In science fiction, people have managed to travel through time in spaceships, DeLoreans, hot tubs, and duffel bags, among many other things. It's that simple. In real life, science can't even decide whether time travel is theoretically possible, although many prominent figures are inclined to believe it's impossible. But what are people if not dreamers? Even without technology or scientific know-how, we've encountered the idea of time travel more often than you might think.
10. Stephen Hawking threw a party for time travelers
A good argument can be made that Stephen Hawking was the most brilliant scientist of our time, and certainly the most famous of the last thirty years or so. He's been compared to Albert Einstein more times than you might imagine, and he's become one of those rare scientists so good at what they do that it earns them celebrity status.
Hawking, a physicist, disagreed with the idea of time travel. But as a scientist, he wasn't exactly open to the idea, so he even planned a way to prove or disprove it. He threw a party for time travelers.
Being a scientist, this idea had to have a scientific twist, and sure enough, Hawking came up with one. He only advertised the party the day after it took place. So, the only people who could attend would have to travel back in time to do so. You might be surprised to learn that no one actually attended his party.
Hawking has long been known for his good sense of humor, and this incident was clearly something of a joke, but it does play up one of the most compelling arguments against time travel that exists: if time travel is real, then why not? Have we met anyone from the future yet?
9. Astrophysicist Ronald Mallett believes he has cracked time travel
While many scientists consider the idea of time travel frivolous and best left to the realm of science fiction, not everyone agrees. Ronald Mallett dedicated his life to time travel.
Mallett's father died when he was only 10 years old. He attributes his lifelong love of science and learning to this man, and it partly inspired his quest to solve the mystery of time travel. He longs to see his father again.
According to Mallett, he's developed equations that allow for time travel. He's been working on this for sixty years. He believes he's developed a way to bend spacetime using lasers that follows Einstein's general theory of relativity, but there's a significant problem with his work. He believes that if it actually works, it will only work once his machine is turned on. This means it will be a zero-point, and no one will be able to travel further in time, so his dream of seeing his father will never come true.
Nevertheless, the potential to change the world exists if people in the future can send information back to the present. But there's another catch. Mallett says the energy required to operate the machine will be "galactic.".
8. There is a theory that a time-traveling bird stopped the Large Hadron Collider.
Few things irritate social media more than the Large Hadron Collider. Search for stories about the window of light, and you'll find enough to keep you busy for days. People thought it would open a black hole, or a portal to another dimension, or even hell itself. And while this all sounds silly, it's true that in 2009, the collider had so many problems that it had to be shut down. And that got people wondering what might have happened. And in a world where people already think the machine can open the gates to hell, it's not hard to imagine some outlandish theories about why it shut down.
One of the more intriguing theories was that time travel halted the machine, or more accurately, some kind of chain reaction of future particles traveling back in time. But a more complex theory suggests there's more to it than that.
The particle accelerator's shutdown was caused by overheating. However, it didn't overheat by accident. It contained a piece of baguette. So how does a piece of bread get into a giant particle accelerator? Some suggested a bird dropped it along the way. But others suggested it wasn't an ordinary bird. Perhaps it was a bird sent from the future to that precise place and time, so it could drop the bread and shut down the accelerator.
As silly as it may sound, more than one scientist has suggested, at least somewhat seriously, that the LHC is so potentially dangerous that time, the universe, or people of tomorrow have devised ways to stop it from working.
7. Scientists have determined that time travelers probably don't use social media.
If someone from the future existed in the world right now, where would you look for them? If you think social media is the answer, think again. Scientists have already spent some time trying to find them on Facebook, Twitter, and other sites, but they've come up empty.
Physicists from Michigan Technological University tried to find evidence of time travelers back in 2013 and came up empty-handed. Their search included searching for any signs of messages or communications indicating knowledge of future events—things that a person in the present should never know.
They acknowledged that the discovery doesn't prove time travelers don't exist; after all, people from the future might not use Facebook or Twitter. Furthermore, if someone traveled through time for a serious reason, there's a good chance they wouldn't stop to scroll through Twitter.
6. A man claiming to be from 2030 allegedly passed a lie detector test.
Of course, we've just looked at a couple of cases where evidence points to time travelers not existing, but perhaps they simply weren't looking hard enough. Occasionally, people appear in the world claiming to be honest with time travelers, and they make the news.
