- A recent study claims to have calculated a potential method of time travel.
- It involves a highly theoretical object called a “ring wormhole,” which is a type of wormhole that connects two regions of space, like a portal.
- Ring wormholes had previously been theorized to be portals to other universes, and researchers now propose they could act as time machines as well.
If you could go back in time and change one thing, what would you change? As much fun as that question can be to ponder, we’re not traveling back in time… yet.
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But that hasn’t stopped scientists from trying to figure out how we maybe could, someday, jump around out of order in the time stream. And recently, a team of theoretical physicists published a paper on exactly what laws of physics could be stretched just far enough to make it happen.
The key to the whole idea is wormholes—specifically, a type of wormhole called a ring wormhole. Now, wormholes are already entirely theoretical, so this discussion is going to get weird. And ring wormholes get even weirder than “normal” wormholes.
Your average, run-of-the-mill wormholes, as we tend to think of them, are basically holes punched in the fabric of spacetime by the immense gravity of black holes. The gravity well at the center of these objects is so intense that scientists have often theorized they could act as tunnels to another universe, or another time.
But ring wormholes aren’t black-hole dependent. Instead, the (again, highly theoretical) objects are caused by circles of mass that have negative energy, something only made possible by the strange effects of the quantum realm. This circle of negative energy would basically create a portal to another universe without the need to go through a black hole tunnel.
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“You could go through and not even notice that you went to another universe,” Andrei Zelnikov, one of the authors on the recent paper, told New Scientist.
The paper—published in the journal Physical Review D by Zelnikov and his team—puts forth calculations that claim a ring wormhole could not only act as a universe-to-universe teleport, but as a time machine.
According to the heavy-duty number-crunching, the ring wormholes could generate something called a “closed timelike curve” if one “mouth” of the wormhole near a bunch of mass and the other “mouth” was far away from any significant amount of mass. If the conditions are right around the mouths of the wormhole, the closed timelike curves generated are then able to turn a portal into a time machine.
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“The time machine is a natural consequence of the wormhole existing,” Toby Wiseman, a professor of theoretical physics at the Imperial College London who was not a part of the study, told New Scientist. “Apart from the crazy matter that makes up the wormhole, there’s nothing too wild being postulated here, and then the consequence is something even more crazy.”
You can decide for yourself if proposing a method for time travel is “too wild.” But wild or not, scientists remain dedicated to truly understanding all of the laws of time and space—and exactly how we can bend them to make the coolest things possible.
