In science fiction, people have managed to travel through time in spaceships, DeLoreans, hot tubs, and duffel bags, among many other things. It’s that simple. In real life, science can’t even decide whether time travel is even theoretically possible, although many prominent names are inclined to believe that it’s impossible. But what are people if not dreamers? Even without the technology or scientific know-how, we’ve encountered the idea of time travel more than you might think.
10. Stephen Hawking threw a party for time travelers
A good argument can be made that Stephen Hawking was the most brilliant scientist alive today, and certainly the most famous of the last thirty or so years. He was compared to Albert Einstein more times than you might imagine, and became one of those rare scientists who are so good at what they do that it gives them celebrity status.
Hawking, who majored in physics, did not agree with the idea of time travel. But as a scientist, he was not close to this idea, so he even planned a way to prove or disprove this idea. He threw a party for time travelers.
Being a scientist, there had to be a scientific twist to this idea, and sure enough, Hawking came up with one. He only advertised the party the day after it was held. So the only people who could attend would have to go back in time to do so. You might be surprised to learn that no one was at his party.
Hawking has long been known for his good sense of humor, and this incident was clearly something of a joke, but it does play into one of the most striking arguments against time travel that exists - if time travel is real, then why not? Have we met anyone from the future yet?
9. Astrophysicist Ronald Mallett thinks he's cracked time travel
While many scientists believe that the idea of time travel is frivolous and best left to the realm of science fiction, not all of them think so. Ronald Mallett has dedicated his life to time travel.
Mallett's father died when he was just 10 years old. He credits his lifelong love of science and learning to this man, and partly what inspired him to pursue the mystery of time travel. He wants to see his father again.
According to Mallett, he has worked out the equations that allow time travel. He has been working on this for sixty years, too. He believes he has developed a way to bend space-time using lasers that follows Einstein's general theory of relativity, but there is a major problem with his work. He believes that if it does work, it will only work once his machine is turned on. That means it will be a zero point, and no one will be able to travel further in time, so his dream of seeing his father will never come true.
Still, the potential to change the world exists if future humans can send information back to the present. But there's another catch. Mallett says the energy needed to run the machine would be "galactic."
8. There is a theory that a time-traveling bird stopped the Large Hadron Collider.
Few things are more frustrating to social media than the Large Hadron Collider. Search for stories about the window of light and you’ll find enough to keep you busy for days. People thought it would open a black hole, or a portal to another dimension, or hell itself. And while that all sounds silly, it’s true that in 2009, the collider had so many problems that it had to be shut down. And that got people wondering what might have happened. And in a world where people already think the machine could open a gateway to hell, it’s not hard to imagine there were some outlandish theories about why it shut down.
One of the more interesting theories was that time travel had stopped the machine, or more accurately, some kind of chain reaction of future particles going back in time. But a more sophisticated theory suggests that there's more to it than that.
The particle accelerator was shut down because it overheated. But it didn't overheat by accident. It had a piece of baguette in it. So how does a piece of bread get into a giant particle accelerator? Some suggested that a bird dropped it along the way. But others suggested that it wasn't an ordinary bird. Perhaps it was a bird sent from the future to that exact place and time so that it could drop the bread and shut down the accelerator.
As silly as it sounds, more than one scientist has suggested, at least somewhat seriously, that the LHC is so potentially dangerous that time, the universe, or the people of tomorrow have devised ways to stop it from working.
7. Scientists have determined that time travelers probably don't use social media
If there was someone from the future out there in the world right now, where would you look for them? If you think social media is the answer, think again. Scientists have spent some time trying to find them on Facebook, Twitter, and other sites, but they haven't found anything.
Physicists at Michigan Technological University tried to find evidence of time travelers back in 2013 and came up empty-handed. Their search included looking for any sign of messages or communications indicating that a person knew about future events, things that a person in the present should never know.
They acknowledged that the discovery does not prove that time travelers do not exist; after all, people from the future may not use Facebook or Twitter. Plus, if someone did time travel for a serious reason, there's a good chance they wouldn't stop to scroll through Twitter.
6. Man Claims to Be From 2030 Supposedly Passes Lie Detector Test
Sure, we just looked at a couple of cases where the evidence points to time travelers not existing, but maybe they just weren't looking hard enough. Sometimes people come out into the world claiming to be honest with time travelers, and they make the news.
