Is time travel possible? Time travel becomes a reality Time travel with the help of an antique watch

Sensational photographs, videos and eyewitness accounts pop up on the Internet again and again, which are immediately accepted as irrefutable evidence of the existence of time travelers. Ten of the most ridiculous arguments of those who are trying to justify the possibility of traveling to the past and future are collected in this article.

On the back cover of this “watch” there is allegedly an engraving “Swiss”

In December 2008, Chinese archaeologists discovered an ancient burial place. The grave in Shanxi province, they believe, remained untouched for 400 years.

Before archaeologists managed to open the coffin, a strange metal object resembling a ring was discovered in the ground next to it. Upon closer inspection, it turned out to be a tiny gold watch, the frozen hands of which showed five minutes to ten. The word "Swiss" ("made in Switzerland") was engraved on the back cover of the find. There is no way a watch like this can be more than a hundred years old. So how did they end up in the ground above a sealed grave from the Ming Dynasty (1368 - 1644)? Is there really a traveler from the future involved here?

Perhaps the Chinese archaeologists just wanted to draw a little attention to their hard and underappreciated work, and just in time they found an ordinary ring that bears a funny resemblance to a modern watch. All that remains is to take a couple of photos, carefully avoiding the angle from which the treasured back cover with the “Swiss” engraving will be visible, and trumpet the sensational find to the media.

Moberly-Jourdain incident

Marie Antoinette, Queen of France from 1774 to 1792, whom time travelers from 1901 met

Reports of time travel are, of course, not limited to the modern era. Descriptions of such cases have been periodically encountered for many decades. One of them dates back to August 10, 1901.

Two English teachers, Charlotte Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, who were spending their holidays in France, decided to visit the Petit Trianon castle, but were unfamiliar with the surroundings of Versailles. Having lost their way, they finally reached their destination... 112 years earlier.

Travelers recall seeing a woman shaking a white tablecloth out of a window and an abandoned farm in the distance before something strange began to happen.

“Everything around suddenly became unnatural, unpleasant,” writes Jourdain. “Even the trees seemed flat and lifeless, like a pattern on a carpet.” There was no light or shadow, and the air was completely still.”

After some time, Moberly and Jourdain encountered a group of people dressed in the fashion of the late 18th century, who showed them the way to the palace. And on the steps of the palace they met the French queen herself, Marie Antoinette.

Somehow, the travelers managed to return to their rented apartment in 1901. Taking pseudonyms, they wrote a book about their adventure, which was received very controversially by the public. Some considered their story a hoax, others - a hallucination or an encounter with ghosts.

There are also more down-to-earth versions: Moberly and Jourdain witnessed a historical reconstruction, or simply wrote a fantastic story, inspired by H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, published in 1895.

A pilot's journey to the Scotland of the future

Illustration for the film “The Night I Was Destined to Die,” in which an official predicts a plane crash

The life of RAF Marshal Victor Goddard was full of strange, inexplicable incidents. For example, one day his plane crashed exactly like in a dream that one of his acquaintances had told him about shortly before. This incident formed the basis for the film “The Night I Was Destined to Die.” And in 1975, Goddard published a photograph in which a ghost can allegedly be seen.

Long before the film was released and he gained fame among fans of mysticism, Goddard was an ordinary Air Force pilot who served in the First and Second World Wars. He also lectured in engineering at Jesus College, Cambridge and Imperial College London. In 1935 he was appointed Deputy Director of Intelligence at the Royal Air Ministry. Apparently, the British government considered Goddard to be a completely sane person without the slightest hint of paranormality, but in popular culture there was a different opinion.

In his book Time Travel: New Perspectives, Irish writer D. H. Brennan recounts a strange incident that allegedly happened to Goddard while he was inspecting an abandoned airfield near Edinburgh in 1935. The airfield was dilapidated and dilapidated; grass emerged from under the asphalt and was chewed by local cows. On his way home, Goddard was caught in a storm and had to turn back. As he approached the abandoned airfield, he was surprised to discover that the storm suddenly stopped, the sun came out, and the airfield itself was completely transformed. It was repaired, mechanics in blue overalls were scurrying around, and four yellow planes of a model unknown to Goddard stood on the runway. The pilot did not land and did not tell anyone about what he saw. Four years later, the RAF began painting planes yellow and mechanics began wearing blue uniforms - exactly as in his vision.

It’s a pity, after all, that Goddard didn’t land at the airfield of the future and bring back some artifact from there. Then perhaps there would be at least some reason to believe his words.

Fantasy by an unknown artist on what the secret Philadelphia experiment might have looked like

The US Navy is known for its interest in dangerous futuristic technologies, from mind control and psychological weapons to robots and time travel. The legend of the Philadelphia Experiment states that on October 28, 1943, they conducted a secret experiment codenamed Project Rainbow, during which the destroyer Eldridge was supposed to become invisible to enemy radar, but instead traveled 10 seconds into the past.

Reports of this experiment are somewhat vague, and the US Navy has never confirmed that it actually took place, but of course, no one believes the US government, and rumors continue to spread.

Some argue that the ship experiment is based on the unified field theory developed by Albert Einstein. Allegedly, in accordance with this theory, a special electromagnetic field was created around the ship, which caused the “bending” of light, and with it the entire space-time continuum, which is why the ship became invisible and moved in time. But immediately after the experiment, for some reason everyone forgot about this amazing technology. Including the sailors who served on that destroyer, who unanimously claim that this whole story was invented by some crazy person.

Montauk Project

A scary-looking radar in Montauk is leading locals to believe secret experiments are being conducted somewhere nearby.

And again about the secrets of the American government, the distrust of which among the people has only increased in recent years due to the story of Edward Snowden. The Montauk project, like Rainbow, is strictly classified and is associated with electromagnetic fields. Frightening experiments, including time travel, are allegedly being carried out at the Camp Hero aviation station in Montauk near New York.

The founder of the legend is considered to be the American writer Preston Nichols, who claims that he managed to restore his memory, which was erased after his participation in time travel experiments. In his own words, Nichols holds a degree in parapsychology. He dedicated a video on YouTube to his experience of time travel and it is, I must say, quite strange.

Let's try to be as unbiased as possible given the above facts. Nichols claims that the US government is conducting secret mind control experiments, which may be true given Project MK Ultra, a secret CIA program aimed at finding ways to manipulate human consciousness using psychotropic drugs.

It’s just that drugs and interrogation methods are one thing, and electromagnetic fields and time travel are quite another. The influence of electromagnetic fields on human consciousness or the space-time continuum has not yet been proven anywhere or by anyone.

The Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider is a particle accelerator built on the border between France and Switzerland

There are very few real experts in the hadron collider. Why, most people can’t even pronounce its name correctly. And yet everyone has their own opinion about what researchers at CERN do. Some are convinced that a time machine is being built there - what else could all these complex devices be needed for, if not to realize our fantasies inspired by science fiction films?

Today the LHC is the most complex experimental facility in the world. It is located at a depth of 175 meters above the ground. In the “ring” of the accelerator, which is almost 27 thousand meters long, protons collide at a speed close to the speed of light. Both scientists and the press are concerned that the collider's work could create black holes. However, after several launches of the installation, nothing like this has yet happened, but in 2012 the Higgs boson was discovered. It was because of him that the rumor began that the LHC was the first step towards building a time machine.

Physicists Tom Weiler and Chui Meng Ho from Vanderbilt University suggest that in the future it will be possible to discover another particle - the Higgs singlet, which has incredible properties that violate cause-and-effect relationships. According to scientists' hypothesis, this particle is capable of moving into the fifth dimension and moving through time in any direction, to the past and to the future. “Our theory may seem presumptuous,” says Weiler, “but it does not contradict the laws of physics.”

