TIME TRAVEL

HOW
TO BUILD
A TIME
MACHINE
It wouldn’t be easy, but it might be possible By Paul Davies

T
OVERVIEW
• Traveling forward in time is ime travel has been a popular science-fiction
easy enough. If you move theme since H. G. Wells wrote his celebrated
close to the speed of light or
novel The Time Machine in 1895. But can it re-
sit in a strong gravitational
field, you experience time ally be done? Is it possible to build a machine that
much more slowly than other would transport a human being into the past or future?
people do—another way of
For decades, time travel lay beyond the fringe of respectable
saying that you travel into
their future. science. In recent years, however, the topic has become some-
• Traveling into the past is thing of a cottage industry among theoretical physicists. The
rather trickier. Relativity
motivation has been partly recreational— time travel is fun to
theory allows it when space-
time takes on certain shapes: think about. But this research has a serious side, too. Under-
a rotating universe, a rotating standing the relation between cause and effect is a key part of
cylinder and, most famously,
attempts to construct a unified theory of physics. If unrestrict-
a wormhole—a tunnel
through space and time. ed time travel were possible, even in principle, the nature of
such a unified theory could be drastically affected.

32 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SEPTEMBER 2002

WORM HOLE GENERATOR /TOWING MACHINE is imagined by futurist artist Peter Bollinger. The image above
depicts a gigantic space-based particle accelerator which is capable of creating and amplifying particle sized
worm holes. Once amplifyied, the worm holes can be towed to various locations.
 Our best understanding of time comes from Einstein’s the- To observe really dramatic time warps, one has to look
ory of relativity. Prior to this theory, time was widely regard- beyond the realm of ordinary experience. Subatomic particles
ed as absolute and universal, the same for everyone no mat- can be propelled at nearly the speed of light in large acceler-
ter how they moved or what their physical circumstances ator machines. Some of these particles, such as muons, have
were. In his special theory of relativity, Einstein proposed that a built-in clock because they decay with a definite half-life;
the measured interval between two events depends on how in accordance with Einstein’s theory, fast-moving muons in-
the observer is moving. Crucially, two observers who move side accelerators are observed to decay in slow motion. Some
differently will experience different durations between the cosmic rays also experience spectacular time warps. These

The wormhole was used as a fictional device

by Carl Sagan in his novel Contact.
same two events. particles move so close to
The effect is often described using the “twin paradox.” the speed of light that,
Suppose that Sally and Sam are twins. Sally boards a rocket from their point of view,
ship and travels at high speed to a nearby star, turns around they cross the galaxy in
and flies back to Earth, while Sam stays at home. For Sally the minutes, even though in
duration of the journey might be, say, one year, but when she Earth’s frame of reference
returns and steps out of the spaceship, she finds that 10 years they seem to take tens of thousands of years. If time dilation
have elapsed on Earth. Her brother is now nine years older did not occur, those particles would never make it here.
than she is. Sally and Sam are no longer the same age, despite Speed is one way to jump ahead in time. Gravity is an-
the fact that they were born on the same day. This example other. In his general theory of relativity, Einstein predicted
illustrates a limited type of time travel. In effect, Sally has that gravity slows time. Clocks run a bit faster in the attic than
leaped nine years into Earth’s future. the basement, which is closer to the center of Earth and there-
fore deeper down in a gravitational field. Similarly, clocks run
Jet Lag faster in space than on the ground. Once again the effect is mi-
T H E E F F E C T , known as time dilation, occurs whenever two nuscule, but it has been directly measured using accurate
observers move relative to each other. In daily life we don’t clocks. Indeed, both these time-warping effects have to be tak-
notice weird time warps, because the effect becomes dramat- en into account in the Global Positioning System. If they
ic only when the motion occurs at close to the speed of light. weren’t, sailors, taxi drivers and cruise missiles could find
Even at aircraft speeds, the time dilation in a typical journey themselves many kilometers off course.
amounts to just a few nanoseconds— hardly an adventure of At the surface of a neutron star, gravity is so strong that
Wellsian proportions. Nevertheless, atomic clocks are accu- time is slowed by about 30 percent relative to Earth time.
rate enough to record the shift and confirm that time really is Viewed from such a star, events here would resemble a fast-
stretched by motion. So travel into the future is a proved fact, forwarded video. A black hole represents the ultimate time
even if it has so far been in rather unexciting amounts. warp; at the surface of the hole, time stands still relative to
CREDIT (previous page); CREDIT

