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What Are Wormholes, and Could They Be the Answer to Time Travel?

Wormholes, cosmic tunnels also known as einstein-rosen bridges, are a staple of science fiction. could they allow real-world humans to travel back in time.

The sci-fi landscape is littered with wormholes. From Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Rick and Morty to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, these theoretical constructs allow characters to zip between distant points in the universe as easy as stepping through a doorway.

An Einstein-Rosen bridge is the simplest kind of wormhole. And while it can, in theory, allow you to meet a new friend from a distant part of the universe, there are some important reasons why it won’t let you travel back in time.

Black Holes, White Holes and Wormholes

Let’s start with everybody’s favorite astronomical mystery: a black hole . Despite their fearsome reputation, they’re actually rather simple creature. They have a point of infinite density, known as the singularity, in their centers. They are surrounded by a boundary called the event horizon.

The event horizon doesn’t exist in the same way that the surface of a planet exists. Instead it’s just a mathematical line in the sand that tells you one thing: if you cross within that special distance, you’re trapped forever, because you’ll have to travel faster than the speed of light to escape.

Read More: 'Fuzzballs' Might Be the Answer to a Decades-Old Paradox About Black Holes

And that’s it. That’s a black hole. A singularity and an event horizon. All things that cross the event horizon will never escape back into the universe – things go in and never come out.

Mathematically we can also define the polar opposite of a black hole, which is conveniently called a white hole. White holes also have a singularity, but their event horizons act differently. Anything already on the outside of a white hole (like, the entire universe) can never, ever cross within it, no matter how hard it tries. And anything already inside the white hole will find itself ejected from it faster than the speed of light.

Now when we take a black hole and a white hole and connect their singularities together, we get an entirely new kind of object: an Einstein-Rosen bridge , better known as a wormhole.

Read More: Astronomers Found a Baffling Black Hole That Existed 13 Billion Years Ago

What Is a Wormhole?

Wormholes are essentially hollow tubes through space and time that can connect very distant regions of the universe. A star may be thousands of light-years away, but a wormhole can connect that star to us with a tunnel only a few steps long.

Wormholes also have the somewhat mystical ability to allow backwards time travel. If you take one end of the wormhole and accelerate it to a speed close to that of light, it will experience time dilation — its internal “clock” will run slower than the rest of the universe.

That will cause the two ends of the wormhole to no longer be synchronized in time. Then you could walk in one end and end up in your own past. Voilà: time travel.

Read More: Is There a Particle That Can Travel Back in Time?

Can Humans Travel Through Wormholes?

There's just one, tiny, teensy problem with this setup: Einstein-Rosen bridges are indeed wormholes, but the entrance to the wormhole sits behind the black hole event horizon. And the number one rule of black hole event horizons is that once you cross them, you’re never allowed to escape. Ever.

Once you pass through a black hole event horizon, you are forced towards the singularity, where you are guaranteed to meet your gruesome end. In other words, once you enter an Einstein-Rosen bridge, you will never escape.

So, the unfortunate truth with Einstein-Rosen bridges is that while they appear to be magical doorways to distant reaches of the universe, they are just as deadly as black holes. When you enter you can meet other travelers who have fallen in from the other side, and you could even carry on a conversation…briefly, before you both struck the singularity.

There have been attempts to stabilize Einstein-Rosen bridges and make them traversable by somehow getting their entrances to sit outside the event horizon. So far the only way we know how to do this is with exotic matter. If you threaded the wormhole tunnel with matter that had negative mass, then in principle you could have a not-deadly-at-all wormhole.

Alas, negative matter does not appear to exist in the universe, and so our wormhole — and time travel — dreams will have to remain as mere mathematical fantasies.

Read More: What Did Einstein's Theories Say About the Illusion of Time?

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Bizarre portal-like ‘ring wormholes’ could let you time travel

A ring wormhole is one that you could simply step through, like a portal through space – but new, more detailed models have shown that they could be a portal through time as well

By Leah Crane

14 July 2023

A ring wormhole might be a time portal

Shutterstock / Jbruiz

Wormholes are often thought of as tunnels through space-time with black holes for entrances, but they could theoretically be flat instead, like a door into another location or even another universe. These are known as “ring wormholes”, and in some cases they could also become time machines.

Ring wormholes, first proposed in 2016, are made up of a string of exotic matter with negative energy – a property that is possible due to quantum effects, but only, as far as we know,…

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Scientists Have Determined How to Travel Back in Time With a Ring Wormhole

Gear-obsessed editors choose every product we review. We may earn commission if you buy from a link. Why Trust Us?

• A recent study claims to have calculated a potential method of time travel.
• It involves a highly theoretical object called a “ring wormhole,” which is a type of wormhole that connects two regions of space, like a portal.
• Ring wormholes had previously been theorized to be portals to other universes, and researchers now propose they could act as time machines as well.

But that hasn’t stopped scientists from trying to figure out how we maybe could, someday, jump around out of order in the time stream. And recently, a team of theoretical physicists published a paper on exactly what laws of physics could be stretched just far enough to make it happen.

The key to the whole idea is wormholes —specifically, a type of wormhole called a ring wormhole. Now, wormholes are already entirely theoretical, so this discussion is going to get weird. And ring wormholes get even weirder than “normal” wormholes.

Your average, run-of-the-mill wormholes, as we tend to think of them, are basically holes punched in the fabric of spacetime by the immense gravity of black holes. The gravity well at the center of these objects is so intense that scientists have often theorized they could act as tunnels to another universe , or another time.

But ring wormholes aren’t black-hole dependent. Instead, the (again, highly theoretical) objects are caused by circles of mass that have negative energy, something only made possible by the strange effects of the quantum realm . This circle of negative energy would basically create a portal to another universe without the need to go through a black hole tunnel.

“You could go through and not even notice that you went to another universe,” Andrei Zelnikov, one of the authors on the recent paper, told New Scientist .

The paper —published in the journal Physical Review D by Zelnikov and his team—puts forth calculations that claim a ring wormhole could not only act as a universe-to-universe teleport, but as a time machine .

According to the heavy-duty number-crunching, the ring wormholes could generate something called a “closed timelike curve” if one “mouth” of the wormhole near a bunch of mass and the other “mouth” was far away from any significant amount of mass . If the conditions are right around the mouths of the wormhole, the closed timelike curves generated are then able to turn a portal into a time machine.

“The time machine is a natural consequence of the wormhole existing,” Toby Wiseman, a professor of theoretical physics at the Imperial College London who was not a part of the study, told New Scientist . “Apart from the crazy matter that makes up the wormhole, there’s nothing too wild being postulated here, and then the consequence is something even more crazy.”

You can decide for yourself if proposing a method for time travel is “too wild.” But wild or not, scientists remain dedicated to truly understanding all of the laws of time and space —and exactly how we can bend them to make the coolest things possible.

Jackie is a writer and editor from Pennsylvania. She's especially fond of writing about space and physics, and loves sharing the weird wonders of the universe with anyone who wants to listen. She is supervised in her home office by her two cats.

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The Missing Piece: Are Wormholes the Key to Time Travel?

Time travel -- it's a concept we're all too familiar with. From Hollywood Movies (shout out to Back to the Future) to theoretical physics, many theories have circulated regarding the bewildering topic of time travel. However, recently students at the California Institute of Technology1 have shed new light on a relatively dated theory: that wormholes may be the missing piece in the seemingly unsolvable puzzle behind time travel. So, step aside Doc Brown, because we're going to explore how a unique and mysterious part of our universe- the wormhole- connects to traveling through time!

Just like many principles in Physics, this concept finds its base in Einstein's Theory of General Relativity (for some background on this topic, view our previous blog post, "What happens to Matter inside a Black Hole?"). Basically, the theory attributes the characteristics of a wormhole to its incredibly high velocity. Similar to a black hole, a wormhole would compress an entering object to the size of a singularity and accelerate it to immeasurable speeds through the "throat" of the wormhole to the other side of the funnel. So, for now, think of a wormhole as a black hole that has a start and end point.2

Now, this is where the physics becomes complex. We know that a wormhole can basically "teleport" compressed objects at super speeds from one end to another, but how does that explain the time travel aspect? Well, the concept of time dilation can explain that. Time dilation is the relative difference in the passage of time between two entities due to a stark difference in either gravity or relative velocity. In the case of the wormhole, both are in play, which only compounds the effects. For a tangible example to grasp, let's look to the astronauts aboard the International Space Station. After 6 months aboard the ISS (where there is less gravity, but greater velocity of movement), these astronauts have actually aged .007 seconds less than the crew stationed on Earth.3 While this seems insignificant, we have to remember that because the velocity is increased but the gravity is decreased, each is actually mitigating the effects of the other. However, in a wormhole, where the effects of both gravity and velocity are exponentially amplified AND working in tandem, their relativistic effects are enormous.4

This graphic portrays an accurate depiction of velocities' effect on time dilation: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/Nonsymmetric_velocity_time_dilation.gif

Now that we have an understanding of time dilation, we want to leave you with this example. Imagine two test subjects at each side of a wormhole in the year 1995. One mouth of the wormhole has been accelerated to a point where relativistic effects (i.e. time dilation) apply significantly and the other mouth is stationary. When the two subjects pass through their respective mouths, they end up at where their counterpart stood... but at different times! The accelerated mouth would land its test subject in, let's say, 2000. However, the stationary mouth would place its test subject in a later year - we'll call it 2005- since the accelerated mouth exists in a different time caused by time dilation. The time travel becomes evident when we consider the following: what if the test subject who landed in 2005 stepped back into the mouth? They would end up in the year 2000, or 5 years in the past! A bit of manipulation, therefore, could technically transport this subject to any point in time between 2000 and 2005.5

Unfortunately, scientists have been unable to totally grasp how we could adapt the power of a wormhole into time machine-esq technology. We have yet to even theorize how we could accelerate a wormhole to relativistic speeds. Given that this is another theoretical aspect of our known universe, testing is extremely limited and all postulates have very little opportunity for tangible proof. What is certain, though, is that the advances we've made thus far in the field have brought us several pieces closer to solving the time traveler's puzzle!

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• January 23, 2014 The Search for the God Particle
• January 21, 2014 Can We Make the Jump?
• September 07, 2013 An Enlightening View of Solar Eclipses
• September 02, 2013 Sunny Side Down: The Future Destruction of the Sun
• August 28, 2013 The Missing Piece: Are Wormholes the Key to Tim...
• July 30, 2013 What Happens to Matter Inside a Black Hole?

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Universe Today

Space and astronomy news

Large Hadron Collider Could Create Wormholes: a Gateway for Time Travelers?

As we get closer to the grand opening of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, it seems the predictions as to what we might get from the high energy particle accelerator are becoming more complex and outlandish. Not only could the LHC generate enough energy to create particles that exist in other dimensions , it may also produce “ unparticles “, a possible source for dark matter. Now, the energy may be so focused that even the fabric of space-time may be pulled apart to create a wormhole, not to a different place, but a different time . Also, if there are any time travellers out there, we are most likely to see them in a few weeks… If you could travel back in time, where would you go? Actually it’s a trick question: you couldn’t travel back in time unless there was a time “machine” already built in the past. The universe’s very first time traveller would therefore only be able to travel back to when the machine he/she was using was built. This is one restriction that puts pay to those romantic ideas that we could travel back in time to see the dinosaurs; there were no time machines back then (that we know of), so nothing to travel back to. And until we create a time machine, we won’t be seeing any travelers any time soon.

However, Prof Irina Aref’eva and Dr Igor Volovich, mathematical physicists at the Steklov Mathematical Institute in Moscow believe the energies generated by the subatomic collisions in the LHC may be powerful enough to rip space-time itself, spawning wormholes. A wormhole not only has the ability to take a shortcut between two positions in space, it can also take a shortcut between two positions in time . So, the LHC could be the first ever “time machine”, providing future time travelers with a documented time and place where a wormhole “opened up” into our time-line. This year could therefore be “Year Zero”, the base year by which time travel is limited to.

Relativity doesn’t dispute this idea, but the likelihood of a person passing through time is slim-to-impossible when the dimensions of a possible wormhole will be at the sub-atomic level at best and it would only be open for a brief moment. Testing for the presence of a man-made wormhole would be difficult even if we knew what we were looking for (perhaps a small loss in energy during collision, as energy escapes through the wormhole?).

As if that didn’t discourage you from hoping to use wormholes for time travel, Dr Brian Cox of the University of Manchester says: “The energies of billions of cosmic rays that have been hitting the Earth’s atmosphere for five billion years far exceed those we will create at the LHC, so by this logic time travellers should be here already.” As far as we know, they’re not.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk

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145 Replies to “Large Hadron Collider Could Create Wormholes: a Gateway for Time Travelers?”

I just had a question. What exactly will happen to said wormhole once it has been opened. You say it will only be open for a brief moment, so are you implying that it will fade out by releasing all its energy?

The Death Star will be coming trough tthat wormhole. Mark My Words.

through reading this it seams that you have come to the conclusion that time travel is possible. i once read a few yrs ago that a woman/man had a close encounter of the third kind and was told by the alien beings that they were actually alot closer than we thought. could it be that those beings (if true) could be human beings from the future born and raised on another planet and have evolved into what they/we will be in the future and they are coming back to us to make sure we are on track or give us advice about interplanetary travel, so we remain to exist on other planets!? it is a theory, and we have learned that in space, nothing is impossible!

