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Despite the lack of any significant practical results, scientists still do not deny the very possibility of time travel, and theoretical developments continue.

Theories about time travel are perhaps one of the most impressive, following developments in the field of teleportation, torsion fields and antigravity. However, time travel has not been so lucky - there are still not only no eyewitnesses to time travel, but also no universal definition of time.

In a sense, each of us is a time traveler, but this is not impressive, especially since in this understanding we can only move “forward.”

Before Einstein, only writers spoke about time travel, and the idea of ​​“turning back time” did not belong to H.G. Wells, but to Edward Page Mitchell, publisher of the New York Sun newspaper, who 7 years before “The Time Machine” published the story “ The Clock That Went Backward"

In physics, it has become fashionable to think about the possibility of such movements, following Einstein. The phenomenon of time travel from that moment began to be explained from the point of view of the action of the space-time continuum. Einstein’s “shadow” still “lies” over all more or less serious discussions on this topic.

Einstein, who revolutionized ideas about space and time, is credited with the phrase: “Newton, forgive me.”

According to the theory of relativity, it turns out that at speeds approaching the speed of light, time should slow down. However, the speed of light is practically unattainable - unlike, say, the speed of sound, a barrier that was overcome in the last quarter of the last century. Further, according to Einstein's theory, it follows that when a body develops a speed close to the speed of light, its weight begins to increase and at the point of reaching this speed is practically infinite.

Another axiom, which also accompanies theories about time, says: the first journey, if it is destined to happen, will be associated not with the invention of ultra-fast transport, but with the discovery of a special environment in which any vehicle could accelerate to the required speed. A corridor in time can also be formed by purely “natural” phenomena: black holes, tunnels, cosmic strings, and so on.

In the movie "Back to the Future", a specially equipped car, accelerating to the speed of light, overcomes linear time without any holes.

The most likely candidate for the “time corridor” is black holes, the nature of which is still very little known. It is generally accepted that when stars with at least four times the mass of the Sun die, that is, when their “fuel” burns, they explode due to the pressure caused by their own weight.

As a result of the explosion, black holes are formed, the gravitational fields in which are so powerful that even light cannot leave this area. Any object that reaches the boundary of a black hole - the so-called event horizon - is sucked into its depths, and from the outside it is not visible what is happening “inside”.

A black hole is surrounded by a gravitational field in which bodies reach the speed of light

It is assumed that in the depths of a black hole - presumably at the center, at the so-called singular point - the laws of physics cease to apply, and space and time coordinates, roughly speaking, change places, and travel in space becomes travel in time.

In addition, physicists have suggested that if there are black holes that suck in everything in the zone of influence, then somewhere there, in the “core” of the hole, there must be some kind of “white hole” that pushes out matter with an equally crushing force.

In the center of a black hole there is a corridor where space and time change their characteristics.

However, there is one “but”: before the body reaches the zone where the laws of traditional physics cease to apply, it will be destroyed. This point of view was expressed by California Institute of Technology physicist Kip Thorne, author of the monograph “Black Holes and the Warp of Time.”

Caricature of Thorne and his "wormhole theory" in the space-time continuum

Thorne proposed another way to achieve the acceleration necessary for time travel. He, based on the same theory of Einstein, according to which space and time are constant everywhere, studied other “gaps” in the space-time continuum. These hole-tunnels are supposedly capable of appearing between distant objects due to the casual twisting of space.

Tunnels can connect distant points in space that exist in fundamentally different time planes.

Kip Thorne, absolutely seriously, on the eve of the opening of these tunnels, proposed to cover the surface of the tunnel with a certain substance with a negative energy density to keep them open. Gravitational forces will tend to destroy the tunnel, slam it shut, and the coating will push the walls and keep it from collapsing.

Model of the tunnel between Earth and Sirius.

Another interesting theory about methods of time travel belongs to Richard Gott, a physicist from Princeton. He suggested the existence of certain comic strings that were formed in the early stages of the formation of the Universe.