Unfortunately, it is difficult for an ordinary person far from physics to verify whether this is really the case. We have to take the authors of the theory at their word.

Mobile phones in old films

This elderly woman, seen in the extras for Charlie Chaplin's The Circus, appears to be talking on a cell phone (1928)

The internet collective is the greatest detective mind in history. Reddit users are investigating the 2013 Boston bombing, another group of volunteers is looking for scammers online, and everyone else is busy looking for evidence of time travel in the most unexpected places. For example, on the DVD edition of Charlie Chaplin’s film “The Circus,” attentive detectives found an interesting fragment, which they immediately uploaded to YouTube. When the film's extras show the crowd gathered for the premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theater in 1928, a woman can be seen talking on a cell phone in the background.

Or rather, with this quality of the video, the only thing we can say with certainty is that she really is holding something near her ear. Historians cooled everyone's ardor by reporting that this could be one of the first models of Siemens hearing aids, but this version did not seem convincing enough to conspiracy theorists. They found another video, this time from 1938, in which a girl who would hardly need a hearing aid was talking on a mobile phone. Still, it's not very convincing. Perhaps we need more old videos of people holding something to their ear and talking.

And in the following excerpt from the 1948 film, our contemporaries persistently see the iPhone at 18 seconds. Have you ever wondered how people rode carriages without GPS? It turns out they had to use smartphones! In fact, the actor in the video is holding an ordinary notepad, and Internet detectives should look for something more convincing.

Immortal Nicholas Cage

Nicolas Cage look-alike from the 19th century

It's hard to imagine anyone taking this seriously, but it's quite popular on the Internet to search for vintage photographs and portraits of people who look like modern celebrities. Here, for example, is a copy of Nicolas Cage from the 19th century. The ignorant compilers of the textbook in which the photo appeared claim that it depicts Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico. How could they not notice such a striking resemblance to the actor from “National Treasure” and “Ghost Rider”?

Of course, this case is far from the first and not the only one. Portraits of Keanu Reeves from 1570 and 1875 and a photograph of John Travolta from 1860 are widely known.

Keanu Reeves with a “double” from the past

Is John Travolta a vampire or a time traveler?

Opinions differ regarding such coincidences. Some claim that all these actors are immortal vampires, while others consider them time travelers. Cage himself refuted the version of his vampirism on David Letterman's show, so only the second option remains.

Apparently, Hollywood has a secret time machine at its disposal specifically to help actors better prepare for roles in historical films. But the irresponsible actors perceive this as an additional vacation: they take pictures, rule Mexico... What kind of people are they?

John Titor

One of John Titor's drawings, with the help of which he tried to explain the structure of his time machine

It turns out that on the Internet you can find not only evidence of time travel, but also the travelers themselves. Today, however, we all fall into this category: you just have to look at the news feed for five minutes, and three hours are gone.

At the beginning of the 2000s, social networks were not so popular. In those days, people communicated on so-called boards - forums that look quite unusual to us today. To start a conversation, it was necessary to start a new topic. The author of one of the popular topics was a certain John Titor, who claimed that he arrived from 2036, and cited a number of predictions to support his words.

Some of them were quite vague, some more specific. Titor argued that the America of the future was on the verge of destruction due to a nuclear attack, after which it split into five regions. Most other countries ceased to exist. He also posted drawings of his time machine, but no one ever tried to build anything from them. None of his predictions have yet come true.

What can I say, you can really be anyone on the Internet. I wonder why no one pretends to be a time traveler these days? Is it really more interesting to pretend to be a celebrity?

Information leak from the future

A researcher is waiting for messages from the future to appear on the Internet.

And again about the Internet. John Titor and others like him simply could not leave people of science indifferent.

Robert Nemirov and Teresa Wilson from Michigan Technological University have been studying the network for several years for traces that could have been left by time travelers. To do this, they use special Google magic to look for references to certain events that are dated earlier than these events actually happened, for example, information about comet C/2012 S1 that appeared before 2012, or the phrase “Pope Francis” that appeared somewhere or until March 2013, in which Francis was elected pope. It is assumed that if time travelers use the Internet to communicate, then somewhere there must be phrases that do not correspond to their date. Agree, the idea is quite interesting. So what did the researchers find? - you ask.

Nothing. There are no information traces of time travelers on the Internet. As if to console those whose hopes were dashed, the scientists write: “Although the study has not confirmed that time travelers from the future are among us using the Internet to communicate, it is also possible that they simply cannot leave any traces of their presence in the past, even intangible ones.” . In addition, discovering information about them may be impossible for us, since this would violate some of the currently known laws of physics. Finally, time travelers may not want to be found and carefully hide their tracks."

It turns out that time travelers exist, they are just invisible, hiding and cannot leave any traces! Very convincing, isn't it?

Time travel is not as mysterious as it seems. In theory, all you have to do is reach faster than the speed of light and you'll find yourself in the future. But no one yet knows how to do it. There is one more problem: you will not be able to return, because this would break the cause-and-effect relationship. Therefore, as Stephen Hawking said: “Time travel is possible, but not useful.”

The idea that you can go into the past or the future has given rise to a whole genre of chrono-fiction, and it seems that all possible paradoxes and pitfalls have long been known to us. Now we read and watch such works not for the sake of looking at other eras, but for the sake of the confusion that inevitably arises when trying to disrupt the flow of time. What tricks eventually form the basis of all chrono-operas and what plots can be assembled from these building blocks? Let's figure it out.

Wake up when the future comes

The simplest task for a time traveler is to travel to the future. In such stories, you don’t even have to think about how exactly the time flow works: since the future does not affect our time, the plot will be almost no different from a flight to another planet or to a fairy-tale world. In a sense, we all already travel through time - at a speed of one second per second. The only question is how to increase the speed.

In the 18th-19th centuries, dreams were considered one of the fantastic phenomena. Lethargic sleep was adapted for traveling into the future: Rip van Winkle (the hero of the story of the same name by Washington Irving) slept for twenty years and found himself in a world where all his loved ones had already died, and he himself had been forgotten. This plot is akin to the Irish myths about the people of the hills, who also knew how to manipulate time: the one who spent one night under the hill returned after a hundred years.

This "hit" method never gets old

With the help of dreams, writers of that time explained any fantastic assumptions. If the narrator himself admits that he has imagined strange worlds, what is the demand from him? Louis-Sébastien de Mercier resorted to such a trick when describing a “dream” about a utopian society (“Year 2440”) - and this is already a full-fledged time travel!

However, if travel to the future needs to be plausibly justified, doing this without contradicting science is also not difficult. The cryogenic freezing method made famous by Futurama could, in theory, work - which is why many transhumanists are now trying to preserve their bodies after death in the hope that future medical technologies will allow them to be revived. True, in essence this is just Van Winkle’s dream adapted to modern times, so it’s difficult to say whether this is considered a “real” journey.

Faster than light

For those who want to seriously play with time and delve into the jungle of physics, traveling at the speed of light is better suited.

Einstein's theory of relativity allows time to be compressed and stretched at near-light speeds, which is used with pleasure in science fiction. The famous “twin paradox” says that if you rush through space for a long time at near-light speed, in a year or two of such flights a couple of centuries will pass on Earth.

Moreover: the mathematician Gödel proposed a solution for Einstein’s equations in which time loops can arise in the universe - something like portals between different times. It was this model that was used in the film “,” first showing the difference in the flow of time near the horizon of a black hole, and then using a “wormhole” to create a bridge into the past.

