9 Movie Mad Scientists That Might Have Been Onto Something

There has been a truly enormous amount of brainpower put into answering the question of whether time travel will ever be possible. The greatest scientific minds of past and present have battled his one out for decades and there is still no definitive answer.

Which, if you're a glass-half-full type, means there's a chance.

Super-brainbox Stephen Hawking once stated that time travel was completely impossible, empirically observable by the fact that we haven't been visited by any time travellers, but now even Steve has had to back track a little bit on that. Some argue that a society that has cracked time travel would probably have as much interest in coming back and visiting primitive old us, as you would have in trying to teach ants brain surgery.

A number of the problems brought up in the past that would prohibit time travel have since been addressed, largely by the world of quantum mechanics. The paradox of altering your own past needn't be the problem it once was if you subscribe to the Many Worlds Interpretation of parallel universes. If you change the past, then you simply create another branch of reality - no problem.

There is still the issue of power - time travel requires a lot of energy. The DeLorean used plutonium and the TARDIS is powered by an exploding star. Incidentally, the energy provided by an exploding star is about how much you would need.

It is thought that the true answer to time travel is tied up in the development of a Theory of Everything - one unifying theory that can finally reconcile the quantum and classical worlds. 

At present, "Super String Theory" is the most likely candidate. The theory is well defined, but there currently isn't anyone smart enough on the planet to be able to figure it out. Until that genius is born, time travel will remain firmly in the future.

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