Is Time Travel Possible?

You may think that time runs the same for everyone, regardless of where they are or
what they’re doing, but that is not actually true. Did you know, that each person has
their own measure of time?
A lot of things that were once science fiction are now a reality.
So what are the prospects for time travel?
In the early 1900s, Einstein showed that there is no such thing as “absolute time”.
Instead, each person has their own measure of time, and different observers need not
agree on the time of an event. Those who are traveling at high speeds or those who are
in a more powerful gravitational field will have their time running much slower
compared to others (this effect is called time dilation; at everyday speeds it is negligible).
This has profound implications because it means we can travel to the future! You can
step into a machine, wait, step out, and see that more time has passed on earth than it
has for you. Since time and space are related by Einstein’s theory of relativity, one way to
build such a machine would be to make a spaceship that accelerates nearly to the speed
of light and then comes back. Thus time travel to the future is just an engineering
problem now, we know it can be done. But what about time travel to the past?
Well…that’s more complicated. Since time and space are related, it shouldn’t surprise
you that traveling through space is related to traveling through time. More specifically,
going faster than the speed of light is equivalent to traveling backward in time. It is easy
to see how. Let’s say event A is the opening of the 2023 Cricket World Cup and event B is
the 1001st meeting of the Congress on Proxima Centauri (our nearest star system, about
4 light-years away). Suppose B happens in 2024 by Earth’s time, so from Earth, event B is
one year away. But to get from A to B you need to travel faster than light, since B is 4
light-years away. If you did travel faster than light, you would reach B, but to an observer
on Proxima Centauri movning away from Earth at nearly the speed of light, event A
happens later. Thus you can again go back to A from B by traveling faster than light, and
you would have arrived back to event A (with sure knowledge of who would win the
world cup). However, there’s one problem with this. According to Einstein’s theory of
relativity, nothing can travel faster than light. So all our hopes are now gone…or is it?
Another way to traverse through time might be through “wormholes”. A wormhole is
like a thin tube of space-time that connects two nearly flat regions of space apart,
providing a shortcut through space-time. You can imagine it like a tunnel through the
side of a mountain. Normally, you would have to go up and over the mountain, but the
tunnel provides a shortcut to the other side. This can similarly allow us to travel to the
past. If you take a wormhole from event A, you can arrive at event B. But from event B, A
happens later, so you can then take a wormhole back to event A and arrive before it
begins. However, any wormhole always pinches off into a singularity (an infinitely dense
and small point), so there’s no way a spaceship can go through it. But there is a way
around it. If we can harness negative energy density, it could counteract the singularity
and make an opening, but that is much too advanced for our civilization (quantum
mechanics, unlike classical theories, allows some places to have negative energy,
provided there is enough positive energy in other places to make up for it).