Scientist Claims Time Travel Is Theoretically Possible, But Only Backwards

A scientist says time travel might be possible. It's fucking baffling though.

The expert in question says that if we can create wormholes in time we could theoretically travel back to the past. However the chances are that we will never be able to go back and undo all of our mistakes because it's too mind-meltingly complicated.

We've all wanted to travel back in time at some point in our lives. Whether to warn our past-selves not to finish off the bottle of corner-shop vodka the night before meeting the in-laws, or to warn everyone about the pre-apocalyptic disaster zone that is the world of 2017.

Well, one astrophysicist says that (in theory) this might be possible.

So - and bear with me here because my astrophysics is a bit rusty - apparently, there is a theoretical counterpart to every bit of positive energy or matter in the universe.

Credit: PA

This is known as negative energy/mass. It hasn't been found yet, but scientists are pretty convinced it exists.

Creating a connection between the negative and positive energy/mass in the form of a black-hole and its negative counterpart would mean one end staying in sync with time, whilst the other moved off at nearly light-speed into the future.

Remember I said to bear with me?

I'll let Ethan Siegel, an astrophysicist from Lewis and Clark College take it from here.

"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," Ethan told Forbes blog Starts With A Bang.

"No matter how far apart you took these to connected objects from one another, if they had enough mass/energy - of both the positive and the negative kind - this instantaneous connection would remain."

"If, 40 years ago, someone had created such a pair of entangled wormholes and sent them off on this journey, it would be possible to step into one of them today, in 2017, and wind up back in time at the mouth of the other one... back in 1978"

via GIPHY

Right, now we've cleared that up - Let's get back to the issue in question. Can humans travel back in time?

Probably not, because you'd have to have been there when the wormhole was created (or travelling through space-time at alarming speed) for it to work.

Back to Ethan Siegel: "The only issue is that you yourself couldn't also have been at that location back in 1978; you needed to be with the other end of the wormhole, or traveling through space to try and catch up with it."

Confused? You should be.

Wish you'd never read this? There's nothing you can do about it now.

Topics: Forbes, World News, time travel, tech, space

Mark McGowan

Mark is a journalist at LADbible, who joined in 2015 after a year as a freelance writer. In the past he blogged for independent football fan channel Redmen TV, after graduating from Staffordshire University with degrees in journalism and English literature. He has worked on campaigns such as UOKM8? and IIOC.