Back to the Future: The Time Travel Paradigm

The Time Travel Paradigm

For centuries people have fantasised about time travel. Many novels and poems have been written about time travel; even movies like Back to The Future were made about time travel. But keeping aside the entertainment factor of time travel, let's discuss whether time travel is truly possible.

While doing my research about time travel, I came across several references, but neither quite made sense. Sure I could travel from Mumbai to Delhi because there is a physical relation of distance between them; but how could I travel from 2016 to let's say 1989? At first this question agitated me all day, until I came across the most satisfying theory. Years ago the multiuniverse theory was proposed by physicists. According to the theory, the universe is continually in a state of expansion ever since The Big Bang took place.

This expansion takes place in the form of a sphere. There may be billions of particles in the universe, but they are still finite; and there is only a limited number of ways they can combine with each other. Hence, at regular intervals a universe like our's repeats itself. Therefore there are almost infinite number of such universes as ours. 

But each one is either at a different stage of time or a result of some different incidents. For example, there might be one universe where Hitler lived on and Germany won the World War, enslaving the entire planet. So the only possible way of time travel is if we could reach any of these universes, and since there are infinite such universes, there is one at every point if time. But if these universes are so far away, how do we get there. Even light would take thousands of years to get there.

The answer is a wormhole. Now let me tell you that a wormhole is a sphere shaped object that bends space time as if it's a piece of paper. Hence, where usually I would have to travel the full length, thanks to the wormhole I just have to poke my way through it, just as a pin would poke through folded paper.

But worm holes do not exists naturally in sizes big enough for humans to fit in with a spacecraft. However, they do exists at subatomic levels where space time usually exists in crumples called quantum foam. But how do I get a human through a sphere smaller than an atom? Well, we do transfer data like movies and pictures from one point of the earth to a other in a matter of seconds, so why can't we do that with humans? The fact is that when we send a picture, our device simply gathers all the information in the picture and sends this data to another device; however humans have information a billion times that of a picture.

Hence, all that we need is a computer strong enough to gather the data of a human and send it through the worm hole to the other universe.

Since time acts like a cycle, we will already be in the other universe by the time we reach there and hence we could literally recreate ourselves in the other universe. This strong computer is called a quantum computer and it is so strong that it is capable of changing the quantum states of matter! This computer was first suggested by famous physicist Richard Feynman, and currently many scientist are working on making such a computer. But until this is achieved, we can always satiate ourselves with sci-fi.