In 2018, a man claiming to be from the year 2030 made headlines when he allegedly took several linear detector tests that proved his claims to be true. Now, years later, we can look back and speculate that he may not have been from the future at all, as he claimed that Donald Trump would win a second term. Other less specific predictions included self-driving cars becoming very popular, virtual reality, no one using Instagram, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s granddaughter becoming president when she’s 21.
5. China was forced to deny the creation of a time machine
While most people want to prove, if not explore, time travel, one lab in China has been forced to take the opposite approach and deny that they have anything to do with it. In 2021, the country's largest government particle physics lab was caught up in rumors that they were helping a private firm build a time machine.
A private company called Ruitai claimed that a third organization created a PowerPoint that linked them to a particle physics lab, and it's unclear whether they were trying to build a time machine and were simply mistakenly linked to a government lab, or whether the entire story was made up.
The leaked PowerPoint title mentions a Nobel laureate involved in the project, and he's not even a real person. As for Ruitai, the company had only been around for a few months when it was leaked, so it's hard to tell what's going on, but rest assured, there's no time machine in China. They swear.
4. Iranian scientist claims to have invented a machine to predict the future
Is seeing the future the same as time travel? It might be a bit of a hoax, but an Iranian scientist has claimed to have invented a machine that can do just that. Using what was described as “complex algorithms,” the machine could supposedly predict a person’s future with 98% accuracy.
Known as the Aryaeka Time Travel Machine, it would print out a report of your life five to eight years into the future. The inventor was the managing director of Iran's Strategic Invention Center, and his time machine was one of 179 other inventions he had registered there. Of course, at the same time the story broke, Iran's deputy minister of science, research and technology basically dismissed it as nonsense.
3. Researchers believe that parallel timelines make time travel possible without paradox
The big problem with time travel comes in the form of a time paradox. Say you go back in time before you were born and kill your own father. How then can you be born, grow up, and go back in time? Well, some enterprising minds argue that the math still works for paradox-free time travel. The answer, as Dr. Strange might tell you, lies in parallel timelines or dimensions.
According to one physicist, spacetime can be shown to mathematically accommodate paradoxes. One example given was disease. You travel back in time to stop Covid-19. If you succeed, Covid-19 will not happen, and in the future you will not need to travel back in time. So either you are creating a new timeline, or the universe is preventing you from succeeding, and Covid-19 will spread no matter what you do. Either way, time moves on. And according to physicists, it is all possible, at least on paper.
2. Mental time travel
Sometimes science plays a little fast with its definition of time travel, as in the case of mental time travel. Research has shown that the human mind has an internal time flow independent of external time. So we can mentally time travel in our own heads, back through memories, and into the future.
Electrodes in the brains of epileptics have been studied and have shown that brain cells associated with time fire on their own, independent of external stimuli, indicating that human episodic memory of how things happen and when exists on a kind of internal timeline.
This ability to be aware of the past and future is called chronesthesia.
1. Sergei Krikalev traveled through time
It wouldn't be a punchline to talk about time travel and dash your hopes that it's real at every turn, so why not focus for a moment on the only real time traveler in the world? Sergei Krikalev, according to everything we now understand about science, has traveled through time.
Krikalev is a Russian cosmonaut who has spent a lot of time in space. In fact, he has spent over 800 days in orbit. And because of the way Einstein's theory of relativity works, he has traveled not only in space, but also in time.
If you’re a fan of science fiction, you may know that the closer you get to the speed of light, the slower time goes. This is called time dilation, and it means that the faster you travel through space, the less time passes for you overall. People here on earth can age up to 50 years, and for you, only a fraction of that age will pass, depending on your speed. Theoretically, if you reached the speed of light, time would stand still. And then, also theoretically, if you somehow traveled faster than light, you would go back in time. But that’s not the case with Krikalev’s story.
Astronauts in orbit are moving at about five miles per second. That's 18,000 miles per hour. That's nothing compared to the speed of light, but it's faster than anything on Earth. And since Krikalev has spent 803 days, 9 hours, 39 minutes in space, he's effectively traveled forward in time. Admittedly, he's only 0.02 seconds in the future, but that's more than the rest of us can tell.
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