Time travel is possible through Black Holes and a ‘cunning plan’, experts claim
Time travel has many meanings. For example, when be observe planets and stars in the sky, we see them as they were in the past, for planets its only a few minutes but for stars, it may be thousand of years. This means that through our observations of the universe, with the help of our latest telescopes we have the ability to ‘look’ back in time, and see the history of our universe unfold.
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But that’s not the general idea of time travel, is it?
It’s about physically breaking known scientific laws and traveling in time, either to the past, or the future.
Not long ago, a team of scientists from the University of Queensland, Australia, have simulated how time-travelling photons might behave, indicating that at least on a QUANTUM LEVE, the grandfather paradox –which demonstrates how time travel is not possible— can be resolved. Using photons –single particles of light— researchers simulated quantum particles traveling to the past. After studying their behaviors, researchers revealed possible anomalous aspects of modern-day physics.
But many bright minds have spoken about time travel, and among them was one of my favorite ‘mad’ scientists, the great Nikola Tesla who is reported to have tested a time traveling machine.
However, it seems that Nikola Tesla may have worked on time travel before modern science even thought it was possible.
According to reports, in 1895 Tesla made a shocking discovery suggesting that time and space could be influenced by magnetic fields. Allegedly, this idea –that one could alter time and space by magnetic fields— led to a number of experiments that allegedly gave birth to the infamous Philadelphia project –considered mostly a hoax.
It is believed that Tesla worked on the idea of time travel, discovering amazing results along the way. Using magnetic fields, Tesla found that the space-time barrier could be ‘altered’ and accessed by creating a ‘Trojan horse’ which eventually led to a different time.
This however is considered by many as a story without verifiable facts. So, let’s get to the facts.
One of the first scientists on Earth to mention the idea of traveling in time was Albert Einstein who proposed that if one were to travel at the speed of light away from Earth, time would ‘literally slow down’ for the traveler, while people on Earth would continue to experience time at a normal rate.
In addition to Einstein, many others have spoken out about traveling in time.
Brian Greene a theoretical physicist and string theorist from Columbia University, said: “You can build a spaceship, go out into space [and travel] near the speed of light, turn around and come back.
“Imagine you go out for six months and you turn around and you come back for six months.”
The theoretical physicist added: “When you step out of your ship, you’re one year older but Earth has gone through many, many years.
“It can have gone through 10,000, 100,000 or a million years depending on how close to the speed of light you traveled.”
And now, in an article featured in the conversation, two experts discuss time travel and how it is achievable.
In an interview, literature professor Simon John James and physicist Richard Bower were both involved in an exhibition called, Time Machines – the past, the future, and how stories take us there, reveal many, wildly various, meanings of “time travel”. Here, they discuss how time traveling in literary and scientific terms might, one day, coincide.
Simon John James: Richard, what does the term “time travel” mean for a physical scientist?
Richard Bower: Time travel is the basis of modern physics, and, for anyone that looks up at the night sky, an everyday experience.
When we view the stars and planets, we see them, not as they are now, but as they were in the past.
For planets, this time delay is only a few minutes, but for most of the stars in the night sky, thousands of years.
For galaxies, faint smudges of light made up of very distant collections of stars, the delay can be millions or billions of years. By observing the faintest galaxies with the world’s latest telescopes, we can look back through time and watch the whole history of the universe unfold.
But this is not the most satisfying kind of time travel. It allows us only to gaze into the past as remote observers. One of the key challenges for modern physics is to determine whether it is possible to influence the past.
One of the key concepts of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity is that objects exist in a long line in 4D spacetime, a unification of time and space.
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Although all observers agree on the length of the worldline that connects two events, they may have different views about whether the events occur simultaneously, or at the same location but at different times, or a mixture of both.
For example, while I sit at my desk to eat lunch, then work a little and get up to go home several hours later, a (very) fast-moving observer will see me whizz by eating lunch and immediately getting up to go home.
In Einstein’s theory, time and space are mixed together: we cannot think of them separately. It, therefore, makes best sense to think of myself as always moving along that 4D world-line, traveling into the future at the speed of light.
But is it possible to cheat the safeguards of Einstein’s theory and to travel backward through time? At face value, the answer is no, but then again, the science of earlier generations would have said it was impossible for mankind to fly. Perhaps all scientists need is an inspiration and a cunning idea.
SJJ: Well, you can find a lot of inspiration and cunning ideas in fantastic fiction, of course. Perhaps the most famous time travel text is The Time Machine (1895) by HG Wells, which was the first to imagine humans travtraveling time through the use of technology.
Other of his imaginations have been realized – he imagined and wrote about the technology of powered flight before science made it possible in real life, for example. Wells’s innovative idea led to modern time travel stories such as Back to the Future or Doctor Who.
But many different kinds of stories travel in time: Aristotle observed that a good story has a beginning, a middle and an end – but they do not have to be in that order. Even a text as ancient as Homer’s Iliad does not begin with the judgment of Paris, but with Achilles sulking in his tent in the ninth year of the Trojan War, and the story unfolds from there.
Whodunnits usually don’t tend to begin with the murder, but with the discovery of the body, and the plot is reconstructed by the detective as the story moves both forwards and backward. This is the temporal freedom of narrative time.
RB: What’s freeing in the literary device is for practical time travel the central obstacle. Although Einstein’s theories allow us to stretch and shrink time, the causal ordering of events remains constant. While, in your example, the life of the murder victim might experience their life flashing before their eyes in their dying seconds, the experience of their life will always precede the moment of death.
But in The Terminator, to take one example, the future human civilization finds a way to loop the protagonist’s world line so that he travels back in time to intercept the cyborg and avert Sarah Connor’s death. In the inner regions of a spinning black hole, space and time are mixed so that this is tantalizingly close to possible, but I’ve never knowingly met anyone that made their way back from the future this way.
Perhaps the looped world line cuts off the old future and pops out a new future, creating parallel worlds that exist at the same time.
From the conventional point of view, there’s rather a lot wrong with the idea of looping back in time.
But modern interpretations of quantum mechanics suggest that the world may actually consist of many parallel futures, constantly splitting off from one another. All of these futures exist simultaneously, but we are only conscious of one of them. From this viewpoint, there isn’t so much to fear from time travel. The looped world line simply creates another layer of possible futures.
SJJ: I’m fascinated by time travel’s flexibility as metaphor for talking about many different kinds of academic research. History, archaeology would be obvious examples, but in a recent project I’ve been really inspired by work in the psychology of autobiographical memory.
Narrative is not just a property of literary and other kinds of texts: it has been argued that the human sense of self is constructed from our narrativising of our own experiences within the passing of time: that memory and planning for the future are a kind of “mental time travel” which allows us to constitute identity.
Here my literary example is Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Scrooge travels back to memories of his past selves, and by so doing is encouraged to change his ways for the better in the future.
We could think of the despised, neglected miser of the vision of Christmas Yet to Come, and the beloved happy Scrooge of the novel’s ending as those inhabiting two different “parallel worlds”, perhaps?
RB: It’s certainly fascinating how literary ideas challenge scientific understanding – perhaps both of those parallel futures might be proved equally real yet.
Source and Reference:
Time travel: a conversation between a scientist and a literature professor
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