There\u2019s no denying that we\u2019ve seen some absolutely staggering accomplishments in physics in the past year or so, particularly in our ability to measure space and time with unprecedented levels of detail. But being a lifelong \u201cWhovian\u201d excited about Doctor Who returning to our screens once again, I wondered how these accomplishments stacked up to those of the fictional Time Lords.<\/p>\n
The crowning achievement of the Doctor has to be the TARDIS, the blue box from the show that\u2019s bigger on the inside and allows the Doctor and his companions to travel \u201call of time and space, everything that ever happened or ever will\u201d as Matt Smith\u2019s eleventh Doctor once put it. But throughout the history of the show, the Doctor\u2019s TARDIS has shown itself to be rather unreliable, regularly turning up at the wrong place or time. Given these faults we might think that the TARDIS isn\u2019t quite what it\u2019s cracked up to be<\/a>.<\/p>\n While the show has featured many, often conflicting, descriptions of how the TARDIS works, the key to the Time Lords\u2019 time travelling ability seems to be the \u201cEye of Harmony\u201d, essentially a star in an eternal state of collapsing into a black hole. In terms of real science though, the same theory that predicted black holes \u2013 Einstein\u2019s general relativity \u2013 has solutions which permit time travel (in fact one possible way<\/a> of doing this has been given the name TARDIS).<\/p>\n Whether nature actually allows such solutions to exist is still an open debate among theoretical physicists<\/a>, and even if time travel could happen we certainly don\u2019t know how to build a time machine. So we\u2019ll just have to compare the Doctor\u2019s TARDIS with our best instruments of simply measuring time and space.<\/p>\n