Time Travel

Teleportation, time travel, antimatter and wireless electricity. It all sounds far-fetched, more fiction than fact, but it's all true. Everybody is used to science fiction featuring science that seems, well, not very scientific.

On the net since 1999, Andy's Anachronisms is devoted to exploring the themes of time travel and alternate history in books, movies, television, and pop culture in general.

Cryonics is regarded with skepticism within the mainstream scientific community and is not part of normal medical practice. It is not known if it will ever be possible to revive a cryopreserved human cadaver.

From millennium-skipping Victorians to phone booth-hopping teenagers, the term time travel often summons our most fantastic visions of what it means to move through the fourth dimension. But of course you don't need a time machine or a fancy wormhole to jaunt through the years.

Virtual reality can be used to give the illusion of going "back in time", according to an exploratory study. In this virtual world, subjects were able to reduce how many people a gunman killed, an event they had unknowingly been part of.

Forget Dr Who; Chris Wild is a real Time Lord. The 40-year-old ex-museum curator and entrepreneur describes himself as a retronaut - someone who goes back in time "using just his perception".

Time travel is the concept of movement between certain points in time, analogous to movement between different points in space by an object or a person, typically with the use of a hypothetical device known as a time machine. Time travel is a widely recognized concept in philosophy and fiction.

Physicists have confirmed the ultimate speed limit for the packets of light called photons - making time travel even less likely than thought. The speed of light in vacuum is the Universe's ultimate speed limit, but experiments in recent years suggested that single photons might beat it.

For budding time travellers, the future (or should that be the past?) is starting to look bleak. Hypothetical tunnels called wormholes once looked like the best bet for constructing a real time machine.