According to string theory, all microparticles are formed by tiny strings closed in loops and are under a monstrous tension of hundreds of millions of tons. Their thickness is much smaller than the size of an atom, but the colossal gravitational force with which they act on objects falling within their zone of influence accelerates them to colossal speed. The combination of strings or the juxtaposition of a string and a black hole can create a closed corridor with a curved space-time continuum, which could be used for time travel.

There are other, less exotic ways to “cheat” time. This will be easiest for astronauts to do. Staying, for example, on Mercury for 30 years means that the astronaut will return to our planet younger than if he had remained on Earth, since Mercury revolves around the Sun slightly faster than Earth. However, here the linear progression of time is preserved, and in its pure form this phenomenon should not be called time travel.

Moreover, it has been recorded that the astronauts carried into orbit by the Shuttle are already several nanoseconds ahead of “earthly” time, although, to put it mildly, they are far from the speed of light.

"Time machine" of the Victorian era.

In addition to technical problems, physicists are also discussing possible time conflicts. The real problem that can await travelers is time paradoxes. There will be many of them, and they will all be associated with a possible impact on the course of events that have already occurred - the “grandfather paradox,” for example.

Most theorists agreed that any impact on the course of what was accomplished creates a new, parallel reality or another “world line” that does not in the least interfere with the existence of the “original” one. And there will be exactly as many such “parallelities” as is necessary for the consistent existence of each of them.

In general, it should be noted that reasoning, discussions and lectures about the nature of time and the possibility of time travel still remain a favorite pastime of serious physicists - a kind of intellectual fun. At one time, NASA astrophysicist Carl Sagan, in response to Stephen Hawking’s statement that if time travel were possible, we would be full of “guys from the future”, retorted that there are, there are at least a dozen ways to refute this statement.

Carl Sagan: “Read Carroll: the hole into which Alice falls is Thorne’s wormhole.”

Firstly, a time machine, for example, can only transfer to the future. Secondly, a time machine can only transport you to the recent past, and we, again, for example, are “too long ago.” Thirdly, our descendants from the future can only travel to those ancestors who already have a car, and so on.

Be that as it may, the hypothetical possibility of such travel remains, and the most sarcastic skeptics are unable to refute it. Moreover, theories are theories, but practically developments are still underway. Moreover, with some success.

To be continued.

Time Travel Paradoxes regularly occupy the minds of not only scientists who comprehend the possible consequences of such a movement (albeit hypothetical), but also people who are completely far from science. Surely you have argued with your friends more than once about what would happen if you see yourself in the past - like many science fiction authors, writers and directors. Today, a film starring Ethan Hawke, Time Patrol, based on a story by one of the best science fiction writers of all time, Robert Heinlein, was released. This year has already seen several successful films dealing with the theme of time, such as Interstellar or Edge of Tomorrow. We decided to speculate on what potential dangers might await the heroes of temporary sci-fi, from the murder of their predecessors to reality splits.

Text: Ivan Sorokin

The paradox of the murdered grandfather

The most common, and at the same time the most understandable of the paradoxes that overtake a time traveler. The answer to the question “what will happen if you kill your own grandfather (father, mother, etc.) in the past?” may sound different - the most popular outcome is the emergence of a parallel time sequence, erasing the culprit from history. In any case, for the temponaut himself (this word, by analogy with “cosmonaut” and “astronaut,” sometimes refers to the pilot of a time machine), this does not bode absolutely nothing good.

Movie example: The entire story of teenager Marty McFly accidentally traveling back to 1955 is built around avoiding an analogue of this paradox. Having accidentally conquered his own mother, Marty begins to literally disappear - first from photographs, and then from tangible reality. There are many reasons why the first film in the Back to the Future trilogy is an absolute classic, but one of them is how carefully the script avoids the idea of ​​potential incest. Of course, in terms of the scale of the plan, this example can hardly compare with the famous plot from Futurama, as a result of which Fry becomes his own grandfather, accidentally killing the one who was supposed to become this grandfather; As a result, this event had consequences that affected literally the entire universe of the animated series.

