Time travel has been one of man’s wildest fantasies for centuries. Many science fiction movies have shown people getting into a vehicle of some sort and then magically arriving in the past or future.
Sounds crazy, right? But maybe not. According to astrophysicist Ethan Siegel, time travel is technically possible, but you’ll ONLY be able to go back into the past, not into future.
Siegel explained this by referring to Einstein’s General Relativity and the concept of negative mass/energy particles. He said that a person could travel through a wormhole and go back in time.
Siegel wrote, “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.” He added, “No matter how far apart you took these two connected objects from one another, if they had enough mass/energy – of both the positive and the negative kind – this instantaneous connection would remain.”
The wormhole could be constructed in such a way that allows one end of it to remain almost motionless, and the other is traveling at roughly the speed of light. Then, one could “step into the relativistic end of the wormhole, and you arrive back on Earth only one year after the wormhole was created, while you yourself may have had 40 years of time to pass.”
Siegel explained, “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. 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.”
