Fantasy becomes Reality? Let’s travel in time!

“Treasure your time as it is irreversible!”

“Time files! Time is money!”
“A young idler, an old beggar.”

What is your biggest regret in life?

What advice would you give to your 10-year-younger self?
Do you want to have a glimpse of the life of your grandson?

It is time for you to think about the questions above. In the future, travelling in time may be
as usual as travelling to other continents.

Time travel has become a common theme in lots of movies and fictions. The authors and
movie directors gave us an array of imagination on the functioning and some possible
consequences of undergoing time travel in reality. Interstellar, directed by Christopher Nolan,
gave us a visual illustration on the way of time travel with strong scientific foundations1.
Joseph Cooper, who was a trained engineer and NASA pilot, took part in a secret space
mission. After some twists and turns, he returned to his daughter, who was an elder
approaching death while he had just aged a couple of years.

Does time travel sound appealing or frightening to you? Is it really possible for humans in
reality? How can we achieve it practically?

How Time Travel works in Theory?

In 2016, Dr. Serpa from the Paulista University and Dr. Steiner from the Santa Cruz State
University in Brazil collaborated to investigate the possibilities of developing a time machine
using a mathematical approach. They predicted the effect of gravitation on the flowing of
time and established some physical conditions required to develop a time machine2.

To understand the principle of time travel, you should first have a brief understanding on the
concept of time. Before 1915, physicists believed that time is universal, which means that the
flow rate of time is the same in anywhere in the universe. However, after Einstein published
the theory of general relativity in 1915, we realised that the flow rate of time can be different
in different regions!
Distorted time
©Nigel Neve Available from: https://www.flickr.com/photos/nodulespix/7338409098/

Time flows slower around a more massive object2. You can treat gravitation as attractiveness.
When you see something appealing and arousing your interest on the street, you would slow
down and look at it. In the universe, gravitation is attractive to time. The more massive the
object is, the slower the time flows. For example, black hole is the most massive object
known in the universe. The time near a black hole flows much slower than the time on Earth.
As time is not universal and could be different between regions, time travel becomes
possible!

The MOST Important Tool: Wormhole

Why aren’t we time travellers now if it sounds possible? Currently, as our understanding of
the universe is still insufficient, scientists haven’t come up with a solid answer for the method
of time travelling. But you don’t need to feel frustrated. Generally, the theoretical physicists
believe that wormhole is an essential tool for developing a time travel machine2.

Do wormholes naturally exist in the universe? The answer is YES! The research of Professor
Maldacena from the Institute of Advanced Study in the United States showed that the
existence of macroscopic wormholes is possible and obeys the law of physics3, though this is
still being researched.

According to Professor Maldacena’s research, a wormhole consists of two entrances which

are connected by a tunnel. Passing through the wormhole is just like taking a shortcut3. Two
very distant places, which light requires hundreds of thousands of years to travel through,
could be connected by a wormhole. When you travel to a distant planet, which is much more
massive than Earth, through a wormhole and then return to the earth after staying there for a
period of time, you are actually travelling forward in time3!

Imagine that you are travelling from Hong Kong to America. The ordinary way to travel is to
take a flight over the surface of Earth. By taking a shortcut, you are going to penetrate the
core of our planet and reach the other side of Earth directly. If you are using the same speed,
the time required for the latter one is shorter for sure. In the universe, which is a more
complicated environment, wormholes act as a shortcut which enables us to travel to a very
distant place with less time.
Illustration of the working principle of a wormhole
© Link Observatory Space Science Institute Available from:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/linkobservatory/13393981343/

How about Backward Time Travel?

After knowing one of the ways of going to the future, do you want to go to the past?
Unfortunately, it is much more complicated and fewer scientific foundations have been made
on this before.

A problem on backward time travel that scientists were unable to solve is time paradox4,
which shows that backward time travel would falsify itself in some situations.

First, suppose someone really invented a time machine that can undergo backward time
travel. If that person went to the past and killed his mother before he was born, so did the
time traveller exist? If his mother died before giving birth to the time traveller, the time
traveller would not exist. If the time traveller did not exist, he could not kill his mother5. So
confusing! Isn’t it? As backward time traveller may do something to alter the history and thus
lead to an alternative future, the existence of the time machine may no longer be true. It is
almost impossible under the current understanding of the universe2.

