The Prague astronomical clock in the Czech Republic has been documenting the passage of time since the 1400s time There are many ideas called theories out there about how we could time travel However are any of them true Time Travel in Stories Many people have dreamed of traveling in time Time traveling is talked about in myths and fairy tales from ancient cultures and in more recent eras Some religious folktales also mention it The usual kind of time travel found in religious 6 The Science of Time Travel
traditions legends and folk and fairy tales involves time passing differently in two different worlds These worlds are sometimes called dimensions Such stories discussing this kind of time travel can be found in religions like Hinduism and Buddhism Fairy tales from Japan England and other parts of the world also use this idea In this kind of story a fairy or genie or some other supernatural being usually takes a human from the human world into a supernatural world This image of the legend of Rip Van Winkle was painted by John Quidor in 1849 A History of Time Travel 7
DID YOU KNOW People in Ireland and Britain once thought it was bad luck to go into a fairy hill This was a hill where people thought fairies lived People believed if you went into the hill you might come out again years or centuries later The human will stay there for what seems like a few hours or days When they come back they find that many years have passed Time is faster or slower in the human world In some stories time is very fast In others the human comes back after what seems like a long time to find almost no time has gone by at all This idea is used in many modern stories and books One of the most famous is The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe by C S Lewis In this book four children go to a different world called Narnia and stay there for many years When they come back to their own world no one even noticed they were gone in their world only a minute or so had passed Other stories include Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving and the religious folktale The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus In The Seven 8 The Science of Time Travel
This picture shows the main characters in the Chronicles of Narnia movie entering Narnia for the first time A History of Time Travel 9
