Each of us at least once had the thought: "If only I could return to the past - I would have done everything differently!" Or there was a desire to look into the future and see how fate would turn out. It seems fantastic.
But American scientists at Michigan Technological University Robert Nemiroff and Teresa Wilson are convinced that time travel is not unreality. By now, many unexplained facts have accumulated.
For example, in 2008 in China, archaeologists were perplexed by a find made during excavations of a 16th century tomb. Researchers have found a certain metal object, upon closer inspection, turned out to be a miniature version of a Swiss watch. The hands were frozen at 10.06, and Swiss was engraved on the inside. How a modern product could have gotten to a place where no human has set foot for about 400 years remains a mystery.
A lot of interesting things were also found in photographs of the 20th century, in which researchers of this topic more than once found people who clearly did not fit into the era. So, in one of the pictures from 1940 from the opening of the South Fork bridge across the river in the Canadian province of British Columbia, a young man who was clearly mistaken in time attracted public attention.
Among the unremarkable crowd of people in hats and jackets, he was the only one - in fashionable sunglasses, a printed T-shirt and a cardigan, clearly out of fashion in the 40s. He had a camera in his hands, several decades ahead of its time. Experts who studied the picture confirmed that computer manipulation is excluded, because the alien is present in many photographs taken from different angles.
And how to explain the episode from the documentary from the premiere of Charlie Chaplin's 1928 film "Circus"? There you can see a woman at the entrance to the cinema, who puts … a mobile phone to her ear. Skeptics, however, argue that this is not a mobile phone at all, but an ordinary hearing aid. If so, then he also comes from a different time: miniature hearing aids appeared only in the 50s.
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Scientists from the United States suggested that these days travelers from the future could easily inherit on the Web, and thoroughly scoured the virtual space in search of records of events before they happened. They searched for references to world-wide events such as the discovery of the comet ISON and the election of a new Pope Francis.
Researchers tried to locate the prophetic records by the hashtags #cometison and #popefrancis on Twitter, as well as by the internal search logs of the Astronomy Picture of the Day portal, which is edited by Robert Nemiroff.
Scientists also posted an appeal for aliens from another time on the Internet to come out of the shadows. Despite their efforts, over the entire period of the study (from January 2006 to September 2013), scientists did not succeed in tracking down at least one traveler from the past or future. However, the failed experiment does not at all prove that time travel is impossible.
Getting off the ground
Great minds have fought, fought and will fight over the question of whether it is possible to break the wall between the past, present and future. To understand this, one cannot do without understanding the nature of time itself. It seems to us that it represents something clear and obvious. However, with the advent of more and more accurate measuring instruments, it becomes clear that time is a complex concept. It turns out that its performance depends on our location and the movement of the Earth.
“We live, as is commonly believed, in three-dimensional space,” says Professor, Doctor of Physics and Mathematics, Head of the Biophysics Department of the Physics Faculty of Moscow State University. MV Lomonosov Vsevolod Tverdislov. - Space is not an empty space, there are various fields and particles in it. In order to describe their interaction, one cannot do without a time coordinate. Space and time cannot be perceived separately."
On the basis of various experiments at the end of the 20th century, it was proved that the course of time in space can be changed by gravity - a universal fundamental interaction in nature between all bodies. True, in order to track these changes, you need a watch that can cut a second into a billion parts. It is such a device that is in the American National Institute of Standards and Technology. It is the most accurate clock in the world, measuring the vibrations of atoms and tracking the frequency of the time interval with nanosecond precision.
They lag behind by only 1 second in 3.7 billion years. With the weakening of gravity with distance from the Earth, such a clock will begin to run faster. Conversely, in a strong gravitational field, closer to the center of the Earth, they will slow down. It is this phenomenon - the change in the flow of time depending on the strength of the gravitational field - that opens one of the potential paths to travel into the future.
And here's an example. The gravitational effect on a person who left Earth in a spaceship weakens, and time begins to pass for him differently than for those who remained on the planet.
For example, an astronaut moving outside of Earth's gravity at a speed of 27,000 kilometers per hour will be 1 / 48th of a second ahead of time. It seems negligible, but by increasing the speed of the object, you can, in theory, look ahead even further. “Time can go faster or slower, depending on the speed of movement of bodies relative to each other. By changing the speed of your own movement, you can theoretically change the course of time for yourself,”says Vsevolod Tverdislov.
The saying "The quieter you go, the further you will be" is clearly not suitable for those who want to travel in time. Physicists believe that a spacecraft capable of moving to another temporary reality must reach at least 98 percent of the speed of light.
Of course, modern technologies are still very far from this, but if we assume that a person moving at a speed of 300 thousand kilometers per second will travel in outer space for a year, then, despite the fact that he himself has become older by only 12 months, having returned on Earth, he will find that he has arrived in the very present future - it will be 10 years on Earth.
