Interest in time travel, which appeared after the publication of H. G. Wells’ novel “The Time Machine” in 1895, still continues to excite both ordinary people and the academic scientific community.
Meanwhile, the number of scientists who claim that time travel is absolutely impossible is growing every year. But are they right?
Clark’s laws
British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke formulated three adages that are known as Clarke’s three laws, of which the third law is the best known and most widely cited. They are part of his ideas in his extensive writings about the future. The first of the laws says:
“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”
Based on this rule, many scientists begin to doubt whether time travel is really impossible. Thus, Professor Brian Green argues that the possibility of intertemporal tourism is simply beyond our understanding of physics.
In his opinion, the boundaries of knowledge are expanding almost daily following the next scientific discoveries, and we cannot even imagine what new data about the nature of the Universe will be available to us tomorrow.
“The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible,” quotes the second of Clark Green’s Laws.
And the third law is:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Time travel from the point of view of physicists
Very often the opinion is expressed that in order to open the same “time portal” through which passage will be carried out at another time, a huge amount of energy will be required. But no one can explain why this process should take place in this way and not otherwise.
Scientists have not been able to prove the presence or absence of time particles – chronotons, the existence of which some physicists are trying to indirectly confirm using the General Theory of Relativity.
Hypothetically, chronotons have a negative mass and velocity, i.e., they presumably move back to the flow of time. But no reliable physical model of this process has been proposed.
Hope is placed on the “general theory” or “quantum string theory”. It should unite all subsections of physics, explaining the processes occurring in the Universe, using a single set of concepts. Albert Einstein devoted decades of his life to the search for this theory, but neither he nor his followers achieved any results.
String theory continues to be an interesting scientific concept, but evidence of this hypothesis and subsequent application in real science is not expected in the coming years.
The scientific community does not have any data on the potential particle tachyon, the existence of which is customary to explain all the incomprehensible and fantastic events in the world. While all the particles in the world (tardions) move slower than the speed of light, the tachyon is supposed to overcome this threshold and be the ground state of the vacuum.
Tachyonic particle is a hypothetical particle that always travels faster than light. Physicists believe that faster-than-light particles cannot exist because they are not consistent with the known laws of physics. If such particles did exist they could be used to send signals faster than light.
It can be assumed that in the field of knowledge known to modern science there is not a single physical process that could prove or disprove the possibility of time travel.
Which, in accordance with Clarke’s Laws, can be interpreted quite simply – we have not yet reached that level of understanding of the world around us to make predictions about travel into the past and the future.