Just like children playing with TNT . Now a lighter has been found on the play ground . Just a matter of time , the fuse will be lit . We all might wish we could go back in time to put a stop to this union. At least till we know more about what we are playing with. 1. FACT. No One Really knows what dark matter or energy is , let alone what it does . 2. FACT. No One Really Knows what a worm hole is , or where it leads . This Rip Could be like opening a door we may not want to open , a door that cannot close . We are asking , how to light the fuse. and the question really is , Should we ?

OMG! OMG! OMG! The end is nigh

“you couldn’t travel back in time unless there was a time “machine” already built in the past.”

When stated as fact, it’s speculation like in this story that drains neurons of their usefulness. By any chance, was Ian on the committee that shot down the Texas collider that cost more to dismantle than to complete?

Why am i getting sudden visions of Doom in my head? In before the demon overlords from Hell come through and attempt to take over the human race.

I always had an idea that the “aliens” in space ships were probably just people from the future. And if they were, then it could prove that time isn’t linear, since coming back (and the spottings) could have had massive effects on the timeline. Maybe the people at the LHC should have a radio receiver on their end, just in case someone wants to send a little message through. “Hello world”

So, now we know wher UFOs come from!

Oh yes, Mark F., someone said that a UFO space occupant told them we will soon be able to travel in time – why it MUST be true then!

The gullibility level of people continues to amaze me, to say nothing of the lack of real education.

@korak jumping onto the sneering insult wagon doesn’t do your position much good, either. Just sayin’, because plenty of what we accept as fact today would have been derided in decades past.

Todd – I wasn’t dumping on the possibility that one day we may be able to time travel.

I was dumping on the fact that someone heard a story about an alien from a UFO telling someone else that we humans are close to being able to time travel.

I thought that was obvious.

With attitudes and gullibility like that, we won’t be able to cross the street properly soon enough, to say nothing of time travel.

And guess what, even if an alien did say we were close to time travel, what good does that do if no details on how to do this were possible. The story merits about as much usefulness if I said some day we are going to send spaceships to the stars. Nice sentiment, but it doesn’t get us there any faster or easier.

Go Korak 12!

Just wondering, with a name like that, are YOU a space traveler or time traveler? And I was told by an alien zombie’s girlfriend’s locker partner that slushy machines would open a portal to Michael Jackson’s Neverland. I’m proposing we destroy every one of them before we all get sucked in!

Well aliens and time traveling killer androids aside… What about the possibility of the appearance of particles placed inside the LHC from future experiments? That would be proof of time travel. May be messages could be sent in some form of particle Morse Code… As for the world getting sucked into oblivion I highly doubt there is enough energy to create a black hole or something. I’m more afraid of the ITER fusion reactor set to create gas to over 100 million degrees in 2018… Get your sunglasses and marshmallows out!

Edensdoor, I really like the idea of looking for particles in the LHC coming from future experiments! Now just so long as you didn’t get it from Peter K.’s alien zombie’s girlfriend’s locker partner.

And as for Peter K., no I am not a space or time traveler, nor am I the advance scout for the invasion fleet of the Galactic Empire – I mean, uh, nope, not that.

Hunnter I had that thought as well, that the classic aliens we see, if they even exist could be time travelers from the future;) Creating a black hole in my opinion doesnt sound like a good idea, what if it starts expanding?

Interesting indeed…and while we are at it, why don’t we push this little red button- I mean, I don’t know what it does but I’m sure if anything bad will come of it then little ‘Greys’ will shoot through the wormhole and save us all from ourselves. Testing fate usually works best in action movies only. Good Luck Science…Good Luck to Humanity

by the way…I’d like to know when they plan on throwing the switch as so I could kiss my loved ones just in case…nuff said!

You guys read WAY too much science fiction and not enough science texts.

Or am I assuming too much in the reading department, period?

To Toby: 3. FACT: The LHC doesnt have enough power to generate either black hole or wormhole.

To Korak: I totally agree with you. This 100% delusion like finding green bugs on the moon. Honestly speaking, does anyone really expect a 14TeV machine that can do everything?

I think I’ve read a research paper about the next generation collider, The VLHC which has the power from 100~400 TeV and it’s planned to build around 2020-2050. This is truly the machine we need to create both black hole and wormhole in the lab, and look for other high energy exotic particles in theoretical predictions.

People believe the strangest things….

Mark Farnaby Says: …it is a theory, and we have learned that in space, nothing is impossible!

Yes, and we also have learned that, in space, no one can hear you scream.

ok, aliens being the evolved humans from the future is ABSURD! how can someone from the future come to us. If a future human comes to us, than that means we are living in the past. NOT the present that we THINK that we are living in. And if they are from the future than that means that THEY are living in the present because they are our future lol and if they are in the present than that means that THEY THEMSELVES have evolved humans living in their future as well lol LUDACRIS as they may sound. that is what you said.

and how can an alien from the future come to us any ways? didn’t you say in order for us to go into the past we can only visit a time in period in history where there is a time machine invented. WE HAVE NO MACHINE YET. so how can they visit US????

think people. a child has more sense…

I viewed a DVD on the Return of the Nephilim as an explanation for UFOs. It is very thought provoking and rather credible. It feels way out there, but the evidence is so compelling that it is difficult to dismiss even though it made me a little uncomfortable.

See about it here http://store.khouse.org/store/catalog/CDA14.html?mv_pc=KHBOT

By the way, the presenter talked about multi dimensional universes and about what an object would look like as it travelled in, through and out of our universe to other universes.

In reference to previous comments about not being able to travel back in time to a period of time with no time machine, wouldn’t it depend on the type of time travel? A “one way fare” version wouldn’t necessarily need to have a time machine on the other end, as a “round trip” version would.

And Adrian, determining whether or not you or someone else is in the future is all up to perception.

In the future or the past, I mean.

If time travel was possible, than according to einstein we would have to be going the speed of light. then time would seem to stop, although it doesnt actually stop. Time would just seem to stop because you are going the speed of light, not the speed of the universe. This reminds me of this one futurama program where the crew “goes faster than the speed of light” by moving the Universe instead of their space-ship. Thinking about this, I realized that everything does this and so if you were to to (according to einsteins theory of relativity) go into the past, you would have to go More than Twice the speed of light.

Think about things that happen without reasons . You will find that those are just impossible , not the time travel or alien . A wormhole if it exists would be a shortcut from place to place in space . If wormhole could be the way to travel through time , then past and present and future would be together in a same time . Present is result of past , and reason of future . So , imagine how could reason and its result occurs in same time ? Because we believe eveything is made of basic particles that have truth of their own , so we have to find what they are and prove them . That means we are trying to find the unique reason for everything . But nothing has just one reason , so we never find out . I believe particle is a structure of energy . if LHC use a great deal of energy , maybe we won’t get a wormhole , but instead of that we get a more massive particle which is formed by the energy and Einstein’s EQT : E = mc2 . Anyway , I’m a curious person , so I hope LHC will make a wormhole or even a black hole ( I’m not afraid of being eating by it ) , but I don’t believe in time traveling .

I just want to say that EVERYTHING is a theory and NOTHING has ever been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. And anyone who says otherwise is living in a severe state of delusion. So who’s to say what this collider will or won’t accomplish. Nobody will know until it is powered up and then it will be too late if it proves to be a mistake. But the point is, NOBODY knows.

This BS article has attracted BS comments of all nature (including mine of course).

Most of you guys are not interested in scientific work or useful science results.

You enjoy drowning in lament, fear and naive dreams.

So now I know why the web site posts such BS, it is for you the dear readers 😉

In response to the one semi-constructional comment made above, ie. the possible (however unlikely) appearance of `future particles` within the LHC, I wonder how scientists would be able to recognise that such particles were indeed from the future?

Hey Llorac, jump off a building – after all, gravity is just a theory, right? It isn’t certain that you won’t end up a pancake when you reach the ground, right?

There are some certainties in this world, not the least of which is that sub-educated fools always respond to stories like this with their sub-educated minds.

Am I the only person who isn’t concerned that we could destroy the entire UNIVERSE with what we are doing here? I mean, creating conditions that have not existed since the Big Bang sounds a little DANGEROUS to me.

This may be the last year of all of our lives!

The idea that the LHC might be able to generate microscopic black holes is a product of scientific theory. The same theories also indicate that such black holes cannot possibly consume and/or destroy the entire universe.

By nature, black holes are unstable. Even the largest of them will eventually dissipate their mass/energy via Hawking radiation and disappear. Smaller black holes “dissolve” faster, and our theories indicate that microscopic black holes do so in mere fractions of a second. Yes, these are just theories, but they are the same theories that provide for the existence of black holes in the first place.

Jason Kurant, please repeat after me:

I Am Legend was only a movie.

I will get some real science books on the subjects of particle accelerators and black holes.

We’ve had nuclear weapons for 63 years now, and despite the fact that they could have definitely destroyed civilization, we are still standing.

The LHC will make some amazing new discoveries for physics, but the only thing I hope it will destroy is the type of scientific illiteracy and ignorance I have seen in this thread and elsewhere.

Mark Farnaby, your argument is non-sense. If they were coming from a future where time travel is already possible it would only be possible because we discovered it. So why would they need to come back to see we are in the right track if we already did it in their past with their help!! non sense. Not to talk about that woman encounter. Toby: you speak like an inquisitor or something like that. We dont really exactly know how wormholes work or what they are. But there are many in the universe and no deadly aliens are coming through them Nicolas G: the existence of this holes if they happen at all would last nano seconds. If wont even be possible to detect them at all in the experiments. Actually, I grant you noone will look for them. The missing energy on the detectors is always explain with partciles that dont leave track like neutrinos or others that we havent yet found. korak: hahahaha completely right edensdoor: Actually, micro black holes are predicted to be created in LHC. Nothing to be afraid about ITER Mega: this kind of very tiny black holes are created and destroyed all time around our planet. As the article well says, the cosmis rays hitting our outside atmosphere create more energetic collision than the one will happen at LHC Malcolypse_the_Obsolete: low energy collisions by summer. Full energy by the end of the year. 3. FACT: The LHC doesnt have enough power to generate either black hole or wormhole–> no trully discarded Adrian Shipp 11th grade: you really need to open your mind! xD Andrew: what the writer is talking about is a present pushing theory that explains our universe composed by some extra very small dimensions that we havent been able yet to see. Instead of the 4 known (3 spacial + time) we will have extra dimension in each of the space directions, small so that if you will move along it you will end up in the same place 😀 google “String Theory” Brian: theoretically you need someone to open a door on the other side. An exit. N Stone: we are all traveling in time all time. Our relative times are different. Someone travelling on an ariplane is travelling in time respect to the person waiting at the airport. The difference in times are so small that could only be detected by extremelly precise atomic clocks. However, the more the speed increases the more this time difference can be appreciated so that if you could travel to a very high speed just around the earth and you will come back, you will be actually in the future. We see this happending every day with particles. We just dont have the technology to travel ourselves at that speed. Now, travelling to the PAST, the subject of this article, is a different issue. Thanks ED.

@ walzaimer: The LHC doesnt have enough power to generate either black hole or wormhole–> no trully discarded

Is this a fact ? Or more a statement. i cant even proove from a statistical point of view thattomorrow earth will collide with anasteroid. But it is very unlikely given the real facts.

Hey guys. I am a demon and tell you that LHC is a tool of evil. Apocalypse is coming. Or maybe something even worse we just have not been indoctrinated with yet, so I cant scare you with the stereotype of it .

No offense menat but you are children that have seen to much lurid discovery channel exaggerations and hollywood pseudoscientific stereotypes about modern particle physics.

Actually I happen to work at CERN. I wish I was a child again though lol

And I am cathbad the seer.

[boast on] I worked in semiconductor physics and in Ghz appliances, I was marketing manager, sales representative and system admin of complex real time super computers. [boats off]

I dont know anything more than others. But I feel that this article is nothing more than BS. It collects 2 opinions (not facts) and puts a speculative lurid headline on top.

So what has that to do with scientific work ?

And with respect to the context:

what has it to do with science journalism ?

Yeah, korak, you sure hit the nail on the head with that sub-educated remark. At least you recognize your limitatations. That’s always the first step in overcoming them. There’s hope for you yet.

This is what i think…

If future dimensions and time are opened up in parrallel with our present dimensions and time then it could posibly create the following conditions:

1. A transition of our more dense universe into a future less dense universe? (as the universe is expanding)

2. A coexisting link at the collision from the exact present dimensions and position in existance(from when it occurs) to the exact dimensions and position of existance in a parrallel time(from when it occurs) with the posible opening up of a time where at that new present it is occupied by a star or even a real deep space sized black hole or even a quasar. Then we would be in trouble!

3. A non-happening effect where the instant in time the link is created, any change in physical existance of the two coexisting times will be evenly spread/distributed by the difference of time that seperates the coexisting times. Which can only be the length of time the colission takes place in?

it should not be done, the most un….natural thing humans will have done to that day.

