In the 90s of the last century, a Hong Kong newspaper published stories about a very unusual boy who claims to be an alien from the past. One could, of course, explain this strange statement by ordinary insanity, but something still got in the way: the boy spoke excellently in ancient Chinese, retelling many details from the lives of long-dead people, while having an excellent command of the stories of China and Japan.
Some episodes told by the boy were generally unknown, or only narrow specialists knew about them. The boy was dressed in clothes from Ancient China. It was very difficult to believe in the story of the boy, and his name was Jung Lee, while he himself did not fully understand how he got to modern Hong Kong.
Historians decided to check the boy's stories and delved into the study of ancient tomes stored in temples. And in one of them, their attention was attracted by a story that almost coincided with the boy's stories. Historians have also come across a record of the place of birth, as well as a record of his birthday. And when they were almost convinced of the boy's veracity, it turned out that he had disappeared after spending only a year in that time. Historians found, following the record of the boy's birth, another record that he had already disappeared several times, and when he appeared, he claimed that he was in the future, saw huge birds, magic mirrors, rode in a huge snake, and so on. It turned out that this mysterious boy traveled in time.
However, this case is not unique. Thus, the British metapsychic society, which existed more than 150 years ago, has collected in its archives about two hundred facts testifying about time travel: about travel from the past to our present and vice versa. Practically all those who came from the past had a hard time transferring themselves and ended their lives either in a clinic or in prison.
After developments in teleportation, anti-gravity, and torsion fields, the theories explaining time travel are perhaps the most impressive. However, it must be said that time travel has not been fully studied so far: there are still not only eyewitnesses, but also a universal definition of the concept of time.
In a sense, each of us is a time traveler, although this is not particularly impressive, especially since we can only move “forward” in this understanding.
Before the great Einstein, only literary men wrote about the possibility of time travel. Not many people know that the idea of turning back the clock did not belong to HG Wells, but to Edward Mitchell, the publisher of the New York Sun, who published a story about it seven years before Wells.
In the science of physics, it became fashionable to think about time travel after Einstein. The phenomenon of this time travel began to be explained on the basis of the action of the space time continuum. However, the "shadow" of the great Einstein is still felt in all more or less serious discussions on this topic.
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We - people are constantly moving in time space, moving through it. At its most basic level, "time" is the rate at which the universe changes, and whether we like it or not, we are subject to change all the time.
We measure the passage of time in seconds, hours or years, but this does not mean at all that the passage of time goes at a constant speed. After all, even the water in the river flows differently, so time in different places goes differently. In short, time is relative.
Scientists have found out that travel to the future happens all the time. They proved this postulate experimentally, and now it forms the basis of Einstein's famous theory of relativity.
Moving to the future is quite real, the only question is: "how fast"? And as for the journey into the past, then to understand it, you just need to look at the night sky.
The theory of relativity does not rule out the possibility of traveling to the past, but the very assumption of the existence of a button that can return to yesterday violates the laws of causality. When something happens in our universe, this event gives rise to an endless chain of many events. Moreover, the cause is always born before the effect. This is understandable: after all, the victim cannot die before the bullet hits him.
This would be a violation of reality, however, despite this, scientists do not at all exclude the possibility of travel to the past.
For example, they believe that moving faster than the speed of light can send a person back into the past.
It is likely that time travel depends not so much on the available basic knowledge of space as on existing phenomena in space, such as a black hole.
According to Einstein's theory, at a speed very close to the speed of light, the passage of time must necessarily slow down its speed. But the speed of light is unattainable in practice, unlike, for example, the speed of sound, which was overcome. Further, it is assumed from Einstein's theory that when the body develops a speed as close as possible to the speed of light, the existing weight of the body begins to increase, and at the moment of reaching this speed it becomes almost infinite.
Another axiom accompanying the theory of time states that the first time travel, if it is ever destined to happen, will not be associated with the invention of super-fast transport, but with a special environment within which the vehicle can accelerate to the required speed. And then such a structure as a collider comes to mind.
Corridors in time can also be formed by purely "natural" phenomena, for example, tunnels, black holes, cosmic strings, and so on.
The most likely candidates for "time corridors" are called black holes, about the very nature of which very little is known to this day. However, it is generally accepted that stars whose mass is several times greater than the mass of the Sun, dying as a result of the combustion of their "fuel", explode under the pressure caused by their own weight.
And it is as a result of these explosions that black holes appear, in which such powerful gravitational fields are formed that even light cannot escape from this area. Any object that has reached the boundaries of black holes - the so-called event horizons - is absorbed into them, and what is happening "inside" is absolutely not visible from the outside.