All the plot twists that the authors of chronoopers are now coming up with were already in Einstein and Gödel (filmed on an iPhone 5)

Is it possible to go back in time this way? Scientists strongly doubt this, but science fiction writers are not bothered by their doubts. Suffice it to say that only mere mortals are prohibited from exceeding the speed of light. And Superman can make a couple of revolutions around the Earth and go back in time to prevent the death of Lois Lane. What about the speed of light - even sleep can work in the opposite direction! And Mark Twain got the Yankees on the head with a crowbar at the court of King Arthur.

Of course, it’s more interesting to fly into the past, precisely because it is inextricably linked with the present. If an author introduces a time machine into a story, he usually wants to at least confuse the reader with time paradoxes. But most often the main theme in such stories is the fight against predestination. Is it possible to change your own destiny if it is already known?

Cause or effect?

The answer to the question of predestination - like the concept of time travel itself - depends on the principle by which time is organized in a particular fantasy world.

The laws of physics are not a decree for terminators

In reality, the main problem with traveling into the past is not the speed of light. Sending anything, even a message, back in time would violate a fundamental law of nature: the principle of causality. Even the most seedy prophecy is, in a sense, time travel! All scientific principles known to us are based on the fact that first an event occurs, and then it has consequences. If the effect is ahead of the cause, it breaks the laws of physics.

To “fix” the laws, we need to figure out how the world reacts to such an anomaly. This is where science fiction writers give free rein to their imagination.

If the film genre is a comedy, then there is usually no risk of “breaking” time: all the actions of the heroes are too insignificant to affect the future, and the main task is to get out of their own problems

It can be stated that time is a single and indivisible flow: between the past and the future there is, as it were, a thread along which one can move.

It is in this picture of the world that the most famous loops and paradoxes arise: for example, if you kill your grandfather in the past, you can disappear from the universe. Paradoxes arise because this concept (philosophers call it “B-theory”) states that the past, present and future are as real and unchangeable as the three dimensions we are familiar with. The future is still unknown - but sooner or later we will see the only version of events that must happen.

This fatalism gives rise to the most ironic stories about time travelers. When an alien from the future tries to correct the events of the past, he suddenly discovers that he himself caused them - moreover, it has always been so. Time in such worlds is not rewritten - a cause-and-effect loop simply arises in it, and any attempts to change something only reinforce the original version. This paradox was one of the first to be described in detail in the short story “In My Own Footsteps” (1941), where it turns out that the hero was carrying out a task received from himself.

The heroes of the dark series "Dark" from Netflix go back in time to investigate a crime, but are forced to commit actions that lead to this crime.

It can be worse: in more “flexible” worlds, a careless act by a traveler can lead to the “butterfly effect.” Intervention in the past rewrites the entire time flow at once - and the world not only changes, but completely forgets that it has changed. Usually only the traveler himself remembers that everything was different before. In the "" trilogy, even Doc Brown couldn't keep track of Marty's jumps - but he at least relied on the words of his comrade when he described the changes, and usually no one believes such stories.

In general, single-threaded time is a confusing and hopeless thing. Many authors decide not to limit themselves and resort to the help of parallel worlds.

The plot, in which the hero finds himself in a world where someone canceled his birth, came from the Christmas film It's a Wonderful Life (1946).

Split time

This concept not only removes controversy, but also captures the imagination. In such a world, everything is possible: every second it is divided into an infinite number of similar reflections, differing in a couple of little things. A time traveler doesn't actually change anything, but only jumps between different facets of the multiverse. This kind of plot is very popular in TV series: in almost any show there is an episode where the heroes find themselves in an alternative future and try to return everything to normal. On an endless field you can frolic endlessly - and there are no paradoxes!

Nowadays, in chrono-fiction, the model with parallel worlds is most often used (a still from Star Trek).

But the fun begins when the authors abandon the B-theory and decide that there is no fixed future. Maybe the unknown and uncertainty are the normal state of time? In such a picture of the world, specific events occur only in those segments where there are observers, and the remaining moments are just probability.

An excellent example of such “quantum time” was shown by Stephen King in “”. When Strelok unwittingly created a time paradox, he almost went crazy because he remembered two lines of events at the same time: in one he traveled alone, in the other with a companion. If the hero came across evidence that reminded him of past events, the memories of these points formed into one consistent version, but the gaps were as if in a fog.

The quantum approach has become popular recently, partly due to the development of quantum physics, and partly because it allows us to show even more intricate and dramatic paradoxes.

Marty McFly almost erased himself from reality by preventing his parents from meeting each other. I had to fix everything urgently!

Take, for example, the film “Time Loop” (2012): as soon as the young incarnation of the hero performed some actions, the alien from the future immediately remembered them - and before that, fog reigned in his memory. Therefore, he tried not to interfere once again with his past - for example, he did not show his younger self a photograph of his future wife, so as not to disrupt their first unexpected meeting.

The “quantum” approach is also visible in “”: since the Doctor warns companions about special “fixed points” - events that cannot be changed or bypassed - it means that the rest of the fabric of time is mobile and plastic.

However, even a probabilistic future pales in comparison to worlds where Time has its own will - or its guard is guarded by creatures that lie in wait for travelers. In such a universe, the laws can work as they please - and it’s good if you can come to an agreement with the guards! The most striking example is the langoliers, who after every midnight eat yesterday along with everyone who is unlucky enough to be there.

How does a time machine work?

Against the background of such a diversity of universes, the technology of time travel itself is a secondary issue. Time machines have not changed since the time of time: you can come up with a new operating principle, but this is unlikely to affect the plot, and from the outside the journey will look approximately the same.

Welles's time machine in the 1960 film adaptation. That's where steampunk is!

Most often, the principle of operation is not explained at all: a person climbs into a booth, admires the buzzing and special effects, and then gets out at a different time. This method can be called an instantaneous leap: the fabric of time seems to be pierced at one point. Often, for such a jump, you first need to accelerate - gain speed in ordinary space, and the technology will already translate this impulse into a jump in time. This is what the heroine of the anime “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time” and Doc Brown did in the famous DeLorean from the “Back to the Future” trilogy. Apparently, the fabric of time is one of those obstacles that can be attacked with a running start!

DeLorean DMC-12 is a rare time machine that deserves to be called a car (JMortonPhoto.com & OtoGodfrey.com)

But sometimes it happens the other way around: if we consider time to be the fourth dimension, in the three ordinary dimensions the traveler must remain in place. The time machine will rush him along the time axis, and in the past or future he will appear at exactly the same point. The main thing is that they don’t have time to build anything there - the consequences can be very unpleasant! True, such a model does not take into account the rotation of the Earth - in fact, there are no fixed points - but in extreme cases, everything can be attributed to magic. This is exactly how it worked: each revolution of the magic clock corresponded to one hour, but the travelers did not move.

Such “static” travel was dealt with most harshly in the film “Detonator” (2004): there the time machine rewinded exactly one minute at a time. To get to yesterday, you had to sit in an iron box for 24 hours!

Sometimes a model with more than three dimensions is interpreted even more cunningly. Let's remember Gödel's theory, according to which loops and tunnels can be laid between different times. If it is correct, you can try to get through additional dimensions to another time - which is what the hero “” took advantage of.

In earlier science fiction, a “time funnel” worked on a similar principle: a kind of subspace that can be entered on purpose (on Doctor Who’s TARDIS) or by accident, as happened to the destroyer crew in the film “The Philadelphia Experiment” (1984). Flight through the funnel is usually accompanied by dizzying special effects, and leaving the ship is not recommended, so as not to be lost in time forever. But in essence, this is still the same ordinary time machine, delivering passengers from one year to another.