In 2018, a man claiming to be from the year 2030 made headlines when he allegedly passed several linear detector tests that confirmed his claims. Now, years later, we can look back and speculate that he might not have been from the future at all, as he claimed Donald Trump would win a second term. Other less specific predictions included self-driving cars becoming wildly popular, as well as virtual reality. In the future, no one will use Instagram, and Martin Luther King Jr.'s granddaughter will become president at age 21.
5. China was forced to deny the creation of a time machine.
While most people want to prove, if not research, time travel, one laboratory in China was forced to take the opposite approach and deny any involvement. In 2021, the country's largest public particle physics laboratory was ensnared in rumors that they were helping a private company build a time machine.
A private company called Ruitai claimed that a third organization created a PowerPoint that linked them to a particle physics lab, and it's unclear whether they were trying to build a time machine and were simply mistakenly linked to a government lab, or whether the entire story was made up.
The leaked PowerPoint title mentions a Nobel laureate involved in the project, and he's not even a real person. As for Ruitai, the company had only been around for a few months at the time of the leak, so it's hard to say what's going on, but rest assured, there's no time machine in China. They swear by it.
4. An Iranian scientist claimed to have invented a machine for predicting the future.
Is seeing the future the same as time travel? It might be a bit of a hoax, but an Iranian scientist claimed to have invented a machine that can do just that. Using what were described as "complex algorithms," the machine could supposedly predict a person's future with 98% accuracy.
Known as the Aryaeka Time Travel Machine, it would print out a report on your life five to eight years into the future. The inventor was the managing director of Iran's Strategic Invention Center, and his time machine was one of 179 other inventions he registered there. Of course, at the time this story broke, Iran's deputy minister of science, research, and technology largely dismissed it as nonsense.
3. Researchers believe that parallel timelines make time travel possible without paradox.
A major problem with time travel arises in the form of a temporal paradox. Let's say you go back in time to before you were born and kill your own father. How then could you possibly be born, grow up, and return to the past? Well, some enterprising minds argue that the mathematics still works for paradox-free time travel. The answer, as Doctor Strange might tell you, lies in parallel timelines or dimensions.
According to one physicist, it can be shown that spacetime mathematically accommodates paradoxes. One example given was disease. You travel back in time to stop Covid-19. If you succeed, Covid-19 won't happen, and in the future, you won't need to travel back in time. Therefore, either you're creating a new timeline, or the universe is preventing you from succeeding, and Covid-19 spreads regardless of your actions. Either way, time moves on. And according to physicists, all of this is possible, at least on paper.
2. Mental time travel
Sometimes science plays a bit hastily with its definition of time travel, as in the case of mental time travel. Research has shown that the human mind has an internal time flow, independent of external time. Thus, we can mentally travel through time within our own heads, back through memories, and into the future.
Electrodes in the brains of epileptics have been studied and shown that brain cells associated with time fire on their own, independent of external stimuli, indicating that human episodic memory of how something happens and when exists on a kind of internal timeline.
This ability to be aware of the past and future is called chronesthesia.
1. Sergei Krikalev traveled through time
It wouldn't be a climax to talk about time travel and dash your hopes that it's real at every turn, so why not focus for a moment on the only real time traveler in the world? Sergei Krikalev, according to everything we currently understand in science, has traveled through time.
Krikalev is a cosmonaut who has spent a lot of time in space. In fact, he spent over 800 days in orbit. And thanks to Einstein's theory of relativity, he traveled not only through space but also through time.
If you're a fan of science fiction, you might know that the closer you get to the speed of light, the slower time passes. This is called time dilation, and it means that the faster you travel through space, the less time passes for you overall. People here on Earth can age up to 50 years, and for you, only a fraction of that age will pass, depending on your speed. Theoretically, if you reached the speed of light, time would stand still. And then, also theoretically, if you somehow traveled faster than light, you would return to the past. But this doesn't apply to Krikalev's story.
Astronauts in orbit move at about five miles per second. That's 18,000 miles per hour. It's nothing compared to the speed of light, but it's faster than anything on Earth. And since Krikalev spent 803 days, 9 hours, and 39 minutes in space, he effectively traveled forward in time. Admittedly, he's only 0.02 seconds in the future, but that's more than the rest of us can say.