That’s why we still haven’t met a person coming from the future. In order to develop a
backward time travel machine, we may need to wait for the physicists to develop a new
system of explanation of the universe, or we may choose to believe that the nature could
solve these kinds of paradoxes automatically2.

Another Problem to be Solved: Negative Energy

The research of Dr. Serpa pointed out that wormholes in nature only exist momentarily and
with a microscopic scale2, which means that it could disappear just after the moment that it
was created and even cannot be observed by bare eyes. Under these circumstances, Dr. Serpa
pointed out that it is impossible for human beings to undergo time travel by the wormholes
existing in nature2.

How are we going to make wormholes traversable?

To enlarge and sustain the wormholes so as to make it traversable, Dr. Serpa suggested that a
huge amount of negative energy is required2. Like wormholes, this form of energy also exists
momentarily in nature. Currently, scientists are still working on the way of generating stable
negative energy2.

Negative energy sounds abstract. What is it actually?

As its name implies, negative energy is the inverse of the ordinary form of energy in our daily
life: positive energy. The total average energy in the space has to remain positive. Extra
positive energy is required to offset the effect of generating some amount of negative energy2.
Like an air-conditioner, hot air is pumped out to the environment so as to give out cold air to
cool down the room. Hot air is the positive energy while cold air is the negative energy.

Moreover, a strong pulse of negative energy could only last for a short time while a weaker
pulse could last longer6. However, in order to keep the tunnel of the traversable wormholes
open, we need a strong pulse of stable7 negative energy8. Under the current level of
technology, we are not able to generate such a huge amount of negative energy. If the
engineers could develop a way to generate it, time travel is then no longer a theoretical issue.

Leaping into the Future

Although time travel is becoming an engineering problem rather than a scientific problem,
there are still many uncertainties for the scientists to explore.

Imagine a future where everyone can live without regrets, travel to different eras, forecast the
future. Would it cause chaos? Can humans reap the greatest benefit from time travel but not
ruining the world by undermining the fundamental feature of life - uncertainties?

If the fantasy becomes the reality, you should doubt whether this article is written by me at
this moment. Would I get a better grade if I had taken reference from my future’s feedback
for this article? Who knows? How about you? What are you going to do? Time to think about
it!

References

1. James O, Tunzelmann EV, Franklin P, Thorne KS. Visualizing Interstellar’s

Wormhole. American Journal of Physics. 2015 [accessed 2018 Sep 13]; 83(2015):
486-499. https://aapt.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1119/1.4916949?class=pdf
2. Serpa N, Steiner JR. General Relativity, Quantum Gravity and All That: Time
Machines in Perspective by Singularity Functions. Bulgarian Journal of Physics. 2016
[accessed 2018 Sep 13]; 43(2016):1-20. http://www.bjp-
bg.com/papers/bjp2016_1_001-020.pdf
3. Maldacena J, Stanford D, Yang ZB. Diving into traversable wormholes. Progress of
Physics. 2017 May [accessed 2018 Nov 22]; 65(5): 170034. https://onlinelibrary-
wiley-com.eproxy.lib.hku.hk/doi/epdf/10.1002/prop.201700034
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[accessed 2018 Sep 17]; 313: 68-73.https://www-nature-
com.eproxy.lib.hku.hk/scientificamerican/journal/v313/n3/pdf/scientificamerican0915
-68.pdf 

5. Dunlap L. The Metaphysics of D-CTCs: On the Underlying Assumptions of

Deutsch’s Quantum Solution to the Paradoxes of Time Travel. History and
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https://arxiv.org/pdf/1510.02742.pdf
6. Rahaman F, Kalam M, Rahman KA. Wormholes Supported by Scalar Fields with
Negative Kinetic Energy. International Journal of Modern Physics A. 2009 April 28
[accessed 2018 Nov 20]; 24(27): 5007-5018. https://www-
worldscientific.com.eproxy.lib.hku.hk/doi/pdf/10.1142/S0217751X09046023

7. Zangeneh MK, Lobo FSN, Dehghani MH. Traversable wormholes satisfying the
weak energy condition in third-order Lovelock gravity. Physical Review D. 2015
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https://arxiv.org/pdf/1510.07089.pdf
8. Lee DS, Yeh CP. A Holographic Description of Negative Energy States. Journal of
High Energy Physics. 2016 September 19 [accessed 2018 Nov 22]; 2016:59.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.02420.pdf