For thousands of years, humanity has been at war with time. Preventing the aging process, finding out the future - all this pushes humanity to think about how to make a time machine. The brightest minds of humanity have worked on this issue, both in the past and in the present. Writers who are famous for their fantastic stories and directors who make films about traveling in time capsules make us believe in the implementation of the idea of creating a machine capable of transporting people through time.
History of attempts to create a time machine
Physicists such as Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel worked to create a machine that could transport a person through time into the past or future. The theory that Einstein put forward is based on the control of the Universe. Or rather, to derive its equation gravitational field. The scientist believed that the Universe is a rotating body. And light is an element that enters the trajectory of its rotation. Thanks to this, you can fly through space-time rings that are created by the rotation of the Universe and light particles, thereby seeing your past.
The theory of relativity has always caused conflicting opinions among mathematicians and physicists. After all, if scientists believe in its veracity and accept it, they will automatically agree that time travel is by no means a fairy tale, but a very real possibility.
There is another opinion that exists among scientists who want to conquer time. It consists in the fact that time can be influenced, like everything else. The fact is that time is the same component of our world as space. It can be changed or distorted by the pressure of gravity. At the same time, time turns from a straight line into a loop through which you can travel. You just need to pick up a certain speed.
But that’s why it’s a theory, it’s not confirmed by practice. And the question of how to invent a time machine remains just a question, although there are many not entirely substantiated claims that such a machine has long existed.
Modern attempts to create
Projects to create temporary tunnels have been carried out in the United States of America. All of them were developed in order to confirm the possibility of time travel. Although some sources confirm that during such experiments it was possible to get into the future. The paradox is that all the subjects who confirmed such “breakthroughs” were considered simply crazy. This begs the question: why were experiments carried out that were previously recognized as invalid? For example, a secret project called "Phoenix", during which it was established that time loops exist. Participants wanted to find out how possible the theory of temporary movement is in practice. Unfortunately, those who answered positively were sent to places for the insane.
Nobody knows whether a time machine will be invented. Or maybe it already exists. Some mysteries always remain unsolved. It is possible that even a positive answer to this question will not satisfy scientists; it will only make them understand that they have sacrificed their entire lives on the altar of science, solving a riddle that has already been solved in the distant past or future.
34-year-old self-taught physicist Alexey Rasulov from the village of Vorontsovo, Kursk region, is confident that time travel is possible. He supports his theory with the necessary calculations and diagrams of the “machine of the future.”
The village of Vorontsovo, not indicated on all maps and even invisible to a satellite navigator, is hidden in a real rural outback. This, however, does not prevent its resident Alexei Rasulov from conducting research on a global scale.
At home, the Kursk self-taught scientist has neatly arranged volumes of encyclopedias, reference books and monographs on physics, mechanics and problems in the study of the Universe on the shelves.
If other Vorontsovites are more interested in gardening and farming, then the Rasulovs in everyday life use “hadron colliders”, “quanta”, “deuterium” and “black holes”, which are incomprehensible to many. It is difficult to judge to what extent Alexey’s projects are scientifically substantiated and realistic for implementation, but we responded to the invitation to come visit him in order to see with our own eyes the place where the possibilities of cold nuclear fusion are discussed and a time machine is being developed.
Alexey was born into a family of engineers, which determined his choice of specialty. He studied to become an electrical engineer, first at the Kursk Railway Technical School, and then at the Polytechnic Institute (now South-West State University). Even then, the inquisitive student’s mind was excited by the theory of cold nuclear fusion, which involves the implementation of an atomic reaction without heating the substance.
Since childhood, Rasulov loved to read a lot, studied well, and physics was one of his favorite subjects at school. Having become disabled 10 years ago, he devoted himself entirely to research; his youthful hobbies grew into something more. But the roots of everything, without a doubt, come from there.
“The same Jules Verne foresaw many scientific discoveries, which we are convinced of as the years pass,” says the Kursk resident. – Among other things, he believed that energy could be extracted from water and air. Based on the fact that nitrous oxide appears due to high voltage on power lines, I assumed that it also exists in clouds - there is also a high electric field strength there.”
