Time Travel:

Is it
possible?
Submitted by: Mary Bernadette L.
Macaraeg (STEM 21)
Submitted to: Ma’am Josephine Casero

Yes, time travel is possible since a time machine can also be possibly made. Some people had
already made a time machine. These are the following.
Artwork: A wormhole can be thought of as a kind of tunnel creating a
shortcut between separate points in space-time

Albert Einstein thought the three dimensions of space were linked to time - which serves as a
fourth dimension. He called this system space-time, and it's the model of the Universe that we
use today. 

But Einstein also thought it was possible to fold space-time, creating a shortcut between two
distant locations. This phenomenon is called a wormhole, and it can be visualised as a tunnel
with two openings, each emerging at different points in space-time.

Wormholes might exist naturally in the cosmos; indeed, scientists in Russia are trying to use
radio telescopes to detect them. But using wormholes for time travel won't be straightforward.

The nearest ones could be many light-years away. And even if you could get to them and then
survive the journey through them, there's no guarantee where you'd end up.

But some physicists have speculated that we might be able to conjure up bespoke wormholes at
some point in the future - though we currently have no idea how.

Physics also predicts that wormholes would have a habit of collapsing, crushing whatever's
inside them. If a time machine is ever to exploit them, we'd have to find a way to stop this
inconvenient feature.

The mysterious phenomenon of dark energy might provide a solution. In the 1990s, astronomers
found that the expansion of the Universe was speeding up, rather than slowing down as might
have been expected.
"Something out there is having an 'anti-gravity' effect - it's pushing rather than pulling. We don't
know what that is, but it makes up most of the Universe. We call it dark energy," says Prof
Tamara Davis, a cosmologist at the University of Queensland in Australia.

A wormhole will only work for time travel if its "mouth" can be held open for long enough that
it allows something to travel through it. That requires something called negative energy, which
doesn't really exist in the everyday world. 

But the dark energy that permeates the cosmos fits the bill - if we can figure out what it is, we
might be able to prop open a wormhole long enough to go in one end and out the other.

"We don't know whether we are able to make a wormhole, whether that's technically within our
capabilities… But who knows what a future human civilization is going to be able to do," says
Prof Davis.

"Technology has advanced so rapidly that maybe space and time themselves are something that
can come under our control."

Wormholes exist at the more speculative end of physics, offering one approach to travelling in
time. But Ron Mallett has another.

He has drawn up plans for an actual time machine, and his concept was inspired by a book he
read at age 12 about Albert Einstein's equations.

Prof Mallett has built a table-top device that illustrates principles he thinks could be used to build
a real, working time machine. First, lasers are used to generate a circulating beam of light. The
space inside this "ring laser" should become twisted, "like stirring a cup of coffee", the
University of Connecticut professor explains.

Prof Lee Smolin believes the concept of time passing may be a real one, rather than an illusion
created by humans

"Time travel is probably impossible," he says. "If what's real is the present moment and the past
is only real in the sense that there are memories and records of it in the present, and the future is
still to exist… there's nowhere to go."

His colleague Prof Neil Turok, director of the Perimeter Institute, thinks the weird world of
quantum physics could be crucial to answering this question. 

This area of physics emerges at very small scales, where the rules of classical physics we learnt
about in our school textbooks break down. For example, in the quantum world, it might be
possible for a particle to be in many places at once.

"I think it's clear to me that there is some probability of us going backwards in time," he says. "In
quantum physics, nothing is impossible - particles travel through walls!"
Prof Turok explains that time travel remains a distant hope because "no one really has any
plausible idea of how to go backwards in time right now". But he adds: "One should never say
never, because some clever person will come along and tell you how to break the rule."

Source: (2018, July 11). We can build a real time machine. Retrieved from
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44771942

The Subatomic Time Machine

In fact, not only is time travel possible, it’s already happened—it just doesn’t looklike your
typical sci-fi film. 

Returning to our time-traveling cosmonaut Padalka, his 1/44-second jump into the future is so
minuscule because he was only traveling 17,000 miles per hour. That isn’t very fast, at least in
comparison to the speed of light. But what would happen if we created something that could go
much faster than geostationary orbit? We are not talking a commercial jetliner (550 to 600 miles
an hour) or a 21st century rocket to the ISS (25,000 miles per hour), but something that could
approach 186,282 miles per second?
But there is one big caveat to this theoretical portrait of real-
world time travel—this machine doesn’t go in reverse. While Bill
and Ted travel to the past to pick up Socrates with relative
ease, in reality scientists and researchers need to find a way to
circumvent the rules of physics in order to travel back in time.

Wormholes, black holes, cosmic strings, and circulating light

beams have all been suggested as potential solutions for time-
traveling to the past. The main challenge that astrophysicists
are grappling with is figuring out is how to beat a light beam to
a point in spacetime and back.

Since the speed of light is the absolute maximum, physicists

are concentrating on finding phenomena like wormholes, which
could provide tunnel-like shortcuts that jump across curved
spacetime and, in theory, beat a light beam to a particular point
in spacetime. 

While wormholes do work within the confines of Einstein’s

theories of relativity, they have yet to be observed in space,
and scientists have no concrete evidence that these galactic
shortcuts would even work.
Source: Blitz, M. (2018, May 28). We already know how to build a time machine. Retrieved
from https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/math/a20718322/building-a-time-machine/