Time Travel — A mystery maze
The question is not where, but when.
In the light of recent events, if science allowed we all would never decline a journey to just see our future selves. Imagine the endless curiosities time travel will quench.
We’ll get to know whether we get our dream job, how we will look 20 years later, whom we will end up marrying, all in all, how bright or dismal our future looks like. On the other hand, if time-travel is a double-sided pathway, we’ll be able to travel to our past, take a sneak at what our parents looked like when they were kids and how ‘disciplined’ they were when they were of our age. The amount of information that time travel deprives us of is pretty vast and somehow unfair.
Now, returning to the real question, is time-travel a possibility or is it just a cooked up science fiction?
Let’s explore some time-travel related conspiracies and theories before we dive into the possibilities of time-travel.
Firstly, what is time?
Albert Einstein showed that time is an illusion, it is relative — it can vary for different observers depending on your speed through space. To Einstein, time is the “fourth dimension”. Space is described as a three-dimensional arena, which provides a traveller with coordinates such as length, width and height which shows the location. Time provides another coordinate which is direction, although conventionally, it only moves forward.
Till now what we thought was a mere play of digits, is something which has such a lot of physics in it and can even confuse some of the most talented scientists out there.
Next, what exactly is time-travel?
Time travel is the concept of movement between certain points in time, analogous to movement between different points in space by an object or a person, typically with the use of a hypothetical device known as a time machine.
Moving onto some time-travel related conspiracies and paradoxes,
The first one on the list is the most famous grandfather paradox.
The grandfather paradox is a potential logical problem that would arise if a person were to travel to past time. The name comes from the idea that if a person travels to a time before their grandfather had children, and kills him (pretty harsh here), it would make their birth impossible, which in turn leads us to the question of WHO killed the grandfather? So, if time travel is possible, it somehow must avoid such a contradiction.
Over the years, scientists and science enthusiasts have curated solutions for the above paradox:
The first solution introduces us to the existence of parallel universes, it says that when you go back in time to kill your grandfather, you’re not going back to your history, but a copy of your history and everything you do in this version of your history will affect the alternate future of that universe, not your own.
But, this solution kind of bypasses the paradox, rather than solving it. What we want to know is what happens when we go back into our past, not a copy of it and alter things, what happens then, according to physics?
The best solution scientists have so far formulated is that if we go back in time and kill our grandfather, we don’t exist, so our grandfather can’t be killed. So, two realities are happening in parallel here. While all of this is 100 per cent hypothetical because no one’s gone back in time to test this out, we do have evidence of two separate realities happening in parallel such a phenomenon is called quantum superposition and is happening in the core of the Sun right now.
You can read more about Schröndinger’s cat experiment which will make the ideas of quantum superposition and quantum entanglement clear to you, also it’s an extremely interesting experiment.
Well, it sounds like a lot of quantum physics to digest. Let’s give it some time to sink in.
Fun-byte: The sudden dejavús we experience could be possible glitches in the matrix or even possibly a message from the ‘other’ world. Sounds familiar? Go figure out!
Another famous paradox which exists is the bootstrap paradox. It is yet another paradox which raises questions in the context of travelling to our past in the timeline.
The Bootstrap Paradox is a theoretical paradox of time-travel that occurs when an object or piece of information sent back in time becomes trapped within an infinite cause-effect loop in which the item no longer has a discernible point of origin, and is said to be “uncaused” or “self-created”.
Let’s take a simple example to better comprehend this,
This is the year 2020, and I am well aware of Newton’s laws of motion which were discovered back in 1686. Now, let’s say I own a time machine and go back in time to meet Isaac Newton( sounds fancy, right!) and have a casual conversation with him over a cup of coffee. Later, I explain to him Newton’s laws of motion in the best possible way. Now, the question arises, who exactly discovered the Laws of motion? This is an example of a piece of information which is stuck in the space-time loop without a proper origin.
Here’s a video which explains the bootstrap paradox with the example of Beethoven symphony :
Another paradox is the Predestination paradox which occurs when the actions of a person travelling back in time becomes part of past events, and may ultimately cause the event he is trying to prevent to take place. This results in a ‘temporal causality loop’ in which Event 1 in the past influences Event 2 in the future (time travel to the past) which then causes Event 1 to occur, with this circular loop of events ensuring that history is not altered by the time traveller, and that any attempts to stop something from happening in the past will simply lead to the cause itself, instead of stopping it. This paradox suggests that things are always destined to turn out the same way, and that whatever has happened must happen.
Let’s take an example to better comprehend this,
It’s going to get pretty violent here, but let’s not jinx it, let’s suppose your sister got killed in a massive car crash 5 years ago. You start feeling extremely lonely and you are ready to go to any extreme to bring her back. You make a time machine and go back in time to bring her back. You have no idea on how to drive a car still, you end up rash driving in a car you stole from the church’s parking lot. It’s a Sunday and you know that she’ll be around soon. In a hurry, you push down the accelerator and things get messed up and you hit hard on to a car in front, which you later realize is your sister’s car! This leads us to the conclusion that the events that we have been trying to stop will eventually lead to the cause itself. In other words, you can’t change your destiny!
Fun-byte: We all are time travelling to the future at the rate of 1 second per second. Also, if we compare two clocks, one placed on an airplane moving at a speed of 926 km/h, in the direction of rotation of Earth and the other placed on the ground, it can be observed that the clock in the airplane is moving slower, which is a solid proof to Einstein’s theory of relativity which states that the faster you travel the slower you experience time.
Now, coming to the heart of this article is time travel possible?
We’ll dissect this question in parts.
The wormhole theory postulates that a theoretical passage through space-time could create shortcuts for long journeys across the universe and time travel. Wormholes are predicted by the theory of general relativity. It exists theoretically and mathematically although scientists have never discovered a real wormhole.
Fun-byte: The Bermuda Triangle in the Atlantic Ocean is believed to be wormhole by a vast majority of people because of it’s gravitational properties and because of how, many vessels which have got lost around the triangle have never been found again.
A wormhole is speculated to have a microscopic size and is expected to be crushed by gravity the moment it is opened, but we have solid scientific ways to bypass that. Here’s is where exotic matter comes into picture.
Exotic matter is a type of matter which has negative mass. In other words, it does not obey the laws of gravity.
Since gravity crushes the ‘throat’ which connects the two openings of a wormhole, exotic matter which is an ‘anti-gravity’ matter can be potentially used to stabilize it, and it can be kept open and unchanging for longer periods, so as to let a human get to the ‘other’ side.
Although there are speculations about the existence of exotic matter on our Sun and even recent reports of exotic matter discovery at CERN, but we don’t have solid proof or evidence to back it up.
So, this seems like a hypothesis of hypothesis and a play of imagination, hence the answer to our question of whether time travel is possible is a no, right now. Possibilities can open up if scientists discover a wormhole or end up making one and stabilize it which sounds a bit complex and impossible to attain anywhere in the near future.
Moreover, if everything turns outright, we’ll have to venture through infinite paradoxes before things start making sense.
In the meantime, let’s brainstorm and see if we have any interesting solutions to the paradoxes and ponder about ‘when’ we would like to travel to if we are given a chance of a lifetime.
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