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TIME TRAVEL?!
Bla Balzs

SUMMARY sun some eight minutes ago, a 1 light-year dis-

tant star as it beamed one year ago, a 1 billion
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been suc-
light-year far-away galaxy as it existed one bil-
cessfully switched on recently. According to a
lion years ago. Extra individual time travel is not
pair of noted Russian mathematicians Irina
possible.
Arefeva and Igor Volovich it might turn out to
be the Earths first time machine [1]. If the two But Albert Einsteins Special (1905) and General
experts are correct, the LHC debut at CERN (1915) Theory of Relativity changed the Newto-
could yield a landmark in history. nian picture radically. According to the former
one if we travel at velocity v, then our proper
To systematically review the state of our knowl-
time (T) passes for us at a slower rate relative to
edge on time travel is therefore highly actual. In
the time (t) of a stationary observer. This effect
the following, well discuss the pros and cons of
is known as time dilation, and the numerical re-
time travel, including its history, conditions and
lationship is given by:
inferences.
2 2
T = t/(1- v /c ) (1)
INTRODUCTION
The origins of time travel can be found within COSMIC TIME TRAVEL
legends and fairytales. The first depiction of
time-travel may have been in the Sanskrit-Indian In special relativity, time dilation is most simply
classic Mahbhrata, written roughly 2,400 to described in circumstances where relative veloc-
2,800 years ago, in which a character journeys ity is unchanging (see equation 1). Neverthe-
to heaven and then returns to Earth, only to dis- less, the Lorentz equations allow one to calcu-
cover he has jumped ahead centuries into the late proper time and movement in space for the
future. case of a spaceship whose acceleration rela-
tive to some stationary object is uniform
An illustrative selection in the literature of mod- throughout the period of measurement.
ern times (no overall consensus of who wrote
the first time travel story): In our cosmic round-trip (figure 1), we will travel
in a spaceship to a distant destination and back
Samuel Madden: Memoirs of the 20th
with constant 2g acceleration. We accelerate
Century (1733),
towards our destination over the first-half of the
Lewis Caroll: Alice in Wonderland (1865),
distance, and decelerate over the second one,
Mark Twain: A Connecticut Yankee in so that our spaceship reaches its highest speed
King Arthuts Court (1889), half-way between the ends and is at rest at our
H. G. Wells: The Time Machine (1895). destination. The spaceship will then make the
The golden medal belongs to Wells for writing return trip to Earth in the same way. At the end
a novel entirely focused on intentional time of the trip, we compare the clock carried by the
travel accomplished not by gods, demons or spacecraft to a clock left at Earth. What we find
wizards, but by science and a human being. is that substantially more time has passed for
Earth than for the travelers on our spacecraft
TIME TRAVEL IN CLASSICAL PHYSICS (see figure 2).
Do the laws of physics allow time travel? Well, The equation for the time at Earth (t) versus the
we all travel in time at 60 seconds per minute time in the spaceship for a round trip is given by
and according to Newtonian physics the time is t= 4 c sinh(aT/4c)/a (2)
flowing uniformly at a constant rate everywhere
at all times and under any conditions in the where c is the speed of light, a is the accelera-
whole universe. tion (in our case 2g), and T is the proper time of
the spacecraft. The time dilation as a function
As the propagation velocity of light is 300 000 of T is illustrated on figure 2.
km/s, we see a 1 km distant tower as it was
1/300 00 seconds ago, we see light that left the

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We can observe extreme time dilation in the only 10 minutes old!!! (Another good example:
Universe. Some cosmic ray particles travel at a Cosmic particles entering the atmosphere of the
velocity of 0.999999999999999c (15 decimal Earth when collide with the air particles at a
places)! These are free neutrons which have a height of ~10 km produce the short living (2 mi-
half-life around 10 minutes (in proper time). cro seconds) muon particles. In spite of their
They were emitted at the Big Bang and they are short life they reach the Earths surface due to
still travelling today. They feel the Universe is the dilation of their proper time.)

Figure 1.
Lets make a space-travel with 2g acceleration. We speed up for the first quarter of the trip, speed down for the second one,
speed up for the third one and speed down again for the final one. The time-gain as a function of T is illustrated on figure 2.