Earth. This means that if you fell into a black hole from near-
THE AUTHOR

PAUL DAVIES is a theoretical physicist in the Australian Center for by, in the brief interval it took you to reach the surface, all of
Astrobiology at Macquarie University in Sydney. He is one of the eternity would pass by in the wider universe. The region with-
most prolific writers of popular-level books in physics. His scientif- in the black hole is therefore beyond the end of time, as far
ic research interests are in the fields of cosmology, black holes, as the outside universe is concerned. If an astronaut could
quantum field theory and the origin of life. zoom very close to a black hole and return unscathed— ad-
mittedly a fanciful, not to mention foolhardy, prospect— he

34 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SEPTEMBER 2002

 WORM HOLE TRAVEL

A Wormhole Time Machine in Three

Not So Easy Steps
1 Find or build a wormhole— a tunnel connecting two different locations in space. Large
wormholes might exist naturally in deep space, a relic of the big bang. Otherwise we
would have to make do with subatomic
wormholes, either natural ones (which are
thought to be winking in and out of existence
all around us) or artificial ones (produced by
particle accelerators). These smaller
wormholes would have to be enlarged to
useful size, perhaps using energy fields like
those that caused space to inflate shortly
after the big bang.

2 Stabilize the wormhole. An infusion of negative energy,

produced by quantum means such as the so-called
Casimir effect, would allow a signal or object to pass safely
through the wormhole. Negative energy counteracts the
tendency of the wormhole to pinch off into a point of infinite
or near-infinite density. In other words, it prevents the
wormhole from becoming a black hole.

3 Tow the wormhole. A spaceship, presumably of highly

advanced technology, would separate the mouths of
the wormhole. One mouth might be positioned near the
surface of a neutron star, an extremely dense star with an
strong gravitational field. The intense gravity causes time to
pass more slowly. Because time passes more slowly for one
of the wormhole mouths than for the other, the two mouths
become separated not only in space but also in time.

4 Go through the wormhole. By passing through the

wormhole, astronauts might travel into the past or
future, within limits that depend on how the wormhole was
built. A combination of wormhole and rocket travel could
allow astronauts to arrive at their point of departure before
they left.

could leap far into the future. this universe, an astronaut could travel through space so as
to reach his own past. This comes about because of the way
My Head Is Spinning gravity affects light. The rotation of the universe would drag
S O F A R I H A V E discussed travel forward in time. What light (and thus the causal relations between objects) around
about going backward? This is much more problematic. In with it, enabling a material object to travel in a closed loop
1948 Kurt Gödel of the Institute for Advanced Study in in space that is also a closed loop in time, without at any stage
Princeton, N.J., produced a solution of Einstein’s gravita- exceeding the speed of light in the immediate neighborhood
CREDIT

tional field equations that described a rotating universe. In of the particle. Gödel’s solution was shrugged aside as a

