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Traversable Wormholes Time Travel

Time travel through wormholes is theoretically possible if wormholes exist that connect different points in spacetime. One proposed method is to accelerate one end of a wormhole to near light speed and return it to the origin, so it has aged less due to time dilation. An observer entering the "younger" end would exit the "older" end at an earlier point in time. However, current theories suggest wormholes would require exotic matter with negative energy to form, and may collapse or repel if the ends are brought too close together to allow travel.

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Vedant Nigade
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58 views

Traversable Wormholes Time Travel

Time travel through wormholes is theoretically possible if wormholes exist that connect different points in spacetime. One proposed method is to accelerate one end of a wormhole to near light speed and return it to the origin, so it has aged less due to time dilation. An observer entering the "younger" end would exit the "older" end at an earlier point in time. However, current theories suggest wormholes would require exotic matter with negative energy to form, and may collapse or repel if the ends are brought too close together to allow travel.

Uploaded by

Vedant Nigade
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Time travel[edit]

Main article: Time travel

If traversable wormholes exist, they could allow time travel.[20] A


proposed time-travel machine using a traversable wormhole would
hypothetically work in the following way: One end of the wormhole is
accelerated to some significant fraction of the speed of light, perhaps
with some advanced propulsion system, and then brought back to the
point of origin. Alternatively, another way is to take one entrance of the
wormhole and move it to within the gravitational field of an object that
has higher gravity than the other entrance, and then return it to a
position near the other entrance. For both these methods, time
dilation causes the end of the wormhole that has been moved to have
aged less, or become "younger", than the stationary end as seen by an
external observer; however, time connects differently through the
wormhole than outside it, so that synchronized clocks at either end of
the wormhole will always remain synchronized as seen by an observer
passing through the wormhole, no matter how the two ends move
around.[26]:502 This means that an observer entering the "younger" end
would exit the "older" end at a time when it was the same age as the
"younger" end, effectively going back in time as seen by an observer
from the outside. One significant limitation of such a time machine is that
it is only possible to go as far back in time as the initial creation of the
machine;[26]:503 It is more of a path through time rather than it is a device
that itself moves through time, and it would not allow the technology
itself to be moved backward in time.[39][40]
According to current theories on the nature of wormholes, construction of
a traversable wormhole would require the existence of a substance with
negative energy, often referred to as "exotic matter". More technically,
the wormhole spacetime requires a distribution of energy that violates
various energy conditions, such as the null energy condition along with
the weak, strong, and dominant energy conditions. However, it is known
that quantum effects can lead to small measurable violations of the null
energy condition,[7]:101 and many physicists believe that the required
negative energy may actually be possible due to the Casimir effect in
quantum physics.[41] Although early calculations suggested a very large
amount of negative energy would be required, later calculations showed
that the amount of negative energy can be made arbitrarily small.[42]
In 1993, Matt Visser argued that the two mouths of a wormhole with
such an induced clock difference could not be brought together without
inducing quantum field and gravitational effects that would either make
the wormhole collapse or the two mouths repel each other,[43] or
otherwise prevent information from passing through the wormhole.
[44]
 Because of this, the two mouths could not be brought close enough
for causality violation to take place. However, in a 1997 paper, Visser
hypothesized that a complex "Roman ring" (named after Tom Roman)
configuration of an N number of wormholes arranged in a symmetric
polygon could still act as a time machine, although he concludes that this
is more likely a flaw in classical quantum gravity theory rather than proof
that causality violation is possible.[45]

Interuniversal travel[edit]
A possible resolution to the paradoxes resulting from wormhole-enabled
time travel rests on the many-worlds interpretation of quantum
mechanics.
In 1991 David Deutsch showed that quantum theory is fully consistent
(in the sense that the so-called density matrix can be made free of
discontinuities) in spacetimes with closed timelike curves.[46] However,
later it was shown that such a model of closed timelike curves can have
internal inconsistencies as it will lead to strange phenomena like
distinguishing non-orthogonal quantum states and distinguishing proper
and improper mixture.[47][48] Accordingly, the destructive positive feedback
loop of virtual particles circulating through a wormhole time machine, a
result indicated by semi-classical calculations, is averted. A particle
returning from the future does not return to its universe of origination but
to a parallel universe. This suggests that a wormhole time machine with
an exceedingly short time jump is a theoretical bridge between
contemporaneous parallel universes.[8]
Because a wormhole time-machine introduces a type of nonlinearity into
quantum theory, this sort of communication between parallel universes is
consistent with Joseph Polchinski's proposal of an Everett
phone[49] (named after Hugh Everett) in Steven Weinberg's formulation
of nonlinear quantum mechanics.[50]
The possibility of communication between parallel universes has been
dubbed interuniversal travel.

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