Is Time Travel Possible?

Time travel is possible, right? Yes, and it’s happening right now.

You’re hurtling into the future at an impressive rate of one second per second.

Every time you watch paint dry or wish you had more hours to visit with a friend from out of town, time moves at the same speed.

In franchises like “Doctor Who,” “Star Trek,” and “Back to the Future,” characters ride into some wild machine to blast into the past or spin into the future.

However, this type of time travel hasn’t captured the imaginations of countless science fiction writers.

In time travel stories, the characters grapple with the idea of altering the past or present by using information from the future (which is where parallel universes and alternate timelines intersect).

Despite the interest in changing history or seeing the future before it happens, no one has ever demonstrated the kind of backward and forward time travel seen in science fiction, or proposed a procedure that wouldn’t lead to death on the way.

The best evidence that time travel is not possible and never will be, according to Stephen Hawking in his book “Black Holes and Baby Universes” (Bantam, 1994), is the fact that we haven’t been invaded by tourists from the future.

Theoretically, it is possible to travel back in time using wormholes, black holes and string theory.

Despite this, time travel remains the subject of numerous science fiction books, movies, TV shows, comics, and video games.

A Time-Travel Theory Based On Special Relativity And The Near Future

It is deceptively simple in its short form.

There’s no such thing as an “absolute” frame of reference, since everything is measured in comparison to something else.

Secondly, light travels at a constant speed. No matter how you measure it, it will always remain the same.

Third, the speed of light can never be exceeded.

It is from those simple principles of time travel that actual, real-life time travel is derived.

Traveling at high speed will cause the observer to experience time at a slower rate than a non-speeding observer.

Humans are not accelerated to near-light speed, but they do swing around the earth at 17,500 mph (28,160 km/h) aboard the International Space Station.

Mark Kelly, another astronaut and Scott Kelly’s twin brother, was born after him.

Scott Kelly spent 520 days in orbit, while Mark logged 54 days in space.

As a result of their differing experiences of time over their lifetimes, the age gap between them has actually increased.

Can We Travel Back In Time Through Wormholes?

NASA says that general relativity might also provide scenarios that could allow travelers to travel back in time.

Physically, however, those time-travel methods are far from easy.

Wormholes are hypothetical “tunnels” through space-time that could connect different points in history or locations in reality.

The existence of wormholes, which are also considered to be Einstein-Rosen bridges or white holes, is a subject of much speculation.

However, despite taking up a lot of space (or time), wormholes have yet to be discovered in the real world.

At the tunnel’s “mouth,” primordial wormholes are predicted to be just 10-34 inches (10-33 centimeters) wide. It was expected that items couldn’t travel through them because they were too unstable.

Live Science reports that a new study says this is not the case.

In a new theory, physicist Pascal Koiran proposes that wormholes may serve as space-time shortcuts.

Koiran’s study utilized the Eddington-Finkelstein metric rather than the Schwarzschild metric that has dominated previous analyses.

Through a hypothetical wormhole, particle paths could not be traced in the past.

However, the physicist was able to accomplish this using the Eddington-Finkelstein metric.

Various Other Theories About Time Travel

Researchers have suggested other solutions to Einstein’s time travel paradox that could allow researchers to jump back and forth in time.

There’s one major flaw in each of these alternate theories: Scientists cannot imagine how a living being could survive the type of gravitational pulling and pushing that each solution would require.

Infinite Cylinder Theory

As proposed by astronomer Frank Tipler (sometimes known as the Tipler Cylinder), one could create a cylindrical structure with a mass ten times that of the sun by rolling it into a very long, yet very dense cylinder.

Time travel experts at the Anderson Institute describe the cylinder as “the black hole of a spaghetti factory.”

A spaceship near this black hole spaghetti could travel backwards in time on a “closed, time-like curve” by spinning it a few billion revolutions per minute, according to the Anderson Institute.

A major problem with the Tipler Cylinder is that to become a reality, the cylinder would need to be infinitely long or made of some unknown material.

Time Donuts

An Israeli theoretical physicist has proposed a model for a time machine made of curved space-time, in which normal matter surrounds a donut-shaped vacuum.

Live Science quoted Ori as saying, “The machine is space-time itself.”

Ori said that if a warp like this can be created in space, future generations may be able to visit us.

The time machine of Ori has a few caveats.

The time donut would not have been invented and constructed prior to the invention of time travel.

Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, the invention and construction of such a machine would require the ability to manipulate gravitational fields at will – a feat theoretically possible, but out of our reach for the foreseeable future.

Final Thoughts

So there you have it, it is possible to time travel.

Maybe not in the way you think, but there are multiple theories developed by famous scientists that help to prove that time travel can be possible under certain circumstances.