For some reason, lightning always strikes inside temporary craters and sometimes credits fly

If the authors do not want to delve into the jungle of theories, the time anomaly can exist on its own, without any devices. It is enough to enter the wrong door, and now the hero is already in the distant past. Is it a tunnel, a puncture or magic - who can figure it out? The main question is how to get back!

What can't be done

However, usually science fiction still works according to rules, albeit fictitious ones, which is why restrictions are often invented for time travel. For example, one can follow modern physicists in declaring that it is still impossible to move bodies faster than the speed of light (that is, into the past). But in some theories there is a particle called a “tachyon”, which is not affected by this limitation because it has no mass... Maybe consciousness or information can still be sent into the past?

When Makoto Shinkai takes on time travel, he still manages to create a touching story about friendship and love (“Your Name”)

In reality, most likely, you won’t be able to cheat like that - all because of the same principle of causality, which doesn’t care about the type of particles. But in science fiction, the “informational” approach seems more plausible - and even original. It allows the hero, for example, to find himself in his own young body or to travel through other people’s minds, as happened with the hero of the series “Quantum Leap.” And in the anime Steins;Gate, at first they could only send SMS to the past - try changing the course of history with such restrictions! But plots only benefit from restrictions: the more complex the problem, the more interesting it is to watch how it is solved.

Microwave-phone hybrid to connect with the past (Steins;Gate)

Sometimes additional conditions are imposed on ordinary, physical time travel. For example, often a time machine cannot send anyone back in time before the moment when it was invented. And in the anime “The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya”, time travelers forgot how to go into the past beyond a certain date, because on that day a catastrophe occurred that damaged the fabric of time.

And this is where the fun begins. Simple leaps into the past and even time paradoxes are just the tip of the iceberg of chrono-fiction. If time can be changed or even damaged, what else can be done with it?

Paradox on paradox

We love time travel for its confusion. Even a simple leap into the past gives rise to such twists as the “butterfly effect” and the “grandfather paradox,” depending on how time works. But this technique can be used to build much more complex combinations: for example, jump into the past not just once, but several times in a row. This creates a stable time loop, or “Groundhog Day.”

Do you experience deja vu?
“Didn’t you already ask me about this?”

You can cycle for one day or several - the main thing is that everything ends with a “reset” of all changes and a journey back to the past. If we are dealing with linear and unchanging time, such loops themselves arise from cause-and-effect paradoxes: the hero receives a note, goes into the past, writes this note, sends it to himself... If time is rewritten each time or creates parallel worlds, the result is an ideal trap : a person experiences the same events over and over again, but any changes still end with a reset to the original position.

Most often, such stories are devoted to attempts to unravel the cause of the time loop and break out of it. Sometimes the loops are tied to the emotions or tragic fates of the characters - this element is especially loved in anime (“Magical Girl Madoka”, “The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya”, “When Cicadas Cry”).

But “Groundhog Days” have an undoubted advantage: they allow you, through endless attempts, to sooner or later achieve success in any endeavor. It’s not for nothing that Doctor Who, having fallen into such a trap, recalled the legend about a bird that, over many thousands of years, chipped away a stone rock, and his colleague managed with his “negotiations” to drive an extraterrestrial demon into a white heat! In this case, you can break the loop not with a heroic act or insight, but with ordinary perseverance, and along the way you can learn a couple of useful skills, as happened with the hero of Groundhog Day.

In Edge of Tomorrow, aliens use time loops as weapons to calculate the ideal battle tactics

Another way to build a more complex structure from ordinary jumps is to synchronize two periods of time. In the film "X-Men: Days of Future Past" and in "Time Scout", the time portal could only be opened to a fixed distance. Roughly speaking, at noon on Sunday you can move to noon on Saturday, and an hour later - only at one o'clock in the afternoon. With such a limitation, an element appears in a story about traveling into the past that, it would seem, cannot be there - time pressure! Yes, you can go back and try to fix something, but in the future time goes on as usual - and the hero, for example, may be late to return.

To complicate the traveler's life, you can make time jumps random - take away control over what is happening from him. In the TV series Lost, such a misfortune happened to Desmond, who interacted too closely with a time anomaly. But back in the 1980s, the TV series Quantum Leap was built on the same idea. The hero constantly found himself in different bodies and eras, but did not know how long he would last in this time, and certainly could not return “home.”

Spin the time

The heroine of the game Life is Strange faces a difficult choice: undo all the changes she made to the fabric of time to save her friend, or destroy an entire city.

The second technique used to diversify time travel is changing speed. If you can skip a couple of years to find yourself in the past or future, why not, for example, put time on pause?

As Wells also showed in the story “The Newest Accelerator,” even slowing down time for everyone except yourself is a very powerful tool, and if you completely stop it, you can secretly sneak somewhere or win a duel - and completely unnoticed by the enemy. And in the web series “Worm,” one superhero could “freeze” objects in time. Using this simple technique, it was possible, for example, to derail a train by placing an ordinary sheet of paper in its path - after all, an object frozen in time cannot change or move!

Enemies frozen in time are very convenient. You can see this for yourself in the shooter Quantum Break

The speed can also be changed to negative, and then you will get the countermotors familiar to readers of the Strugatskys - people living “in the opposite direction.” This is possible only in worlds where the “B-theory” works: the entire time axis is already predetermined, the only question is in what order we perceive it. To further confuse the plot, you can launch two time travelers in different directions. This happened with the Doctor and River Song in the Doctor Who series: they jumped back and forth through eras, but their first (for the Doctor) meeting was River’s last, the second was the penultimate, and so on. To avoid paradoxes, the heroine had to be careful not to accidentally spoil the Doctor's future. Then, however, the order of their meetings turned into complete leapfrog, but the heroes of Doctor Who are not used to this!

Worlds with “static” time give rise not only to contrarians: often in science fiction there appear creatures who simultaneously see all points of their life path. Thanks to this, the Trafalmadorians from Slaughterhouse-Five treat any misadventures with philosophical humility: for them, even death is just one of the many details of the overall picture. Doctor Manhattan from "" due to such an inhuman perception of time, moved away from people and fell into fatalism. Abraxas from The Endless Journey regularly got confused with his grammar, trying to understand which event has already happened and which will happen tomorrow. And the aliens from Ted Chan’s story “The Story of Your Life” developed a special language: everyone who learned it also began to simultaneously see the past, present and future.

The film "Arrival", based on "The Story of Your Life", begins with flashbacks... Or does it?

However, if the countermoths or Trafalmadorians really travel in time, then with the abilities of Quicksilver or Flash everything is not so obvious. After all, in fact, they are the ones accelerating relative to everyone else - can we really assume that the whole world around is actually slowing down?

Physicists will notice that the theory of relativity is called that way for a reason. You can speed up the world and slow down the observer - this is the same thing, the only question is what to take as the starting point. And biologists will say that there is no science fiction here, because time is a subjective concept. An ordinary fly also sees the world “in slow-mo” - that’s how quickly its brain processes signals. But you don’t have to limit yourself to the fly or the Flash, because in some chronoopers there are parallel worlds. Who's stopping you from letting time pass through them at different speeds - or even in different directions?

A well-known example of such a technique is “The Chronicles of Narnia,” where formally there is no time travel. But time in Narnia flows much faster than on Earth, so the same heroes find themselves in different eras - and observe the history of a fairy-tale country from its creation to its fall. But in the Homestuck comic, which, perhaps, can be called the most confusing story about time travel and parallel worlds, two worlds were launched in different directions - and when contacts between these universes arose the same confusion that the Doctor had with River Song.

