Time travel — moving between different points in time — has been a popular topic for science fiction for decades. Franchises ranging from "Doctor Who" to "Star Trek" to "Back to the Future" have seen humans get in a vehicle of some sort and arrive in the past or future, ready to take on new adventures.

What is time travel? One standard definition is that of David Lewis’s: an object time travels iff the difference between its departure and arrival times in the surrounding world does not equal the duration of the journey undergone by the object. This definition applies to both natural and Wellsian time travel. For example, Jane might be a time traveler if she travels for one hour but arrives two hours later in the future (or two hours earlier in the past). In both types of time travel, the times experienced by a time traveler are different from the time undergone by their surrounding world.

Time travel, is it actually possible? It turns out nature does allow a way of bending time, an exciting possibility suggested by Albert Einstein when he discovered special relativity over one hundred years ago.