Science & Technology

Could wormholes enable us to time travel ?

By T.K. Randall
May 26, 2014 ·  81 comments

Could a wormhole be a portal to another time ? Image Credit: NASA A wormhole is essentially a shortcut through the fabric of spacetime, a passageway that joins two separate points and through which something could theoretically pass in order to traverse large distances almost instantly.

Some physicists have taken this idea one step further by speculating that wormholes may exist for which each end resides in a different time as well as in a different place. If this turns out to be true then sending a photon through one of these inter-dimensional corridors could make it possible to send messages in to the past or future.The catch however is that wormholes are only thought to exist for a tiny fraction of a second, far too short an existence to send anything through.

Now physicist Luke Butcher from the University of Cambridge has put forward a new idea that may be able to bypass this issue. His paper details the notion that if a wormhole is longer than it is wide then the energy within it may be sufficient to keep it open for long enough to send something through.

Whether these predictions will ever amount to a workable time travel mechanism remains to be seen, but it will certainly be interesting to observe first hand the peculiar physics going on inside one of these space-bending vortices if scientists ever do get the opportunity to study one up close.

Source: Phys.org | Comments (81)

Tags: Photon, Time Travel