Alexey, of course, is not so naive as to rely only on fiction. Spent more than one week in the regional scientific library them. N.N. Aseeva, persistently studying all the works available on the topic of interest to him. Particular emphasis was placed on the works of Miguel Alcubierre, Kurt Gödel, John Richard Gott and Nobel laureate in physics by Vitaly Ginzburg.
Time machine - a message from aliens
Rasulov considers his debut in the scientific arena to be his speech at the international congress “Fundamental Problems of Natural Science and Technology” in St. Petersburg in 2010. The response to the report he read on cold nuclear fusion was the review of the organizers: “In a short essay by Rasulov, a deserved special attention the idea of the need to take into account nuclear reactions nitrogen, which participates in the processes of decomposition and synthesis with a positive energy output.”
Kuryanin was published in the newspaper “Anomaly”, the magazines “Inventor and Innovator”, “Itogi” and even in “Energetics”, which is included in the list of peer-reviewed scientific publications of the Higher Attestation Commission under the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation and included in the list of international citation databases.
The theory of cold nuclear fusion also holds the secret to time travel. Based on it, Rasulov made a guess: what a mechanism that could move a person to the past or future would look and operate.
“A huge installation the size of the Kursk region or even larger should be built underground, like the hadron collider on the border of Switzerland and France,” explains Alexey. – Inside the diameter there are several arcs of electromagnets interacting with a ball of electrons at the nuclear level.
To create a gravitational field sufficient to form a black hole, the ball must be accelerated to the speed of light. At this moment, space and time are deformed, and a “wormhole” appears in the black hole - a tunnel through which a person can travel in time.”
By the way, at one time Rasulov tried to unravel the mystery of crop circles allegedly left by alien civilizations. In his opinion, it is possible that these mysterious drawings of UFOs depict a time machine, thanks to which they themselves end up on Earth. In 2014, he observed similar circles near Kursk - one of the regional TV channels even filmed a story about it.
The project to create a time machine requires enormous financial investments, but there are also technical difficulties. The researcher admits: there is no computer in the world yet that is powerful enough to control the new cyber system. However, humanity does not stand still, and in the future this will become possible.
“Traveling to other worlds, the past and the future will allow us to rewrite history and avoid many wars and disasters,” says Rasulov. “It would be the property of all people.” Personally, I would use a time machine to travel back several years to when the tragedy that left me disabled could have been prevented.”
Andrey Kananin,philosopher-cosmologist and author of the book “Unreal Reality” on air at the Pravda video studio.R u spoke about the new technical principles on which the time machine, which is already being built in several laboratories abroad, will operate. The operating principles of the device and the drawings are not a secret, and the technical possibility of creating the device already exists.
Physicists are building a time machine
The scientist led research expeditions and missions to more than 50 countries. The author of books and articles in the field of cosmology, anthropology, philosophy, Andrei Kananin worked for several years in the Far North. The cosmologist also discusses ways to avoid chrono-paradoxes and some features of the theory of time in the context of Einstein’s theory.
— Andrey, what is cosmology?
— Cosmology is the science of our Universe and the place of intelligent beings in it. Of course, a lot of interdisciplinary knowledge intersects here, everything related to space, its origin, its evolution, cosmic mysteries, black holes, wormholes, the quantum physics…
And since there are intelligent beings in it, you and me, then, accordingly, cosmologists are also interested in the problem of human consciousness, the problem of space travel. The topic of time travel is also, of course, in our area of attention.
— Are you saying that time travel is possible, that it is possible to create a time machine?
- Yes, that's absolutely right. It's just that the crude logic of relativity theory tells us that since time is one of four dimensions, moving back and forth in time is as possible as walking left and right. Naturally, this is not all that simple, but it is fundamentally important to understand that such travel does not contradict the laws of physics.
— So you set yourself such a scientific task?
- Absolutely right. This does not contradict fundamental laws - this is the first key point. Traveling to the future is definitely possible. In general, the principle of operation of a time machine for traveling to the future is extremely simple. It also follows from Einstein's theory of relativity.
If we accelerate the device to near light speed, then the clock on this device will go much slower than on Earth. That is, having made such a space flight, you will automatically find yourself in the future. That is, the problem arises purely technological.
You just need to build one spaceship and calculate exact time departure, arrival, to understand how and where exactly you want to end up. Therefore, here, in general, it’s not even worth chewing on for a long time, discussing the topic of traveling to the future.