Pulling yourself by your hair

The second most common plot in time travel movies: by traveling to a glorious past from a terrible future and trying to change it, the hero ends up causing his own (or everyone's) troubles. Something similar can happen in a positive context: the fairy-tale assistant who guides the plot turns out to be the hero himself, who came from the future and ensures the correct course of events. This logic of development of what is happening can hardly be called a paradox: the so-called time loop here is closed and everything happens exactly as it should be - but in the context of the interaction of cause and effect, the human brain still cannot help but perceive this situation as paradoxical. This technique, as you might guess, is named after Baron Munchausen, who pulls himself out of the swamp.

Movie example: The space epic "Interstellar" (spoiler alert) uses a huge number of plot twists of varying degrees of predictability, but the emergence of a "closed loop" is almost the main twist: Christopher Nolan's humanistic message that love is stronger than gravity only receives its final form in at the very end of the film, when it turns out that the spirit of the bookshelf protecting the astrophysicist played by Jessica Chastain was the hero Matthew McConaughey, sending messages to the past from the depths of a black hole.

The Bill Murray Paradox

Some time ago, stories about looped time loops already became a separate subgenre of sci-fi about temponauts - both in literature and in cinema. It is not at all surprising that almost any such work is automatically compared to Groundhog Day, which over the years has come to be perceived not only as a parable of existential despair and the desire to appreciate life, but also as an entertaining study of the possibilities of behavior and self-development in extremely limited conditions. The main paradox here lies not in the very presence of the loop (the nature of this process is not always touched upon in such plots), but in the incredible memory of the temponaut (it is she who is capable of providing any movement in the plot) and the equally incredible inertia of those around him to all evidence that the position of the protagonist is truly unique.

Movie example: Detractors dubbed “Edge of Tomorrow” something like “Groundhog Day with aliens,” but in fact the script for one of the best science fiction films of the year (which, by the way, was super successful for this genre) handles its loops much more delicately. The paradox of perfect memory is bypassed here as a result of the fact that the main character writes down and thinks through his moves, interacting with other characters, and the problem of empathy is solved due to the fact that there is another character in the film who at some point had similar skills. By the way, the occurrence of the loop is also explained here.

Frustrated expectations

The problem of results not meeting expectations is always present in our lives - but in the case of time travel, it can hurt especially strongly. This plot device is usually used as an embodiment of the adage "Be careful what you wish for" and works according to Murphy's Law: if events can develop in the worst possible way, then they will. Since it is difficult to assume that a time traveler is able to estimate in advance what the tree of possible outcomes of his or her actions will look like, the viewer rarely doubts the plausibility of such plots.

Movie example: One of the saddest scenes in the recent rom-com Future Boyfriend goes like this: Domhnall Gleeson's temponaut tries to travel back to a time before his child was born and ends up coming home to a complete stranger. This can be corrected, but as a result of such a collision, the hero realizes that his movements along the temporary arrow are subject to more restrictions than he previously thought.

Aristotle with a smartphone

This paradox represents a special case of the popular science fiction trope of "advanced technology in a backward world" - only the "world" here is not another planet, but our own past. It is not difficult to guess what the introduction of a conventional pistol into the world of conventional batons is fraught with: the deification of aliens from the future, destructive violence, a change in the way of life in a particular community, and the like.

Movie example: Of course, the most striking example of the destructive influence of such an invasion should be the Terminator franchise: it was the appearance of androids in the USA in the 1980s that ultimately led to the emergence of the artificial intelligence Skynet, which literally destroyed humanity. Moreover, the main reason for the creation of Skynet is given by the protagonists Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor, because of whose actions the main Terminator chip falls into the hands of Cyberdyne, from whose depths Skynet eventually emerges.

