Physicists Agree That Time Travel is Possible – at Least in one Direction

New York (USA) At the “World Science Festival” Brian Greene, a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, gave a speech on the latest scientific knowledge about movements through time. Of course the most popular question, if time travel is somehow possible, Greene answered with yes.

According to Greene, there would be exactly two different ways to travel through time. Traveling into the future is one of them and this is also the one that many scientists agree, should actually be feasible. Professor Greene says that Albert Einstein explained mankind how time travel works and it is astonishing to him, that people know next to nothing about it.

Apparently traveling to the future is definitely possible. According to Einstein, the process basically works like this: A person flies to space and accelerates to nearly the speed of light and then returns back to earth. Nothing will feel different to the person, but returning to earth after a journey of a few years, time would have advanced by thousands or even tens of thousands of years, depending on how fast the traveler was. The person would have successfully traveled to the future. In addition, Einstein showed that staying near a strong gravitational source (such as a black hole) and approaching the edge of this object would cause the time for this person to be greatly slowed down compared to everyone else. Back here on earth, time would have passed much faster.

According to Greene, many scientists who are familiar with these theories would agree with the findings of the German physicist icon. However what creates controversial discussions is the travel into the past, because unlike traveling into the future, many physicists do not believe that time travel into the past is possible in any way. One reason being that things from the past simply do not physically exist in our universe anymore.

Some Scientists still do not completely rule out this option and instead think that the wormhole theory could be the key to time travel, which was also formulated by Albert Einstein. Einstein’s theory states that manipulating the opening of a wormhole means that time does not pass at the same pace at both ends. Thus, when crossing this tunnel one would not get from one place in space to another place, but from one moment in time to another moment. The future would be in one direction and the past in the other.

The wormhole theory states that a passage through space-time could create a shortcut for large distances across the universe. In 1916 Wormholes were first suggested by Austrian physicist Ludwig Flamm, although he called them a “white hole”. While studying another physicist’s solution to the equations in Einstein’s theory of general relativity, Flamm found another possible solution. He described the “white hole” as a theoretical time reversal of a black hole, where entrances to both could be connected by a space-time conduit. Later in 1935, Einstein himself and Nathan Rosen used the theory of general relativity to propose the existence of “bridges” through space-time.

Recently there was also new research that explored the possibility of traveling through at least microscopic wormholes. The problem of previous models was that the only way to keep the wormhole open required an exotic form of matter (negative mass). In the new study, Dr. Blázquez-Salcedo and his colleagues demonstrated that the wormholes could also be traversable without such exotic matter. In their model, the researchers consider certain elementary particles such as electrons and their electric charge as the matter that is to pass through the wormhole.

However the researchers said that “the microscopic wormholes postulated by our team would probably not be suitable for interstellar travel”. Their research paper can be found in the journal Physical Review Letters (https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.101102).