How to make a

time machine
101
➔ Black holes
Einstein discovered that gravity from massive objects causes time to slow
down. Therefore, while black holes will simply crush anything that enters
them, by staying outside of its event horizon you could travel years into the
future relative to an observer beyond its gravitational field, while for you just a
few days would have elapsed.

➔ Wormholes
General relativity also allows for the possibility for shortcuts through
spacetime, known as wormholes, which might be able to bridge
distances of a billion light years or more, or different points in time.
Many physicists, including Stephen Hawking, believe wormholes are
constantly popping in and out of existence at the quantum scale, far
smaller than atoms. The trick would be to capture one, and inflate it to
human scales – a feat that would require a huge amount of energy,
but which might just be possible, in theory.
Attempts to prove this either way have failed, ultimately because of
the incompatibility between general relativity and quantum mechanics.
 ➔ Superstrings
If superstrings exist, one with the diameter of a proton and 1.6 kms long would weigh as much as the entire
planet Earth. If you can arrange to have two of these side by side and start orbiting the two strings in a
figure-eight pattern, through some very esoteric and complex mathematical operations this would allow you
to travel forward or backward in time, to transmit matter from point to point, or a travel to any point that you
could calculate. The funny thing is the strings would have minimal gravity despite their mass as long as
they were straight. If they were formed into loops they would possess the full gravity of our planet.
However, no matter how intimidating the mathematics, there’s still no evidence that superstrings exist.
They still remain a theoretical construct to explain some phenomena that we don’t completely understand
yet.

➔ Neutron star
Neutron stars spin very quickly. The fastest one found in our galaxy rotates at to 716 times per second,
which is approaching 25% the speed of light. If a spinning neutron star were to collapse to a black hole the
centrifugal effect might very well cause it to form a ring of protons that do not collapse to a singularity. This
“spinning doughnut” might not stretch you out into an infinitely long piece of spaghetti, but rather cause a
rupture in the space-time continuum at the nexus of that doughnut. The other end might spontaneously
form at another weak point elsewhere in the galaxy. There are a number of readily apparent possibilities –
you are ripped to shreds; you get stuck forever; you end up outside our galaxy; you exit in the future; or
you exit in the past. Another possibility is that you exit in a parallel universe. If it so happens to be one
where our laws of physics don’t apply, then you would simply cease to exist as your atoms will no longer
obey the laws of your own universe.

➔ Different dimensions
We can add a whole new dimension to the discussion; seven of them in fact! Quantum theory
currently requires 10 dimensions, or 11 if you include time, in order to describe itself. But where are
they? You can see lengths, you can see widths, you can see heights; they are perfectly obvious.
The fourth dimension is duration, or time. So where are the seven other dimensions? Picture these
dimensions as flower petals that haven’t unfurled. They’re tightly held at the corners of all the other
dimensions. If there was another direction you could travel other than up, down, left, right, forward,
or back, it would be quantified by one of these dimensions.

Robert A. Heinlein, both a scientist and a science fiction writer, wrote a book titled Number of the
Beast. In his novel one of the protagonists created a device where he could swap one dimension for
another. People in the book would continue to perceive three dimensions, but if you traveled along
this new dimension that might have taken the place of “length” you could travel into the future, or
into the past. Other dimensional swaps would allow you to transit to parallel universes, while another
would allow you to transit to a different physical location in the blink of an eye.

Maybe he was on to something. Maybe it is as simple as swapping one dimension for another.
We’re basically four dimensional creatures. We can handle length, width, depth, and time. Maybe by
rotating out one dimension and rotating in another we can accomplish anything. The secret is to let
quantum physicists figure out how to make it actually work. It might only require knowledge and a
very tiny expenditure of energy. You could step into a “booth” in your home, twist a knob, and step
out of the booth, halfway around the world, in a fancy restaurant, or in a lunar base on the far side of
the Moon, ready for a night’s observation. Think it unlikely? At this point it makes sense to refer to
one more of Arthur C. Clarke’s laws.

