Science Forums 2

[futuretalk]

Most physicists agree that time travel does not violate any of the known laws of physics. Now whether it’s practical or not is another story; and today, it most certainly is not practical.

Michio Kaku, in his recent book, “Physics of the Impossible” believes that to harness a wormhole would require capturing all the mass energy of a galaxy.

But the most promising design for a time machine is the “transversable wormhole,” a hole in spacetime in which a person could freely walk back and forth in time. On paper, transversable wormholes can provide not only faster-than-light travel, but also travel in time. The key to transversable wormholes is negative energy.

A transversable wormhole time machine would consist of two chambers. Each chamber would consist of two concentric spheres, which would be separated by a tiny distance. By imploding the outer sphere, the two spheres would create a Casimir effect and hence negative energy. Assume that a Type III Civilization (we could get there in 300-500 years or so?) is able to string a wormhole between these two chambers (possibly extracting one from the spacetime foam).

Next, take the first chamber and send it into space at near light-speed. Time slows down in that chamber, so the two clocks are no longer in synch. Time beats at different rates inside the two chambers, which are connected by a wormhole.

If you are in the second chamber, you can instantly pass through the wormhole to the first chamber, which exists at an earlier time. Thus you have gone backward in time.

The problems with this design though are as follows: the wormhole may be quite tiny, much smaller than an atom (but it could send information back in time). And the plates may have to be squeezed down to Planck length distances to create enough negative energy.

With the neurons we possess today, this technology is far beyond our ability to turn into reality; but with the “Golden Age of Intelligence” expected between 2035 and 2050, and a few hundred years to work on it, sending information back in time to perform for us could one day become a “piece of cake.”

Comments welcome, Dick Pelletier