Tech billionaires tryin tae live for ever? That’s a pure waste o time, says physicist

Tech billionaires attemptin tae live for ever are, quite literally, wastin their time, a leadin physicist has said.

While some ordinary folk are turnin tae unregulated peptide injections, cauld plunges and supplements in an effort tae defy agin, the ultra-rich are aimin for immortality wi even mair drastic interventions: the tech chief executive Bryan Johnson has even tried injectin plasma frae his 17-year-auld son – awtho he later said he saw nae benefit frae it.

Prof Jim Al-Khalili, who will be giein this year’s Royal Institution Christmas lectures on the topic o time, has said folk expendin their energy on tryin tae live for ever may be missin oot on the here and now.

“We hae a finite interval o time in which we exist in the universe. And the mair I study the nature o time, the mair I think aboot it, the mair I realise that I juist want tae mak the maist o the time that I hae,” he said.

“We are here for a blink o an ee compared wi the age o the universe. If I spend that blink o an ee tryin tae extend it tae twa blinks o an ee, I am nae sure if that is actually a worthwhile thing tae be spendin my life doin.”

Al-Khalili has lang been fascinatit by time. As a bairn he was bafflet when his faither, an engineer, said naebody really understuid what time was. “I had nae idea what he was talkin aboot,” he said. “It was only efter trainin as a physicist you realise that, actually, the notion o time – our commonsense view o time – somehow it is very far removed frae the way we think aboot time in physics in particular.”

Amang ither examples, Al-Khalili points oot that the renowned theoretical physicist Albert Einstein revealed time does nae run at the same rate for everyone. “What I micht caa a second wad be langer than a second for you if I was flyin past you wi my clock in a rocket,” he said. “I will say, look, it is tickin by one second. And you will say, nae, actually, five seconds hae gane by. You are doin everythin in slaw motion.”

Gravity, he addit, had an effect an aa. “That for me is the maist spine-tinglin aspect tae it, that time runs at different rates dependin on how strang gravity is.”

Einstein’s wark may an aa shed licht on a Christmas conundrum: how the ghaists o past, present and future cud turn up on the same nicht tae spook Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.

Al-Khalili says that accordin tae Einstein all times coexist – past, present and future – in the same way as all points in space exist. “The problem, o course, is that we only ever experience the present moment,” Al-Khalili said. “Sae, the idea o the Christmas Carol is a wonderful one that highlights this notion that times maybe are nae all separate. That maybe we can join wi folk, someone frae the past, someone frae the future. But o course, in relativity, that means time travel.”

Time travel is anither topic Al-Khalili plans tae explore in the Christmas lectures. “Mathematically, it is possible tae travel back in time,” he says. The reality, however, is a little mair complicatit – akin tae travelin a rollercoaster’s loop-the-loop.

“You are travelin forrit alang the rollercoaster, but what is happenin is you are doublin back on yersel and arrivin back at your startin point. It is the same sort o thing [wi time travel]. What is caaed a closed time-like curve in relativity, is somewhere in space-time which is so warped and curved by gravity that you are travelin what you regard as forrit in time, but in fact you are loopin back through space-time tae a moment afore you stairtit,” he said.

“But the problem, o course, is maist physicists think ‘surely that is impossible’, because time travel intae the past leads tae all sorts o paradoxes.”

Travellin intae the future is, at least in theory, easier. “The way you dae it is by slawin time doon, either by travelin close tae the speed o licht or doin what Matthew McConaughey daes in Interstellar – you go and orbit aroond a supermassive black hole whose gravitational field is so strang that, I think in the movie, every hour they spend near this black hole, seven years gae by on Earth.”

Al-Khalili will an aa tackle a conundrum that has bothered scientists for centuries: why time only seems tae flow in one direction.

“Things decay, batteries rin oot, balls roll doonhill, we grow aulder, your bairns’ bedroom gets mair messy, nae mair tidy – unless you intervene,” he said. “All those things point tae a directionality tae time, and yet fundamentally our equations say there is nae preferred direction in time.”

The problem has keepit Al-Khalili up at nicht for months, if nae years. But now he thinks he has the answer: for those who tune in.

“In the lectures, I am gaun tae gie an explanation for how tae solve that problem,” he said. “I winnae gie ony spoilers, that is for the Christmas lecture. I hae solved the problem o the arrow o time.”