Time travel possible in future, expert believes

By Dick Pelletier

      

    Welcome ladies and gentlemen to the Time Portal. In a few moments we will beam your minds to the year 1990, where you will each live a day in the life of your 20th century self. Although your bodies remain here, your minds will travel back in time and merge with your younger selves. We hope you enjoy this fascinating experience.

    The above scenario is fiction of course, but researchers at the Cern Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland believe their machine can recreate conditions like the "big bang" which brought time and space into existence, and create tiny black holes and wormholes; elements that many believe offer the best chance to further develop the concept of time travel.

    In a recent Daily Mail post, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking stated that traveling through time will become reality in the future. "Time travel was once considered heresy," he said. "I used to avoid talking about it for fear of being labeled a crank. But now I'm not so cautious."

    Hawking thinks backwards time travel may be difficult, but he believes that one day we could harness wormholes and travel into the future. Physicists have long thought about these tunnels in space and time and have even debated their existence. But it turns out, they do exist.

    Wormholes are cosmic oddities that link two places in space-time. Nobody has ever seen one, but experiments at Cern show convincing evidence of their existence.

    Down in the atomic scale, we get to a place called quantum foam. This is where wormholes are found. Tiny shortcuts through space and time that constantly form, disappear, and reform. And they can actually link two separate places and two different times.

    Although today's laws of physics do not rule out time travel, the idea is laden with problems. What if you went back in time and prevented your parents from getting together. You would not have been born, therefore how could you be traveling through time?

    Clearly, time travelers from the future are not altering our present. People don't suddenly vanish because a rerun of events has prevented their birth. Therefore, something else is stopping them from disrupting our world, and physicists believe they know what it is – parallel universes.

    This holds that our cosmos includes an infinite number of universes. If you travel through time and prevent your parents from meeting, or do anything that causes the present to change, you are thrust into a parallel universe; one that already includes the changes you caused. But you can't return to your original world because the present that included you cannot exist anymore.

    Time travel promises huge benefits. A glimpse into the future could show us how our lives will unfold; and reveal humanity's first contact with ETs – will they be friendly or dangerous? And even more important, visiting the past would allow us to scan minds of lost loved ones before they died enabling them to continue living in our time.

    Today's physics reveals just how strange the universe is. And armed with brains reinforced with artificial intelligence and other futuristic technologies predicted for this century, positive futurists believe that humans will become time travelers.

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