A top scientist insists time travel is theoretically possible but those hoping to get a glimpse of the future will be disappointed after experts warned we will only have the ability to travel backwards.
Experts would need to create a wormhole – where space and time are warped to create portals that act as shortcuts through space – to allow the feat which would not be impossible according to the rules of theoretical physics.
Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel of Lewis & Clark College wrote in the Forbes blog Starts With A Bang said scientists are yet to discover the conditions to make the wormhole possible, but “there is nothing forbidding it”.
The wormhole could be made possible if or when scientists discover the counterpart to the already discovered positive or zero mass particles which are found throughout the universe.
Mr Siegel said: “It’s eminently possible to have negative mass/energy particles in the framework of General Relativity.
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“Sure, we haven’t discovered any yet, but according to all the rules of theoretical physics, there’s nothing forbidding it.
“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.
“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.”
The wormhole would need to be constructed in a way that would allow one end to remain stationary while the other end travels at almost the speed of light.
For example, if the end of the wormhole is 40 lightyears away from the stationary beginning, the journey through could be instantaneous, but to reach the end 40 years of time would have passed.
Mr Siegel writes: “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.”