If dials haven't been invented yet, hourglasses will do too (Prince of Persia)

Kill time

Based on any of these techniques, you can write a story that would make even Wells's head crack. But modern authors are happy to use the entire palette at once, tying time loops and parallel worlds into a ball. Paradoxes with this approach accumulate in batches. Even with one leap into the past, a traveler can inadvertently kill his grandfather and disappear from reality - or even become his own father. Perhaps the best mockery of the “paradox of causation” was in the story “All of You Zombies,” where the hero turns out to be both his own mother and father.

The story “All You Zombies” was adapted into the film Time Patrol (2014). Almost all of his characters are the same person

Of course, paradoxes must be resolved somehow, which is why in worlds with linear time it often restores itself, according to the will of fate. For example, almost all novice travelers first decide to kill Hitler. In worlds where time can be rewritten, he will die (but according to the law of meanness, the resulting world will be even worse). Asprin's assassination attempt in "Time Scouts" will fail: either the gun will jam, or something else will happen.

And in worlds where fatalism is not held in high esteem, you have to monitor the preservation of the past on your own: for such cases, they create a special “time police” that catches travelers before they do anything bad. In the film "Looper" the mafia took on the role of such police: the past for them is too valuable a resource to allow someone to spoil it.

If there is neither fate nor chronopolice, travelers risk simply breaking time. At best, it will turn out like in Jasper Fforde’s “Thursday Nonetot” series, where the time police went so far as to accidentally cancel the very invention of time travel. At worst, the fabric of reality will collapse.

As Doctor Who has shown more than once, time is a fragile thing: one explosion can cause cracks in the universe across all eras, and an attempt to rewrite a “fixed point” can cause both the past and the future to collapse. In Homestuck, after a similar incident, the world had to be recreated anew, and all eras were mixed together, which is why the events of the books are now impossible to combine into a consistent chronology... Well, in the manga Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle, the son of his own clone, erased from reality, had to replace himself with a new person, so that in the events that have already happened there was at least some kind of character.

Some heroes of the Tsubasa multiverse exist in at least three incarnations and come from other works of the same studio

Fans' favorite pastime is drawing for the most confusing works of chronology

Sounds crazy? But this kind of madness is why we love time travel - it pushes the boundaries of logic. Once upon a time, an ordinary leap into the past must have driven an unaccustomed reader crazy. Nowadays, chrono-fiction truly shines at long distances, when authors have room to expand, and time loops and paradoxes are layered on top of each other, giving rise to the most unimaginable combinations.

Alas, it often happens that the structure folds under its own weight: either there are too many time jumps to make it worth keeping track of them, or the authors change the rules of the universe on the fly. How many times has Skynet rewritten the past? And who can now say by what rules time works in Doctor Who?

But if chrono-fiction, with all its paradoxes, turns out to be harmonious and internally consistent, it is remembered for a long time. This is what captivates BioShock Infinite, Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle or Homestuck. The more complex and intricate the plot, the stronger the impression left on those who reached the end and managed to look at the entire canvas at once.

* * *

Time travel, parallel worlds and the rewriting of reality are inextricably linked, so now almost no work of science fiction can do without them - be it a fantasy like Game of Thrones or a sci-fi exploration of the latest theories of physics, as in Interstellar. Few plots give the same scope for imagination - after all, in a story where any event can be undone or repeated several times, everything is possible. However, the elements that make up all these stories are quite simple.

It seems that over the past hundred years, the authors have done everything possible with time: they let them go forward, backward, in a circle, in one stream and in several... Therefore, the best of such stories, as in all genres, rest on the characters: on the one who has yet to come from ancient Greek tragedies on the theme of struggle with fate, on attempts to correct one’s own mistakes and on the difficult choice between different branches of events. But no matter how the chronology jumps, the story will still develop only in one direction - in the one that is most interesting to viewers and readers.

From the era of Queen Victoria to the present day, the concept of time travel has captivated the minds of science fiction lovers. What is it like to travel through the fourth dimension? The most interesting thing is that time travel does not require a time machine or something like a wormhole.

You've probably noticed that we are constantly moving through time. We move through it. At the most basic level of the concept, time is the rate at which the universe changes, and whether we like it or not, we are subject to constant change. We get old, planets move around the sun, things break down.

We measure the passage of time in seconds, minutes, hours and years, but this does not mean that time flows at a constant speed. Like water in a river, time passes differently in different places. In short, time is relative.

But what causes temporary fluctuations on the path from cradle to grave? It all comes down to the relationship between time and space. A person is able to perceive in three dimensions - length, width and depth. Time also complements this party as the most important fourth dimension. Time does not exist without space, space does not exist without time. And this couple connects into the space-time continuum. Any event that occurs in the Universe must involve space and time.

In this article we will look at the most real and everyday possibilities travel through time in our universe, as well as less accessible, but no less possible, paths through the fourth dimension.

The train is a real time machine.

If you want to live a couple of years a little faster than someone else, you need to manage space-time. Global positioning satellites do this every day, beating the natural course of time by three billionths of a second. Time passes faster in orbit because the satellites are far away from the Earth's mass. And on the surface, the mass of the planet carries time along with it and slows it down on a relatively small scale.

This effect is called gravitational time dilation. According to Einstein's general theory of relativity, gravity bends space-time, and astronomers use this consequence when studying light passing near massive objects (we wrote about gravitational lensing).

But what does this have to do with time? Remember - any event that occurs in the universe involves both space and time. Gravity not only tightens space, but also time.

Being in the flow of time, you will hardly notice a change in its course. But quite massive objects - like supermassive black hole Alpha Sagittarius, located in the center of our galaxy, will seriously bend the fabric of time. The mass of its singularity point is 4 million suns. This mass slows down time by half. Five years in orbit of a black hole (without falling into it) is ten years on Earth.

The speed of movement also plays an important role in the speed of our time. The closer you get to the maximum speed of movement - the speed of light - the slower time passes. The clock on a fast-moving train will begin to be “late” by one billionth of a second towards the end of the journey. If the train reaches the speed of 99.999% of light, one year in a train car can transport you two hundred and twenty-three years into the future.

In fact, hypothetical travel to the future in the future is built on this idea, forgive the tautology. But what about the past? Is it possible to turn back time?

Time travel to the past

Stars are relics of the past.

We found out that traveling to the future happens all the time. Scientists have proven this experimentally, and this idea forms the basis of Einstein's theory of relativity. It is quite possible to move into the future, the only question remains “how fast”? When it comes to traveling back in time, the answer to this question is to look at the night sky.

The Milky Way galaxy is about 100,000 years wide, which means light from distant stars needs to travel thousands upon thousands of years before reaching Earth. Catch this light, and in essence, you are simply looking into the past. When astronomers measure cosmic microwave radiation, they peer into space as it was 10 billion years ago. But is that all?

There is nothing in Einstein's theory of relativity that rules out the possibility of traveling back in time, but the very possibility of a button that could take you back to yesterday violates the law of causality or cause and effect. When something happens in the universe, the event gives rise to a new endless chain of events. The cause always comes before the effect. Just imagine a world where the victim died before the bullet hit his head. This is a violation of reality, but despite this, many scientists do not exclude the possibility of traveling into the past.

For example, it is believed that moving faster than the speed of light can send people back to the past. If time slows down as an object approaches the speed of light, could breaking this barrier turn back time? Of course, as we approach the speed of light, the relativistic mass of the object also increases, that is, it approaches infinity. It seems impossible to accelerate an infinite mass. Theoretically, warp speed, that is, the deformation of speed as such, can deceive the universal law, but even this will require a colossal expenditure of energy.

What if time travel to the future and past depends less on our basic knowledge of space, and more on existing cosmic phenomena? Let's take a look at a black hole.

Black holes and Kerr rings

What's on the other side of a black hole?

