movies.
So, in movies, people can know how much time they have, when the right time is and even can get back lost time. In mythology, the gods held the power, mapping out linear lives filled with opportunity and “right” moments. But we live in this world without gods where we watch movies about time. Does that mean our time is out of our control? Arguably, no. The Greeks had gods to rely on. The movies have supernatural, fantastical science fiction to rely on. However, we as a people have ourselves and each other to rely on, which means that nothing else controls our time except for us.
