Time Travel moving from sci-fi fantasy to real science

By Dick Pelletier

      

    At a UCLA workshop attended by yours truly and a group of future-thinkers, the late physicist Dr. Robert Forward predicted that a better understanding of general relativity and quantum mechanics may one day enable humans to travel through time. "Given the money and the mandate," Forward said, "a time machine will be built."

    This discussion convened in 1983 and today, 26 years later, scientists are bringing this bold concept ever closer to reality. Researchers at the 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 experts theorize can create tiny black holes and wormholes; elements that some believe offer the best chance to prove the concept of sending information; possibly even matter, back through time.

    Cal-Tech Physicist Kip Thorne in Black Holes and Time Warps describes how wormholes can be used successfully to travel through time. While acknowledging that it may be years before humanity develops this technology – if ever, Thorne says, "It could one day become reality."

    Though the laws of physics do not forbid time travel, the idea poses critical problems. Say we travel back in time and stop our parents from getting together. This would prevent us from being born, we would not exist, and thus our journey in time couldn't happen. Scientists call this a paradox. By changing the past, we've created a different present from the one that already exists.

    Clearly, mischievous time travelers cannot change the present. People are not disappearing because a rerun of events has prevented their birth. Thus something else is stopping time travelers from changing our present, and 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 from ours. If you travel through time and prevent your parents from getting together, you have created a new universe where you never existed; you only appear as a time traveler in that universe. But beware; you could be stranded in a world without family and friends.

    Advantages to time travel are mind-boggling. A glimpse at the future could reveal how our life will unfold. Will we be happy and healthy living an indefinite lifespan; or is death in our future? Gaining popularity also is the hope that within 200-to-300 years, we could go back in time, scan the minds of lost loved ones before they died and allow them to continue living in our future time.

    Although many believe it impossible to travel back in time before a time-traversing wormhole was created, UK theoretical physicist Jim Al-Khalili predicts that naturally-occurring wormholes might already exist in our universe, which in theory, could allow travel to any past time.

    Experts believe we're approaching a decisive time in human evolution. Will we merge with our machines by mid-century and become immortal as futurist Ray Kurzweil and others predict? What role might the miracles of time travel play in our lives? Welcome to this amazing "magical future."

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