Spin around a black hole long enough and gravitational time dilation will throw you into the future. But what if you fall right into the mouth of this space monster? We have already discussed what will happen when diving into a black hole. wrote, but did not mention such an exotic variety of black holes as Kerr ring. Or the Kerr black hole.

In 1963, New Zealand mathematician Roy Kerr proposed the first realistic theory of a spinning black hole. The concept involves neutron stars - massive collapsing stars the size of St. Petersburg, for example, but with the mass of Earth's Sun. We included neutron holes in the list, calling them magnetars. Kerr theorized that if a dying star collapsed into a spinning ring of neutron stars, their centrifugal force would prevent them from collapsing into a singularity. And since the black hole will not have a singularity point, Kerr believed that it would be quite possible to get inside without the fear of being torn apart by gravity at the center.

If Kerr black holes exist, we could pass through them and exit into a white hole. It's like the exhaust pipe of a black hole. Instead of sucking in everything it can, the white hole will, on the contrary, throw out everything it can. Perhaps even in another time or another universe.

Kerr black holes remain a theory, but if they do exist, they are portals of sorts, offering one-way travel to the future or past. And although an extremely advanced civilization could evolve in this way and move through time, no one knows when the "wild" Kerr black hole will disappear.

Wormholes (wormholes)

Curvature of space-time.

Theoretical Kerr rings are not the only possible shortcuts to the past or future. Science fiction films - from Star Trek to Donnie Darko - often deal with theoretical Einstein-Rosen bridge. These bridges are better known to you as wormholes.

Einstein allows the existence of wormholes, since the basis of the theory of the great physicist is the curvature of space-time under the influence of mass. To understand this curvature, imagine the fabric of space-time as a white sheet and fold it in half. The area of ​​the sheet will remain the same, it itself will not deform, but the distance between the two points of contact will clearly be less than when the sheet was lying on a flat surface.

In this simplified example, space is depicted as a two-dimensional plane, and not the four-dimensional one that it actually is (remember the fourth dimension - time). Hypothetical wormholes work similarly.

Let's move into space. The concentration of mass in two different parts of the Universe could create a kind of tunnel in space-time. In theory, this tunnel would connect two different segments of the space-time continuum with each other. Of course, it is quite possible that some physical or quantum properties prevent such wormholes from arising on their own. Well, or they are born and immediately die, being unstable.

According to Stephen Hawking, ten of the most interesting facts from whose life we ​​present to you, wormholes can exist in quantum foam - the shallowest medium in the Universe. Tiny tunnels are constantly being born and torn, connecting separate places and times for short moments.

Wormholes may be too small and short-lived for human travel, but what if one day we can find them, hold them, stabilize them, and enlarge them? Provided, as Hawking notes, that you are prepared for feedback. If we want to artificially stabilize a space-time tunnel, the radiation from our actions can destroy it, just as the backflow of sound can damage a speaker.

These strings permeate the entire Universe, being thinner than an atom and under strong pressure. Naturally, it follows that they provide gravitational pull to everything that passes near them, which means objects attached to the cosmic string can travel through time at incredible speeds. If you pull two cosmic strings closer together, or place one of them next to a black hole, you can create what is called a closed timelike curve.

Using the gravity produced by two cosmic strings (or a string and a black hole), a spacecraft could theoretically send itself back in time. To do this, one would have to make a loop around the cosmic strings.

By the way, quantum strings are currently a very hot topic. Gott stated that to travel back in time, you need to make a loop around a string containing half the mass-energy of an entire galaxy. In other words, half the atoms in the galaxy would have to be used as fuel for your time machine. Well, as everyone well knows, you cannot go back in time before the machine itself was created.

In addition, there are time paradoxes.

Time Travel Paradoxes

If you killed your grandfather, you killed yourself.

As we have already said, the idea of ​​traveling into the past is slightly clouded by the second part of the law of causation. Cause comes before effect, at least in our universe, which means it can ruin even the best-laid time travel plans.

First, imagine: if you go back in time 200 years, you will appear long before you were born. Think about it for a second. For some time, the effect (you) will exist before the cause (your birth).

To better understand what we are dealing with, consider the famous grandfather paradox. You are an assassin who travels through time, and your target is your own grandfather. You sneak through a nearby wormhole and approach the living 18-year-old version of your father's father. You raise the gun, but what happens when you pull the trigger?

Think about it. You haven't been born yet. Even your father hasn't been born yet. If you kill your grandfather, he will not have a son. This son will never give birth to you, and you will not be able to travel back in time to complete the bloody task. And your absence will not pull the trigger, thereby negating the entire chain of events. We call this the loop of incompatible causes.

On the other hand, one can consider the idea of ​​a sequential causal loop. Although it makes you think, it theoretically eliminates time paradoxes. According to physicist Paul Davis, such a loop looks like this: a mathematics professor goes into the future and steals a complex mathematical theorem. After that, he gives it to the most brilliant student. After this, the promising student grows and learns in order to one day become the person whose professor once stole a theorem.

Additionally, there is another model of time travel that involves distorting probability when approaching the possibility of a paradoxical event. What does this mean? Let's get back into the shoes of your girlfriend's killer. This time travel model could kill your grandfather virtually. You can pull the trigger, but the gun won't fire. The bird will chirp at the right moment or something else will happen: quantum fluctuation will prevent the paradoxical situation from taking place.

And finally, the most interesting thing. The future or past that you go to could simply exist in a parallel Universe. Let's think of this as the paradox of separation. You can destroy anything, but this will not affect your home world in any way. You will kill your grandfather, but you will not disappear - perhaps another “you” will disappear in a parallel world, or the scenario will follow the paradox patterns we have already discussed. However, it is quite possible that this time travel will be disposable and you will never be able to return home.

Completely confused? Welcome to the world of time travel.

« Each of us has a time machine: what takes us into the past are memories; what carries into the future - dreams»

Herbert Wells. "Time Machine"

What does a person dream about if his head is not occupied with war and mercantile ambitions? He dreams about his future, about the stars, about the well-being of those around him. This fact was reflected most colorfully in our area during the existence of the Soviet Union, when state propaganda within the framework of the Cold War and the space race convinced people that science was the engine of progress. And there was nothing wrong with that.

Having seen the successes of mankind in the exploration of outer space, as well as achievements in other fields of science, people began to dream of what previously seemed only fantasy. For example, about eternal life and youth, perpetual motion, traveling to the stars and other galaxies, understanding the language of animals, levitation and even a time machine. However, science has again intervened in the matter, which time after time clips the wings of dreamers with its formulas, which prove that some dreams are unrealistic:

The creation of a perpetual motion machine of the first kind is impossible within the framework of the law of conservation of energy. The first law of thermodynamics prohibits us from doing this, so we can only wait for the next breakthrough theory in the field of physics and mathematics.

Understanding the language of birds and animals is, for obvious reasons, still a fantasy. Scientists are only in the early stages of deciphering the sounds animals make. The greatest success has been achieved in deciphering the language of dolphins, but this is still more like a ghostly future.

We will not be able to live forever, because our cells are programmed to die. There are no adequate theories about reprogramming yet and are not expected, so human life is only possible.

You can endlessly smash the dreams of humanity against the rocks of science, but there are things that are not prohibited by science. For example, time travel. One of the craziest, at first glance, ideas turns out to be real, because it does not contradict the modern laws of physics.

Humanity's first thoughts on time travel

It is impossible to establish when a person first thought about returning to the past or going to the future. Most likely, this thought has visited many throughout the entire existence of our species. Another thing is the rejection of ordinary dreams and an attempt to describe the idea of ​​time travel within the framework of the relativity of time periods. And it was not scientists who were the first to notice this, but science fiction writers. Creative people are not constrained by scientific frameworks, so they can give free rein to their imagination. In addition, it turned out that most of the writers’ prophecies regarding our future came true.

