Experiments
Experiments carried out
Certain experiments carried out give the impression of reversed causality but are interpreted in a different way by the scientific community. For example, in the delayed choice quantum eraser experiment performed by Marlan Scully, pairs of entangled photons are divided into “signal photons” and “idler photons”, with the signal photons emerging from one of two locations and their position later measured as in the double slit experiment, and depending on how the idler photon is measured, the experimenter can either learn which of the two locations the signal photon emerged from or “erase” that information. Even though the signal photons can be measured before the choice has been made about the idler photons, the choice seems to retroactively determine whether or not an interference pattern is observed when one correlates measurements of idler photons to the corresponding signal photons. However, since interference can only be observed after the idler photons are measured and they are correlated with the signal photons, there is no way for experimenters to tell what choice will be made in advance just by looking at the signal photons, and under most interpretations of quantum mechanics the results can be explained in a way that does not violate causality.
The experiment of Lijun Wang might also give the appearance of causality violation since it made it possible to send packages of waves through a bulb of caesium gas in such a way that the package appeared to exit the bulb 62 nanoseconds before its entry. But a wave package is not a single well-defined object but rather a sum of multiple waves of different frequencies (see Fourier analysis), and the package can appear to move faster than light or even backwards in time even if none of the pure waves in the sum do so. This effect cannot be used to send any matter, energy, or information faster than light, so this experiment is understood not to violate causality either.
The physicists Günter Nimtz and Alfons Stahlhofen, of the University of Koblenz, claim to have violated Einstein’s theory of relativity by transmitting photons faster than the speed of light. They say they have conducted an experiment in which microwave photons – energetic packets of light – traveled “instantaneously” between a pair of prisms that had been moved up to 3 ft (0.91 m) apart, using a phenomenon known as quantum tunneling. Nimtz told New Scientist magazine: “For the time being, this is the only violation of special relativity that I know of.” However, other physicists say that this phenomenon does not allow information to be transmitted faster than light. Aephraim Steinberg, a quantum optics expert at the University of Toronto, Canada, uses the analogy of a train traveling from Chicago to New York, but dropping off train cars at each station along the way, so that the center of the train moves forward at each stop; in this way, the center of the train exceeds the speed of any of the individual cars.
Some physicists have attempted to perform experiments which would show genuine causality violations, but so far without success. The Space-time Twisting by Light (STL) experiment run by physicist Ronald Mallett is attempting to observe a violation of causality when a neutron is passed through a circle made up of a laser whose path has been twisted by passing it through a photonic crystal. Mallett has some physical arguments which suggest that closed timelike curves would become possible through the center of a laser which has been twisted into a loop. However, other physicists dispute his arguments.
Non-physics based experiments
Several experiments have been carried out to try to entice future humans, who might invent time travel technology, to come back and demonstrate it to people of the present time. Events such as Perth’s Destination Day (2005) or MIT’s Time Traveler Convention heavily publicized permanent “advertisements” of a meeting time and place for future time travelers to meet. Back in 1982, a group in Baltimore, MD., identifying itself as the Krononauts, hosted an event of this type welcoming Visitors from the Futures. These experiments only stood the possibility of generating a positive result demonstrating the existence of time travel, but have failed so far—no time travelers are known to have attended either event. It is hypothetically possible that future humans have traveled back in time, but have traveled back to the meeting time and place in a parallel universe. Another factor is that for all the time travel devices considered under current physics (such as those that operate using wormholes), it is impossible to travel back to before the time machine was actually made
Time travel to the future in physics
Twin paradox diagramThere are various ways in which a person could “travel into the future” in a limited sense: the person could set things up so that in a small amount of his own subjective time, a large amount of subjective time has passed for other people on Earth. For example, an observer might take a trip away from the Earth and back at relativistic velocities, with the trip only lasting a few years according to the observer’s own clocks, and return to find that thousands of years had passed on Earth. It should be noted, though, that according to relativity there is no objective answer to the question of how much time “really” passed during the trip; it would be equally valid to say that the trip had lasted only a few years or that the trip had lasted thousands of years, depending on your choice of reference frame.
This form of “travel into the future” is theoretically allowed using the following methods:
Using time dilation under the Theory of Special Relativity, for instance:
Traveling at almost the speed of light to a distant star, then slowing down, turning around, and traveling at almost the speed of light back to Earth
Using time dilation under the Theory of General Relativity, for instance:
Residing inside of a hollow, high-mass object;
Residing just outside of the event horizon of a black hole, or on the surface of a larger-than-earth mass object.
Additionally, it might be possible to see the distant future of the Earth using methods which do not involve relativity at all, although it is even more debatable whether these should be deemed a form of “time travel”:
Time dilation
Time dilation is permitted by Albert Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity. These theories state that, relative to a given observer, time passes more slowly for bodies moving quickly relative to that observer, or bodies that are deeper within a gravity well.[49] For example, a clock which is moving relative to the observer will be measured to run slow in that observer’s rest frame; as a clock approaches the speed of light it will almost slow to a stop, although it can never quite reach light speed so it will never completely stop. For two clocks moving inertially (not accelerating) relative to one another, this effect is reciprocal, with each clock measuring the other to be ticking slower. However, the symmetry is broken if one clock accelerates, as in the twin paradox where one twin stays on Earth while the other travels into space, turns around (which involves acceleration), and returns—in this case both agree the traveling twin has aged less. General relativity states that time dilation effects also occur if one clock is deeper in a gravity well than the other, with the clock deeper in the well ticking more slowly; this effect must be taken into account when calibrating the clocks on the satellites of the Global Positioning System, and it could lead to significant differences in rates of aging for observers at different distances from a black hole.
It has been calculated that, under general relativity, a person could travel forward in time at a rate four times that of distant observers by residing inside a spherical shell with a diameter of 5 meters and the mass of Jupiter. For such a person, every one second of their “personal” time would correspond to four seconds for distant observers. Of course, squeezing the mass of a large planet into such a structure is not expected to be within our technological capabilities in the near future.
Time perception
Time perception can be apparently sped up for living organisms through hibernation, where the body temperature and metabolic rate of the creature is reduced. A more extreme version of this is suspended animation, where the rates of chemical processes in the subject would be severely reduced.
Time dilation and suspended animation only allow “travel” to the future, never the past, so they do not violate causality, and arguably should not be considered time travel. However time dilation should be considered an actual form of time travel, since the person does actually travel into the future at a faster pace than normal, whereas with suspended animation this is not the case.
from wikipedia
