8 Iconic Doctor Who Things That Scientists Say Are Real
5. The TARDIS
Whilst lots of physicists are pondering the possibilities and practicalities of time travel in general, there are some who have taken a specific look at the practicalities of arriving by TARDIS. Physicist Ben Tippet has written a scientific paper (and an easier-to-understand white paper), along with his colleague David Tsang, on how exactly a time travelling police box would work. First up, he changes the name. TARDIS usually stands for Time And Relative Dimension In Space which, as Tippet points out, sounds very impressive but doesn't actually mean anything. Tippet rechristens it the Transversable Achronal Retrograde Domain in Spacetime which basically means its a box that can go backwards in time and move faster than the speed of light. Tippet's TARDIS essentially exists in a little bubble of spacetime, and moves in a circle, appearing and disappearing at different points in time and space. In order for anything to move backwards in time, it has to travel faster than the speed of light. To to this, you have to bend spacetime so much that it fold back on itself - also the principle behind the Warp Drive. Unfortunately, it would be impossible to build this TARDIS at the moment, as it would need to be made of a "weird, unphysical matter" that would bend spacetime in the right way. So, the physics work, it's just the specialist materials we're lacking. Shame.
