Making Time Travel a Reality

It’s a question everybody asks but never believes will be a possibility, “If you could travel to any point in time, when would you travel to?” As it turns out, time travel may not be as far off as many anticipate as there is now concrete science backing up the idea.

James Beacham, a particle physist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, sat down to talk to Chelsea Gohd at the Brain Bar Budapest, a festival focused in the future, to talk about the idea. One of Beacham’s proposed ideas was the idea of using wormholes. Beacham stated, “We know that space can be bent. If space can be bent by, say gravity, then space-time can be bent.” Space if the 3 dimensional system in which everything moves, space-time is the 4 dimensional system in which space and time meet. So, if space-time can be bent, so can time.

This may seem farfetched still, but scientists from the Department of Physics at the Universitat Autnòma de Barcelona have created a wormhole in a lab that connects two points in space magnetically. These wormholes are magnetic wormholes and not space-time (gravitational) wormholes, but the idea that an invisible wormhole can be made remains a big step in creating time travel.

Beacham said, “We could possibly address things about time travel and understand the basic nature of time with research that we do now. Or at least, in the next 50 to 100 years.” Stephen Hawking has also stated about time travel, “Even if it turns out that time travel is impossible, it is important that we understand why it is impossible.”