The entire universe already Was destroyed… 13.7 billion years ago. That’s why we’re here.

no one knows exactly what will happen and because of that they shouldn’t go ahead.

I came from the future; I’ve been here two years…..where the heck am I now?

Didn’t someone say the same sort of thing about the atom being split… sure it resulted in nuclear power and medicine and weapons but the universe didn’t come to an end…

@ Phillip White: that sort of attitude is what brought about the dark ages, as a scientist and a nautrally curious human being it is our right to explore and push the boundaries as long as it is done in a manner generally ethically accepted. As much of this is speculation and hyped up some of the more mundane reports say this thing will do exactly what other colliders do and thats it. It will just give us insight to different types of particles.

Personally if they did detect objects from the future i would be thrilled but i seriously doubt that will happen.

Sorry Phillip…

Becuase i don’t know if i will get hit by a bus tomorrow does that mean i should not leave the house?

We are all time travellers. Flowing from the past, through the present, to the future. Like a flowing river current. We are all space travellers. Riding on the space ship earth at huge speeds.

We may be able to change the rate at which we travel in these flows. Thereby for example slowing down our travel or speeding our travel.

However its poor logic to believe that we can go back to something that has ceased to exist in our reality or to move forward to something that has yet to happen.

Time travel will be practical but in terms of changing our individual rates of travel within the flow.

Einstein’s admitted he knew nothing about why time has an arrow and he also admitted he did not know what space itself is. Yet based around his physics the scientific community still makes the mistake of believing that Einstein’s relativity is the last word on time and space.

It is this poor attitude and closed mindedness that keeps us locked in Earth’s gravity well. Parrot fashion physics of the type taught from the top down in our Universities will never be radical enough to truly understand time and space.

Einstein has had a good run but now its time to think outside the box. Unless time and space are truly understood gravity will remain our jail keeper.

The LHC will not discover the Higgs Boson just as LIGO will never detect gravitational radiation, as has been shown by the non detection of gravitational waves from GRB070201, nor will the LHC create a wormhole. Like gravitational radiation, both dark energy and dark matter do not exist. They are only needed to fill the lack of understanding of what we are observing when peering back in time as we look out into the Universe purely because of the physics we presently use to describe spacetime.

Get real, physics has absolutely no understanding of the origins of space and time, it only has a description of spacetime made a hundred years ago so I wouldn’t worry too much about the LHC if I were you. As for time travel, slowing down time is not a problem but going back in time will never happen so it should be left purely to the science fiction writers

I can’t wait! Time travel should be opened up anyday now for us..

We are the aliens and we will be apart of time travel one day. Once we discover what’s beyond the the dimensions that we know of, we will be able to experience time travel. And yes we must take chances if mankind want to go beyond our solar system to find other inhabitable place. If not, our limitation is already set. Who will be the ones who travel, and what if the travel exit to a volital

We are the aliens and we will be apart of time travel one day. Once we discover what’s beyond the the dimensions that we know of, we will be able to experience time travel. And yes we must take chances if mankind want to go beyond our solar system to find other inhabitable place. If not, our limitation is already set. Who will be the ones who travel, and what if the travel exit to a volital time like when earth was just forming or when the sun starts to expand. These are just some of the questions. But it could also lead to Parallel worlds inwhich would be fun to encounter. This is something that we need as a world to see whats beyond!

Welzeimer: “we are all traveling in time all time. Our relative times are different. Someone travelling on an ariplane is travelling in time respect to the person waiting at the airport. The difference in times are so small that could only be detected by extremelly precise atomic clocks. However, the more the speed increases the more this time difference can be appreciated so that if you could travel to a very high speed just around the earth and you will come back, you will be actually in the future.” -Time: A nonspatial continuum in which events occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past through the present to the future.- “apparently irreversible” is to say that it appears to be irriversible and nothing, not even things moving faster than the speed of light could go back in time. Would still just be be very fast and it would just seem to be in the past from the person witnessing it. and say that there was no light anywhere in the universe, What then? My point is, Einsteins theory of relativity is not really a theory let alone a fact, but more of a point of veiw. And that is up to you to decide because this theory is really, relative(!) and it will change in relation to everything.

Hey Llorac – thanks for proving to me that your thoughts on this and probably every other subject are worthless.

Seriously, folks, stop reading SF and go read a book on real physics.

It amazes me, korak, how you never seem to have anything useful or intelligent to say; you just personally attack everyone else who don’t fall down and worship you like the god you deludedly think you are. Grow up, you big baby.

If you actually understood anything I said, you would see I am railing against ignorance in general. Sorry if I don’t sugarcoat it for the wussies of today.

Go waste someone else’s time with your pseudoscientific ramblings.

why worry about the LHC, when we cannot detect anything unusual in high energy collisons (neutron stars BH etc) and supernovae explosions? We cant even see or detect anything unusual in these instances, and the power of these natural effects are in the order of hundreds of trillions of times more powerful! so the LHC is nothing more than a amoeba fart in a very small glass in comparison, so no green aliens, no bloody wormhole of any discerning worry, no bloody time travel, just a bunch of exotic particles… youre all gonna be soooo disappointed! my 2penny worth!

First of all, the hisggs boson is very inconclusive, because all matter has mass and if you took mass out of an object, it would cease to exist or (1st idea) perhaps become a wormhole, because a wormhole is said to move things instantaniously from one place to another. this effect would be created by zero mass and thus create zero friction (maybe even acceleration). this would move someting through space at an extremely fast rate, and would (accordingto einsteins theory of relativity, speed something into the future lastly, (2nd idea)If there was a higgs boson (particle that is mass) and it could be seperated from other particles than it would become a black hole, I say this because if an object has zero volume, it would become a singularity and a singularity (or anything) that has only mass would be a black hole(even if it is very small.

the higgs boson can help discover someting whether it finds what they are looking for or not

Time travel is a subject that has excited me for years and I’d be thrilled if someone obtained objects containing information from the future. But I accept I am unlikely to have personal experiences with physical time travel due to the lack of technology I have available to work with.

I was however able to travel freely in time during out of body experiences and re-entered younger versions of my body in the past! I even changed events and tried to make my life better. Goodluck with physical time travel…

Hey Paul , that happens to me too ! I revisit my childhood all the time . But I havent thought of it as time travel , I call it Day Dreaming . hehe

Walzaimer , thank you for your comment but I dont recall saying anything about ” Deadily Aliens or Demons ” comming through a worm hole . I’m so glad you know for a FACT if one is created , being so small , it will close on it’s own .. Or will it ? Please tell me how your so sure of this ? I’m not like you , I learn something new every day .

The writer is blowing smoke up his butt if he thinks we can’t travel back in time. The same statement would be true if someone traveled into the future and there was no time machine.

toby it felt too real to be a dream. When I found myself in a tent at summer camp I certainly wasn’t day dreaming!

I accept that a lot of people will refuse to believe the experiences I have had are real but that’s not an issue for me.

Paul , I do believe you , when I was much younger , I myself would have dreams of an event and when I woke I would quickly forget the dream I had , till days later , It would be like dejvue ! The event would start to take place , My memory of the dream would come back in perfict detail , I knew just what was about to happen, what other people were going to say and do . It would happen just how I dreamed down to the smallest detail . But know that I’m much older I dont have the dream sight anymore . Now its your turn to poke fun at me if you wish , But I think most people set unbreakable limits for themselves , like the FACT we cannot fly … Walk on water… Or read other peoples thoughts … Yes even travel back & forth in time …. OR Can We ??

To Hiro , the non-reader. I was commenting on what the main article had stated . Did you even read it ? Or were you to busy swating those GREEN bugs from Mars ? Not only could the LHC generate enough energy to create particles that exist in other dimensions , it may also produce “unparticles” . a possible source for DARK MATTER. Now ,the energy may be so focused that even the FABRIC of SPACE-TIME may be pulled apart to create a WORMHOLE .This is Word for word from the MAIN article.

Geez, looks like we need to start a “Bad Physics” website and put all these crackpot stories in there.

What was it that convinced their backers to finance this again?

Oh yeah just trying to confirm a couple of long hair pure science questions.

Nothing practicle to see here, just move along. Move along!

Yeah,sure. NASA wishes they had those bucks.

I bet it alchemy they’re after. Turn rocks to gold, put the world on a gold standard, and print all they gold they want!

Does anyone else feel something in the air. I can’t really put it into words, but I know others must feel it too. It’s almost like the way my dogs feel before a tornado. Is anyone else feeling this? I wish I could describe it, it is not necessarily bad , but SOMETHING is going to happen. A change , or total shift in the way things are? Please respond

I was also thinking what if the LHC does open another dimension and there is something there? Like what if we alerted something to our presence and it came through because it was curious? What if it is something terrible, like a supervirus. is that possible?

If we can make a wormhole then the people from the time ahead of us would have came here along time ago

I predict that with the opening of the LHC, within the next few years we’re going to see the most important discoveries in history. I’m hoping they discover something key to developing faster than light interstellar travel, maybe a method of opening a wormhole or warping spacetime easily.

oh please people (you must first learn to travel in space ) & i dont mean to the moon. people here are very far off from true space travel & if any of you think i am wrong please tell me about any ship or rocket that could fly at speeds & to other planets apart from the moon & mars. wormholes nothing so far could travel though one because the ship or rocket would brake up in to little bits,warping my god you must first get a ship to fly at speeds ,(what i am trying to say is the engery out put to get those speeds is not yet been designed & will not be for very long time ,to contain such energy you first need to make a sheild to keep the power with in it,on earth i say only few forms of power could make such energy & i dont mean nuclar power to un stable )even if you work out how to get the power ) you then need a ship with sheilds to protect the outer skin of the ship . so i ask every one be happy traveling on a train or tube ,bus because space travel just to far off for most of you. only way travel will come if some one looks out side the normal box of idears

Tavelling to another star is temporally possibe due to time dilation, (ie they don’t die during the trip due to old age) maybe only 6 months pass in their frame of reference to get to the nearest star.

The difficulty is that mass increases to infinity as one approaches C so the energy required would appear to be impossible to achieve.

Gravitational fields must be used to bring the distant star to the traveler so that you do not need to travel anywhere near the speed of light if you can create a sufficiently strong directional gravetational field.

How do you create this field? Converting the energy from a fusion reaction to a gravitiational field must be how they do it but how do you do the energy gravity conversion?

Answer: The energy from Fusion is used to accelerate the craft. Since the mass increases as the craft accelerates the fusion energy is converted to gravitational energy. The craft reaches a sub-C speed whereby the mass is sufficient to create the necessary G to bring the star to the traveler.

The technology needed is to direct the G field like a laser! I have no clue how they do this but this must be the mechanism for jumping to other stars..

Cheers Frederick Portigal

My concern with the LHC is somewhat philosophical. I don’t trust human nature to make the correct risk free decision when faced with risks of this magnitude. I know enough about statistics to know that any risk, repeated enough times is virtually guaranteed to happen. Once the first risk is taken, then logic says it will be repeated (the next biggest collider, ect).

I cant wait to see the results tho.

Hello every1. I think that hollywood and other b grade science fiction has a large impact on the education here. Think About this and let me know, There is no future, the future is only a tool to diecribe oganised planning. What if we are at the front of our timeline, think about it we plan to do stuff but use objects which are in this time spot to do them, we set tasks aside but do them in order to the plan, we use the lessons learnt to plan better, we learn new things from the now. But people will say if we can see the past, why can’t the future see us as the past and that proves the future exist, true to a piont, to us the future don’t exist, same as to them, but to them the past exist so they see us, I know its hard to place you mind around but just think about it. don’t get blinded about the convention of time as we were brought up to think. Using shoestring theroy its possible to tarvel time, but I think we need to touch the other dimension where time is not linear where we can go sideways then pop back into the oringinal path. Because on the linear path we are restricted to us being at the front always in the timeline. Please give your thoughts

The best thing i can possibly think of with the LHC is with the research in Quantem computers and with the ability of wormholes, we can travel to other palces at the same time. which means with 1 gateway we can travel to multiple pionts. That should cut down on carbon use and make the greenies happy. but also think of travelling to other planets and moons, the cost would be afforable to everyone as that cost of fuel to blast away from earth will no longer be a factor. But we have to work out a safe way to travel since its most likely we would be ripped apart once we get close to the event horizon and singalarity. 🙂

Won’t it be funny when the increased gravitational pull resulting from an error in the current theories yanks a few hundred asteroids directly toward Earth? I mean, sure, all humans will increase in weight by an insane amount, but maybe we’ll be alive long enough before the G’s kill us to see the first impact. Woohoo!

First you say that time machines did not exist with the dinosaurs.

They you say a microscopic wormhole is a time machine and could bring time travelers

Then you say the very same wormholes are opening all the time from cosmic rays.

Didn’t they have sunshine when the dinosaurs roamed the earth?

Make up your mind. Learn logic and reason. Start the career at McDonalds which you so richly deserve.

