Time Travel: sci-fi fantasy moving closer to reality

By Dick Pelletier

 

      

     Welcome ladies and gentlemen to the Time Portal. In a few moments we will travel back in time to 10,000 BC North America and observe an ancient human tribe making a kill on a herd of wooly mammoths. Although our bodies remain in the studio, our minds will travel through time and observe all the sights and sounds of this experience as it is happening.

     The above scenario is fiction of course, but researchers at the new LHC (Large Hadron Collider) in Cern, Switzerland believe their machine can recreate conditions like the "big bang" which created our universe and brought time and space into existence.

     The LHC smashes particles into each other traveling at light speeds which cause collisions that scientists theorize can create tiny black holes and wormholes; elements that some predict offer the best chance to prove the concept of time travel.

     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 can jump into a wormhole and instantly pop out somewhere else in the universe, or into another time. You've gone through a tunnel that connects two places in spacetime."

     Physicist Kip Thorne, in an article published in Physical Review Letters was the first to give respect to time travel. While acknowledging that it may be years before humanity develops this technology, Thorne concluded: "From a single wormhole an advanced civilization could one day construct a machine for backward time travel."

     Though the laws of physics do not forbid time travel, the idea has many 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, thus our journey in time couldn't happen. Scientists call this a paradox. We created a present 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 physicist Michio Kaku and other forward thinkers believe they know what it is – parallel universes.

     This holds that our universe is surrounded by an infinite number of other universes, each one slightly different. If you travel through time and prevent your parents from meeting, you are thrust into a parallel universe where you never existed before; you appear only as a time traveler.

     However if time travel has not been developed in your new universe, you could be stranded forever in a world without family and friends.

     Longing to visit departed relatives or foil atrocities are the main reasons that keep the dream of time travel alive. But gaining in popularity is the hope that one day we could go back in time and scan the consciousness of lost loved ones before they died, and with tomorrow's advanced technologies, allow them to continue living in our time.

     We dream of a breathtaking "magical future," and we ponder the wonders that lie ahead as we get closer to the 22nd century? Will time travel become part of our future? Only time will tell.

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