— But I would like to understand whether traveling into the past is possible? Because a one-way journey is not interesting, you always want to go back.
— Everything here is much more complicated, although there is a fundamental understanding of how to technologically solve this problem. For example, such a very basic device that helps you move into the past is a rather handicraft thing. You need to construct a very long, very strong cylinder and spin it around its axis.
Then, by moving around this cylinder, you can go back in time. The problem is that the length of the cylinder must be the size of our galaxy, its strength is comparable, and it must also be accelerated at approximately the speed of light. Therefore, I assume that even the most highly developed civilizations are not capable of creating such a structure, although it looks quite primitive.
But the very idea that this is possible inspired scientists to further research. And when they began to figure it out, it turned out that the easiest way to travel through time in our space occurs if you penetrate into the so-called wormholes or wormholes. These are such strange cosmological objects.
They formed when our Universe was small, right after the Big Bang. It was such a foaming substance, and these small tunnels were present there. It is absolutely possible, this does not contradict the laws of physics, that when our Universe began to expand, these tunnels, at least some of them, also became large.
If you learn to find them and control them, then traveling into the past is possible through these wormholes. There are a lot of nuances there, primarily due to the fact that monstrous energy is required to penetrate wormholes, however, there is a general understanding that this is possible.
Theorists have developed this. But of course, I would like to talk not about science fiction, about real models, real devices. Several breakthroughs have occurred here in recent years. I will give as an example two or three models that are the most promising.
The first of them was developed by physicist Richard Goth. Today, one of the leading areas of space exploration and physics research involves the assumption that at the microscopic level there are some individual points - atoms or strings. String theory is vibrating small substances that are the essence, the basis of our entire universe.
And the strings were also microscopic at the moment big bang, and after the expansion of the Universe they also acquired cosmological proportions. And Richard Goth believed that if these strings were somehow isolated from space, he learned to control them and pushed one string against another at a high enough speed, then time around them would begin to flow backwards.
Then the apparatus, moving around the two colliding strings in the opposite direction, automatically ends up in the past. This is a calculated model, and not some general theoretical reasoning. This model has one big plus and one big minus.
The big disadvantage is that it is very difficult to imagine how it is possible to drive such a model. The author himself believed that in order to move just two years ago, it is necessary to use energy equal to the energy of our entire galaxy Milky Way. For now, this is completely inaccessible to us, but we don’t know what is available to highly developed civilizations, which may be at a very far level from us.
And the main advantage is that, unlike all hypothetical ideas related to antiparticles and other incomprehensible phenomena, nothing like that is needed here. Ordinary matter is used, and the device itself moves not at the speed of light, but below, so there is no need to use any fantastic ideas. The question is how to technologically implement this project.
The second idea developed by Kip Thorne is related to the fact that a time machine can be created if you learn to control negative energy and negative matter. Physicists are sure that both exist, but this is a material with very unusual properties. Negative matter tends to move away from normal matter rather than approach it, making it very difficult to detect.
Negative energy can be obtained, and in an engineering way that is quite understandable to us, if two very smooth metal, preferably silver, plates are placed as close as possible - at a quantum distance from each other. Then between these plates, if they are brought as close to each other as possible, negative energy is formed.
I will not explain the complexity of the theory, but this is an objective fact. Kip Thorne created a completely workable model by shifting these plates into spheres and placing one sphere inside another. It turned out that if one of the spheres is directed at the speed of light in relation to the other, then it automatically falls into the past due to negative matter and negative energy.
It turns out that the sphere moves and is destroyed, time is desynchronized, which means that this is already a device, because a crew can be placed inside the sphere. Moreover, Thorne’s model already has drawings. That is, the principle of creating a time machine is clear even to modern engineers.
- Well, the speed of light is unattainable...
- Not yet. We are talking about the fact that the entire history of scientific thought, the history of mankind shows that if some kind of workable device or apparatus was born in someone’s head, some drawings appeared, then sooner or later it can be created. Let’s remember the steamship of Archimedes or the helicopter of Leonardo Da Vinci, the plane...
Of course, such a complex device as a time machine is millions of times more complicated, but nevertheless, if engineers have an understanding of how to create it, they can create drawings, that is, they are confident that sooner or later they will be able to do it. This is why, by the way, the Thorne model is used in all advanced popular science films.
