#cheahyhk

[mit219]

Is Time Travel Possible?

Creative Commons: CC BY-NC-SA, MIT http://k12videos.mit.edu/terms-and-co… Hosted by: Kenneth Cheah Written by: Kenneth Cheah Additional scripting: Elizabeth Choe, Jaime Goldstein, Ceri Riley, George Zaidan, students of 20.219 Executive producer: Elizabeth Choe Director: Kenneth Cheah Editor: Kenneth Cheah Production assistant: Yuliya and PJ

Cartoon families from TattooedTrilobite (https://tattooedtrilobite.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/stik.jpg) Sources:

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jan/12/einstein-theory-of-relativity-speed-of-light

[mit219]

Rough Cut time travel

[mit219]

CheahYHK's revision 2

Link at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NBZ4wuyE1eUyZd3XXUo3Z7M4R87DULnHqpfHMxs1S3g/edit?usp=sharing

Kenneth: Once upon a time (in the year 2009), Stephen Hawking held a party with all the usuals, wine, hors d’oeuvres, and yet, no one turned up! <Show party setting> You’d thought that he’d be upset  <show stephen hawking with sad face>  But it turns out that he was far from it <show sad face turning into smiling> He had in fact only sent out the invitations to the party after the party, and had addressed it to all time travelers of the future. He did so in an attempt to prove his own theory, that

TIME TRAVEL WAS NOT POSSIBLE!

No party-goers, meant no travelling back in time!

Or were people of the future just too cold for Hawkings?

 Is time travel possible then? What exactly is time travelling?

When we think about it, we’re all actually time travelling, but not in the manner you might be thinking of.

What we are doing, is to time travel at a rate of 1hour/hour, which means that for every 1 hour we experience, 1 hour passes around us! In the year 1905, Einstein proposed that when we travel at extreme speeds, time around us actually slows down, and that we could experience time at an “accelerated” rate. In other words, when we are travelling at a high speed for an hour, the world around us could be experiencing time at a much faster rate, for e.g. 7 hours could have passed.

This has been seen in many modern sci-fi movies, the most recent of which would be in Interstellar, where Anne Hathaway and Matthew McConaghey’s character descends to a planet where time passes a lot slower than the rest of the universe around them. Based on some of Einstein’s math, if we travel at a speed of approximately 90% the speed of light (number appears on screen), a year to us would seem like 2.3 years to the rest of the world. This means that should we invent a space ship which could travel at a speed of 0.9c, when we take a year trip in it, all your friends and family would have aged 2.3 years in that period! <insert little animation of a space ship taking off and coming back, to see a infant turning a toddler on earth, while an infant maybe remains as an infant on the ship) Travelling at 0.99c, this number becomes 7 years. In fact, the faster you travel, the slower time around you would slow down. This is probably not the idea of time travelling we often have, but you are travelling through time at a different speed from what we would normally do, and so it might be possible to travel forward through time should we attain high enough speeds! What about travelling back in time? Can we run backwards with incredible speeds to be able to go back in time? Doesn’t sound really possible does it? <flash the FLASH running backwards across the screen>

How about, travelling faster than the speed of light? In fact, that’s one of the possible theories of reverse time travelling, that we would need to travel faster than the speed of light. Part of einstein’s initial proposal when he talked about time dilation (which is travelling a high speeds to slow down time around us), was that it was not possible for us to travel at speeds faster than the speed of light.

Why?

Another effect of Einstein’s theory of relativity (where all of this is under), is that when we travel at high enough speeds, time and space aren’t the only thing around us that changes. One other factor which changes with high speed, is the mass of the object! With more mass, it takes a lot more energy to move the object at the same speed, and as we approach the speed of light, the amount of energy required would be wayyyyy too great

Even if we did manage to put in more energy, we might not be actually increasing the speed, but merely making the object heavier, and heavier. Is it thus really impossible to travel back in time? We know we can travel forward (not efficiently), and maybe science has just not yet uncovered the holy grail of it all. Maybe one day, we would encounter time travelers, and know more about how possible or impossible this feat could be. In the meantime though, I guess we could continue hosting more time traveler parties in hope that one of them would finally see a guest from the future.

[mit219]

I like to believe I'm a creative person. Putting that with my stubborn nature, at times I feel it hard to accept conflicting creative decisions from others around me. Storyboarding itself was a huge test to this trait of mine, and the fact that we had to come up with a story board as a group was a little challenging, as I tend to quickly arrive at my own ideas, and could stick to them quite hard before even hearing everyone's input.

So when it came down to storyboarding as a large group, it helped that we were looking through the script line by line, and that helped me "buffer" my thought process and not to see the entire set as a huge picture (which I tend to do and not focus on the details as times)

However I realised soon after that my little problem came back as we broke into smaller groups and that I had sped through the entire remaining of the script and had started to generate ideas within my head. This proved to be a problem as I soon imagined everyone else's proposed ideas through the vision I've had for my own idea.

Drawing it out however seemed to slowly help me better picture everyone else's ideas, which seems to be a core part of my graphic-heavy visualising process.

[mit219]

Brief summary and trailer or video!

