Billionaires chase immortality

Tech executives like Bryan Johnson are pursuing extreme anti-aging methods, from unregulated peptides to injecting plasma from younger people, in hopes of living forever.

Physicist says it's wasting time

Prof Jim Al-Khalili argues that spending your finite existence trying to extend it slightly misses the point of being alive in the present moment.

“We're [here for] a blink of an eye compared with the age of the universe.”

Time doesn't work like we think

Einstein showed that time runs at different rates depending on speed and gravity. A second for you might be five seconds for someone moving fast past you.

Past, present, future coexist

According to Einstein's relativity, all moments in time exist simultaneously, like all points in space. We just experience only the present.

Time travel is mathematically possible

Traveling backward in time could work through warped spacetime, but it creates paradoxes that most physicists think make it impossible in reality.

“Mathematically, it is possible to travel back in time.”

Forward travel needs extreme conditions

You can theoretically travel into the future by slowing time down, either by moving near light speed or orbiting a supermassive black hole.

Why time flows one direction

Things decay, batteries die, and disorder increases. Yet physics equations show no preferred direction for time, creating a century-old puzzle.

“All those things point to a directionality to time, and yet fundamentally our equations say there is no preferred direction in time.”

Al-Khalili claims to solve it

The physicist says he will reveal the solution to the arrow of time problem in his Royal Institution Christmas lectures, broadcast on the BBC in late December.

“I have solved the problem of the arrow of time.”