In new Disney Pixar movie ‘Lightyear’, time gets bendy

Is time travel real, or just science fiction?

At the beginning of the new Disney Pixar film, Lightyear, Buzz Lightyear gets stranded on a dangerous faraway planet with his commanding officer and crew.

Their only hope of getting off the planet is to test a special fuel. To do that, Buzz has to fly into space and repeatedly try to jump to hyper-speed. But each attempt he makes comes with a terrible cost.

Every time Buzz takes off for a four-minute test flight into space, he lands back on the planet to find many years have passed. The people Buzz cares most about fall in love, have kids and even grandkids. Time becomes his biggest enemy.

What’s going on? Is this just science fiction, or could what happened to Buzz actually happen?

Buzz is experiencing a real phenomenon known as time dilation. Time dilation is a prediction of one of the most famous scientific theories ever developed: Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Prior to relativity, the best theory of motion we had was Isaac Newton’s mechanics.

Newton’s theory was incredibly powerful, providing stunning predictions of the motion of the planets in our solar system.