Presumably, in the depths of black holes, at the so-called point of the singular, somewhere in their center, the laws of physics cease to operate, and the temporal and spatial coordinates simply change places. It turns out that travel in space turns into travel in time.
Physicists have put forward such an assumption that if there are black holes, all tightening, everything that turned out to be in the zone of influence, then somewhere in the "cores" of holes there must be "white holes" pushing out matter with the same crushing force.
However, there is one "but": before any body reaches the area where the laws in force in traditional physics cease to operate, this body will be destroyed. This point of view was expressed by physicist from the California Institute of Technology Kip Thorne, who proposed a more efficient way to obtain the value of acceleration necessary for time travel. Thorne, basing again on Einstein's theory, according to which space is constant everywhere with time, studied other "holes" in the space-time continuum. Such tunnels, in his opinion, are capable of forming due to casual twisting in the space between very distant objects. These tunnels should connect the most distant points in space, existing, however, in fundamentally different time planes.
Thorne quite seriously suggested that at the time of opening such tunnels, in order to keep them open all the time, cover the surfaces of the tunnel with some incomprehensible substance with a negative energy density. And when gravitational forces begin to tend to destroy the tunnel, trying to close it, the coating will allow the walls to be pushed apart, keeping it from collapse.
Another, no less curious theory about the methods of time travel belongs to the physicist from Princeton University, Richard Goth, who put forward a theory about the existence of some comic strings formed in the earliest stages of the formation of the universe.
According to this string theory, literally all the microparticles were formed by tiny strings closed in a loop, while they are under monstrously high tension, reaching hundreds of millions of tons. The thickness of these strings is much less than an atom, but the colossal force of gravity with which they can act on those objects that fall into the zone of their influence can accelerate them to a gigantic super-speed. The combination of these strings, as well as the juxtaposition of a black hole and such a string, can create closed corridors with curved space-time continua, which can be used for time travel.
Today there are other, although not such "exotic" ways of "deceiving" time. And astronauts can do it most easily. For example, staying on the planet Mercury for thirty years means that astronauts will return to our planet younger than if they had stayed on Earth, since the planet Mercury revolves around the sun, albeit only slightly, but faster than our Earth. However, in this case, the linear course of time is still preserved, and this phenomenon somehow does not attract time travel.
Moreover, it is noted that astronauts entering orbits with the help of the Shuttles are already ahead of our "Earth" time by a certain number of nanoseconds, but they are still very far from reaching the speed of light.
In addition to the technical problems surrounding time travel, modern physicists are discussing the existence of possible time conflicts. The real problem that time travelers can expect is the paradoxes of time, of which many can arise, and at the same time all of them will somehow be connected with the impact on the course of already accomplished events.
In general, hypotheses, reasoning, discussions or lectures about the possibility of time travel are a favorite pastime of quite serious physicists, their so-called intellectual fun. Once Carl Sagan - NASA astrophysicist - in response to the remark that if any time travel were possible, then there would be a lot of "aliens from the future" among people, replied that there is at least ten ways to disprove this claim, and one of them is a time machine.
The genius of physics, Einstein, faced discontinuities in time during World War II, during the famous Philadelphia experiment, which ended tragically. Then Einstein destroyed all the records, saying that such experiments are very dangerous over time. But this did not prevent scientists from the MAI, the Plant im. Khrunichev, production associations "Salut" and "Energia" in the early 90s of the last century to create the very first model of the "time machine".
The tests of the machine were very successful, and this device was modified and improved. During experiments with the modified model, the clock placed inside the apparatus fell behind by as much as four hours, then the instruments began to record magnetic oscillations already four hours before the experiment. Information about these experiments has not been disclosed to this day.
Americans are also very active in such studies, but, like our researchers, they prefer not to disclose their results. However, some information could still be leaked to the press: rabbits were launched into the created time machine, and during the experiment one of the animals died. And although before sending the unfortunate creature on an unknown and unexplored journey, he was properly fed, upon opening the rabbit's stomach was completely empty. And that could only mean one thing: he died before he ate.
It turns out that the hypothetical possibility of time travel still exists, and the most critical skeptics cannot refute it. In this case, theories are theories, but practical developments are nevertheless underway. Moreover, they are being conducted with some success.
The future or the past, to which we can ever go, may well exist in our parallel universe. Most likely, though, this time travel will become a one-off, and we can never return home. Do we need it?