In literature, time travel was described depending on the era in which its creators lived. For example, in novels of the 18th century, when religion still retained its weight in society and prevailed over other facts, writers associated everything unusual with divine intervention.

The first science fiction book about time travel is considered to be Samuel Madden's novel “Memoirs of the 20th Century. Letters concerning the State governed by George VI... Received by revelation in 1728. In six volumes.” In the book, which was written in 1733, the main character received letters describing events from the end of the 20th century, which were brought to him by a real angel.

The appearance of the "Time Machine"

The first mention of a certain man-made mechanism that allowed time travel appeared only at the end of the 19th century. In 1881, a story by American journalist Edward Mitchell, “The Clock That Went Backward,” appeared in one of the New York scientific journals. It talks about a young man who was able to travel back in time using an ordinary room clock.

Edward Mitchell is considered one of the founders of modern science fiction. He described in his books many inventions and ideas long before they appeared on the pages of other science fiction writers. He talked about faster-than-light travel, the invisible man, and more before anyone else.

In 1895, an event occurred that turned the world of fantastic prose upside down. In the English magazine The New Review, the editor decides to publish the story “The Story of the Time Traveler,” the first major work of fiction by H.G. Wells. The name “Time Machine” did not appear immediately, and was adopted only a year later. The writer developed the idea of ​​the story “The Argonauts of Time,” written in 1888.

“The idea of ​​the possibility of time travel arose in 1887 after a certain student named Hamilton-Gordon, in the basement of the School of Mines in South Kensington, where the meetings of the Debating Society were held, gave a report on the possibilities of non-Euclidean geometry based on the book Hinton "What is the fourth dimension"

A distinctive feature of the novel is that some moments of the protagonist's time travel were described using assumptions that later appeared in Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. At the time of writing the story, it did not even exist.

Einstein phenomenon

Since ancient times, man has perceived the space around him as the value of three dimensions: length, width and height. Talking about time was the lot of philosophers; only in the 17th century the concept of time was introduced into science as a physical quantity, but scientists, including Newton, perceived time as something unchangeable and linear.

Newtonian physics assumed that clocks placed in any part of the Universe would always show the same time. Scientists were satisfied with the current state of affairs, because it is much easier to carry out calculations using such data.

Everything changed in 1915, when Albert Einstein stood up at the podium. The report on the Special Theory of Relativity (SRT) and the General Theory of Relativity (GRT) brought Newton's perception of time to its knees. In his scientific works, time existed inextricably with matter and space and was not linear. It could change its course, speed up or slow down, depending on conditions.

The supporters of the Newtonian universe gave up. Einstein's theory was extremely logical, all the basic laws of physics continued to work flawlessly in it, so the scientific community could only accept it as a given.

« Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited, while imagination embraces the whole world, stimulating progress, giving rise to evolution».

Albert Einstein

In his equations, the scientist presented the curvature of space-time caused by the gravitational component of matter. They took into account not only the geometric features of objects, but also the density, pressure and other factors that they possess. The peculiarity of Einstein's equations is that they can be read both from right to left and from left to right. Depending on this, the perception of the world around us and the interaction of space-time will change.

First representations of time travel

After the scientific community recovered from the shock, it began to actively use Einstein's work in its research. Astronomers and astrophysicists were the first to become interested, because the theory of relativity worked for the Universe around us, which will undoubtedly help answer a number of questions that were previously considered rhetorical. At the same time, it turned out that the scientific works of the German physicist allow for the possibility of the existence of a time machine, even several of its types.

Already in 1916, the first scientific works on time travel with theoretical justification appeared. The first to announce this was a physicist from Austria, whose name was Ludwig Flamm, who at that time was only 30 years old. He was inspired by Einstein's ideas and tried to solve his equations. Suddenly it dawned on Flamm that with the curvature of space and matter in the Universe around us, peculiar tunnels could arise through which we could pass not only within space, but also within time.

Einstein warmly accepted the young scientist's theory and agreed that it met all the conditions of the theory of relativity. Almost 15 years later, he was able to develop Flamm's reasoning, and he, together with his colleague Nathan Rosen, were able to connect two Schwarzschild black holes with the help of a space-time tunnel that widened at the entrance, gradually narrowing towards its middle. In theory, one can travel through such a tunnel in the space-time continuum. Physicists called such a tunnel the Einstein-Rosen bridge.

To people outside the scientific world, Einstein-Rosen bridges are known by the simpler name “wormholes,” which was coined by Princeton scientist John Wheeler in the mid-20th century. The name “wormholes” is also common. This expression quickly spread among supporters of modern theoretical physics and very accurately reflected holes in space. Traveling through a wormhole would allow a person to cover vast distances in much shorter periods of time than traveling in a straight line. With their help, one could even go to the edge of the Universe.

The idea of ​​"wormholes" has inspired science fiction writers so much that most science fiction since the mid-20th century tells us about the distant future of humanity, where people have mastered the entire space and easily travel from star to star, meeting new alien races and interacting with some of them. them into bloody wars.

However, physicists do not share the writers’ optimism. According to them, traveling through a wormhole may be the last thing a person sees. As soon as he falls beyond the event horizon, his life will stop forever.

In his book The Physics of the Impossible, the famous scientist and popularizer of science Michio Kaku quotes his colleague Richard Gott:

« I don't think the question is whether a person in a black hole can go back in time, the question is whether he can get out of there to show off».

But don't despair. In fact, physicists still left a loophole for romantics who dream of traveling through space and time. To survive in a wormhole, you just need to fly faster than the speed of light. The fact is that according to the laws of modern physics this is simply impossible. Thus, the Einstein-Rosen bridge is impassable within the framework of today's science.

Development of the theory of time travel

If traveling through a “wormhole” allows us, in theory, to get into the future, then with our past in this regard everything is much more complicated. In the mid-20th century, Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel once again tried to solve the equations created by Einstein. As a result of his calculations, a rotating universe emerged on paper, which looked like a cylinder, in which time ran along its edges and was looped. Such a complex model is difficult for an unprepared person to even imagine, however, within the framework of this theory, it was possible to get into the past if you circled the universe along the outer contour at the speed of light or higher. According to Gödel's calculations, in this case you will arrive at the starting point long before the start itself.

Unfortunately, Kurt Gödel's model also does not fit into the framework of modern physics due to the impossibility of traveling faster than the speed of light.

Kip Thorne's Reversible Wormhole

The scientific community did not stop trying to solve the equations of the theory of relativity, and in 1988 a scandal occurred that put the whole world on its ears. One of the American scientific magazines published an article from the famous physicist and expert in the field of gravity theory, Kip Thorne. In his article, the scientist stated that he and his colleagues were able to calculate the so-called “reversible wormhole”, which will not collapse behind the spacecraft as soon as it enters it. For comparison, the scientist gave an example that such a wormhole will allow you to walk along it in any direction.

Kip Thorne's statement was very reliable and supported by mathematical calculations. The only problem was that it went against the axiom that lies at the foundation of modern physics - events of the past cannot be changed.

The so-called time paradox of physics was jokingly called “the murder of grandfather.” This bloodthirsty title describes the scheme quite accurately: you go back in time, accidentally kill a little boy (because he pisses you off). The boy turns out to be your grandfather. Accordingly, your father and you are not born, which means you will not go through the wormhole and kill your grandfather. The circle is closed.

