Time travel: Swiss Cern project could validate theories

By Dick Pelletier

     Welcome ladies and gentlemen to the Time Portal. In a few moments we will beam your minds to the year 2007, where you will each live a day in the life of your 21st century self. Although your bodies remain here in the present, your minds will travel back in time and merge with your younger self. We hope you enjoy this unique learning experience.

     The above scenario is fiction of course, but researchers at the new Cern Particle Accelerator in Switzerland believe their machine can recreate conditions like the “big bang” which brought time and space into existence, and create baby black holes and wormholes; elements that many believe offer the best chance to validate or dispute the concept of traveling backwards in time.

     Princeton University’s Richard Gott describes wormholes as shortcuts through space and time that connect two distant points, like a worm tunnel through an apple. “You jump into the wormhole and instantly pop out on Alpha Centauri; you’ve gone through a tunnel that connects two places in spacetime.”

     Although today’s laws of physics cannot rule out time travel, the idea is laden with problems. Say we travel back in time and stop our parents from getting together. This would prevent us from being born; we could not exist and our journey in time couldn’t happen – scientists call this a paradox. We created a past different from the one that already exists.

     Clearly, mischievous time travelers cannot change the present. People are not suddenly disappearing because a rerun of events has prevented their birth. Therefore, something is stopping time travelers from changing our present, and physicists Stephen Hawking, Michio Kaku, and others believe they know what it is – parallel universes.

This holds that we inhabit a universe with an infinite number of other worlds. If you travel through time and convince your parents to split, you will immediately be thrust into a parallel universe; one where you never existed. You become a visitor in this new universe, but you can never return to your original universe because you don’t exist there anymore.

     The longing to hug a departed loved one or foil atrocities, are among the compelling reasons that keep the dream of time travel alive in the minds of many. However, assuming that nobody wants to get lost in a strange universe, an advanced civilization might find the following applications worth pursuing:

• Glimpsing into the future could allow humanity to become aware of dangerous threats in plenty of time to find solutions.

• Backwards time travel would enable us to scan minds of lost loved ones the night before they died, and with tomorrow’s technology advances, allow them to continue living in our time.

Though wormhole construction is beyond today’s knowledge, positive futurists believe that humanity will one day think with super-intelligent minds governed by physics, not biology; and over the next few millennia, could easily learn to harness these wonders.

We dream of breathtaking changes ahead as we approach the era when machines surpass human intelligence. We ponder how our “magical future” might unfold. What miracles will civilization accomplish? Will we develop exotic planets; discover aliens; travel through time? Only time will tell.

This article appeared in various print publications and on-line blogs. Comments always welcome.