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You've probably seen movies like "Back to the Future" and "The Time Machine" where scientists find brilliant ways to travel to the past and future. But really, scientists have only found one way that traveling through time might be possible. And it all has to do with wormholes and Einstein's theory of Realitivity (the closer something travels to the speed of light, the more slowly time will move for it.) But how would it work? Really, it's quite simple. If you took two mouths of a wormhole, and put one on Earth, then sent the other off into space near the speed of light, when the one in space comes back, maybe a year will have passed for it . . . while back on Earth, 70 years have passed for the other mouth of the wormhole, creating a time machine: one is a one year later, one at 70. So if you go through one mouth of the wormhole, you go 69 years in the future, and through the other, you go 69 years in the past. However, this means that it is impossible to go back in time to a point before the wormhole was created, as no matter what happens, both mouths of the wormhole will end up after the time machine was begun. Traveling through time at all brings up some interesting paradox. The most popular of these paradoxes is called the "Grandfather Paradox." It is: what if I went back in time and killed my grandfather before my mother was conceived? So then I could have never been born, and never been able to travel back in time, so then I would have been born, and would have gone back . . . It basically creates a mess. Well, scientists like to explain how paradoxes like the grandfather pardox could be resolved by bringing up another paradox: the Pool Table Pardox. It is: what would happen if, during a game of pool, I were to shoot one ball through a socket, and it went through a time machine to the past to a point before it was ever hit, and out of another socket. Then when the ball was hit in the first place, it would knock itself out of the way, so it would never go in the socket. But we live in a world of infinite possiblities. And while it may be likely that the ball will hit itself out of the way, there is always a possibility that it will not, or even that it would be the very thing that knocks itself in, in the first place, creating a complete circle. And this is what scientists say will always happen: that the universe in itself will prevent paradoxes. So can we go out a build a time machine right now? Sadly, no. For one thing, we can't travel nearly fast enough to create any kind of difference, we don't have enough power to keep a wormhole open . . . and we don't know what will happen. You see, there is one other fundamental problem: if we sent one mouth of a wormhole off into space, it is quite likely that when it comes back, the reacting energy between the two mouths of the wormhole will cause it to explode . . . and then you have no wormhole, and no time machine. We don't know. And we can't know, until scientist either try it out or learn the full fabric and equation of the universe. But we can know: at least it may be possible. And if we're creatures of the 3rd dimention trying to understand the 4th . . . well, maybe when we have that mastered, we can go after the 5th. |
| Time Travel |