[Link] SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN 35

Grandmother Pardox A staple of science fiction, the notorious physics. It cannot spontaneously
grandmother paradox purports to change its velocity unless a net force
demonstrate the absurdity of time acts on it, and it cannot pass through
travel. A simplified version involves the wormhole in such a way that will
billiard balls. A billiard ball might pass prevent itself from passing through the
through a wormhole time machine. On wormhole. But this does not prevent the
emerging, it hits its earlier self, thereby ball from passing through the wormhole
preventing it from ever entering the in an infinity of other ways. Here is one
wormhole. But then the ball never of those ways:
passes through the wormhole. It never
hits itself. But then the ball can pass
through the wormhole after all.
A more sophisticated look at the
paradox, however, shows that it is not a
paradox but simply a constraint on the
ball’s path. By definition, a ball cannot
do something that is inconsistent,
either with logic or with the laws of

mathematical curiosity— after all, observations show no sign In science fiction, wormholes are sometimes called star-
that the universe as a whole is spinning. His result served gates; they offer a shortcut between two widely separated
nonetheless to demonstrate that going back in time was not points in space. Jump through a hypothetical wormhole, and
forbidden by the theory of relativity. Indeed, Einstein con- you might come out moments later on the other side of the
fessed that he was troubled by the thought that his theory galaxy. Wormholes naturally fit into the general theory of rel-
might permit travel into the past under some circumstances. ativity, whereby gravity warps not only time but also space.
Other scenarios have been found to permit travel into the The theory allows the analogue of alternative road and tunnel
past. For example, in 1974 Frank J. Tipler of Tulane Uni- routes connecting two points in space. Mathematicians refer
versity calculated that a massive, infinitely long cylinder spin- to such a space as multiply connected. Just as a tunnel passing
ning on its axis at near the speed of light could let astronauts under a hill can be shorter than the surface street, a wormhole
visit their own past, again by dragging light around the cylin- may be shorter than the usual route through ordinary space.
der into a loop. In 1991 J. Richard Gott of Princeton Uni- The wormhole was used as a fictional device by Carl
versity found that cosmic strings— structures that cosmolo- Sagan in his novel Contact. Prompted by Sagan, Kip S.
gists think were created in the early stages of the big bang— Thorne and his co-workers at the California Institute of
could produce similar results. But in the mid-1980s the most Technology set out to find whether wormholes were consis-
realistic scenario for a time machine emerged, based on the tent with known physics. Their starting point was that a
concept of a wormhole. wormhole would resemble a black hole in being an object
with fearsome gravity, but unlike a black hole, which offers
a one-way journey to nowhere, a wormhole would have an
E X ISTING FORMS OF TIME TRAVEL exit as well as an entrance.
For the wormhole to be traversable, it must contain what
SYSTEM SPECIFICATIONS TIME LAG
Thorne termed exotic matter. In effect, this is something that
airline flight 920 Kilometers 10 nanoseconds will generate antigravity to combat the natural tendency of
per hour a massive system to implode into a black hole under its in-
tense weight. Antigravity, or gravitational repulsion, can be
nuclear 300 mile depth 500 nanoseconds generated by negative energy or pressure. Negative-energy
submarine (relative to sea states are known to exist in certain quantum systems, which
tour level) for 6 months suggests that Thorne’s exotic matter is not ruled out by the
laws of physics, although it is unclear whether enough anti-
cosmic ray 1018 eV mean life stretched gravitating stuff can be assembled to stabilize a wormhole
neutron from 15 minutes
[see “Negative Energy, Wormholes and Warp Drive,” by
to 30,000 years
Lawrence H. Ford and Thomas A. Roman; Scientific
neutron star redshift z=0.2 each time interval American, January 2000].
relative to infinity stretched by
In the Loop
CREDIT