Time travelling isn’t the issue of concern, but the possible creation of gravity that can’t be undone and could lead to the instant destruction of our planet, though not necessarily through asteroids. The LHC is the manifestation of human hybris to date, in that what has been speculated about in a very theoretical way is now being put in practice with a very vague outcome. No scientist is to be taken seriously who claims that the “results” from the LHC are predictable and safe. One night/day the whole population of the earth may be shaken up by the sound of a tremendous rumble, and a minute later our planet will have been swallowed up by what started off as an LHC-made super-gravitational field. No time to even say your last prayer. LHC is the worst nightmare the human mind has ever come up with. STOP IT NOW!

“LHC is the worst nightmare the human mind has ever come up with. STOP IT NOW!”

Oh boy. Listen, when you learned about physics in high school, did it ever occur to you how much energy is in each atom and how many atoms there are in the entire universe, let alone the human body?

So the energy from millions of protons (parts of an atom), creates “particles” that defies the laws of nature because some dudes in Hawaii said so? How exactly, will these particles obtain energy while not losing it, thus destroying the world?

It is a worry isn’t it. end of the world all that biz

Personally, i would like to see all the scientists that dreamt up this idea put into the Hadron Collider, wizzed around and smashed into each other so we can study the effects and if they have a Higgs Boson. Same thing isn’t it. We’re just atoms Seriously, whatever actualized this idea is a true force of evil. My advice is try and grab a hold of something and not let the Gravitational or Quantum Singularity, or White Dwarf, or whatever is created, consume your mass, and get some bloody good sunscreen too!!

I say.. bring on the Hardon Collider. If anything, it will make a hell of an experiment.

Why are people so afraid of this? Is it really because it creates a so-called risk to the world? Or maybe it’s because people won’t be able to read sci-fi novels anymore without abruptly coming to the realization that what is in their book is real.

Get off your tawdry asses and stop being babies. Let this thing happen. So what if a black wormhole sucks you in? Are you so sure you’ll die because of it? This Hadron is one of the single greatest scientific achievements in human history.. it could be the closest thing to a time machine we make.

Let the vastness and enigma of the universe be revealed. Let fabrics be torn. Breathe in the incredible, ominous giant that will soon make his living in the world.

On another note, somebody here mentioned that B-grade sci-fi movies were being used as evidence for a supposed risk to humanity. I completely agree.

No grandiose apocalypse is going to occur; I believe we probably won’t even see anything.

if we do create a time machine, there is nothing to suggest that we have been visited in the future from people in the present?

Well I can see You’re all living in seperate timeslices already. Why not accelerating your paces and zooming out a little. If I assume this correctly progress has already been made just be the mere thought of creation. So just by thinking something up and telling someone who is willing to let his imagination run freely on it You’re snowballing into reality. If that sounds too complicated or like little elves to You obviously You’re not in touch with reality, You’re skimming the surface.

Oh and another laughable idea: We don’t know where we come from so let’s not listen to ideas and just say: We don’t know it so there is nothing there. Assuming this the creation was reduced to these proportions: out of nowhere came chaos which then created matter which in turn became bigger due to the essence of chaos which in turn exploded creating thus a galaxy full of stars. Does that sound better to You then those dilusional creationists? I think the atlantis story as explained by freemasonry is far more accurate, not to be confused with Mister El Ron who clearly thought it to be funny to fool humankind into a new century of chaos. I think Scifi is NOT foolish, just by actually looking at one aspect: the fact that evolution follows fantasy, NEVER the other way around. If fantasy stops, probably time will stop creating permutations altogether.

The LHC will destroy the universe….and pigs can fly. Seriously. I’m 17 and i have more common sense than half the people replying to this

i think that the LHC will discover some very surprising things that could revolutionize our everyday lives, but by the time this assimilation occurs we will have forgotten just how/why these advances have occurred. like silicon chips, etc. etc. i only wish that regular people could be this interested in scientific undertakings without all the fear-mongering and fiction…isn’t knowledge about the universe enough? does there have to be u.f.o.’s, time-travelers, and catastrophes added to the mix just so that people will stop watching television and pay attention to what promises to be a truly wonderful experiment?

Time travel is not possible. When bending space-time with a wormhole, even the millisecond it takes to step through the hole would be foreward in time, not backward. You cannot bend space time byond itself. To travel time you’d have to go faster than light, but no matter how fast you are going, light will always pass you at lightspeed, so you will never reach a point where you are going faster than any particular beam of light. The flaw in the theory is that if a paticle’s mass increases as it aproaches the speed of light, the particles that makes up light must have infinate mass, hahaha, how did that pass the clever blokes?!?

All things have already occurred. Past, present and future have already happen. Our perception of time is just an illusion created by the brain. We perceive time in the present at the rate of our cognition and comprehension, a rate which is described as, “one second, per second”. However, our sense of time can get distorted. Time flies when your having fun, and seems to crawl when you’re bored. Our sense of time can disappear completely with things like sleeping or deep meditation.

We only experience the present. We can remember the quantum information from the “past” because the information is stored holographically in our brains — and with proper training — we can receive quantum information from the “future”.

Time is much like a movie on a DVD. Time is like the movie, our brain is like the DVD player and playing the movie is like our perception of time in the present. The entire movie is already there on the disk, it is not created on-the-fly when we push the Play button. We cannot watch the entire movie all at once because our brains cannot perceive information that fast. To perceive the information, we push Play and watch the movie unfold moment-by-moment at a rate our brains can handle. We can remember what we’ve already seen, and guess what will happen next.

It has been predicted that the LHC will open a wormhole and will discover time travel. I REALLY hope that it will. Maybe it already has.

I think there are no reason to care about end of the world. The maximum what can happen its complite annihilation of France and Switzerland and global Ice Age after it!

For security reason I suggest to the civilians in the location of this machine to leave this place at time of experiment, and the people who do this experiments to warn those people before machine start to go on full power – for them to pray!

And this will never happen, because its stupid as a fact… Live such long time by creating such long history of human race and to reach the final step its destroying of all(except of correcting), for Nova World!??? I think God have a lot of places in hisshe’s hands to create New Worlds, or you think we dont like them because a lot of p0rn in internet!? OK… For example, the God is hate the p0rno, but why he is create them?

K.O. Have Nice Day, France and Switzerland! 😉

How do we know for a certainty that we have not already created the capability of time traveling? This would not be something that would be broadcasted by the “powers that be”.

For all you “Scientists” out there, all Science started out as Science Fiction. nuff said

So, when’s this thing being turned on then???

now time travel is possible because if you say it is not possible you need to lear science time travel is possible and i will prove it just use the ingredients and it will work learn it do it and then prodictions will appear how do i know you ask i’m a good scientist and time travel is possisble

i would just like to say, i know very little of science. i am 16 and i love the idea of a time travelling “wormhole” it just makes me proud of the advances in the field of scientific advancements. i would like to debate your theorie on having to have a wormhole already in place to travel back to, what if we were able to not only bend the matter of the present but some how manipulate the matter of the past. though i do like the idea of a walk in steel shelled time machine, we all know that is very, very unlikly to happen. if there was a way to send a “code” of sorts to the past then we could open up a wormhole in the past, of course we are a really long way off. i just hope to god this thing works… and we get a moon base

can we travel forward in time?

I thought that the “zero point” restriction only applied to the use of a Tippler device as a time machine. Theoretically, of course.

If the world’s going to end, I’d far rather it be caused by us boldly pushing back the boundaries of science than in some lame war, plague, or by us simply drowning in our own garbage. Let ‘er rip, LHC – either show us the dawn of time, or bring about the end of it. I, for one, will be equally pleased by either.

I’ve always been intrigued by things like this, but I hate to say this may very well be bad. Think about it, if the farthest we could go back with this time machine were the moment the machine was turned on, that would mean that anyone or anything could come through and wipe us out. What if in the future AI’s really do attempt to take over like in the movie “Terminator” but after they become self aware, they dont even waste time nuking the people who exist at that time they simply come through this machine in massive numbers and take over at our present time when we are not technologically advanced enough to fight them off? Even our future George W. Bush idiot could try to send our future people through to take advantage of our natural resources that they may not have in the future. Really theres an infinite number of possibilities that I can see happening and I’m willing to bet that whatever does happen is going to happen the very second the machine is activated.

But whatever happens, I agree LET ER RIP!!!!!

I have time traveled. Twice a year, spring ahead, fall back. But you know it is peculiar, I am still right here in my present. Time is a man made measurement of existence, of being. How can you put a measurement to something that has not existed, like the future? To travel in “time” you would have to travel in the existing presence faster or slower than existence. So shouldn’t we use the term “existence travel (ET)” . Going back in time you existed and going forward in time you did not exist yet. FIRE IT UP. Let’s see if we still exist.

just divide by zero

possibilities: 1. sub atomic particles cannot be further divided. They will collide and fall to the ground(gravity), they will collide and release all that energy(boom), or they will have a near-miss and be deflected, eventually coming to rest. 2. sub atomic particles can be further divided. The division of the atom lead to the Atom Bomb. What would the tremendous amount of energy required to split sub atomic particles lead to? World bomb? Hope they have a large containment field.

Good point Matt,

The LHC will certainly not destroy the universe!

But what is of concern is that CERN appears to argue that safety is certain when in fact they do not know this and they have not reasonably and credibly refuted the physicists who challenge safety assumptions.

CERN states that the fact we are still here proves safety. It does not according to several safety papers refuting CERN’s safety.

The main issues are two, credible theories predict micro black holes will grow rapidly if created, and slow moving micro black holes have never before been created on Earth.

(Cosmic ray micro black holes would travel too fast to be captured by Earth, but collider created micro black holes would be created from head on collisions and some would be captured by Earth).

The biggest issue here may be credibility. Regardless of whether the LHC proves safe or not, we will need to review the arguments CERN made and the alleged misinformation given to other physicists and the media about the credibility and certainty of safety arguments.

There is still a small chance that CERN will agree to Dr. Plaga’s danger mitigation proposals or that a safety conference will more properly address safety before high energy collisions begin.

We likely have many months before high energy collisions begin (CERN tends to exaggerate how quickly they can begin collisions).

Even after high energy collisions begin, it could be many years before we know if we gave Earth a chronic disease.

Got LHCFacts.org?

Maybe Mimzy will come through the wormhole…

I could do with a time machine. My life so far has been historically terrible. I need a new life if my new life in Devon doesn’t go well.

I have constructed a time machine. It lets you travel forward 1 minute in 60 seconds.

I found a wormhole in my garden. It had a worm in it. It seemed to be able to go backwards or forwards, two heads and all that. Just goes to show, wormholes can spawn strange things. Anyway isn’t a Hardon Collider a painful thing to wear?…. ooh….

What time tomorrow are they flicking the switch?

This debate is quite funny!!

Although it is extremely unlikely that the LHC could destroy the Earth, I hope it does.

What better way to die?

I mean, ever since I was a kid I have hoped that I’d be alive to see the day that the world ends.

All fantasies and childhood dreams aside, the LHC tests are bound to have some very fantastic results.

If it doesn’t destroy the Earth, which it almost surely won’t, I hope they observe the Higg’s Boson. Or even better the graviton. Or maybe even expanding strings (for all you string theorists). Oh the possibilities….

On a different note…not to be the burster of bubbles, but the LHC won’t run at its full 7TeV capacity for a significant amount of time after its “opening.” They’ll start at low-energy levels and work their way up, documenting all events along the way.

I just thought I would share some thoughts. I personally do not buy into the possibility of human life outside of our planet. My views come from a Christian Biblical sense. I do not feel that there is anything as humans that we can do to destroy God’s Earth. I feel we are foolish and vain to think we are powerful enough to undo what God has created. My main concern is what will we be tapping into when and if we become able to start looking into other dimensions? I believe there is a spiritual realm (where angels and demons can be seen) and worry about the dangers of the possibility of being able to see into that realm. I believe we are not able to see this realm for a reason, too intense and not available to us for our own good!! Another thought is that when people die, we become spiritual beings, since our bodies are left behind on this earth, that perhaps the souls/spirits of the deceased may pass through this dimension we cannot see. It kind of makes me think that humans are playing with something that could carry huge consequences. A very scary thought. Just something to ponder…..

@Kristine I think we definitely have the capability of destroying “god’s” earth. Just detonate the world’s nuclear arsenal and…yup, that’ll do it.

“I always had an idea that the “aliens” in space ships were probably just people from the future. And if they were, then it could prove that time isn’t linear, since coming back (and the spottings) could have had massive effects on the timeline.”

maybe it did have massive effects on the timeline, and therefore the ufo sightings give us models to build airplanes off of in the future, where we become advanced enough to go back in time and tell ourselves how to do it.

This is just silly. What the hell do these German’s place with such things? Im just getting pissed not to be rude. Just don’t advance on things , you HAVE NO CLUE WHAT YOUR DOING. WE HUMANS DON”T KNOW EVERYTHING YET! SCIENCE IS NOT ALWAYS RIGHT! JUST LEAVE GOD”S CREATION ALONE!!!!

What did curiosity do for the cat?? Seems like we are opening “Pandoras box” and we may not like what we get from it. We dont know everything about the universe and the forces within it so why poke it with a stick?

