"Wait a minute. Wait a minute, Doc. Ah... Are you telling me that you built a time machine... out of a DeLorean?"
"The way I see it if you're gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?"
We all remember this historic dialogue between Marty McFly and Dr. Emmett Brown in the cult movie Back to Future. It was 1985 and Dr. Emmett Brown had already executed time travel using a capacitor. Now, in 2017, the scientists are saying that it could actually be possible to travel back in time, not only in the reel life but in the real one too.
Travelling through the different times would not be impossible, after all, said one astrophysicist recently. According to the rules of theoretical physics, certain conditions are needed, which allow for the construction of elaborate wormholes that are capable of transporting humans back to different eras.
While scientists have not yet discovered the exact favourable conditions that are needed to travel back in time, "there's nothing forbidding it" in the laws of theoretical physics, explained astrophysicist Ethan Siegel from Lewis & Clark College in the Forbes blog, named Starts With A Bang.
Backward time travel would be dependent on the mysterious negative mass/energy particles, which are known as the counterpart of the positive energy/positive or zero mass particles that can be found all throughout the universe. Scientists know about the negative mass/energy particles since long now, however, it has never been found anywhere in the universe.
"If this negative mass/energy matter exists, then creating both a supermassive black hole and the negative mass/energy counterpart to it, while then connecting them, should allow for a traversable wormhole," wrote Siegel in the blog. "No matter how far apart you took these to connected objects from one another, if they had enough mass/energy – of both the positive and the negative kind – this instantaneous connection would remain," he added.
The wormhole, which is necessary to travel back in time, could be constructed in such a way that one end would remain almost immobile, while the other one would move at nearly the speed of light. If a person then can enter such a tunnel, theoretically it will be possible for him to take a trip back in time.
In his blog, Siegel took a scenario for example, where he set the destination to be 40 light years away from Earth. In this case, writes Seigel, after the passage of one year, the fast-moving end of the wormhole would have aged 40 years, while only the other end would be only one year old.
As we know, thanks to numerous sci-fi fictions and theories, space-time can be warped and distorted. An enormous amount of matter or energy is needed to create such distortions; however, theoretically, these distortions are possible. In case of the wormhole, we are creating a shortcut by warping the fabric of space-time.
However, Seigel also pointed out some obstacles of using wormholes to travel in space or time, which is that they are innately unstable. When a particle enters a wormhole, it creates fluctuations and that in turn cause the structure to collapse in on it.
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"If, 40 years ago, someone had created such a pair of entangled wormholes and sent them off on this journey, it would be possible to step into one of them today, in 2017, and wind up back in time at the mouth of the other one... back in 1978," wrote Siegel. "The only issue is that you yourself couldn't also have been at that location back in 1978; you needed to be with the other end of the wormhole, or traveling through space to try and catch up with it."
