TIME TRAVEL: IS IT POSSIBLE?

Have you ever watch “Back to The Future” movie? Or the TV series “Doctor
Who”? They both had one same major issue in the story: time travel. Literally, time
travel comes from the combination of the word “time” which means age, era, or time in
particular, and the word “travel” which means to go on a journey or a trip. So time travel
can be interpreted as a trip through time or a visit on a specific time in past or in the
future. In physics term, time travel is the concept of moving between different moments
in time in a manner analogous to moving between different points in space, either
sending objects or information backwards in time to a moment before the present or
sending objects forward from the present to the future without the need to experience the
intervening period. Any technological device, whether fictional or hypothetical, that is
used to do time travel is known as a time machine. Although time travel has been a
common plot device in fiction since the 19th century, especially in science-fiction movies
or books, whether it could be possible in reality is still an open question. In fact, there
was never a single evidence or proof that time travel have ever be done in reality by any
human technology. It was almost to be said as a taboo. But when Albert Einstein came up
with his theory of relativity in the middle of 20th century, that later become the pioneer of
modern and quantum physics, many scientists began convinced that there’s a possibility
of doing time travel in real world. Although time travel is seemingly an impossible thing
to do, some of the modern physics theories are able to explain this phenomenon and its
possibilities.

Einstein’s theory of relativity basically says that time is relative, depending on

which frame of reference. For example, when we see the sun, we actually see the sun in
the past, precisely the sun on 8 minutes ago, as it took 8 minutes long for the sun light to
travel 92 million miles until it reach our earth. Even on earth itself, everything we see
was actually the past, because it took 2 nanoseconds for our eyes to see the objects
around us. This means that time isn’t absolute, and it synchronizes differently at different
places in the universe. So we must consider time as a dimension, along with the other 3
space-dimension. This fourth dimension usually called the “space and time” dimension.
Scientist believed that this dimension can be manipulated, just like a fabric that can be
pulled or folded. The idea to bend space and time leads to a possibility of a time machine
to be built.

There are two kinds of time travel: traveling to the past and traveling to the future.
Time travel to the past, in theory, is allowed by using ‘black holes/wormholes’ and
‘cosmic string’. Actually, a simple way to bend the space-time is using the gravity.
Gravity bend space, thus, it can also bend time. Professor Stephen Hawking, an expert on
black hole, said that the enormous gravity and the rotating velocity at the speed of light of
the black hole greatly distort the space-time. In result, it made a “tunnel” in the space-
time. The problem is black hole have a part where the density level is very high that it
leads to a singularity. This isn’t a good news, since we will be destroyed if we got sucked
into this part of black hole. Similar to this black hole theory, Professor Paul Davies from
Arizona State University is certain that the most possible theory about time travel to be
done in reality was the ‘wormhole’ theory. The gravity bends the space-time fabric, and
the wormhole is a “shortcut” between two regions in a bended space-time dimension.
Now picture this, there’s a piece of paper folded in the middle. Between these two sides
of paper, a tunnel is made to connect the sides together. This tunnel is the wormhole. He
said that wormhole had two mouths and a throat. So the time traveler could travel faster
than light with this wormhole, whereas the light travels through a linear path in space-
time. The second one is to use the ‘cosmic string’. Richard Gott, Professor of
Astrophysics from Princeton University, search the universe to find something that can
warp space-time as much as the rotating black hole. He found something in hypothetical
which called cosmic string. Cosmic string is a thin thread of energy that came from the
leftover of the Big Bang. Despite being no wider than an atom, it has colossal density. A
one yard of cosmic string will made a bigger gravity than earth’s gravity that will warp
space-time. If there are two cosmic strings passed each other, we can make a time
machine. Almost similar to the wormhole theory, if space-time is a piece of paper, the
cosmic string will fold it together.

Picture 1: Cosmic string analogy

Normally a spaceship had to take the longer route in space-time. But with the
shortcut provided by the cosmic string, it can travel faster than light, and go back to the
past. If there’s a car, consider it’s a spaceship, and we found two cosmic strings passed
each other; we can return before we depart. Here’s how, cosmic string will bend space
time, and with the shortcut it provided, we can travel faster than light itself who follow
the normal route in space-time. The route is no longer linear, instead it becomes a circle.
But Gott’s time machine had a disadvantage. In the moment the space-time was bended
into a circle, the whole area around there will be fall inside a black hole. So it seems that
the time travel area will be trapped in the rotating black hole.
 Another way to travel into the past, physicist Ronald Mallett from University of
Connecticut, also the author of Time Traveler, has theorized that very powerful lasers can
be used to stir space-time and twist the past and future together using the principle of
frame dragging, where rotating bodies drag space-time around with them, similar to what
happens when you stir a cup of coffee with a spoon. As the spoon rotates in the cup, it
pulls the coffee with it. Anything else in the coffee, such as sugar cube, will also move
around with the coffee. In Mallett’s theory the spoon is the laser and the coffee is the
space-time dimension. He assumed it was gravity that triggers events like rotating black
hole, cosmic string, worm holes, and so on. So he needs to find another way to control
gravity. Light, it has no mass, but it does have energy. He found that the light might be
use to control gravity. And since gravity controls time, the light might also be use to
control time. He thought if he can make a circulating beam of light, it can twist the space.
And if it can twist the space, it might twist time, too. This could, in theory, allow travel
into the past by looping space-time back on itself. He also made an experiment regarding
his theory, but the ‘time traveler’ he used was only a small particle, in this case, a
subatomic particle. He said that in order to sending a bigger object, it will need another
ten thousand of his laser device. But it’s possible to only send some information back to
the past.