This paradox is also called the “Butterfly Effect,” which appeared in Ray Bradbury’s book “A Sound of Thunder” long before scientists developed the theory, in 1952. The plot described the story of a hero who went on a journey into the past, into the prehistoric period, when giant lizards reigned on the earth. One of the conditions of the journey was that the heroes had no right to leave the special path, so as not to cause a time paradox. However, the main character violates this condition and leaves the path, where he steps on a butterfly. When he returns to his time, a terrifying picture appears before his eyes, where the world he knew before no longer exists.

Development of Thorne's theory

Because of time paradoxes, it would be stupid to abandon the idea of ​​Kip Thorne and his colleagues; it would be easier to solve the problem with the paradoxes themselves. Therefore, the American scientist received support from where he least expected it: from the Russian astrophysicist Igor Novikov, who figured out how to get around the problem with the “grandfather.”

According to his theory, which was called the “principle of self-consistency,” if a person finds himself in the past, then his ability to influence events that have already happened to him tends to zero. Those. The very physics of time and space will not allow you to kill your grandfather or cause the “butterfly effect.”

At the moment, the global scientific community is divided into two camps. One of them supports the opinion of Kip Thorne and Igor Novikov regarding travel through wormholes and their safety, others stubbornly deny it. Unfortunately, modern science does not allow us to either prove or disprove these statements. We are also not yet able to detect wormholes in space due to the primitiveness of our instruments and mechanisms.

Kip Thorne became the chief scientific consultant on the famous science fiction film Interstellar, which tells the story of a man's journey through a wormhole..

Creating your own space-time tunnel

The wider the imagination of a modern scientist, the greater heights he can achieve in his work. While skeptics deny any possibility of the existence of the Einstein-Rosen bridge, supporters of this theory offer a way out of the situation. If we are not able to detect a wormhole in our immediate vicinity, then we can create it ourselves! Moreover, there are already developments for this. For now, this theory is in the realm of science fiction, however, as we have already seen, most of the predictions of science fiction writers have come true.

Kip Thorne, along with his supporters, continues to work on the theory of wormholes. The scientist was able to calculate that the birth of a wormhole can be triggered using so-called “dark matter” - a mysterious building material in the Universe that cannot be detected directly, but according to physicists, 27% of our Universe consists of it. By the way, baryonic matter (the one that we are made of and can see) accounts for only 4.9% of the total mass of the universe. Dark matter has amazing properties. It does not emit electromagnetic radiation, does not interact with other forms of matter except at the gravitational level, but its potential is truly enormous.

According to Thorne, dark matter could be used to create a reversible wormhole large enough for a spacecraft to pass through. The only problem is that for this you need to accumulate so much dark matter that its mass will be commensurate with the mass of Jupiter. Humanity is not yet able to obtain even a gram of this substance, if the concept of “gram” is applicable to it at all. In addition, no one has canceled the need to travel at the speed of light, which means that despite all the achievements of mankind in the field of science, we are still at a cave level of development, and we are very far from real breakthrough discoveries.

Afterword

Ideas for inventing a real time machine, which would allow us to discover the mysteries of the past and see our future, are still unrealistic. However, this does not change the fact that the theory of relativity developed by Einstein continues to work for each of us. For example, finding a real time traveler will not be difficult even now. The faster a person moves, the slower time goes for him, which means that he is slowly but surely moving into the future. Airline pilots, fighter pilots, and especially astronauts working in orbit are real time travelers. Even if only by hundredths of a second, they were ahead of us, people living on Earth.

Time travel is an entertaining plot device in science fiction stories and films. Many stories involve time travel involving a ship traveling at the speed of light. True, we have nothing to test the theory with, due to the lack of such a ship.

In other stories, time travel involves circumstances such as coming close to a very massive object, like a black hole. Unfortunately, the above methods are very limited, because movement is only allowed into the future, due to local time dilation in relation to other objects.

The possibility of traveling through time is of great interest and awakens the imagination. It is easier and more convenient to travel to another time using an exotic device (time machine), since you can travel in both directions. But we don’t have a car either, or at least nothing is known about it.

However, is it even possible to deceive the nature of time in order to travel to the future, even if it is hypothetically possible?

It is important to remember that we are traveling into the future every second. This is the nature of space-time. This is why we remember the past (instead of “remembering” the future). The future is largely unpredictable because it has not yet happened, but we are always heading towards it.

Why no final one? Because right now we do not have the opportunity, but we cannot say about the technologies of the future. Perhaps it’s enough to just sit back and wait for a device to be created in the future and go back in time.

JOURNEY TO THE FUTURE AND RELATIVITY.

It certainly sounds surprising, but the transition in time can be accelerated. Although this only happens in short periods of time. This has already been verified by astronauts who have gone beyond the Earth. That is, we have a precedent for traveling to the future!

Can this happen over longer periods of time? Theoretically yes, according to Einstein's theory of relativity. The key is the speed of an object: the faster an object moves through space, the slower time passes compared to an observer moving more slowly.

A classic demonstration of future travel is the twin paradox. The example works like this: take a pair of twins who are 20 years old and living on Earth. The first takes off in a spaceship on a five-year journey at the speed of light.

GRAVITY AND TIME TRAVEL.

In much the same way that moving at near the speed of light can slow down perceived time, strong gravitational fields can slow down perceived time. The energy of the field can create the effect of time travel (if you remember, a black hole, for example, has an “event horizon”, this is a wonderful region where even time disappears).

Gravity affects movement in space as well as the flow of time. Time passes more slowly for an observer located inside the gravity well of a massive object. The stronger gravity is, the more it affects the passage of time, while an outside observer lives in normal time. But what is interesting is that both observers, relative to themselves, live in the usual time.

Astronauts on the International Space Station experience a combination of these effects, albeit on a much smaller scale. Since they move quite fast and orbit the Earth (a massive body with gravity), time slows down for them relative to people on Earth. And although the difference is only seconds during their time in space, it is measurable.

CAN WE TRAVEL TO THE FUTURE?

Until we develop a way to approach the speed of light and test the theory of time distortion, this can only be speculated. We also cannot travel near black holes and experience time travel to a significant distance into the future - again, there is no technology.

Another problem appears here. Let's say, going into the future at a speed close to light, or with the help of monstrous gravitational forces, how to calculate the time of the jump? The ship will require acceleration to the speed of light - this is already a local time warp. Immersion in a gravitational field – and by how much?

Okay, let's set up an experimental test, say a time jump of a day. However, even one second of error will lead (in both cases) to the fact that the sent object can “pop up” in the future hundreds or tens of hundreds of years later! Well, who will come to us to tell us about a successful experiment, a traveler to the past? – then we will have to wait for the invention of the time machine.

JOURNEY TO THE PAST.

Traveling into the past is not possible based on existing technology. That's the point... But we'll continue.

The possibility of going back in time is denied, citing the well-known paradox of “going back in time and killing your grandfather.” This is how the impossibility of transition is expressed: the grandson will not be able to kill the grandfather, because he has already killed him, so the grandson does not exist and cannot return to the past to perform a vile act against the grandfather and himself... that is, some effects may arise that destroy the sequence of events.

Moving along the path of “events that have already taken place” of the past, the convention of paradoxes can be discarded - these are hypothetical restrictions in time-events that have not been confirmed experimentally. In general, there is a plentiful number of hypotheses on this topic, which expands with the appearance of a new film or book.

In fact, there are most likely no restrictions on time travel into the past. Paradoxes are as absent as time loops; entropy is unlikely to explode if you shake hands with your other self on occasion or try to make changes in the past - everything that happened is already recorded on the fabric of reality, so no one can destroy the sequence of events.

Thus, we choose one, without restrictions on traveling to the past. And if you haven't met time travelers yet, then this can only indicate a couple of things;
a) the time machine has not yet been invented, remaining an exotic device;
b) travelers to the past are the same people as we are, so it is difficult to identify them as people from the future.