Clarke’s Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
 ➔ Using light
Another idea, put forward by the American physicist Ron Mallet, is to
use a rotating cylinder of light to twist spacetime. Anything dropped
inside the swirling cylinder could theoretically be dragged around in
space and in time, in a similar way to how a bubble runs around on
top your coffee after you swirl it with a spoon.
According to Mallet, the right geometry could lead to time travel into
either the past and the future.
Since publishing his theory in 2000, Mallet has been trying to raise the
funds to pay for a proof of concept experiment, which involves
dropping neutrons through a circular arrangement of spinning lasers.
His ideas have not grabbed the rest of the physics community
however, with others arguing that one of the assumptions of his basic
model is plagued by a singularity, which is physics-speak for “it’s
impossible”.
The Royal Institution of Australia has an Education resource
based on this article. You can access it here.

➔ Speed
In fact, not only is time travel possible, it’s already happened—it just doesn’t look
like your typical sci-fi film.In September 2015, cosmonaut Gennady
Padalka arrived back on Earth for the last time. He had just completed
his sixth mission in space and broke the record for most cumulative
time spent beyond Earth’s atmosphere: 879 days. And because of these
2.5 years spent orbiting the planet at high speeds, Padalka also became
a time traveler, experiencing Einstein’s theory of general relativity in
action.
“When Mr. Padalka came back from his adventures, he found the
Earth to be 1/44th of a second to the future of where he expected it
to be,” explains J. Richard Gott, Princeton physicist and author of
the 2001 book Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe, “He literally
traveled...into the future. Returning to our time-traveling
cosmonaut Padalka, his 1/44-second jump into the future is so
minuscule because he was only traveling 17,000 miles per hour.
That isn’t very fast, at least in comparison to the speed of light. But
what would happen if we created something that could go much
faster than geostationary orbit? We are not talking a commercial
jetliner (550 to 600 miles an hour) or a 21st century rocket to the
ISS (25,000 miles per hour), but something that could approach
186,282 miles per second?

“On a subatomic level, it’s been done,” says Mallett. “An example
is...the Large Hadron Collider. It routinely sends subatomic
particles into the future.”

The particle accelerator has the ability to propel protons at

99.999999 percent the speed of light, a speed at which their
relative time is moving about 6,900 times slower compared to their
stationary human observers.

"THE LARGE HADRON COLLIDER...ROUTINELY SENDS

SUBATOMIC PARTICLES INTO THE FUTURE.”
So, yes, we’ve been sending atoms into the future and we’ve been
doing it for the last decade, but humans are another matter.

Gott says given that we propel particles nearly the speed of light on
a regular basis, conceptually, it’s rather simple for humans to time
travel into the future. “If you want to visit Earth in the year 3000,”
Gott says, “all you have to do is to get on a spaceship and go 99.995
percent the speed of light.”

Let’s say a human is put on such a ship and sent to a planet that’s a
little less than 500 light years away (for example, Kepler 186f),
meaning if they traveled at 99.995 percent of the speed of light, it
would take them about 500 years to get there since they are going
at nearly the speed of light. After a quick snack and a bathroom
break, they would then turn around and head back to Earth, which
would take another 500 years. So in total, it would take about a
thousand years for them to arrive safely back home. And, on Earth,
it would be the year 3018.However, since they were moving so fast,
the resulting time dilation wouldn’t seem like a thousand years for
them since their internal clock has slowed. “[Their] clock will be
ticking at 1/100th of the rate of the clocks on Earth. [They] are only
going to age about 10 years,” says Gott. While a millennium would
pass for us, for them it would be a decade.
“If we [on Earth] were watching through the window, they would
be eating breakfast veeeerrry slooooowly,” says Gott, “But to
[them], everything would be normal.”

But there is a massive gulf between what is theoretical and what is

real. So how do we overcome the immense technological challenges
of building a time machine?

Building a time-traveling spaceship may be the best place to start,

but the engineering obstacles, at least for now, are enormous. For
one, we are not even close to having a spaceship that can travel the
speed of light. The fastest spacecraft ever created will soon be the
Parker Solar Probe, which will launch this summer and travel
only .00067 percent the speed of light.There’s also the enormous
amount of energy that would be needed to propel a ship to go that
fast. Gott suggests that highly efficient antimatter fuel could be the
key and other world agencies and scientists also think such a fuel
could be a potentially invaluable piece to interstellar travel.

But ensuring the safety of the human cargo on such a futuristic

mission would also be tricky. First of all, the ship would need to
carry enough supplies, like food, water, and medicine, and be self-
sufficient for the entire journey.

