Sebastian Lozano Cruz

1102

The possibility of traveling in time could mean a great advance in technology, and several
unknowns could be resolved, whether about CTCs or the Einstein-Rosen bridge, but is this actually
possible?

Since we were little we have seen in science fiction movies that several characters manage to
travel to the past or future by means of time machines, which is why many people have been
interested in the subject and have wondered if it is possible to achieve it and although it is not is
not far from reality, achieving this is not going to be so simple.

You can think that time is something linear, that it cannot be modified and that despite not being
able to see it or touch it, we know that it is there, that it moves forward and that it controls our
lives; However, there is also the existence of time dilation, which consists of the difference in
which time has passed from two observers, that is, the time elapsed from the point of view of a
person on earth will pass faster than time seen from people traveling at high speed in space, this is
also linked to the concept of space-time which talks about how bodies with an unimaginable
amount of mass, such as a black hole for example, can curve space-time, making that the time is
different depending on where we are.

It should be noted that we have always been traveling in time, from the moment we are born until
we die we travel in time (linear), we have also traveled in time through people's writings since we
are transported to events from the past when we read, let's say an article. about the first world
war.

We must understand that it was not until 1907 that physics began to take time with the term
space-time introduced by Herman Minkowsky. and stopped taking it as a unitary dimension,
however, in order to solve our mystery we must delve into temporal paradoxes, the theory of
relativity.

What are temporal paradoxes?

In order to delve into this great topic, we must first know that it is a paradox. According to the
BBC, a simple example of this would be “the grandfather paradox, which presents a scenario
where a grandson travels to the past to kill his grandfather before his father was born, what
happens at this moment is that if he kills his grandfather his father could never have been born
and therefore the time traveler was born, in this way, if he was never born then no trip to the past
was ever made and In this way his grandfather never died and he was born, but in this way the
same process is repeated..."(2020)

Furthermore, the paradoxes caused by traveling through time can be divided into two categories,
the first is a paradox of consistency, that is, when the person goes to the past and can change it,
an example apart from the grandfather paradox would be the self. collision of a billiard ball,
created by Dolansky and Krtous, this example suggests the following:
 “Let's imagine for a moment a pool table in which two of its holes
are actually the entrance and exit mouths of a wormhole. The
hole is characterized by the fact that a billiard ball enters through
one of its ends, suppose it enters through the right mouth
indicated with the letter B, but emerges through the left end
(indicated with the letter A) some time ago, in such a way that

said billiard ball travels to the past and when it comes out it
collides with itself."

(Isea, 2016, P.2)

On the other hand, there are also the so-called paradoxes of creation from nothing. This time a
person travels to the past with, let's say, the final version of this writing and delivers it to his
respective car, consequently, the author of the past will no longer have the need to write it, but
here the dilemma arises, someone had to have written this essay, but if it was not the author, who
was it?

Regarding whether it is possible to travel in time or not, Einstein proposed two theories, special
relativity and general relativity, the first and proposes travel to the future while the second not
only proposes travel to the future but also to the past. When talking about special relativity we
would automatically talk about time dilation which was explained previously and to emphasize, it
deals with the difference in time that can occur from two observers either due to speed or gravity
factors.

In general, when a particle moves at a high speed, its space contracts, therefore, everything that
travels inside this particle will also do so, even if from their perspective they would not notice it,
no matter how much distance it will travel to the future. It will depend on how fast the object
moves and how much distance it travels, but this does not mean that we can increase the speed of
the object infinitely since there is a limit; According to Einstein,
As we increase the speed, the mass increases and in turn time stops, this means that we will reach
a point where a large amount of energy will be needed to be able to move, in addition to the
closer we are to the speed of light, the more likely it is that time will stop and it will be impossible
to continue moving forward.

The aforementioned could be opposed to the principle of chance, but if we were based on the
“consistency conjecture” which says that universal history is already written and therefore it is not
possible to modify it no matter how many attempts are made, in other cases In other words, if you
traveled to the past to avoid the Covid-19 pandemic, no matter how hard you try, there will always
be another event that makes that event happen. Here arises the dilemma of whether or not it is
possible to travel in time and what use it would be to do so, but then, how could we travel to the
past?

A quite popular possibility to travel to the past, going to the future, are CTC or Closed Timelike
Curved which are defined as:

“Closed time curve (CTC): Trajectory in

which an observer starting from a given point
in space-time and always traveling towards
the future returns, after a certain period, to
the starting point”
(Isea, 2016)
Seeing it this way as its definition indicates, you can only travel to the starting point,
therefore, we could travel to the future and then return to our starting point, that is, to the
past through the Einstein-Rosen bridges (From now on wormholes) since, according to Einstein,
space-time can curve and in this way, if it does so in a certain place in the form of a loop, it could
return to the moment in which the trip began.
At this point we would still have the problem of, how would we avoid paradoxes? Well, this can be
achieved thanks to the uncertainty principle proposed by Werner Heisenberg, which tells us that
electrons can be in two places at the same time, We could say that electrons are found in different
universes (parallel universes)
In this way, the infinite number of different universes with a great variety of possibilities would be
confirmed, therefore, the concept of paradox is nullified.
Physical laws currently allow us to travel in time, however, there is a phenomenon whose
existence has not been confirmed, these are wormholes which can be defined as shortcuts in the
universe that cause can move from point A to point B, something similar to the example of the
billiard ball, it is formulated that in the remote case that a wormhole existed, a large amount of
(negative) energy would be needed to be able to keep it active. . Now, knowing that an immense
amount of energy would be needed to keep it active, we also need the wormhole to exist at a
macroscopic level so that we could travel in it, since only particles could travel in it if it existed at a
microscopic level.
On the other hand, since we have never seen a wormhole, we do not know how it would behave if
we “entered” it, the only thing we could do is leave it to chance and wait to see what happens.
According to (Hawking, 1988), wormholes do exist and are found everywhere in the universe, but
at a quantum level, that is, they are too small for people to be transported in them.
Recently, an article was published in “The New York Times” about quantum physicists who, with
the help of an IBM quantum computer, managed to reverse a millionth of a second to a single
simulated elementary particle. Despite having achieved such an achievement, it was not a
pleasant victory anymore. that certain factors had to be modified and forced so that this could be
achieved, making it impossible for these factors to occur naturally and only managing to reinforce
the concept that we are hopelessly trapped in time.
But what does it mean to have managed to go back a millionth of a second for technology? Well,
having achieved this means that we have managed to advance today's technology a little to be
able to travel in time, even if it is by modifying certain factors, if in the future If we were able to
make these types of trips it would mean that we greatly improved our technology, either making it
possible to create vehicles capable of traveling at the speed of light or machinery capable of
shrinking things at a quantum level, in addition to achieving these trips we could prove or deny the
existence of wormholes and CTCs.
"Time travel used to be considered only the stuff of science fiction, but Einstein's general theory of
relativity allows us to consider the possibility that we could warp space-time enough for you to go
away in a rocket and come back before leaving.
(Hawking, 1988)