Well, I will give the last example, from my point of view, the simplest and most implementable. It’s probably right when they say that everything ingenious is simple. The device was developed by physicist Robert Malleta, and the principle of its operation is indeed quite primitive.
If you take two high-energy laser beams and accelerate them through a tunnel in opposite directions at near-light speed, then inside time begins to twist like a funnel and, having penetrated this funnel, you can find yourself in the past. The Mallet model is perhaps the most realistic apparatus that can be created.
The difficulty is that in order for the machine to work well, allowing you to travel far into the past, it is necessary to slow down the speed of light. It seems that this is an unsolvable problem. Nothing like this! Experiments are already being carried out, for example, by passing light through a very dense condensate, it was possible to reduce the speed of light.
— Indeed?
— These are actually experiments carried out. The speed of light is 300 thousand km/s, that is, it circles the globe eight times per second. In the laboratory, it was possible to slow down the speed of light in condensate by 1 m/s. And if further experiments are successful, then perhaps Mallett’s model is the most promising.
But all the working time machines that I talked about have one minus, one small nuance. The fact is that they all do not allow you to travel in time before the moment when the machine itself was created. But we want to visit Jurassic Park, but there are also some breakthroughs here.
And the most important idea is that if instead of a portal, then time travel is possible earlier than the period when the time machine was created. Many scientists believe that when entering a black hole, any material object is destroyed, but this is not a fact. We still don’t know enough about the physics of black holes to say this so confidently.
Interviewed by Alexander Artomonov
Preparedfor publicationYuri Kondratyev
In which we ask our scientists to answer quite simple, at first glance, but controversial questions from readers. For you, we have selected the most interesting answers from PostNauka experts.
The question of the possibility of creating a time machine is a question of the universal applicability of the principle of causality and the closely related second law of thermodynamics. In simple terms, the principle of causality tells us that always and everywhere, in any frame of reference and for all phenomena, the effect cannot precede the cause. First thunder roars, and then a man crosses himself. The second law of thermodynamics, again deliberately simplifying, states that closed systems always change in the direction of increasing disorder (entropy). For example, sugar dissolves in water over time because syrup has greater entropy than its constituent sugar and water separately. In order to separate sugar and water again, you need to expend energy (for example, heat the solution).
It is clear that the possibility of time travel would violate both of these laws: a man who jumped a few seconds into the past could cross himself before a flash of lightning, and by sending sugar syrup into the past, we would see how unmixed water and sugar arise from it by themselves.
Interestingly, no other physical laws establish the difference between the past and the future. Most of equations do not change their form at all when changing the direction of the flow of time, the rest remain unchanged with a simultaneous change in the direction of the time axis and the signs of several more physical quantities ( simplest example This kind of systems are systems with magnetism, in which it is necessary to simultaneously change the sign of the time axis and the direction of the magnetic field).
Thus, the principle of causality and the second law of thermodynamics in the modern picture of knowledge are isolated statements - if they suddenly turn out to not be true, the rest of scientific knowledge will remain unchanged. An analogy can be drawn with Euclid’s fifth axiom: a theory based on the postulate of non-intersection of parallel lines correctly describes geometry on the plane, but the abolition of this axiom does not lead to disaster - the result is non-Euclidean geometry, which describes, for example, the properties of figures on the surface of a sphere.
The difference between physics and mathematics, however, is that mathematics is interested in any theories, and physics is only interested in those that describe our real world, which exists in a single copy. And in this real world the principle of causality, apparently, is not violated. Of course, one can always think that we do not notice these violations, but the likelihood of such a state of affairs is extremely low - like all fundamental laws, the principle of causality manifests itself in various aspects of observable reality, and it would be difficult to ignore its violation.
One more thing needs to be said. Scientists love catchy names just as much as newspaper writers, and it has recently become fashionable to borrow terms from science fiction for new discoveries in order to attract the attention of the community to them. One of bright examples- the term “quantum teleportation”, corresponding to an absolutely real and very beautiful quantum information technology, which, however, has nothing in common with teleports from books and computer games. It may well turn out that in the future we will hear about some kind of “quantum time machine.” But, unfortunately, this will not make time travel possible.