Then there’s the whole acceleration thing. To make sure our

hypothetical traveler wouldn’t be obliterated by overwhelming g-
forces, the ship would need to gradually and steadily accelerate.
While steady 1g acceleration (like what we feel on Earth) for a long
period of time would eventually get the ship to approach near
speed of light, it would add to the length of the trip and minimize
how far in the future one could go. Using our 500-light-year planet
example, Gott predicts that the steady acceleration of 1g up to near
light speed would increase the aging of the time traveler to 24
years, “but you would still get to visit Earth in the year 3000,” says
Gott.

To create a vehicle with these specifications would require a lot of

time, resources, and money. But the same can be said for other
massively ambitious experiments, like detecting gravitational
waves and building the Large Hadron Collider. A time machine
could be the world’s next scientific megaproject.
 Wormholes, black holes, cosmic strings, and circulating light
beams have all been suggested as potential solutions for time-
traveling to the past. The main challenge that astrophysicists are
grappling with is figuring out is how to beat a light beam to a point
in spacetime and back.

"THE TECHNOLOGY ISN’T FAR OFF ... WE COULD DO IT IN

THE NEXT TWENTY YEARS."
Since the speed of light is the absolute maximum, physicists are
concentrating on finding phenomena like wormholes, which could
provide tunnel-like shortcuts that jump across curved spacetime
and, in theory, beat a light beam to a particular point in spacetime.

While wormholes do work within the confines of Einstein’s

theories of relativity, they have yet to be observed in space, and
scientists have no concrete evidence that these galactic shortcuts
would even work.

“A good movie... was the original Planet of the Apes,” says Mallett.
"The astronauts thought they had landed on another planet that
was ruled by apes, but what they found out...was that they had
traveled so fast, that they had arrived into Earth’s future. That
movie accurately depicts Einstein’s special theory of relativity.”

Oh...spoilers.

Src-https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/math/
a20718322/building-a-time-machine/
If you flew around the world for more than four million years, people on the ground would
only have experienced one more second than you!

➔ Gravity
According to his theory of general relativity, the stronger the gravity you
feel, the slower time moves.
As you get closer to the centre of the Earth, for example, the strength of
gravity increases. Time runs slower for your feet than your head.
Again, this effect has been measured. In 2010, physicists at the US National
Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) placed two atomic clocks on
shelves, one 33 centimetres above the other, and measured the difference in
their rate of ticking. The lower one ticked slower because it feels a slightly
stronger gravity.
To travel to the far future, all we need is a region of extremely strong gravity,
such as a black hole. The closer you get to the event horizon, the slower time
moves – but it’s risky business, cross the boundary and you can never escape.
And anyway, the effect is not that strong so it’s probably not worth the
trip.
Assuming you had the technology to travel the vast distances to reach
a black hole (the nearest is about 3,000 light years away), the time
dilation through travelling would be far greater than any time dilation
through orbiting the black hole itself.
(The situation described in the movie Interstellar, where one hour on a
planet near a black hole is the equivalent of seven years back on
Earth, is so extreme as to be impossible in our Universe, according to
Kip Thorne, the movie’s scientific advisor.)
The most mindblowing thing, perhaps, is that GPS systems have to
account for time dilation effects (due to both the speed of the satellites
and gravity they feel) in order to work. Without these corrections, your
phones GPS capability wouldn’t be able to pinpoint your location on
Earth to within even a few kilometres.

Travelling to the past

As far as we know, travelling back in time is impossible. Even sending information back in time is
difficult to imagine, because it can change things that have already happened, which should be
impossible.

Say you broke your arm falling off the monkey bars. What if you could travel back in time and tell
yourself to not go on the bars? If you were successful, you’d never fall and break your arm. But then
you would have no reason to travel back in time. So what does this mean for your arm? Did it break
or not?

If thinking about this makes your head hurt, you’re not alone.

Time travelling is a confusing idea for most people. That’s because when we think of time, we think
about it as going in a straight line, with one thing happening after another.

If we could travel back in time and change something that happened before, we would then change
the order of that line. This would mean breaking a rule called “causality”.
Causality is the rule saying that a “cause” (your actions, for instance) happens before an “effect” (the
result of your actions). In our monkey-bars example, the cause is falling, and the effect is breaking
your arm – which happens because you fell.

Causality is one of the unbreakable rules of the universe. Breaking it would have nasty
consequences for the universe and all of us. Experts think that because the universe has this rule,
travelling to the past must be impossible otherwise the rule would be broken all the time.