To Kristin: Quote> “Another thought is that when people die, we become spiritual beings, since our bodies are left behind on this earth, that perhaps the souls/spirits of the deceased may pass through this dimension we cannot see.” End quote. If you think that humans turn into anything other than dust perhaps you should re-read your bible. As for the LHC, It will still be about a month before both beams are fired. Tomorrow is just a test run. They’re firing one way at a time.

Humanity is such a short sighted species. We have to have everything NOW. Rather than wait till we have self sufficient colonies on other planets or conducting the experiment off of Earth or even slowing down and thoroughly studying this before starting we have to roll the dice and gamble the existence of the entire race. Lets not plan for the possibility that the physicists might be wrong because hey, physicists have never been wrong, right?

I would like to see these comments made, based on fact. All this “God’s creation” and “read your bible”. Oh dear. There are many books of religion and not one of them makes any hint of truth. I’m not saying that some of it isn’t true but the fact is that these books hre only there so that we don’t run about killing oneanother. Moving on… Kirstin, I’m not sure which cupboard you have been living in since birth (your mother and father banging uglies and not god’s choice, its evolution, thats why you look abit like your mum and a bit like your dad.) but we have enough fire power to blow the planet out of orbit, let alone distroy it. WAKE UP!!!! Lets just see what happens today and over the next few weeks. Look on the plus side, we may not have to worry about the credit crunch again..

they said that today was doomsday. It wasn’t. should not mess with things the worlds not meant to understand.

anyway I SURVIVED DOOMSDAY! yay me! now where’s that government compensation…

hahahahahahaha RETARDS

I remember what the man who created the atom bomb said, he felt guilty. I believe that just because we CAN do something- doesnt mean we SHOULD. The people at lhc are brilliant when it comes to physics and stuff, but not very bright at common sense. I would rather play it safe and not regret it than to say “hey lets see if we could…..OH CRAP” i understand that without sacrifice and at least trying new things that we cannot succeed at much. BUT i know that russian roullette is stupid!

it took me some 80 mins to read all that was written.i did not find what i wanted,can somebody please explain about the real purpose LHC was made?

To answer Prateek’s question. Its to see what happened just after “the big bang”

“We will be able to see deeper into matter than ever before,” said Dr Tara Shears, a particle physicist at the University of Liverpool.

“We will be looking at what the Universe was made of billionths of a second after the Big Bang. That is amazing, that really is fantastic.”

The LHC should answer one very simple question: What is mass?

surely with the money it has cost to build the LHC we could have done something alot better like researched incurable illness or made affordable hydro cars.i think theres bigger problems out there that need solving.to be honest who actually cares how we came about.i dont.and maybe life is one big cycle.LHC causes a big bang(today or in a couple of years) and we start all over again 13 billion years back.then we evolve and do it all again.ha ha.

“Prateek Bhatia it took me some 80 mins to read all that was written.i did not find what i wanted,can somebody please explain about the real purpose LHC was made?”

Its actually the Stargate project… “winks”

As much as this is so exciting, at the same time it is scary.

Big Bang Experiment Schedule

I am a Muslim and in our holey book, it says “by the name of allah- didn’t the people whom don’t believe in allah see that the earth and the heaven were one block and then exploded, and we make every alive from the water, and we spread a fixers in the earth (mountains)……”

Prof. Brian Cox, one of the LHC physicists, puts it bluntly: ‘Anyone who thinks that the LHC is going to destroy the world is a twat’.

Whatever the result is, it will be interesting, good or bad. I do hope the positive will come out of this. And even if we find NOTHING, it will be equally interesting because it will show us the power of the universe’s complexity is far beyond what the human race can possibly do in our lifetime.

Maybe if we manage to create a stable black hole, we could use it to dump all of the rubbish humanity creates. Oh btw, afaik black holes absorb energetic matter, so it’s only going to suck us in, not blow us up! And we deserve nothing less, being stupid enough to absorb all of the matter created by the media! Has anyone figured out how someone is going to get to the black hole inside that big supercooled chamber?!

PLaying with fire…i h8 how humanity always wants to knowwww things..leave it alone already for GODS SAKE!

we wouldnt be able to create a stable black hole…imposible, And smashing atoms together isnt going to make a difference in our lives..just anohter problem and people getting all paranoid

CERN is all quite new to me, and i find everything that i’m learning lately about space itself to be very fascinating. i now understand why i never put much thought into these matters during my earlier years–my teachers never presented any of it in a way that was meaningful to me. Teachers in public schools and especially private schools are unaware themselves or are too frightened to tell their students to question religion, research its origin, and that space holds the answers to our exsistence. To you all, this may seem quite obvious, but for everyone i know, on average during their so-far life, puts no thought to this kind of “headache.” Seriously i feel like screaming at times; you all may have no idea what it is like to live amongst people who you thought you could talk to about anything, then realizing that you could possibly go to your grave never speaking a word of what you truly believe and also letting those whom you love go to their graves without ever…

In my own little piece of the world, i can’t help but to feel trapped by tradition. A tradition that teaches people to constantly feel guilty for things that they only told are wrong, that teaches people to think about their own pasts and worry about their future, that teaches people to mentally list regrets and lists things that they think they need.

This society rewards people for their own individual accomplishments instead of what they can contribute to their community. This creates competition, thus never allowing people to unite. Please excuse me, but i had to get this out somewhere. Sometimes telling strangers how you feel can be ironically safe.

Is it possible that when we die, our consciousness continue in a life without time and space? Do we become aware of our surroundings but cannot function like we did with our bodies? Do we become invisible people that cannot move, touch nor communicate? So do we have a belief that allow us to function afterward? Life before and life afterward is depends on our condition. Did grey people develop DNA changes to walk visibly in time and space? Do we see them through exposure from their DNA? Are we unaware or becoming aware of the bridge between the greys and us could be a possiblility?

LHC——–Has anyone stopped for a monent to ask if “we” should……. not just do it b/c we can. Ponder this for a moment…..all civilazation so far on Earth as we know it has been “cultured” to bring us to the point of using the LHC just for the purpose of ripping a tear in time-space, or another dimension, or planet ect. b/c “others” have in someway destroyed, or their sun/planet is dying, and their looking to move in!!!!!!!!! Some people believe that they are here, and they are taking control. Look

around. Energy futures are the only ones gains capital, metals prices are steadly going up, gold, copper , ores gold at 1200 oz!!! And has anyone noticed GOOGLE stock prices!!!!!!!!!!!! Say WHAT!!!!!!!! One more item…….. LHC cost around 700 million (that’s what their web sites states) the bailout package for mortages was OHH YEAH 700 million?????????? And shortly after the LHC is turned on the entire global market begins to crash????

I JUST HOPE THEY DONT WANT TO USE US AS BATTERIES!!!!!!! NEO MORPHEUS TRINITY SION CIPHER THE TWINS NIOBE (niobium is used in super conductive wires along w/ copper cuprates Pb Sn Al Nb Ti all elements used in search of the philosopher’s stone. Wrap ur mind around this. Anyone else see what I see???????

the possiblity of time travel is a 50/50 chance! we dont know how or why these things happen but they do. people think they know why and how time travel happens but…..no one really knows. its nature, theres no exsplanation and no real answer to peoples questions. just have faith and let your mind wonder, dont doubt or try to prove some1 wrong….whats the fun in that? just be open to the fact that there is something like that out there and be open to peoples thoughts.

*****peace***** Love, srp518

OMG!! is this a convention of Startrek-ers, HalfLife-ers, Halo-ers, et cetera, et cetera…. ????

Well, let me put what i think about all these stuffs.

Frankly speaking I belive gods and devils both where just humans with some extraordinary powers. Those who did goods where called gods and those who did bad where called demons. Most probably due to there such powers they could not live on earth and they live on other planets. They might be aliens only those visited earth on request of ordinary people of earth and demons came to conquer and rule earth… in past..

now talking about present and future think this also:

1. if a worm hole is created there might be a possiblity that its opposite of blackhole.. that throws out everything that blackhole eated up.

2. if its a traveling stuff then it is possibile that other sides good aliens come this side and teach us lots of stuff or bad aliens come and destroy us all.

3. wormhole can throw the entire galaxy or universe into another dimension which we can not sustain in or time when the universe was being created or is ending and destroy us because we interfered in time.

4. We are thinking of creating a wormhole but we might actually have one. The BLACK HOLE. its a high energy area where not even light can escape. Isn’t it possible that this Black hole might actually be a time travelling or dimension traveling or universe travellings so called wormhole. It might be possible that this black hole might be suction point and throw out point might be in another time or dimension or universe which just doesn’t have exit point like we do in our solar system.

So anyone who tried to go through time through this black hole did not get an oppourtunity to return back and tell us about it because there is no exit gate at the other end. Just an income gate no exit gate.

And no one from other place could come here because our solar system just have an exit gate but no entry gate.

5. Cant it be possible that all these stuffs about time dimensions and other universe is just fake or just our imagination. and we are the only one alive.

6. It is also possible the experiment being conducted in LHC can create such an energy and grow in such a way that can be so powerful it can even end the whole world or start another world.

7. Humans are so much intelligent that they can create life which is not suppose to be there or even destroy life. But subsequently dumb enough to do so to.

anyone who want to comment can email be back on [email protected]

please no junks or spammers.

where from have we come?if we try to find the answer,our jorney ends at the Big-Bang.But how the bigbang was initiated?if GOD has done it with his supernatural power then where from he got the power?The ultimate answer is that energy can be created and I am sure that one day we will be able to creat energy.But we have to wait for the greatest scientist,may be for months,years or centuries.

You are not crazy, and the collider won’t make a black hole. A black hole is caused by a fucking star collapsing, and its size is astronomical. You need fusion, and a vast source of energy to fuel the reaction (e.g. A MASSIVE STAR). This experiment will just gain knowledge and insight, as long as science has existed their are people who will try and use ignorance to prevent advancing the human race. – J Student in discipline of BioChemistry

P.S. yes I have taken physics, both intro and adcanced and understand string theory at a more than basic level

Comments are closed.

Have wormhole, will travel -- maybe even back in time

The concept of a time machine typically conjures up images of an implausible plot device used in a few too many science-fiction storylines. But according to Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, which explains how gravity operates in the universe, real-life time travel isn't just a vague fantasy.

Traveling forward in time is an uncontroversial possibility, according to Einstein's theory. In fact, physicists have been able to send tiny particles called muons , which are similar to electrons, forward in time by manipulating the gravity around them. That's not to say the technology for sending humans 100 years into the future will be available anytime soon, though.

Time travel to the past, however, is even less understood. Still, astrophysicist Eric W. Davis of the EarthTech International Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin argues that it's possible. All you need, he says, is a wormhole , which is a theoretical passageway through space-time that is predicted by relativity. [ Wacky Physics: The Coolest Little Particles in Nature ]

"You can go into the future or into the past using traversable wormholes," Davis told LiveScience.

Where's my wormhole? Wormholes have never been proven to exist, and if they are ever found, they are likely to be so tiny that a person couldn't fit inside, never mind a spaceship.

Even so, Davis' paper, published in July in the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics' journal, addresses time machines and the possibility that a wormhole could become, or be used as, a means for traveling backward in time.

Both general-relativity theory and quantum theory appear to offer several possibilities for traveling along what physicists call a "closed, timelike curve," or a path that cuts through time and space — essentially, a time machine.

In fact, Davis said, scientists' current understanding of the laws of physics "are infested with time machines whereby there are numerous space-time geometry solutions that exhibit time travel and/or have the properties of time machines."

A wormhole would allow a ship, for instance, to travel from one point to another faster than the speed of light — sort of. That's because the ship would arrive at its destination sooner than a beam of light would, by taking a shortcut through space-time via the wormhole. That way, the vehicle doesn't actually break the rule of the so-called universal speed limit — the speed of light — because the ship never actually travels at a speed faster than light. [ Warped Physics: 10 Effects of Traveling Faster Than Light ]

Theoretically, a wormhole could be used to cut not just through space, but through time as well. 

" Time machines are unavoidable in our physical dimensional space-time," David wrote in his paper. "Traversable wormholes imply time machines, and (the prediction of wormholes) spawned a number of follow-on research efforts on time machines."

However, Davis added, turning a wormhole into a time machine won't be easy. "It would take a Herculean effort to turn a wormhole into a time machine. It's going to be tough enough to pull off a wormhole," he told LiveScience.

That's because once a wormhole is created, one or both ends of it would need to be accelerated through time to the desired position, according to general relativity theory.

Challenges ahead There are several theories for how the laws of physics might work to prevent time travel through wormholes .

"Not only do we assume (time travel into the past) will not be possible in our lifetime, but we assume that the laws of physics, when fully understood, will rule it out entirely," said Robert Owen, an astrophysicist at Oberlin College in Ohio who specializes in black holes and gravitation theory.

According to scientists' current understanding, keeping a wormhole stable enough to traverse requires large amounts of exotic matter, a substance that is still very poorly understood.  

General relativity can't account for exotic matter — according to general relativity, exotic matter can't exist. But exotic matter does exist . That's where quantum theory comes in. Like general relativity, quantum theory is a system for explaining the universe, kind of like a lens through which scientists observe the universe. [ Video – How to Time Travel ]

However, exotic matter has only been observed in very small amounts — not nearly enough to hold open a wormhole. Physicists would have to find a way to generate and harness large amounts of exotic matter if they hope to achieve this quasi-faster-than-light travel and, by extension, time travel.