The heavy lot of the rememberer

What happens to the memory of a temponaut when, as a result of his actions, the time arrow itself changes? The gigantic stress that must inevitably arise in such a case is often ignored by science fiction authors, but the ambiguity of the hero’s position cannot be ignored. There are a lot of questions here (and all of them do not have a clear answer - to adequately check the answers to them you need to literally get your hands on a time machine): does the temponaut remember all the events or only part of them? Do two parallel universes coexist in the temponaut’s memory? Does he perceive his changed friends and relatives as different people? What happens if you tell people from the new timeline in detail about their counterparts in the previous timeline?

Movie example: There is at least one example of this condition in almost every time travel movie; from the recent one, Wolverine from the last series of “X-Men” immediately comes to mind. The idea that, as a result of the success of the operation, Hugh Jackman's character will be the only one who can remember the original (extremely grim) development of events is voiced several times in the film; As a result, Wolverine is so happy to see all his friends again that memories that can traumatize even a person with an adamantium skeleton fade into the background.

Scary you #2

Neuroscientists are quite actively studying how people perceive their appearance; An important aspect of this is the reaction to twins and doubles. Typically, such meetings are characterized by an increased level of anxiety, which is not surprising: the brain ceases to adequately perceive the position in space and begins to confuse external and internal signals. Now imagine how a person must feel when he sees himself - but at a different age.

Movie example: The interaction of the main character with himself is perfectly played out in Rian Johnson’s film “Looper,” where the young Joseph Simmons is played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt in sly makeup, and the older one, who arrived from the near future, is played by Bruce Willis. Cognitive discomfort and the inability to establish normal contact is one of the important themes of the film.

Unfulfilled predictions

Your opinion about whether such events are paradoxical depends directly on whether you personally adhere to a deterministic model of the universe. If there is no free will as such, then a skilled temponaut can calmly bet huge amounts of money on various sporting events, predict the results of elections and award ceremonies, invest in shares of the right companies, solve crimes - and so on. If, as usually happens in films about time travel, the actions of a temponaut are still capable of changing the future, then the function and role of predictions based on a kind of insight from an alien from the future are as ambiguous as in the case of those predictions based solely based on logic and past experience (that is, similar to those that are used now).

Movie example: Despite the fact that “Minority Report” features only “mental” time travel, the plot of this film serves as a vivid illustration of both models of the universe: both deterministic and taking into account free will. The plot revolves around the prediction of crimes not yet committed with the help of “clairvoyants” who are able to visualize the intentions of potential killers (a situation of extreme determinism). Towards the end of the film, it turns out that visions are still capable of changing over time - accordingly, a person, to some extent, determines his own destiny.

I was yesterday to tomorrow

Most of the world's major languages ​​have several tenses to denote events that occur in the past, present, and future. But what about the temponaut, who yesterday could observe the death of the Sun, and today he is already in the company of dinosaurs? What tenses to use in speech and writing? In Russian, English, Japanese and many other languages, such functionality is simply absent - and you have to get out of it in such a way that something comical inevitably happens.

Movie example: Doctor Who, of course, belongs to the field of television, not cinema (although the list of works related to the franchise includes several television films), but it is impossible not to mention the series here. The Doctor’s confused use of different tenses became a source of mockery back in pre-Internet times, and after the revival of the series in the mid-2000s, the authors decided to deliberately emphasize this detail: now the on-screen Doctor is able to connect his non-linear perception of time with the peculiarities of the language (and at the same time laugh at the resulting phrases) .

Multiverse

The most fundamental paradox of time travel is not for nothing that it is directly related to a serious conceptual debate in quantum mechanics, based on the acceptance or rejection of the concept of the “multiverse” (that is, the collection of multiple universes). What actually needs to happen the moment you “change the future”? Do you remain yourself - or do you become a copy of yourself in a different timeline (and, accordingly, in a different universe)? Do all the timelines coexist in parallel - so that you just jump from one to another? If the number of decisions that change the course of events is infinite, then is the number of parallel universes infinite? Does this mean that the multiverse is infinite in size?

