Time traveling is a popular subject in sci-fi movies and TV-shows. It usually happens with a device that “bends the time-space continuum”. In Heroes, Hiro Nakamura uses his mind to bend the time-space continuum. In the movie Déjà Vu, artificial wormholes are created to look into the past. In reality, scientists agree that time traveling might be possible. At least to the future.

Wormholes

Wormholes are two dots in the space that are connected. If something goes through the wormhole A, it can travel to the wormhole B in a fraction of a second, even faster than light. The name ‘wormhole’ comes from the description of how it happens: The world is an apple and we are a worm crawling on it. It takes longer time for the worm to crawl to the other side on the surface, when it could just burrow through the apple. Where do wormholes appear then? Black holes are a possibility. The gravitation force in black holes is so powerful that even light cannot get out, thus the name black hole. It is possible that an object reaches singularity, infinite mass, inside the black hole. Infinite mass equals infinite energy which equals faster than light. What does traveling fast have to do with time travel then? Well, the faster something goes, the slower the time appears (No, this does not mean that the faster you drive to work with your car, the longer you’ll live). If you have a space ship that can travel at nearly the speed of light, a thousand years might pass in a second. So traveling through a wormhole also takes you light years and years away.

Problems?

Force just kicked in. Let’s say you weigh 175 pounds (80 kg). In Jupiter you would weigh 350 pounds (160kg). In black hole you would weigh… oh right, infinite mass, infinite weight.

If you’d have a space ship that can travel at nearly the speed of light, it would require massive amounts of energy. It would also require the ship to be able to withstand a massive amount of force. Do the math. m*(c/t). That means mass * (speed of light/time it takes to accelerate).

What about traveling back in time? Why don’t we have men in futuristic outfits wandering around? It causes paradoxes. The most common is the grandfather paradox. What if you would travel back in time and would kill your grandfather. You wouldn’t be born so you couldn’t kill your grandfather so you would be born to kill your grandfather but you wouldn’t be born then. The more you think about it, the more it will make your brain hurt. Scientists and philosophisers have suggested that there is an unknown force that does not allow you to do this. Could be, since there are a lot of things that haven’t been solved yet. Another explanation is the creation of a parallel world. An alternate timeline appears in which the death of your grandfather doesn’t affect you. Debug mode of the universe.