Furthermore, other physicists have used quantum mechanics to posit that trying to travel through a wormhole would create something called a quantum back reaction.

In a quantum back reaction, the act of turning a wormhole into a time machine would cause a massive buildup of energy, ultimately destroying the wormhole just before it could be used as a time machine.

However, the mathematical model used to calculate quantum back reaction takes into account only one dimension of space-time.

"I am confident that, since (general relativity) theory has not failed yet, that its predictions for time machines, warp drives and wormholes remain valid and testable, regardless of what quantum theory has to say about those subjects," Davis added.

This illustrates one of the key problems in theories of time travel: physicists have to ground their arguments in either general relativity or quantum theory, both of which are incomplete and unable to encompass the entirety of our complex, mysterious universe.

Before they can figure out time travel, physicists need to find a way to reconcile general relativity and quantum theory into a quantum theory of gravity. That theory will then serve as the basis for further study of time travel.

Therefore, Owen argues that it's impossible to be certain of whether time travel is possible yet. "The wormhole-based time-machine idea takes into account general relativity, but it leaves out quantum mechanics," Owen added. "But including quantum mechanics in the calculations seems to show us that the time machine couldn't actually work the way we hope."

Davis, however, believes scientists have discovered all they can about time machines from theory alone, and calls on physicists to focus first on faster-than-light travel. 

"Until someone makes a wormhole or a warp drive , there's no use getting hyped up about a time machine," Davis told LiveScience.

Accomplishing this will require a universally accepted quantum gravity theory — an immense challenge — so don't go booking those time-travel plans just yet.

Email  [email protected] or follow her @JillScharr . Follow LiveScience @livescience , Facebook   and  Google+ . Original article on LiveScience.

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Wormhole Is Best Bet for Time Machine, Astrophysicist Says

The concept of a time machine typically conjures up images of an implausible plot device used in a few too many science-fiction storylines. But according to Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, which explains how gravity operates in the universe, real-life time travel isn't just a vague fantasy.

Traveling forward in time is an uncontroversial possibility, according to Einstein's theory. In fact, physicists have been able to send tiny particles called muons , which are similar to electrons, forward in time by manipulating the gravity around them. That's not to say the technology for sending humans 100 years into the future will be available anytime soon, though.

Time travel to the past, however, is even less understood. Still, astrophysicist Eric W. Davis, of the EarthTech International Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin, argues that it's possible. All you need, he says, is a wormhole , which is a theoretical passageway through space-time that is predicted by relativity. [ Wacky Physics: The Coolest Little Particles in Nature ]

"You can go into the future or into the past using traversable wormholes," Davis told LiveScience.

Where's my wormhole?

Wormholes have never been proven to exist, and if they are ever found, they are likely to be so tiny that a person couldn't fit inside, never mind a spaceship.

Even so, Davis' paper, published in July in the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics' journal, addresses time machines and the possibility that a wormhole could become, or be used as, a means for traveling backward in time.

Sign up for the Live Science daily newsletter now

Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox.

Both general-relativity theory and quantum theory appear to offer several possibilities for traveling along what physicists call a "closed, timelike curve," or a path that cuts through time and space — essentially, a time machine.

In fact, Davis said, scientists' current understanding of the laws of physics "are infested with time machines whereby there are numerous space-time geometry solutions that exhibit time travel and/or have the properties of time machines."

A wormhole would allow a ship, for instance, to travel from one point to another faster than the speed of light — sort of. That's because the ship would arrive at its destination sooner than a beam of light would, by taking a shortcut through space-time via the wormhole. That way, the vehicle doesn't actually break the rule of the so-called universal speed limit — the speed of light — because the ship never actually travels at a speed faster than light. [ Warped Physics: 10 Effects of Traveling Faster Than Light ]

Theoretically, a wormhole could be used to cut not just through space, but through time as well. 

" Time machines are unavoidable in our physical dimensional space-time," David wrote in his paper. "Traversable wormholes imply time machines, and [the prediction of wormholes] spawned a number of follow-on research efforts on time machines."

However, Davis added, turning a wormhole into a time machine won't be easy. "It would take a Herculean effort to turn a wormhole into a time machine. It's going to be tough enough to pull off a wormhole," he told LiveScience.

That's because once a wormhole is created, one or both ends of it would need to be accelerated through time to the desired position, according to general relativity theory.

Challenges ahead

There are several theories for how the laws of physics might work to prevent time travel through wormholes .

"Not only do we assume [time travel into the past] will not be possible in our lifetime, but we assume that the laws of physics, when fully understood, will rule it out entirely," said Robert Owen, an astrophysicist at Oberlin College in Ohio who specializes in black holes and gravitation theory.

According to scientists' current understanding, keeping a wormhole stable enough to traverse requires large amounts of exotic matter, a substance that is still very poorly understood.  

General relativity can't account for exotic matter — according to general relativity, exotic matter can't exist. But exotic matter does exist . That's where quantum theory comes in. Like general relativity, quantum theory is a system for explaining the universe, kind of like a lens through which scientists observe the universe. [ Video – How to Time Travel ]

However, exotic matter has only been observed in very small amounts — not nearly enough to hold open a wormhole. Physicists would have to find a way to generate and harness large amounts of exotic matter if they hope to achieve this quasi-faster-than-light travel and, by extension, time travel.

Furthermore, other physicists have used quantum mechanics to posit that trying to travel through a wormhole would create something called a quantum back reaction.

In a quantum back reaction, the act of turning a wormhole into a time machine would cause a massive buildup of energy, ultimately destroying the wormhole just before it could be used as a time machine.

However, the mathematical model used to calculate quantum back reaction only takes into account one dimension of space-time.

"I am confident that, since [general relativity] theory has not failed yet, that its predictions for time machines, warp drives and wormholes remain valid and testable, regardless of what quantum theory has to say about those subjects," Davis added.

This illustrates one of the key problems in theories of time travel: physicists have to ground their arguments in either general relativity or quantum theory, both of which are incomplete and unable to encompass the entirety of our complex, mysterious universe.

Before they can figure out time travel, physicists need to find a way to reconcile general relativity and quantum theory into a quantum theory of gravity. That theory will then serve as the basis for further study of time travel.

Therefore, Owen argues that it's impossible to be certain of whether time travel is possible yet. "The wormhole-based time-machine idea takes into account general relativity, but it leaves out quantum mechanics," Owen added. "But including quantum mechanics in the calculations seems to show us that the time machine couldn't actually work the way we hope."

Davis, however, believes scientists have discovered all they can about time machines from theory alone, and calls on physicists to focus first on faster-than-light travel. 

"Until someone makes a wormhole or a warp drive , there's no use getting hyped up about a time machine," Davis told LiveScience.

Accomplishing this will require a universally accepted quantum gravity theory — an immense challenge — so don't go booking those time-travel plans just yet.

Email  [email protected] or follow her @JillScharr . Follow LiveScience @livescience , Facebook  & Google+ . Original article on  LiveScience .

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Could wormholes be used for future space travel? A new study explains

A theory proposes that wormholes, if they exist, might be more stable than previously suggested..

April 26, 2023

Is Time Travel Possible?

The laws of physics allow time travel. So why haven’t people become chronological hoppers?

By Sarah Scoles

yuanyuan yan/Getty Images

In the movies, time travelers typically step inside a machine and—poof—disappear. They then reappear instantaneously among cowboys, knights or dinosaurs. What these films show is basically time teleportation .

Scientists don’t think this conception is likely in the real world, but they also don’t relegate time travel to the crackpot realm. In fact, the laws of physics might allow chronological hopping, but the devil is in the details.

Time traveling to the near future is easy: you’re doing it right now at a rate of one second per second, and physicists say that rate can change. According to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, time’s flow depends on how fast you’re moving. The quicker you travel, the slower seconds pass. And according to Einstein’s general theory of relativity , gravity also affects clocks: the more forceful the gravity nearby, the slower time goes.

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“Near massive bodies—near the surface of neutron stars or even at the surface of the Earth, although it’s a tiny effect—time runs slower than it does far away,” says Dave Goldberg, a cosmologist at Drexel University.

If a person were to hang out near the edge of a black hole , where gravity is prodigious, Goldberg says, only a few hours might pass for them while 1,000 years went by for someone on Earth. If the person who was near the black hole returned to this planet, they would have effectively traveled to the future. “That is a real effect,” he says. “That is completely uncontroversial.”

Going backward in time gets thorny, though (thornier than getting ripped to shreds inside a black hole). Scientists have come up with a few ways it might be possible, and they have been aware of time travel paradoxes in general relativity for decades. Fabio Costa, a physicist at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics, notes that an early solution with time travel began with a scenario written in the 1920s. That idea involved massive long cylinder that spun fast in the manner of straw rolled between your palms and that twisted spacetime along with it. The understanding that this object could act as a time machine allowing one to travel to the past only happened in the 1970s, a few decades after scientists had discovered a phenomenon called “closed timelike curves.”

“A closed timelike curve describes the trajectory of a hypothetical observer that, while always traveling forward in time from their own perspective, at some point finds themselves at the same place and time where they started, creating a loop,” Costa says. “This is possible in a region of spacetime that, warped by gravity, loops into itself.”

“Einstein read [about closed timelike curves] and was very disturbed by this idea,” he adds. The phenomenon nevertheless spurred later research.

Science began to take time travel seriously in the 1980s. In 1990, for instance, Russian physicist Igor Novikov and American physicist Kip Thorne collaborated on a research paper about closed time-like curves. “They started to study not only how one could try to build a time machine but also how it would work,” Costa says.

Just as importantly, though, they investigated the problems with time travel. What if, for instance, you tossed a billiard ball into a time machine, and it traveled to the past and then collided with its past self in a way that meant its present self could never enter the time machine? “That looks like a paradox,” Costa says.

Since the 1990s, he says, there’s been on-and-off interest in the topic yet no big breakthrough. The field isn’t very active today, in part because every proposed model of a time machine has problems. “It has some attractive features, possibly some potential, but then when one starts to sort of unravel the details, there ends up being some kind of a roadblock,” says Gaurav Khanna of the University of Rhode Island.

For instance, most time travel models require negative mass —and hence negative energy because, as Albert Einstein revealed when he discovered E = mc 2 , mass and energy are one and the same. In theory, at least, just as an electric charge can be positive or negative, so can mass—though no one’s ever found an example of negative mass. Why does time travel depend on such exotic matter? In many cases, it is needed to hold open a wormhole—a tunnel in spacetime predicted by general relativity that connects one point in the cosmos to another.

Without negative mass, gravity would cause this tunnel to collapse. “You can think of it as counteracting the positive mass or energy that wants to traverse the wormhole,” Goldberg says.

Khanna and Goldberg concur that it’s unlikely matter with negative mass even exists, although Khanna notes that some quantum phenomena show promise, for instance, for negative energy on very small scales. But that would be “nowhere close to the scale that would be needed” for a realistic time machine, he says.

These challenges explain why Khanna initially discouraged Caroline Mallary, then his graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, from doing a time travel project. Mallary and Khanna went forward anyway and came up with a theoretical time machine that didn’t require negative mass. In its simplistic form, Mallary’s idea involves two parallel cars, each made of regular matter. If you leave one parked and zoom the other with extreme acceleration, a closed timelike curve will form between them.

Easy, right? But while Mallary’s model gets rid of the need for negative matter, it adds another hurdle: it requires infinite density inside the cars for them to affect spacetime in a way that would be useful for time travel. Infinite density can be found inside a black hole, where gravity is so intense that it squishes matter into a mind-bogglingly small space called a singularity. In the model, each of the cars needs to contain such a singularity. “One of the reasons that there's not a lot of active research on this sort of thing is because of these constraints,” Mallary says.

Other researchers have created models of time travel that involve a wormhole, or a tunnel in spacetime from one point in the cosmos to another. “It's sort of a shortcut through the universe,” Goldberg says. Imagine accelerating one end of the wormhole to near the speed of light and then sending it back to where it came from. “Those two sides are no longer synced,” he says. “One is in the past; one is in the future.” Walk between them, and you’re time traveling.

You could accomplish something similar by moving one end of the wormhole near a big gravitational field—such as a black hole—while keeping the other end near a smaller gravitational force. In that way, time would slow down on the big gravity side, essentially allowing a particle or some other chunk of mass to reside in the past relative to the other side of the wormhole.

Making a wormhole requires pesky negative mass and energy, however. A wormhole created from normal mass would collapse because of gravity. “Most designs tend to have some similar sorts of issues,” Goldberg says. They’re theoretically possible, but there’s currently no feasible way to make them, kind of like a good-tasting pizza with no calories.

And maybe the problem is not just that we don’t know how to make time travel machines but also that it’s not possible to do so except on microscopic scales—a belief held by the late physicist Stephen Hawking. He proposed the chronology protection conjecture: The universe doesn’t allow time travel because it doesn’t allow alterations to the past. “It seems there is a chronology protection agency, which prevents the appearance of closed timelike curves and so makes the universe safe for historians,” Hawking wrote in a 1992 paper in Physical Review D .