Movie example: The idea of ​​multiple parallel timelines is usually not adequately represented in films for one simple reason: writers and directors become afraid that no one will understand them. But Shane Carratt, the author of The Detonator, is not like that: understanding the plot of this film, where one non-linearity is superimposed on another, and to fully explain the movements of the characters in time requires drawing a diagram of the multiverse with intersecting timelines, is possible only after considerable effort.

To get to both the past and the future. Although many have the audacity to disagree with the beacon and offer their own theories. However, they are all dubious because they have not been tested; there is no documentary evidence of their success, and the scientists themselves are not sure. Everyone knows that this is possible, they just haven’t decided how.

And in general, the idea of ​​​​traveling in time is a very strange thing. How many temporary collapses await us, plus the emergence of alternative universes in which we will be confused, like mental patients in straitjackets. And is it worth traveling to the past if 6,000 Earth years will pass upon returning to Earth, whereas the journey took no more than a day? Deal with the present before you spoil the past. After all, if it weren’t for Hitler and World War II, most of our grandparents would hardly have married each other. There were all sorts of situations, romances at the front and evacuation. And there wasn't much choice. Well, God bless him, this is not about that. We are talking about what is not written in the Bible.

1. Punch the future with your forehead

Here is the most primitive of all theories: you need to run so fast until you reach and punch the future with your forehead. And the strangest thing is: in fact, this statement is absolutely true. The faster you walk, the further you will fly.

Many experiments have been devoted to this. For example, in 1971 an experiment was conducted. Without getting too technical, let's say briefly: the research group flew around the Earth until time travel occurred. No, for real. They loaded the plane with atomic clocks and flew east until they were back where they started. When the researchers landed, the clock on Earth was 60 nanoseconds ahead of the airplane clock. In other words, the clock on the plane was effectively brought 60 nanoseconds into the future. The researchers then flew in a different direction. This time, the aviation clock was 270 nanoseconds ahead of the earth's clock.

This is explained by the fact that the clocks on Earth were not stationary, because they were on the rotating surface of the planet. The clocks on the plane flying west moved slower, so everything on Earth slowed down in comparison. It turns out that the famous scene where Superman flies around the Earth and turns back time is just a figment of the scriptwriter's sick brain.

By the way, consider this type of time travel in our pocket. Your phone is connected to GPS satellites, which have to be adjusted for slowdown (after all, satellites have their own time course). If you don't do this, the navigation system will take you to a crack den in the next area instead of the nearest KFC.

Let's assume that a car has already been invented that actually allows you to travel in this way. We reach speed and make a leap not by 60 nanoseconds, but by 60 years. A few minutes or a few hours around the planet, and then boom! - bright future!

But will you be able to live in this future, where everyone has forgotten you, and if they remember you, it’s only as an asshole who endlessly spins around the Earth?

2. Dense, holey objects of comic proportions

If you've seen Interstellar, then the essence of the theory should be clear. The closer you are to a large, dense object, the slower time passes. For you.

Massive time travel has already been observed. Scientists fired a huge laser 10,000 kilometers upward. Sometimes science has no other choice but to shoot mischief from a mega-gun into space. But the experiment confirmed that time actually moves at different speeds depending on the distance to gravity.

And what did this shot do? Nothing, once again confirmed the theory that time flows much slower near a supermassive object. Closer to Earth, the passage of time is not as fast as in the layers of the stratosphere. So, if someone suddenly decides to use the mass of Jupiter for travel, then good luck. It is enough to compress the mass of the planet to the size of a tin can, and then travel will become 2 times faster. And there is no need to fly to, which is not only supermassive, but is also a real galactic time machine: time around it flows very slowly.

