Physicists discover how wormholes could enable time travel

 

Wormholes   play a key role in many science fiction films, where they are often shown as a  shortcut between two distant points in space .

But in physics, these tunnels in space-time remain purely hypothetical, they are not tangible and exist only in the world of mathematics and theory.

Now, an international team led by Valeri P. Frolov of the University of Alberta in Canada and Andrei Zelnikov of Charles University in Prague  has discovered a way to  bend the laws of physics to hypothetically go back in time .

Wormholes, like black holes, appear in the equations of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, published in 1916. An important postulate of Einstein's theory is that the Universe has four dimensions:  three spatial dimensions and time as the fourth dimension .

Together, they form what is known as spacetime, and spacetime can be stretched and bent by massive objects like stars, in the same way that a sheet of rubber would be bent by a metal ball dipped into it.

Wormholes are often thought of as tunnels through space-time.Wormholes are often thought of as tunnels through space-time.Source:   Getty Images

However, in their scientific paper, Frolov and Zelnikov proposed that a  specific type of wormhole would  ' inevitably turn into a time machine ' if subjected to particular conditions.

Frolov, Krtouš and Zelnikov explored what is known as  a wormhole , first described in 2016 by theoretical physicist Gary Gibbons of the University of Cambridge and Mikhail Volkov of the University of Tours.

Unlike black holes, the wormhole proposed by Gibbons and Volkov connects sections of the Universe (or, indeed, different universes) that are usually described as “flat”.

Ring-shaped masses can potentially create some pretty remarkable distortions in flat spacetime when you consider how their electric and magnetic fields can interact.

And so Frolov, Krtouš and Zelnikov decided to consider two types of wormholes: “one that connects flat spaces; and another that connects two distant domains in the same space.”

For the latter, they concluded that if a “thin, massive shell” surrounded one of the ring wormhole mouths, a “temporary closed curve” would form.

Although it is a somewhat technical definition, this closed time curve would mean that any traveling object (or ray of light)  would return to exactly the same point from which it started .