Part of his reasoning involved the paradoxes time travel would create such as the aforementioned situation with a billiard ball and its more famous counterpart, the grandfather paradox : If you go back in time and kill your grandfather before he has children, you can’t be born, and therefore you can’t time travel, and therefore you couldn’t have killed your grandfather. And yet there you are.

Those complications are what interests Massachusetts Institute of Technology philosopher Agustin Rayo, however, because the paradoxes don’t just call causality and chronology into question. They also make free will seem suspect. If physics says you can go back in time, then why can’t you kill your grandfather? “What stops you?” he says. Are you not free?

Rayo suspects that time travel is consistent with free will, though. “What’s past is past,” he says. “So if, in fact, my grandfather survived long enough to have children, traveling back in time isn’t going to change that. Why will I fail if I try? I don’t know because I don’t have enough information about the past. What I do know is that I’ll fail somehow.”

If you went to kill your grandfather, in other words, you’d perhaps slip on a banana en route or miss the bus. “It's not like you would find some special force compelling you not to do it,” Costa says. “You would fail to do it for perfectly mundane reasons.”

In 2020 Costa worked with Germain Tobar, then his undergraduate student at the University of Queensland in Australia, on the math that would underlie a similar idea: that time travel is possible without paradoxes and with freedom of choice.

Goldberg agrees with them in a way. “I definitely fall into the category of [thinking that] if there is time travel, it will be constructed in such a way that it produces one self-consistent view of history,” he says. “Because that seems to be the way that all the rest of our physical laws are constructed.”

No one knows what the future of time travel to the past will hold. And so far, no time travelers have come to tell us about it.

The Journal of Young Physicists

a physics blogging site

[email protected]

• Aug 11, 2023

Wormholes: The Cosmic Tunnels

Updated: Oct 8, 2023

Author: Afreen Hossain

Introduction

The concept of wormholes, or Einstein-Rosen bridges, has fascinated us all for decades. These hypothetical structures predicted by the theory of general relativity offer a fascinating glimpse into the possibilities of interstellar travel, time dilation and even time travel. In this comprehensive article we will delve into the depths of wormholes covering their definition, properties, theoretical existence, potential uses and the intriguing implications they pose for our understanding of the universe.

1 What are wormholes?

Wormholes can be imagined as cosmic tunnels connecting different points in spacetime essentially serving as shortcuts through the fabric of the universe. While there is no direct observational evidence for wormholes, they emerge as solutions in the equations of general relativity. The basic idea involves bending the fabric of spacetime so intensely that two distant regions become connected forming a tunnel-like structure.

2 Theory and physics of wormholes

In 1935, Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen published a paper presenting the concept of a bridge connecting two black holes. This wormhole solution, known as the Einstein-Rosen bridge, was an early theoretical development. The geometry of a wormhole depends on the distribution of matter and energy around it. A traversable wormhole would require exotic matter to stabilize and prevent its collapse.

Exotic matter is a form of hypothetical matter that differs from the atoms and molecules that we are familiar with. Its peculiar characteristic - negative energy density - is what distinguishes it from ordinary matter. Things in our everyday environment have positive energy density which means that they have a certain quantity of energy that is measurable. Exotic stuff on the other hand have the opposite property - less energy than normal matter. This might seem odd and it definitely is! Exotic matter has only been theorized. Nobody has yet generated or observed it. Exotic matter is frequently discussed in relation to wormholes - the hypothetical cosmic passageways that could one day make it possible to traverse through space more quickly.

To understand how exotic matter could potentially prevent the collapse of a wormhole, let’s consider a simple analogy. Imagine you have a tunnel made of flexible material and you want to keep it open so that you can pass through it. However, the tunnel is prone to collapsing because of its own weight. To prevent it from collapsing you need something that pushes the walls outward providing support to keep the tunnel open. In the context of a wormhole, it’s a similar concept but instead of physical walls we are dealing with the fabric of spacetime. The intense gravitational forces surrounding the throat of the wormhole tend to collapse it. This is where exotic matter comes into play. As we learned, exotic matter is theorized to have negative energy density meaning it would have a property that is repelled by gravity instead of being attracted by it like normal matter. Now imagine you have a substance with negative energy density and you place it at the throat of the wormhole. This exotic matter, with its repulsive gravitational effects, would act like a support or anti-collapse mechanism. It would counteract the gravitational forces trying to collapse the throat of the wormhole effectively pushing the walls of the wormhole outward and keeping it open and stable.

Hence, we can think of the exotic matter as an anti-gravity substance that prevents the tunnel from collapsing by pushing against the forces acting inward, just like how an inflatable support structure keeps an inflatable tunnel open. It’s important to note that the concept of exotic matter remains speculative and has not been observed or created in any experiments. The idea is rooted in the mathematics of theoretical physics, particularly the equations of general relativity. However, there is currently no experimental evidence to support the existence of exotic matter. This hypothetical use of exotic matter to stabilize wormholes is just one of the fascinating possibilities. Scientists continue to explore and investigate the concept seeking to understand its properties and potential implications for our understanding of the universe. While it remains theoretical at this point, the study of exotic matter offers exciting avenues for exploring the frontiers of physics and the mysteries of spacetime.

3 Traversable vs. non-traversable wormholes

Traversable wormholes are those that could potentially be used for interstellar travel or time travel while non-traversable wormholes are those that are unstable or collapse too quickly for anything to pass through. The stability of a traversable wormhole largely depends on the properties of exotic matter that holds it open. It's difficult to keep the throat of the wormhole open, which remains a major obstacle in the practicality of wormhole travel.

4 Time travel and wormholes

Wormholes are like tunnels in space that could allow time travel. This idea comes from how time is affected near black holes and wormholes because of their strong gravity. Imagine two twins, one stays on earth and the other goes on a journey through a wormhole. When the travelling twin returns they might have experienced time differently due to the intense gravity near the wormhole. It's almost like they time-travelled into the future. However time travel through wormholes can create tricky problems, for example, the travelling twin might return to find their Earth twin much older or even from a different time period. This creates confusing situations like the possibility of changing the past which leads to what’s called the ‘grandfather paradox’. While time travel is a fascinating idea, it also brings with it many difficult questions and contradictions. Scientists are still exploring these concepts to understand the mysteries of the universe better. For now, time travel through wormholes remains a theoretical possibility with lots of intriguing puzzles.

5 Wormholes and black holes

Wormholes share some intriguing similarities with black holes particularly in terms of their formation and effects on spacetime. Black holes are formed when massive stars collapse under their gravitational forces leading to an incredibly dense region with an event horizon from which nothing, not even light, can escape. The formation of wormholes also involves the collapse of matter but instead of a singularity it forms a tunnel-like structure. The connections between black holes and wormholes offer fascinating research opportunities.

6 Wormholes and interstellar travel

One of the most captivating prospects of wormholes is their potential for interstellar travel. In science fiction, these cosmic tunnels often serve as gateways to distant parts of the universe. By entering a wormhole, space travelers can traverse vast distances in significantly shorter times. However, the challenges of stabilizing wormholes and navigating through them remain unsolved making interstellar travel through wormholes purely speculative at this point.

7 Wormholes and the information paradox

Wormholes : As we have seen, wormholes are theoretical structures in spacetime that serve as shortcuts between two distant points. They are like tunnels that bend the fabric of spacetime allowing for faster travel between far-apart regions. In theory a wormhole has two ends known as “mouths” and they are connected by a tunnel-like passage or a “throat”. However, traversable wormholes require the existence of exotic matter with negative energy density to stabilize and keep them open.

Information paradox in black holes : Black holes are incredibly dense objects in space with super-strong gravity. When something like light or matter gets too close to a black hole, it gets trapped inside an invisible boundary called the event horizon. And nothing, not even light, can escape can escape the black hole, once it has crossed the event horizon. The information paradox arises from the interplay between quantum mechanics and black hole physics. According to the laws of quantum mechanics, information must be conserved, meaning it cannot be lost or destroyed. But when matter falls into a black hole it seems to vanish beyond its event horizon. This creates a conundrum because if information is lost inside a black hole, it contradicts the principle of information conservation.

Stephen Hawking's solution : Stephen Hawking proposed a solution to this paradox. He suggested that black holes emit a type of radiation, now called Hawking radiation. This radiation comes from near the event horizon and carries away energy from the black hole.

As a black hole emits this radiation, it loses energy and slowly shrinks. It can even completely disappear - a process called “black hole evaporation”. This idea was a big breakthrough and got a lot of attention in the scientific community. However, there’s a catch. The Hawking radiation that the black hole emits seems to be just random and doesn’t carry any specific information about the things that fell into the black hole. So even though the black hole eventually vanishes, the information about what it swallowed up seems to be lost.

The paradox remains : So this creates a “paradox”, a puzzling problem. According to quantum mechanics, information cannot be lost but the Hawking radiation from black holes doesn’t seem to carry that information. This discrepancy between the rules of quantum mechanics and the behavior of black holes is what makes the information paradox so puzzling and challenging for scientists to figure out.

White holes and matter transfer : Some theoretical models propose that black holes may be connected to white holes on the other end, which would solve the information paradox. In contrast to black holes, white holes are fictional objects that release matter and energy instead of consuming it. This hypothesis states that the information and matter falling into a black hole may reappear through a white hole at a different place or possibly in another universe.

Role in preserving information : So some people argue that a wormhole connects a black hole to a white hole and the information associated with the object(s) falling in the black hole is not lost, but is only moved along this imaginary tunnel; matter and information may escape a black hole through a white hole. This would show that the information remains and ultimately reappears through the white hole, thereby solving the information problem.

8 Wormholes and the Search for Exotic Matter

As discussed previously, the presence of exotic matter with negative energy density is essential for the stability of a traversable wormhole. Researchers have looked at several theoretical origins of exotic matter, including the Casimir phenomenon and other quantum vacuum phenomena. Exotic matter creation, however, continues to pose an important theoretical and scientific barrier.

9 Observational Evidence for Wormholes

There is currently no direct observable proof of wormholes' existence. Due to their temporary and cryptic character, detecting them is difficult. To deduce the likely existence of wormholes, scientists depend on indirect evidence, such as the examination of black holes and the hunt for possible flaws in spacetime.

10 The Future of Wormhole Research

Theoretical physics and cosmology research on wormholes is still ongoing. In order to better understand the mystery surrounding these cosmic tunnels, scientists are investigating new mathematical models, theoretical ideas, and experimental strategies. Furthermore, fresh views into quantum gravity and unified theories may help us better grasp the characteristics and consequences of wormholes.

Wormholes, the mysterious cosmic passageways predicted by general relativity, have captured people's attention and served as an inspiration for a vast number of science fiction books. The theoretical notion of traversable wormholes raises significant issues regarding the nature of spacetime, the structure of the universe, the possibility interstellar travel and time dilation, although there is no conclusive proof for their existence. The idea of wormholes will likely continue to intrigue and astound future generations as we push the limits of theoretical physics and investigate the greatest secrets of the cosmos.

https://www.nuclear-power.com/wormholes/

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/23/science/stephen-hawking-final-paper.html

https://www.snexplores.org/article/stephen-hawking-says-his-group-has-solved-black-hole-puzzle

• Cosmology and astrophysics
• Theoretical physics

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Time Travel and Wormholes: Physicist Kip Thorne's Wildest Theories

Kip Thorne, the physicist who brought real science to the movie "Interstellar," has a history of coming up with ideas that sound like they are straight out of science fiction. We've rounded up three of Thorne's most mind-bending theories — at least one of which may have recently been confirmed.

Interstellar travel through wormholes

Looking to travel from one star to another, but don't want the trip to take tens of thousands of years ? How about using a wormhole?

Wormholes were first theorized in 1916 (although they weren't called that at the time), derived from Einstein's equations for relativity. A wormhole connects two points in space via a sort of tunnel through a higher dimension. An object entering one end of a wormhole would emerge almost instantly on the other end, even if the openings were separated by trillions of miles.

In the 1980's, Thorne, who is the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus, at the California institute of Technology, kicked off a serious discussion among physicists about whether or not an object (like a spaceship) could physically travel through a wormhole. In other words, do the laws of physics forbid it? Or, with unlimited resources and knowledge, could a civilization build a wormhole and use it as a cosmic highway ?

Physicists, including Thorne, have made some progress on this question. Scientists knew prior to the 1980s that if wormholes existed, they would evaporate before anything (even light) could pass from one opening to another. So sending something through a wormhole would require a kind of scaffolding made from "exotic matter" to hold the wormhole open.

In addition, wormholes for travel would likely need to be artificially constructed, because there is no solid evidence that they exist naturally.

"We see no objects in our universe that could become wormholes as they age," Thorne writes in his new book "The Science of Interstellar" (W.W. Norton & Co. 2014). By contrast, scientists see huge numbers of stars that will eventually collapse to form black holes. There is a possibility that very, very small wormholes exist in the universe in something called "quantum foam," which may or may not exist in the universe.

