Doc Brown got it wrong. Looks like won’t be going back to the future after all.
No time-traveling DeLoreans. No flux capacitor. No pre-birth adventure for Marty McFly.
Discovery News reports scientists in Hong Kong say they’ve proved it’s impossible for a photon to travel faster than the speed of light, meaning time travel will never happen. The finding proves Albert Einstein’s theory that the speed of light is a definitive “traffic law of the universe” that can’t be broken.
From Discovery News:
“The study, which showed that single photons also obey the speed limit c, confirms Einstein’s causality; that is, an effect cannot occur before its cause,” the university said.
“By showing that single photons cannot travel faster than the speed of light, our results bring a closure to the debate on the true speed of information carried by a single photon,” said (Du Shengwang), an assistant professor of physics (at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.)
The study measure the ultimate speed of a photon disproving a theory raised 10 years ago when scientists discovered “optical pulses” that seemed to exceed the speed of light. The measurement study, a first for science, was published in the Physical Review Letters.
Read more: “Time Travel Impossible, Say Scientists.”