(deep space) factor of 5

SOON THORNE and his colleagues realized that if a stable

36 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SEPTEMBER 2002

wormhole could be created, then it could readily be turned Censored!
into a time machine. An astronaut who passed through one EVEN IF TIME TRAVEL isn’t strictly paradoxical, it is cer-
might come out not only somewhere else in the universe but tainly weird. Consider the time traveler who leaps ahead a
somewhere else, too— in either the future or the past. year and reads about a new mathematical theorem in a fu-
To adapt the wormhole for time travel, one of its mouths ture edition of Scientific American. He notes the details, re-
could be towed to a neutron star and placed close to its sur- turns to his own time and teaches the theorem to a student,
face. The gravity of the star would slow time near that worm- who then writes it up for Scientific American. The article is,
hole mouth, so that a time difference between the ends of the of course, the very one that the time traveler read. The ques-
wormhole would gradually accumulate. If both mouths were tion then arises: Where did the information about the theo-
then parked at a convenient place in space, this time differ- rem come from? Not from the time traveler, because he read
ence would remain frozen in. it, but not from the student either, who learned it from the
Suppose the difference were 10 years. An astronaut pass- time traveler. The information seemingly came into existence
ing through the wormhole in one direction would jump 10 from nowhere, reasonlessly.
years into the future, whereas an astronaut passing in the oth- The bizarre consequences of time travel have led some
er direction would jump 10 years into the past. By returning scientists to reject the notion outright. Stephen W. Hawk-
to his starting point at high speed across ordinary space, the ing of the University of Cambridge has proposed a “chronol-
second astronaut might get back home before he left. In oth- ogy protection conjecture,” which would outlaw causal
er words, a closed loop in space could become a loop in time loops. Because the theory of relativity is known to permit

It is even conceivable that the next generation

of particle accelerators would be able to
create subatomic wormholes.
as well. The one restriction is that the astronaut could not re- causal loops, chronology
turn to a time before the wormhole was first built. protection would require
A formidable problem that stands in the way of making some other factor to in-
a wormhole time machine is the creation of the wormhole in tercede to prevent travel
the first place. Possibly space is threaded with such structures into the past. What might
naturally— relics of the big bang. If so, a supercivilization this factor be? One suggestion is that quantum processes will
might commandeer one. Alternatively, wormholes might come to the rescue. The existence of a time machine would
naturally come into existence on tiny scales, the so-called allow particles to loop into their own past. Calculations hint
Planck length, about 20 factors of 10 as small as an atomic that the ensuing disturbance would become self-reinforcing,
nucleus. In principle, such a minute wormhole could be sta- wrecking the wormhole.
bilized by providing a pulse of energy and then somehow in- Chronology protection is still just a conjecture, so time
flated to usable dimensions. travel remains a possibility. A final resolution of the matter
Assuming that the engineering problems could be over- may have to await the successful union of quantum mechan-
come, the production of a time machine could open up a Pan- ics and gravitation, perhaps through a theory such as string
dora’s box of causal paradoxes. Consider, for example, the theory or its extension, so-called M-theory. It is even con-
time traveler who visits the past and murders his mother ceivable that the next generation of particle accelerators
when she was a young girl. How do we make sense of this? would be able to create subatomic wormholes that survive
If the girl dies, she cannot become the time traveler’s moth- long enough for nearby particles to execute fleeting causal
er. But if the time traveler was never born, he could not go loops. This would be a far cry from Wells’s vision of a time
back and murder his mother.
Paradoxes of this kind arise when the time traveler tries MORE TO E XPLORE
to change the past, which is obviously impossible. But that Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science
does not prevent someone from being a part of the past. Sup- Fiction. Paul J. Nahin. American Institute of Physics, 1993.
pose the time traveler goes back and rescues a young girl The Quantum Physics of Time Travel. David Deutsch and Michael
Lockwood in Scientific American, Vol. TK, No. TK; March 1994.
from murder, and this girl grows up to become his mother.
Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy. Kip S.
The causal loop is now self-consistent and no longer para- Thorne. Norton, 1994.
doxical. Causal consistency might impose restrictions on Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe: The Physical Possibilities of Travel
what a time traveler might be able to do, but it does not rule through Time. J. Richard Gott III. Houghton Mifflin, 2001.
out time travel per se. How to Build a Time Machine. Paul Davies. Viking, 2002.

[Link] SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN 37

machine, but it would forever change our picture of physical
reality.

• But doesn’t time travel lead

to all sorts of paradoxes? Not
necessarily. Just because
you can’t kill your grand-
father before your father is
conceived doesn’t mean that
you can’t travel backward in
time; it means only that you
can’t undertake certain trips.