[mit219]

cheahyhk day 3

Being in front of the camera for the umpteenth time, I certainly don't feel like I'm a stranger to it. And when I write, I'd usually write things a little too narratively too, so I'd never really had a problem writing scripts. While doing yesterday's assignment, the words had come seamlessly to me. (Probably why my friends always call me the drama queen). (Probably why I like to speak with so much subtext too)

What had not come so naturally to me though, was getting my point across. It brings to mind another incident during my teaching internship, where I had given an extremely detailed class on the foundations of kinematics, but had left the students walking away with many questions, but NOT the one that I had hoped to inspire in them. Dissappointed in myself, I set out to find out what was the best way to get the right questions out of them, and decided to have a set of materials with a lot more directed content, so as to better encourage and point the students in the right direction.

With today's feedback session, I had realised that while my opening was witty, funny, and was generally enjoyed, it had left many of the class members confused as to what I was proceeding to say with my video, as it seemed that I had already painted time travel in a "nope, it's not going to happen", and then there was that foot-in-mouth moment where I called Stephen Hawkings lame (I kinda legitly did forget he was literally lame! I promise there was no ill intent!).

I guess when having my script revision, I ought to do what I had done with my previous material, which is to better direct audiences to ask the right question. Hmmm, the only question right now is, HOW?!

[mit219]

Blog Entry Day 2 (CheahYHK)

I don't like kids, I said it when class started, and that's probably because to me, I feel so old around them (I like to believe I'm Peter Pan)

Bringing the 6th graders into class today definitely reminded me of that fact, but it also reminded me how young at heart I felt, how inquisitive I was at that age. (these were kids that were exposed to movies of not just their generation, but of their parent's generation. Gosh.)

I felt that unfortunately, I spent too much time trying to understand the kids and their interests (I often started off by asking what they felt their favourite subjects were, how they felt about science in general, and what made them more/less interested in science), that I didn't have enough time to run through my ideas with them. But with those that I had tried to briefly run through my initial concept on the 3 main theories of time travelling, it had felt a little too abstract for them to understand or fully appreciate them, even if I had tried to resort to hollywood's examples to better relate to them (again, no idea why they watched movies from my parent's generation and not my own, I mean I'm only twice their age!)

The session overall led me to initially believe that the entire topic of time travel might have been a little too edgy or abstract for the 12 year olds, and I had initially decided to head down an alternate path of pain (literally, I was considering writing on how we perceive pain and how painkiller work).

I then realised that it wasn't because the topic was unrelatable, but it was more of me not having asked the right question. Changing the question and rescoping my theme a little, I decided to focus on "Can we actually time travel?" as some of the questions posed by the students were asking "how do we time travel" and "the history of time travel", rather than my initial proposed "how does travelling back in time work, when you change thing etc".

Which has thus led, to my #day2script post.

[mit219]

Script for "IS TIME TRAVEL POSSIBLE?!"

Kenneth: Once upon a time (in the year 2009), Stephen Hawking held a party with all the usuals, wine, hors d'oeuvres, and yet, no one turned up! <Show party setting> You'd thought that he'd be upset <show stephen hawking with sad face> But it turns out that he was far from it <show sad face turning into smiling> as it had just proven his own belief that it was impossible to travel back in time! He had in fact sent out an invitation to the party for time travellers A lack of party-goers meant that time travel was probably impossible (or just that people of the future thought the Hawking was too lame) Is time travel really not possible then? When we think about it, we're all actually time travelling, at a rate of 1hour/hour, which means that for every 1 hour we experience, 1 hour passes around us! In the year 1905, Einstein proposed that when we travel at extreme speeds, time around us actually slows down, and that we could experience time at an "accelerated" rate In other words, when we are travelling at a high speed, we would be "time travelling" at a speed of more than 1 hour/hour that we experience. This concept has been seen in many modern sci-fi movies, the most recent of which would be in Interstellar, where Anne Hathaway and Matthew McConaghey's character descends to a planet where time passes a lot slower than the rest of the universe around them. Based on some of Einstein's equations, should we travel at a speed of approximately 90% the speed of light (number appears on screen), a year to us would seem like 2.3 years to the rest of the world. This means that should we invent a space ship which could travel at a speed of 0.9c, when we take a year trip in it, all your friends and family would have aged 2.3 years in that period! <insert little animation of a space ship taking off and coming back, to see a infant turning a toddler on earth, while an infant maybe remains as an infant on the ship) Travelling at 0.99c, this number becomes 7 years. In fact, the faster you travel, the slower time around you would slow down. This is probably not the version of time travelling you're thinking of, but you are travelling through time at a different speed from what we would normally do, and it might be possible to travel forward through time should we attain high enough speeds! What about travelling back in time? do we run backwards with incredible speeds to be able to go back in time? <flash the FLASH running backwards across the screen> One theory is that we would need to travel faster than the speed of light, to be able to travel at negative rates of time travel. Part of einstein's initial proposal when he talked about time dilation (which is travelling a high speeds to slow down time around us), was that it was impossible to travel higher than the speed of light. Why was it not possible to travel faster than the speed of light though? Another effect of Einstein's theory of relativity (where all of this is under), is that when we travel at high enough speeds, time and space aren't the only thing around us that changes, as mass does to. With more mass, it takes a lot more energy to move the object at the same speed, and as we approach the speed of light, the amount of energy required would be wayyyyy too great, and even so, we might not be exceeding the speed of light, but merely making the object heavier, and heavier. Is it thus really impossible to travel back in time? We know we can travel forward (not efficiently), and maybe science has just not yet uncovered the holy grail of it all. Maybe one day, we would encounter time travellers, and know more about how possible or impossible this feat could be. In the meantime though, I guess we could continue hosting more time traveller parties, maybe they just didn't like hawkings?