The strangest part of this theory is that a similar journey is already happening to you right now. In fact, it happens everywhere, not just in the magical horizons of some mysterious black hole on the other side of the galaxy. The Earth's core moves through time slower than people standing at a bus stop in Makhachkala. When you stand, your butt ages slower than your face (although it would be better the other way around). We don't need a machine to travel through time. We just need something huge nearby, like Milonov’s ego or the carcass of Stas Baretsky. Although, even if such a machine, using a monstrous mass, is created, a crowd of protesters will instantly appear, fearing a cosmic collapse and that the Earth’s axis will shift, and Snoop Dogg will become president.

3. Wormholes and Krasnikov pipes

You cannot travel in space and time faster than the speed of light, but with Krasnikov tubes this problem is instantly solved. You just cut a tunnel through space and time and wander back and forth, like one of those green pipes in Super Mario. Here, too, there is an entrance, an exit, and most importantly, the journey goes very quickly, regardless of the distance, so you are unlikely to have time to get bored.

Such “wormholes” are not a physical object, but a distortion of space and time. Schematically, it looks like this: two layers of space bend in a certain place until they touch each other, like panties stuck in the ass.

The main advantages of pipes are that they can be created artificially, and the biggest advantage is that the traveler returns there exactly at the time from which he began the journey. But remember: by cutting a window to new stars 3,000 light years away, you risk getting into an intergalactic war.

In 1993, University of Wellington professor Matt Visser noted that two wormhole entrances with induced time differences could not be combined without generating a quantum field and gravitational effects that would cause the wormholes to collapse, or be repelled from each other. Simply put, the mass will increase, which will only destroy the unfortunate pipes. In addition, this method of transportation, in fact, does not violate the so-called universal speed limit - the maximum speed of light - because the ship itself does not move faster than light. A wormhole shortens the path not only in space, but also in time.

4. Mexican bubbles

Traveling faster than light is as realistic as milking a female unicorn and feeding that milk to a malevolent leprechaun. So stop thinking about it - it's stupid and unrealistic.

That's what everyone thought until the 90s when Mexican scientist Miguel Alcubierre thought about a bubble compressing the space directly in front of it and expanding it behind it. All that is needed for this is tons of negative energy (we are not talking about envy, murder, apathy, or the speeches of Vladimir Solovyov). The idea was purely theoretical and even fantastic. Given the existence of negative energy, moving a bubble with a diameter of 200 meters would require energy equivalent to the mass of Jupiter. You can't get by with the Solovyovs here - you'll have to involve Kurginyan.

However, in the last few years, modifications of his idea have been proposed, in which the “bubble” was replaced by a torus, and negative energy turned out to be completely unnecessary. In this case, calculations show the need for energy contained in just hundreds of kilograms of mass. There was even an experiment that proved that space is perfectly curved even without negative energy. But there is one problem: the bubble is sensitive, like a virgin in his first experience with a woman, and too many extraneous facts can lead him astray.

5. A cylinder in some galaxy

What is a Tipler cylinder? Somewhere in space, roughly to the left of Betelgeuse, there is a rotating cylinder. You take a ship and go there happily. When you get close enough to the surface of the cylinder (the space around it will be mostly deformed), you will need to go around it several times and return to Earth. It’s reminiscent of a Buryat shamanic ritual, but with space things are never simple. But you will arrive in the past. How far depends on how many times you orbit the cylinder. Even if your own time seems to move forward as usual, while you are going around the cylinder, outside the distorted space you will inevitably move into the past. It's like running up a downward escalator.

All that remains is to find this cylinder. Apparently, this is something very big and long, like... the films of Nikita Mikhalkov. But so far no one has seen them. Neither in a telescope, nor in all other instruments. They asked the astronauts - they didn’t see it either. The cylinder is a hypothetical thing, verified from Einstein’s equations, and therefore no one knows how this journey will turn out.