Astrophysicists famously proved Einstein’s theory on the existence of gravitational waves last week. Here’s the less covered part of it all: It might, down the line, bring us closer to moving through time.
A now-famous team of astrophysicists shocked the world Thursday after recording the gravitational waves of two black holes slamming into each other 1.3 billion light-years away.
This detection supports Einstein’s general theory of relativity in a way that revolutionizes scientific understanding of how space and time behave in extreme environments, and astrophysics will never be the same.
That includes mankind’s pursuit of time travel.
Kip Thorne of the acclaimed Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) researchers deflected such assertions about his team’s finding at the press release by saying, “I don’t think [our detection of gravitational waves] is going to bring us any closer to being able to do time travel. ”
But two things are certain: Humility is essential in the path to a Nobel Prize, and other renowned astrophysicists are giving the LIGO team more credit than they give themselves.
David Spergel is a theoretical physicist and chair of Princeton University’s astronomy and astrophysics department and he’s one such admirer. Spergel concedes there is a long way to go before man comprehends the true plausibility of time travel, but he believes general relativity will be essential to that discovery, if the stars align for it.
“There are still a lot of ifs there, starting with the existence of negative mass particles and wormholes being stable,” Professor Spergel tells The Daily Beast. “But general relativity’s equations—which gave us black holes, and we see very strong evidence for them with LIGO—are telling us that that would permit time travel.”
Whether or not they want to claim it, the LIGO researchers just made great strides toward understanding time travel.
A Brief Picture Of General Relativity
Einstein’s general relativity explains gravity and how things move through space, and leading time-travel theories in the scientific community must account for it.
Einstein explains gravity as the product of mass manipulating the fabric of space-time. This fabric is known as “space-time” because the two concepts are inseparably woven together throughout the universe, much in the same way that a mile is roughly six minutes away from a good runner.
Like a bowling ball sitting amid a trampoline, black holes are massive objects that warp the fabric of space-time. Anything (say, a golf ball) that approaches a black hole (the bowling ball) gets faster the closer it gets because that is where the fabric of space-time (the trampoline) is most warped.
This warping is caused by any and everything with mass, but is especially intense around the greatest objects in the universe: black holes. And that’s where the magic happens.
“Time travel might be possible in situations that involve these very strong gravitational fields,” another Princeton astrophysicist, Edwin Turner, tells The Daily Beast. “You wouldonly get time travel in the strong-field gravity.”
