Posted on 21 Nov 2013

The Real Science Of "Doctor Who"

A whole load of wibbly wobbly timey wimey sciencey goodness. Fantastic!

BuzzFeed Staff, UK

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Sorry. If time travel can happen at all, it's likely that we can only go forward. Which means anything that's happened already is set, because we can't go back in time to change it. (Otherwise we'd have met some time travellers from the future, surely?)

Unless you have a traversable wormhole. That would allow you to get around not being able to travel faster than light by taking a shortcut through space-time. Good luck finding one though — we're not even sure if they exist yet.

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“Time and Relative Dimension in Space” sounds very impressive and physics-y but it doesn't actually mean much. Benjamin Tippet, who recently wrote a scientific paper with colleague David Tsang about how a real-life TARDIS would work, thinks “Transversable Achronal Retrograde Domain in Spacetime” is a better name for the blue box. It means something that can go backward in time and move faster than the speed of light. Which is handy, because that’s what the Tardis does.

Colonies of honey bees began dying in their droves a few years ago, and scientists are not sure exactly why. Beekeepers and scientists are calling the phenomenon of apparently healthy colonies disappearing without a trace ‘colony collapse disorder’.

But they're not going back home to their planet Melissa Majoria. The disappearance seems to have been caused by the more earthly combination of parasites, agricultural chemicals, and poor nutrition.

Without aliens, the Doctor wouldn't have much to do (well, given that he's an alien, technically he wouldn't exist at all). In the real world, we've found over a thousand planets outside our solar system in just the last 20 years. But in the few years we've been listening out for extraterrestrial lifeforms, we haven't heard a peep. That doesn't mean there is no other life in the universe. When you think about the vast scale of the cosmos, surely there is?

Sadly, without a Tardis, we only have a small slice of space and time to explore. Our nearest star is a few light-years away, and we're nowhere near having light-speed travel yet, so we can't even get that far. If alien life is not close by, we might never encounter it.

But look on the bright side: Would you ever want to meet the Weeping Angels?

BBC

But it would never happen how it does in the show, where Donna and Wilfred see the constellation Orion blink out before their eyes.

If a star 10 light-years from us disappeared, it'd take us 10 years to find out. That's because light travels at a finite speed and the universe is really, really big. All the stars are different distances away, so we'd see them go out at really different times, probably spread over thousands of years.

Unless Davros managed to set the Reality Bomb so everything happened at once from Earth's point of view...