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Thorne's question on the possibility of interstellar travel through wormholes remains unanswered. But at the moment, he told Space.com, wormhole travel will likely only ever exist in science fiction.  [ Star Trek's Warp Drive: Are We There Yet? | Video]

Wormholes for time travel

When Thorne began to consider the likelihood that wormholes could be used for space travel, he realized that they could also be used for time travel .

In his 1994 book "Black Holes and Time Warps" (W.W. Norton & Co. 1994), Thorne proposes a thought experiment: Say he obtains a small wormhole, which connects two points in space as if they were not separated by any distance at all. [ What's New in Black Holes? A conversation with Kip Thorne ]

Thorne takes his wormhole and puts one end in his living room, and the other aboard a spaceship parked in his front yard. Thorne's wife, Carolee, hops aboard the spaceship to prepare for a trip. The two don't have to say goodbye, though, because no matter how far away Coralee travels, they can see each other through the wormhole. They can even hold hands, as if through an open doorway.

Carolee starts up the spaceship, heads into space and travels for six hours at the speed of light. She then turns around and comes back home traveling at the same speed — a round trip of 12 hours. Thorne watches through the wormhole and sees this trip occur. He sees Coralee return from her trip, land on the front lawn, get out of the spaceship and head into the house.

But when Thorne looks out the window in his own world, his front lawn is empty. Coralee has not returned. Because she traveled at the speed of light, time slowed down for her : What was 12 hours for her was 10 years for Thorne back on Earth.

Now, as Thorne and Coralee hold hands through the wormhole,  they are each traveling in time . Coralee has landed on Earth 10 years after she left, and there she will meet Thorne, 10 years older. But she can still reach through the wormhole and find Thorne, who is only 12 hours older. Thorne can step through the wormhole and find himself 10 years in the future, or his future self can step back 10 years into the past.

Thorne's idea is a thought experiment, intended to answer a larger question: Is time travel forbidden by the laws of the universe? Scientists know that time moves more slowly at high speeds (although traveling at the speed of light would actually kill a person) or in areas with very high gravity. (This was portrayed in the movie " Interstellar ," when time moves more slowly on a planet orbiting a black hole.) Hence, traveling "into the future" is not forbidden.

But backward time travel is still unresolved. Stephen Hawking has stated adamantly that the laws of physics will prevent backward time travel. Thorne writes in "The Science of Interstellar" that the answer lies with more advanced physics than scientists currently understand. 

A star within a star

Scientists may prove at least one of Thorne's wild theories in the near future: that one star can take up residence inside another star.

In 1975, Thorne and his colleague Anna Zytkow proposed that a very small, dense star could fall into a very large, diffuse star and go on living (rather than ending in the destruction or merger of the two). In October, other researchers announced that they had found what they believe to be the first Thorne-Zytkow Object (ZTO) ever detected.

The large, diffuse star would be a red giant: a star nearing the end of its fuel supply, which, as a result, has begun to inflate. (A red giant large enough to form a TZO would have a diameter the size of Saturn's orbit, according to scientists.)

A TZO would look very much like a normal red giant , but at its core would be a neutron star: an incredibly dense object (a teaspoon of neutron star material would weigh 1 billion tons) created when a massive star stops burning and explodes, and the remaining material collapses. A neutron star cannot form inside a red giant, so it would have to form outside and then fall in.

Thorne and Zytkow showed that if this odd merger actually occurred, it would create a unique kind of stellar oven. [ The Strangest Alien Planets (Gallery) ]

"It would have a shell of burning material around the neutron core, a shell that would generate new elements as it burned," Thorne said in an interview . "Convection, the circulation of hot gas inside the star, would reach right into the burning shell and carry the products of burning all the way to the surface of the star long before the burning was complete."

Subsequent work by Thorne's graduate student Garrett Biehle showed that ZTOs produce high levels of the elements rubidium, molybdenum and lithium. This activity differs from that of normal red giants, giving astronomers a way of identifying a ZTO based on its chemical profile.

In June, researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder and colleagues announced that they'd identified a red giant that fit the profile of a TZO. The star, HV 2112, is located in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy about 20,000 light-years away from Earth. 

"The evidence is compelling but by no means ironclad," Thorne told Space.com. "We need to get additional observational data before victory can really be declared. So I think it's premature to say that a Thorne-Zytkow Object has been discovered."

Follow Calla Cofield   @callacofield . Follow us   @Spacedotcom ,   Facebook  and   Google+ . Original article on   Space.com .

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Calla Cofield joined Space.com's crew in October 2014. She enjoys writing about black holes, exploding stars, ripples in space-time, science in comic books, and all the mysteries of the cosmos. Prior to joining Space.com Calla worked as a freelance writer, with her work appearing in APS News, Symmetry magazine, Scientific American, Nature News, Physics World, and others. From 2010 to 2014 she was a producer for The Physics Central Podcast. Previously, Calla worked at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City (hands down the best office building ever) and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California. Calla studied physics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and is originally from Sandy, Utah. In 2018, Calla left Space.com to join NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory media team where she oversees astronomy, physics, exoplanets and the Cold Atom Lab mission. She has been underground at three of the largest particle accelerators in the world and would really like to know what the heck dark matter is. Contact Calla via: E-Mail – Twitter

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Is Time Travel Possible?

We all travel in time! We travel one year in time between birthdays, for example. And we are all traveling in time at approximately the same speed: 1 second per second.

We typically experience time at one second per second. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA's space telescopes also give us a way to look back in time. Telescopes help us see stars and galaxies that are very far away . It takes a long time for the light from faraway galaxies to reach us. So, when we look into the sky with a telescope, we are seeing what those stars and galaxies looked like a very long time ago.

However, when we think of the phrase "time travel," we are usually thinking of traveling faster than 1 second per second. That kind of time travel sounds like something you'd only see in movies or science fiction books. Could it be real? Science says yes!

This image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows galaxies that are very far away as they existed a very long time ago. Credit: NASA, ESA and R. Thompson (Univ. Arizona)

How do we know that time travel is possible?

More than 100 years ago, a famous scientist named Albert Einstein came up with an idea about how time works. He called it relativity. This theory says that time and space are linked together. Einstein also said our universe has a speed limit: nothing can travel faster than the speed of light (186,000 miles per second).

Einstein's theory of relativity says that space and time are linked together. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

What does this mean for time travel? Well, according to this theory, the faster you travel, the slower you experience time. Scientists have done some experiments to show that this is true.

For example, there was an experiment that used two clocks set to the exact same time. One clock stayed on Earth, while the other flew in an airplane (going in the same direction Earth rotates).

After the airplane flew around the world, scientists compared the two clocks. The clock on the fast-moving airplane was slightly behind the clock on the ground. So, the clock on the airplane was traveling slightly slower in time than 1 second per second.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Can we use time travel in everyday life?

We can't use a time machine to travel hundreds of years into the past or future. That kind of time travel only happens in books and movies. But the math of time travel does affect the things we use every day.

For example, we use GPS satellites to help us figure out how to get to new places. (Check out our video about how GPS satellites work .) NASA scientists also use a high-accuracy version of GPS to keep track of where satellites are in space. But did you know that GPS relies on time-travel calculations to help you get around town?

GPS satellites orbit around Earth very quickly at about 8,700 miles (14,000 kilometers) per hour. This slows down GPS satellite clocks by a small fraction of a second (similar to the airplane example above).

GPS satellites orbit around Earth at about 8,700 miles (14,000 kilometers) per hour. Credit: GPS.gov

However, the satellites are also orbiting Earth about 12,550 miles (20,200 km) above the surface. This actually speeds up GPS satellite clocks by a slighter larger fraction of a second.

Here's how: Einstein's theory also says that gravity curves space and time, causing the passage of time to slow down. High up where the satellites orbit, Earth's gravity is much weaker. This causes the clocks on GPS satellites to run faster than clocks on the ground.

The combined result is that the clocks on GPS satellites experience time at a rate slightly faster than 1 second per second. Luckily, scientists can use math to correct these differences in time.

If scientists didn't correct the GPS clocks, there would be big problems. GPS satellites wouldn't be able to correctly calculate their position or yours. The errors would add up to a few miles each day, which is a big deal. GPS maps might think your home is nowhere near where it actually is!

In Summary:

Yes, time travel is indeed a real thing. But it's not quite what you've probably seen in the movies. Under certain conditions, it is possible to experience time passing at a different rate than 1 second per second. And there are important reasons why we need to understand this real-world form of time travel.

If you liked this, you may like:

Time Machines: From H.G. Wells to Modern Science

T he concept of time travel has always captured the human imagination, fueling dreams of voyages to the past or future, altering historical events, or witnessing distant futures. While often relegated to the realm of science fiction, the idea of time machines has evolved over the years, transitioning from the imaginative works of authors like H.G. Wells to the cutting-edge theories and scientific advancements of today. In this article, we’ll explore the fascinating journey of time machines, tracing their origins, exploring their fictional and scientific manifestations, and delving into the tantalizing possibilities they present for our understanding of time and reality.

Introduction to Time Machines

A time machine, as envisioned in science fiction and theoretical physics, is a hypothetical device or concept that enables an individual or object to travel through time, navigating the temporal landscape of past, present, and future, and exploring the mysteries of time dilation, causality, and the fabric of spacetime itself.

• Cultural Impact and Imagination: Time machines have captivated the public’s imagination, inspiring countless stories, films, and discussions about the nature of time, destiny, and the possibilities of temporal exploration within the realms of fiction and reality.
• Scientific Theories and Speculations: Time machines have been the subject of scientific research, theoretical debates, and mathematical explorations within the frameworks of general relativity, quantum mechanics, and the mysteries of the cosmos, offering insights into the potential pathways, paradoxes, and challenges of time travel within the fabric of reality and the universe.

H.G. Wells and the Time Machine: A Journey into the Past

H.G. Wells’ seminal work, “The Time Machine,” published in 1895, introduced the world to the concept of a machine capable of time travel, shaping the cultural perception, scientific speculations, and fictional explorations of time machines for generations to come.

• Literary Legacy and Imaginative Exploration: Wells’ novel delves into the adventures of an inventor who creates a machine capable of traveling through time, exploring the future landscape of humanity, societal evolution, and the mysteries of time, destiny, and human civilization within the framework of science fiction and the human imagination.
• Cultural Impact and Scientific Inspiration: “The Time Machine” has inspired generations of readers, writers, scientists, and thinkers, shaping the cultural perception of time machines, inspiring scientific research, and theoretical speculations about the nature of time, reality, and the possibilities of temporal exploration within the realms of fiction and scientific inquiry.

Scientific Theories, Quantum Mechanics, and Time Travel

In the realm of theoretical physics, time travel has been explored through the frameworks of general relativity, quantum mechanics, and the mysteries of the cosmos, offering insights into the potential pathways, paradoxes, and challenges of time travel within the fabric of reality and the universe.

• General Relativity and Spacetime Geometry: Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity describes gravity as the curvature of spacetime, offering mathematical equations, principles, and insights that explore the potential for time dilation, wormholes, black holes, and the mysterious cosmic phenomena that shape the fabric of reality and the universe.
• Quantum Mechanics, Entanglement, and Quantum Time Dynamics: Quantum mechanics introduces the principles of superposition, entanglement, and the mysterious quantum phenomena that challenge our classical understanding of time, reality, and the nature of the cosmos, offering insights into the non-deterministic, probabilistic nature of quantum systems, time evolution, and the quantum correlations that transcend classical boundaries and the mysteries of the quantum realm.

Modern Science, Technological Innovations, and Time Travel

Advancements in science, technology, and theoretical research have sparked renewed interest, innovations, and possibilities for exploring the concept of time travel, temporal dynamics, and the mysteries of the universe within the context of modern science and technological advancements.

• Time Dilation, Relativistic Effects, and Cosmic Observations: Observations of time dilation effects in high-speed particle accelerators, spacecraft, and cosmic phenomena provide empirical evidence, insights, and challenges for understanding the nature of time, spacetime geometry, and the cosmic dynamics that shape our understanding of time travel and the mysteries of the universe.
• Black Holes, Wormholes, and Cosmic Gateways: Theoretical constructs, such as black holes, wormholes, and cosmic gateways, offer potential pathways, mathematical models, and speculative possibilities for time travel, time dilation, and the exploration of the temporal landscape within the framework of general relativity, quantum mechanics, and the mysteries of the cosmos.

Time machines, from H.G. Wells’ imaginative narrative to modern scientific theories and technological innovations, reflect humanity’s enduring fascination with time travel, the mysteries of the temporal landscape, and the timeless quest for understanding, enlightenment, and the boundless possibilities that lie within the fabric of reality and the cosmic tapestry.

As we explore, investigate, and unravel the captivating journey of time machines through historical inquiry, scientific exploration, and the pursuit of knowledge, we embark on a journey of discovery, exploration, and enlightenment that transcends boundaries, deepens our understanding of human creativity, imagination, and the enduring quest for truth, meaning, and the timeless wonders that inspire wonder, curiosity, and a renewed appreciation for the grandeur, diversity, and interconnectedness of the human experience, cultural heritage, and the boundless realms of time, space, and the universe beyond.

Read More: The Goldilocks Zone: Finding Planets Just Right for Life