Let's cut the path
However, it is not at all necessary to develop crazy speed to get ahead of time. Space can be deceived. Superstring theory allows us to take a fresh look at the structure of space-time. It describes the interaction of one-dimensional extended objects - ultramicroscopic quantum strings measuring only 10 to the minus 33rd power of centimeters. It is their vibrations that determine the properties of matter. One of the main provisions of this theory opens the way for time travel.
“The fact is that this theory can be formulated only if we assume the existence of additional dimensions,” says Irina Arefieva, professor, Doctor of Physics and Mathematics, leading researcher at the Steklov Mathematical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. - It cannot be formulated in a natural way in four-dimensional space; six additional dimensions are needed.
It is not difficult to write solutions that lead to time travel in these multidimensional spaces, but in any experiments additional dimensions are not yet visible, apparently due to insufficient capabilities. It takes colossal energy to penetrate these dimensions."
Scientists believed that the clue could be found at the level of energies that are achieved at the Large Hadron Collider. However, it has been experimentally proven that the energies that are in the LHC are not yet sufficient to confirm the existence of additional dimensions. But all is not lost, researchers are comforted that it is not working at full capacity, and a breakthrough may occur in the coming years.
In addition, there are alternatives to the Large Hadron Collider for studying the microworld - this is a linear collider, the technical design of which was published in June last year. It will be built in Japan.
If protons and heavy ions collide in a hadron collider, then in a linear collider it will be electrons, which, as scientists note, will make the experiment much cleaner and will allow you to learn more about the physics of small distances, without which it is impossible to further develop the theory of superstrings and, accordingly, the search for additional measurements.
And if you can still find additional dimensions, how can this help planned time travel? The idea is that you can buy time by getting to the desired point in a shorter way, moving in additional dimensions. “Imagine two high-rise buildings,” explains Irina Arefieva. - You can move up and down in each elevator. In this case, the space you are in is limited to movement from the first floor to the last in both buildings and, in addition, you can move along the street at the level of the first floor. This is a model of the world in our current understanding.
However, the situation changes if you have something like a cable car. It can be thrown, say, from the hundredth floor of one building to the hundredth floor of another. Passages between dimensions will be similar to this suspension road between buildings. A similar structure of space can exist in additional dimensions."
Don't touch anything
So, assuming that time travel is still possible, the question arises: could we change something in the past? And here we are faced with a contradiction. For example, what about the so-called murdered grandfather paradox, first described in 1943 by science fiction writer Rene Barzhavel?
Let's say a person travels into the past and kills his grandfather there before he met his grandmother and one of the time traveler's parents was conceived. Accordingly, the possibility of the very birth of a traveler and the murder of his grandfather in the past is cut off. Most scientists agree that if there is a possibility of returning to the past, then people who have moved there already become part of this past. They can live in it, but they cannot change it.
The theory by which it will be possible to avoid such collisions was recently put forward by quantum computing specialist Seth Lloyd of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He investigated from the point of view of quantum mechanics closed timelike curves - lines that lead a material particle to its starting point. As a result, the scientist came to the conclusion about the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics. The study concerned only quantum particles, but the scientist is sure that the reasoning can be transferred to larger objects.
Seth Lloyd argues that time travel is possible only if causality is not broken. In other words, the traveler will only have access to certain variants of events that do not lead to a change in the course of history. Let's say you arrived in the past to kill your grandfather, thought it over carefully, pointed your gun, but the plan will fail anyway. For example, because a gunsmith accidentally makes a defective bullet, the pistol will eventually misfire and the assassination attempt will fail.
This variant of time travel really seems to be ideal: I came, I saw and went home. Otherwise, if everyone would change the past to their liking or build the future, interfering in it as they please, this already insane world would finally roll off the coils. The past would be superimposed on the future, and the future on the past - as a result, humanity would be left without the present, although, as many philosophically note, it does not exist anyway.
In general, everything would look like a joke common among American scientists, about the fact that the Titanic could not sink from a collision with an iceberg, but from overload due to a large number of time travelers who decided to watch the wreck of the legendary liner.
Anastasia Pashchenko
Opinions
Semyon Nikolaev, author of the book "Evolutionary circulation of matter in the Universe":
- Time travel is nothing more than fiction. Time is associated with the movement of matter, and this process can only be reversed in science fiction films. There is no backward movement in the universe. It is wrong to look for a means of time travel through the curvature of space, because it is also immaterial, which means that it cannot be curved.
And you should not use the theory of relativity to confirm the possibility of such travel. This is an unreal thing, not experimentally confirmed. And physics only accepts experimental evidence.
Yuri Senkin, ufologist:
- It is possible that a person has not yet learned to travel in time for a reason. Most likely, nature itself protects us from this, so that we do not harm ourselves and the world around us. After all, voyages to the past can certainly affect the future. If everyone is chaotically moving back and forth in time, we will simply cease to exist.
More and more alternative universes will begin to emerge, their mass at some point will increase so much that a collapse will occur. So if time travel becomes possible, then it will probably be controlled by special structures, as described in the story of Ray Bradbury "And Thunder Rocked."