Tickets
Is time travel possible? Talk by Professor Alan Heavens: £5 (drink included)
Back to the Future live in concert.
Abstract
Time travel happens all the time. The laws of Special Relativity mean that astronauts age at different rates from people on Earth, returning to Earth with their watches showing different times from those who stayed behind. General Relativity also makes time run at different rates, so jumps in time are possible, though in practice these shifts are tiny. To jump backwards in time is not so obvious, but some ideas concerning wormholes suggest it might just be possible. If it were, then all sorts of paradoxes arise. What if you went back and prevented your parents from meeting? Then you wouldn’t exist, and how could you have gone back? Maybe the answer is in the many-world’s interpretation of quantum physics whereby the Universe splits into two: in one your parents meet; and in a parallel Universe they don’t. Come and find out why Einstein has a lot to answer for and put all your time travel questions to Professor Heavens at the first of a series of collaborative events planned between Imperial and the Royal Albert Hall.
This discussion event takes place as part of the Hall’s celebration of the 30th anniversary of Back to the Future, which screening the film with live orchestral accompaniment at 14.00 and 19.00 on the same day, Saturday 4 July. Back to the Future, directed by Robert Zemeckis, was 1985’s highest grossing film. The story follows Marty McFly (Michael J Fox), a typical American teenager of the ’80s, who is accidentally sent back to 1955 in a plutonium-powered DeLorean ‘time machine’, invented by the slightly mad Dr Emmett Brown (Christopher Lloyd).
Together, these special events give you an opportunity to brush up on the science of time travel as well as refreshing your memories of Marty’s adventures, as Alan Silvestri’s compositions are performed by a live orchestra alongside a big-screen viewing of the film.
Biography
Alan is the Director of the Imperial Centre for Inference and Cosmology, founded in 2012 in the Departments of Physics and Mathematics at Imperial College London. He has developed new ways of analysing cosmology to extract as much information as possible. He introduced principled statistical analysis to the study of the distribution of galaxies, initiated the field of optimized methods for studying 3-point statistics of the light from the early universe, and pioneered 3D analysis of the bending of light as it passes through the universe. His optimized statistical analysis methods led to the formation of the company Blackford Analysis, which specialises in analysis of 3D medical images.
He bears no resemblance whatsoever to Dr Emmett Brown.