What makes the tardis work

And that is the easy bit. To travel in other more complicated ways, we would have to cut two TARDIS bubbles and connect two ends from the two different bubbles. The paper is easy to understand and filled with more Who references and analogies than I managed to cram into this article. In the end, what can we say other that a straight line may be the shortest distance between two points, but it is by no means the most interesting. Care about supporting clean energy adoption?

Find out how much money and planet! By signing up through this link , Futurism. Massive objects, like stars and galaxies, stretch and curve this fabric into themselves.

Physicists don't really know how space-time warps, but it's theoretically possible to fold one of those curves back on itself, creating what's called a closed time-like curve CTC. The objects inside the loop in the graphic are called light cones. Light cones mark the boundaries of space-time that any one event like the burst of light from a supernova explosion can reach. For example, imagine you're standing at the red dot in the diagram below. Time is on the y-axis left and space is on the x-axis bottom :.

The area enclosed by the white lines is everything you can see without traveling at the speed of light. If a star exploded 10 light-years away from you orange dot , then it would take 10 years for light from that event to reach you. The only way to get outside of a light cone is by traveling faster than the speed of light. Normally light cones are arranged in a straight line, because time moves in a straight line like the right side of the diagram below.

But CTCs tip light cones , making it possible to travel backward and forward in time, like the left side of the diagram:. It would look kind of like the following graphic from Tippet and Tsang's paper. But the science behind how that blue box functions in the universe of Doctor Who is insanely complicated, and theoretically possible — assuming we could access a dimensional plane that connects to all of space and time and discover some kind of exotic matter that shatters the current laws of physics.

They conceptualize the Tardis as a bubble of space-time that moves back and forth through loops of time, but after enough loops are connected, the Tardis would conceivably gain access to all of space and time. The only catch? This can vary between being the size of a cathedral, to the size of a soundstage in Wales.

These are all handled by the architectural configuration system, which as near as we can tell allows the Doctor to add and delete rooms at will, like a house in the Sims. So any of these rooms might have been deleted, or deleted and re-added later, any number of times. The exchange goes:. Relative dimensions, you see.

No constant. There are no measurements in infinity. So take your pick. This is not even close to a full crew complement.