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IS TIME TRAVEL POSSIBLE? - cont.

 But does this mean that we will be able to jump into H.G. Wells’ machine, spin a dial, and soar several hundred thousand years into a future of some England?

       No, or at least, not right now. There are a number of difficult hurdles to overcome. First, the main problem is one of energy. In the same way that a car needs gasoline, a time machine needs to have fabulous amounts of energy. One either has to harness the power of a star, or to find something called “exotic” matter (which falls up, rather than down) or find a source of negative energy. (Physicists once thought that negative energy was impossible. But tiny amounts of negative energy have been experimentally verified for something called the Casimir effect, i.e. the energy created by two parallel plates.) All of these are exceedingly difficult to obtain in large quantities, at least for several more centuries!
 
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Black Holes

Wormholes

Stephen Hawking

Superstrings

 

 

       Then there is the problem of stability. Kerr’s rotating black hole, for example, may be unstable if one falls through it. Similarly, quantum effects may build up and destroy the wormhole before you enter it. Unfortunately, our mathematics is not powerful enough to answer the question of stability because you need a “theory of everything” which combines both quantum forces and gravity. At present, superstring theory is the leading candidate for such a theory. (Actually, it is the ONLY candidate; it really has no rivals at all.) But superstring theory, which happens to be my specialty, is still too difficult to solve completely. The theory is well-defined, but no one on earth is smart enough to solve it. 

      Interestingly enough, Stephen Hawking once opposed the idea of time travel. He even claimed he had “empirical” evidence against it. If time travel existed, he said, then we would have been visited by tourists from the future. Yet we see no tourists from the future. Ergo: time travel is not possible.

      Because of the enormous amount of work done by theoretical physicists within the last five years or so, Hawking has since changed his mind, and now believes that time travel is possible (although not necessarily practical). Furthermore, perhaps we are simply not very interesting to these tourists from the future. Anyone who can harness the power of a star would consider us to be very primitive. Imagine your friends coming across an ant hill. Would they bend down to the ants and give them trinkets, books, medicine, and power? Or would some of your friends have the strange urge to step on a few of them?

     In conclusion, don’t turn someone away who knocks at your door one day and claims to be your future great-great-great-granddaughter. She may be right.
 

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