Years into future

10,000,000

1,000,000
100,000
10,000
1000

100
10
Years on journey
T
10 20 30 40 50

Figure 2.
Time dilation during the cosmic travel illustrated in figure 1 as a function of the proper time (T) of the spacecraft.

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TIME TRAVEL INTO THE PAST When a quantum process occurs, the out-
come is determined by probability.
Using the phenomenon of time dilation an object
made of normal matter can not travel into the For every possible outcome a new uni-
past (figure 3). (However according to Nobel verse is created and branches off. (The
Laureate Richard Feynman antiparticles can wave function never collapses; it splits
be regarded as particles going backwards in into new wave functions. The split off
time.) wave functions reside in physically distin-
guishable worlds).
Fortunately, because otherwise we would run in Our world is bifurcating endlessly like
a number of time paradoxes; e.g.: branches and twigs of an infinite tree.
What if I travel back in time and kill my
grandfather when hes still a baby? According to this theory, when a time-traveler
changes the past, a new universe is immediately
What if I travel back in time and kill my-
created and branches off from the original one.
self?!
Thus history in the original universe cannot be
What if I travel back in time and give my-
changed. Instead, a new history is created in the
self non-contemporary information?
new universe. This provides a possible solution
An ingenious escape from this trap is the many- to the above paradoxes, but one wonders
worlds hypothesis of Hugh Everett [2, 3]. The whether the price is not too high?
sequence of thought of the author is the follow-
ing one:

Figure 3.
Time is the fourth dimension. In this graph, time is vertical and space is horizontal. The z-axis has been suppressed. Every particle
traces out a worldline in space-time. The set of all light rays passing through the point of some event E forms the light cone.
A closed timelike curve (CTC) is a worldline that loops back onto itself. A traveler using such a curve has to travel faster
than light at some stage. But faster- than-light-travel is not possible in the framework of special relativity.

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TIME TRAVEL IN CURVED SPACE ging in the environment of such an ob-

ject with proper mass, density, length and
According to Einsteins General Relativity
speed reverse time travel can be
which is based on the geometric revolution of
achieved without having to travel faster
Bolyai, Lobacsevszkij and Riemann the met-
than light.
ric of the universe is not Euclidean everywhere.
1988, Kip Thorne suggests that worm-
Matter, energy and motion deform the space-
holes can be made to function as time-
time and the geodetic line between two locations
machines ([6], figure 6).
is not always a straight line (figure 4).
1991, Richard Gott points out that cosmic
Henceforth, lets recapitulate the basic scientific strings can be used to allow backward
literature of time travel: time travel [7]. Gott's solution depends
1905, Einsteins Special Relativity: time upon the antigravitational tension of the
travel into the future is absolutely possi- strings to deform space without attracting
ble. nearby objects. Two atomwidth super-
1616, Einsteins General Relativity opens dense strings would have to travel parallel
new perspectives for the topic about time to one another in opposite directions.
travel. They would create severly curved space-
1949, Kurt Gdel shows that even back- time, in which a closed timelike curve
wards time travel is possible in a rotating would open up. A hypothetic time traveler
universe ([4], figure 5). might be able to exploit these conditions
1974, Frank Tipler shows that backwards at just the right moment and fly his space-
time travel is also possible around a mas- ship along the CTC right there created by
sive rotating cylinder [5]. Taking advan- the strings.
tage of the phenomenon of frame drag-

Figure 4.
Illustration of curved space-time around a massive object.

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Figure 5.
Light cones may tip over to form a CTC in a rotating universe. It is not considered a proper solution
for backwards time travel since the universe is expanding, not rotating.

Figure 6.
The wormhole connects two distant points of the curved space-time and creates a closed timelike curve,
which allows objects to travel into the future, or from the future to the present.

