Physicists discover how wormholes enable time travel

Wormholes play an important role in many science fiction movies and are often shortcut between two distant points in space.

But in physics, these space-time tunnels remain purely hypothetical, intangible, 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, discovered a way Bend the laws of physics to hypothetically go back in time.

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

Together they make up what is known as spacetime, and spacetime can be stretched and bent by massive objects like stars, just as a metal ball submerged in it bends a rubber sheet.

But in their scientific papers, Frolov and Zelnikov suggested that there is a certain type of wormhole.it would inevitably turn into a time machine‘ subject to special conditions.

They investigated what became known as Frolov, Krtous, and Zelnikov. worm ringIt was 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 parts of the Universe (or indeed different universes) often described as “flat”.

Annular masses can create quite remarkable distortions in potentially flat space-time when you consider how their electric and magnetic fields might interact.

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

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

While it’s a bit of a technical definition, this closed-time curve is the definition of any moving object (or light beam) it would be back exactly where it started.

Did you like the content? So, be aware of more topics like this here at TecMundo, and also take the opportunity to read: Measuring distortions in time can confirm Albert Einstein’s theory.