The concept of time travel has always captured the imagination of physicists and laypersons alike. But is it really possible? Of course it is. We’re doing it right now, aren’t we? We are all traveling into the future one second at a time.
But that was not what you were thinking. Can we travel much further into the future? Absolutely.
If we could travel close to the speed of light, or in the proximity of a black hole, time would slow down enabling us to travel arbitrarily far into the future. The really interesting question is whether we can travel back into the past.
From space colonization to resurrection of dinosaurs to machine intelligence, the most awe-inspiring visions of humanity’s future are typically born from science fiction.
But among an abundance of time travel, superheroes, space adventures, and so forth, biotech remains underrepresented in the genre.
This selection highlights some outstanding works (new and not so new) to fill the sci-fi gap for biotech aficionados.
If you watched Back to the Future over the holiday weekend and wished the flux capacitor was a real thing so you could travel through time, we have sorta good news. Scientists from Australia and Switzerland have proposed a real-life flux capacitor — but you won’t be able to travel back to a high school dance in the ’50s with it.
The device is a new type of electronic circulator, which can control the directional movement of microwave signals. The scientists, who published their research in Physical Review Letters, have proposed two different potential circuits — one of them borrows the design of the three-pointed flux capacitor Doc Brown and Marty McFly used to travel to 1955 and 2015 in their DeLorean.
The possibility of time travel through the geodesics of vacuum solutions in first order gravity is explored. We present explicit examples of such geometries, which contain degenerate as well as nondegenerate tetrad fields that are sewn together continuously over different regions of the spacetime.
These classical solutions to the field equations satisfy the energy conditions.
Physicists have confirmed the existence of a new form of atomic nuclei, and the fact that it’s not symmetrical challenges the fundamental theories of physics that explain our Universe.
But that’s not as bad as it sounds, because the 2016 discovery could help scientists solve one of the biggest mysteries in theoretical physics — where is all the dark matter? — and could also explain why travelling backwards in time might actually be impossible.
“We’ve found these nuclei literally point towards a direction in space. This relates to a direction in time, proving there’s a well-defined direction in time and we will always travel from past to present,” Marcus Scheck from the University of the West of Scotland told Kenneth MacDonald at BBC News at the time.
As the common tropes of science fiction continue to break out into reality, from humanoid robots to self-driving cars, there’s one concept that has seemingly remained beyond our grasp: time travel.
But, jumping through time might not be impossible, after all, according to one astrophysicist.
By the rules of theoretical physics, certain conditions exist that would allow for the construction of elaborate wormholes, which could transport humans back to different eras.
While scientists have yet to discover the conditions needed to travel back in time, and construction a system large enough for humans certainly wouldn’t be easy, ‘there’s nothing forbidding it’ in the laws of theoretical physics, explains astrophysicist Ethan Siegel of Lewis & Clark College in the Forbes blog Starts With A Bang.
Backward time travel would rely on the elusive counterpart to the known positive energy / positive or zero mass particles found all throughout the universe – the negative mass/energy particles, which have long been theorized but never yet found.
‘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,’ Siegel writes.