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TRAVERSABLE WORMHOLES The basic types of time travel paradoxes are the
AS TIME MACHINES following ones:
Causality paradox: A hypothetical effect
Wormholes arise as solutions to the equations of
that would result if an individual were to
Einstein's general theory of relativity. They are
travel back in time and cause changes to
connecting two different points in space-time in
the circumstances that led to his or her
such a way that a trip through the wormhole
current actions. Open type: Going back in
could take much less time than a journey be-
time and killing your own father before
tween the same starting and ending points in
you were conceived. Closed type: One
normal space (figure 6). The ends of a wormhole
goes back in time and saves his own life.
could, in theory, be intra-universe (i.e. both exist
Solution: Multiverse?
in the same universe) or inter-universe (exist in
different universes in a multiverse, and thus Multiplication paradox: Rendezvous
serve as a connecting passage between the with our earlier ourselves. The main prob-
two). lem is the violation of the fundamental
principle of conservation of matter-energy.
Formerly, one used to think that they are highly Solution: Multiverse?
unstable and would probably collapse instantly if Information paradox: It is a paradox that
even the tiniest amount of matter, such as a sin- questions the originality of information that
gle photon, attempted to pass through them. But travel in time. In simpler terms, some in-
S. V. Krasnikov had recently shown that some formation is brought back in time, and it
wormholes can be suitable for time travel [8]. becomes the input that was initially
The wormholes of this class are static and have brought back in time in the first place.
arbitrarily wide throats, which makes them tra- Specific example: a time traveler is going
versable even for persons. The matter neces- to Homer's time with a scroll of paper con-
sary for these configurations consists of two ex- taining the whole Odyssey. Homer
otic components. Exotic matter [9] violates one pressed for time simply copies the in-
or more energy conditions or is not made of formation from the future. The conse-
known baryonic particles. This hypothetical kind quence is that actually no one really
of matter has both a negative energy density writes the heroic poem! Or a more practi-
and a negative pressure. Such materials would cal one: It would be easy for a time trav-
possess qualities like negative mass or being eler to find out next weeks winning Lotto
repelled rather than attracted by gravity. numbers and an original draw would be
According to Arefeva and Volovich, extreme impossible. Solution: not known for the
conditions at the Large Hadron Collider where author.
colliding gravitational waves from highly accel-
erated protons at an energy level of 14 TeV CONCLUSION
concentrated into a tiny space range of about This paper is an enquiry into the physical possi-
-15 bility of time travel. Modern space-time theories
10 m may produce wormholes in space-
time. An advanced civilization might be able to such as general relativity seem to permit models
manipulate one of these to create a traversable that feature closed timelike curves. We sketchily
tunnel back to the point in time, when the reviewed the recent literature on so-called time
wormhole was first created! machines, i.e. of devices that produce closed
traversable worldlines. Finally, we argued that
none of the purported paradoxes unequivocally
THE MAIN PARADOXES OF
ruled out time travel.
BACKWARDS TIME TRAVEL
Epilogue: The entities of the past, present and
Aside from the actual construction of a time ma-
future are coexisting. Right now I am just a tran-
chine the most challenging part would be the re-
sient spatio-temporal part of the whole that is me
sult of changing the past. Stephen Hawking pro-
throughout 4-dimensional space-time!
posed a simple solution to this problem called
the Chronology Protection Hypothesis. It states
that nature would always find a way of prevent- REFERENCES
ing wormholes and other ways of changing the [1] Arefeva, I. Ya., Volovich, I. V. Time machine
past. But the proof is still missing! at the LHC. arXiv:0710.2696v2, 2007.
[2] Everett, H. Theory of the Universal Wave-
function. Thesis, Princeton University, 1956.

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[3] Balzs, B. Kvantum teleportci? INFOR- Weak Energy Condition. Physical Review
MATIKA, 8. vf., 4. szm, 2005. Letters, 61, 1988.
[4] Gdel, K. An example of a new type of cos- [7] Gott, J. R. Closed Timelike Curves Produced
mological solutions of Einstein's field equa- By Pairs Of Moving Cosmic Strings: Exact
tions of gravitation. Review of Modern Phys- Solutions. Phys. Rev. Lett. 66, 1991.
ics 21, 1949. [8] Krasnikov, S. V. Toward a Traversable
[5] Tipler, F. J. Rotating cylinders and the pos- Wormhole. arXiv:gr-qc/0003092v1, 2000.
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Review D9, 1974. W. Norton, 2002.
[6] Morris, M. S., Thorne, K. S. and Yurtsever,
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