While some physicist and cosmic analysts have suggested that time travel to the
past is at least theoretically possible, MIT physicist Eddie Farhi, director of MIT’s Center
for Theoretical Physics, an internationally renowned expert on general relativity, says it’s
a no go. He has given a lot of thought to the problem of time travel in recent years, but
everything he has ever looked at suggests that the laws of physics conspire to prevent us
from going backward in time. Farhi and MIT colleagues considered the proposal of using
cosmic strings, but they discovered that we really couldn’t construct such an object
because the construction would require more than half the energy in the entire universe.
Furthermore, it was later shown that if you built such a device, before the would-be time
traveler completed a voyage to his past, the universe would end in a Big Crunch.

On the other hand, time traveling into the future is theoretically allowed using the
‘time dilation’ under the theory of special relativity. The idea is, we traveling at almost
the speed of light to a distant star, then slowing down, turning around, and traveling at
almost the speed of light back to earth. Physicists take for granted that if one were to
move away from the earth at relativistic velocities and return, more time would have
passed on earth than for the traveler, so in this sense it is accepted that relativity allows
“travel into the future”. According to relativity, there is no objective answer to the
question of how much time “really” passed during the trip. It would be equally valid to
say that the trip had lasted only a few years or that the trip had lasted hundreds of years,
depending on your choice of reference frame. The example for this case was the twin
paradox. One twin is traveling to outer space at almost the speed of light, then came back
to earth. Because of the time dilation that makes the clock which moving relative to the
observer ticking slower, the traveling twin become aged less than the one who stays on
earth. But using speed to build a time machine is a one-way journey into the future. This
doesn’t make the time traveler mastered the time, he’s merely slowed down “his time”
and fast-forwarded himself to the future. He wouldn’t be come back to tell us tale.
 As the proof of this theory, CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear
Research in Geneva, Switzerland, has the biggest particle accelerator machine in the
world. In there, they have done experiment of time traveling for over forty years. The
particle they used was Muon, a high-energy particle produce by cosmic rays, which
constantly bombarded our atmosphere. Muon lives for only about 1/1,000,000 second.
The scientist in CERN used speed to make the particle live longer, turning it into a time
traveler. In the accelerator, the particle’s velocity was pushed to the speed of light, which
make time move slower for Muon regarding to the relativity. And when the particle came
back, one second has elapsed for the Muon, but twenty seconds had elapsed for the
scientist. So it can be said that the Muon has done a trip to our future. Still, there’s a main
problem if we want to use speed as the basic idea to build a time machine. Mass connects
with energy. When an object moves near the speed of light, its mass will greatly
increased. In the Muon experiment with the particle accelerator, the Muon’s mass
increased 7000 times than its original mass. When the particle becomes heavier, it would
take more energy to move it in constant speed near the speed of light. Imagine if that
happens on human or any macroscopic objects. Even only to move a rocket in a tiny
fraction of the speed of light, it would take all the energy sources on earth. We simply
don’t have enough energy. It would be meaningless if we don’t go close to the speed of
light because we wouldn’t notice any differences either way.

But there are still many constraints that restrict us to do time traveling, which we
called paradoxes. The most famous paradox in the time travel case is the ‘grandfather
paradox’. The grandfather paradox is a hypothetical situation in which a time traveler
goes back in time and attempts to kill his grandfather at a time before the time traveler
was born. If he did so, then the time traveler would never been born, in which case the
time traveler never would have gone back in time to kill his grandfather, and so on. In
short, the time traveler actions could affect the time stream and altered the past.
Regarding this paradoxes, Professor Michio Kaku, the author of Physics of the
Impossible, has done an experiment. He shot a laser beam that made from single particle
of light photon into a mirror, and saw that there are multiple dots on the mirror’s surface,
as if the photons be in different places at the same time. All the matter in the universe is
made from subatomic particles, if photon can be at two places at once, how about us? The
physicist believes that the universe itself splits into several numbers of universes. In the
other way, there can be infinite number of parallel universes; each one is splitting of from
the other ones. We can visit other parallel universe through time travel. So if we changed
the past, the one we changed was the past on that parallel universe. When we go back to
our time, nothing has changed. With this theory of parallel universe, all the paradoxes of
time travel can be ignored, and tell that time in the past cannot be altered.

To conclude, with the advanced science and technology nowadays, time travel
isn’t an impossible thing to do anymore. For the last centuries, pioneers had pushed the
boundaries, turning science fiction into reality. Some of the modern physics theories were
able to explain how time travel may work, and there’s still a limitless possibilities to do it
in reality. Now it’s our duty, the future scientist, to develop the technology. We still had
much time to learn, as long as we keep our curiosity and our will to study much more. If
we can really build the time machine, it will be a great breakthrough for human
technologies. Who knows? Only time will tell whether the human can really do time
travel someday.

Written by: Y.K.

Word count: 2,340

References:
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/series/naked-science/3486/01-Overview#tab-time-
travel-facts
http://engineering.mit.edu/ask/question.php?id=100
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_travel
http://xeno-world.blogspot.com/2009/01/time-machine-project.html
National Geographic’s Naked Science: Time Machine episode from www.youtube.com