Disappointment In Disguise

Hey, losers

(Headnote: if you happen to be a profound enthusiast of Time Travel, Wormholes or changing the past and foreseeing the future, I heavy heartedly warn you that you’ll end up being very disappointed after reading this article. ).

Lot of people often discuss about going to the past or changing their past in order to change their present and hence their future (including me.). Some movies also visualised this idea like the DeLorean in Back to the future or The Time Heist in Avengers: Endgame. H.G. Wells talked about a Device in his novel, The Time Machine and Baran Bo Odar did a marvellous job in creating the famous web series DARK. And consequently, they have developed huge fanbases, me being an even greater one. But being a person who is curious about how and why things work the way they do, I discovered that the ideas and concepts of time travel have a sort of sad reality to lurking within them. Let’s see what that is and may be.

The fire of understanding the nature was first ignited by the Original Gangster- Albert Einstein in the late 19th century. His fanning the flame led to the General Theory of Relativity or GRT. He formulated a plot where the curvature or warping of the very fabric of spacetime is used to explain every and any cosmic phenomenon. It was only for the GRT that we got actual theoretical blueprints for time travel but he never worked on it on a serious note because maybe he knew that the idea was weak. Actually, if you think about it, then in retrospect there is no such thing as Time Travel. There’s just Time Slippage or Time Dilation which means that observers moving at high speeds (comparable to the speed of light- ~3,00,000 Km/s) perceive time very differently in comparison to stationary observers. As an example, (and this is an experimentally proven one)2 synced atomic clocks (the highest precision clocks on Earth) show different times when one is sent off on a supersonic jet and returned after a short while. Sadly, we humans can’t experience this difference because we don’t interact with objects at relativistic velocities (fractions of the speed of light). If anything, the greatest difference we can see is by the astronauts on the International Space Station or ISS for short. There we can find time differences as huge as 5 to 60 minutes which means that the astronauts are up to an hour younger than you. How cool is that! In fact, you can go 6 million years into the future by travelling at 97% the speed of light but it is practically impossible because we just don’t have rockets that can accelerate upto those speeds. The highest velocity ever reached by a man made object is by the Voyager 2 space probe which is still travelling at speeds as huge as 80,000 Km/hr and presently is out of our solar system. And this speed is just 0.007% the speed of light, let alone 97% of that. But enough of the future; what about the past? Is it really possible to see or change the past? Can we go years back into the past like we can into the future? The answer is a big fat NO. Not just in principle but also in practise. Let’s see how and why?

We actually have 3 candidates for travelling to the past namely- Van Stockum’s cylinder, Black Holes and Wormholes. Surprisingly, all of these candidates can allow you to do crazy things like meeting younger self or Killing your grandfather or reaching a point in space before you even started your journey or marrying your own aunt. Of course these actions lead to paradoxes like you never being born to make a time machine if you kill your own grandfather or knowing things without even having a source. Maybe these things can’t happen because The Spectator doesn’t want them to happen. But jokes apart, there is pure physical logic to why Time Travel has IMPOSSIBLE written all over it.

• Van Stockum’s cylinder is a hypothetical infinitely spinning cylinder which can create huge time differences in the vicinity of it’s surface. To put it simply, it Draws time towards it’s center. You can reach the endpoint of your path before starting your journey.

• Black Holes can take you to the very End Of Time where all meanings to rational ideas about spacetime Fade away. For starters, if you manage to reach the center or singularity of a black hole (16 seconds of eternal life), you can see the entire universe since the Big Bang to the present moment in a split second’s time including the back of your head. No doubt a Black Hole can warp and stretch the very fabric of spacetime but it is just straight up impossible to stand against the immense gravity and ‘Anger’ of the Dark Monster.

But in this frenzy of doubts and disappointments there seems to emerge a ray of hope which can make actual Time Travel possible in a couple 100 years or so and that ray comes from Wormholes.(although the conditions required to open or sustain a wormhole useful enough are astronomically Gargantuan but I can’t stop being optimistic)

• If you have watched the movie Interstellar, you must have seen that the crew travels through a 3 dimensional wormhole near Saturn which connects space between whole galaxies. Professor Kip Thorne and his students of Caltech University actually worked on theoretical models of Wormholes or Einstein-Rosen Bridges, to speak in a fancy manner. In a nutshell, Wormholes are hypothetical tunnels in the very fabric of spacetime which reduces the distance and time between 2 points in space. It’s like digging a tunnel through a mountain to save time and reduce the distance. But the only problem is that to tear or dig the very fabric of space is neither possible nor allowed by the laws of physics. Although Quantum Mechanics allows it at very high energy levels (3.4810^47 or 3.48 followed by 47 zeroes. And that’s the energy our sun will produce in its whole lifetime i.e. 10 Billion years; and just to get a feel of it, the explosion in Nagasaki was just a puny little fraction of the energy our sun produces in one second, let alone generating enough for 10 billion years and anyway our sun is already half of it’s age old)*. And this energy is only to open up a Wormhole a meter wide. The hole produces an infinite loop of energy and time gets all messed up and sadly, we don’t and can’t do that.

So the best we could do for the time being is to find our fantasies fulfilled in movies and web series. But considering the voids in certain theories and concepts, actual Time Travel is a possibility only TO the future and IN the future. In fact, that answers the question that why don’t we have Time Travellers among us because it’s only possible ahead. And it has always been the tendency of human will to move ahead. That we will always try and shape the future.

Later.