Space-Time Trips

1. Within theoretical physics, black holes play a primary role in the hypothetical scenario of time-space travels.

About 20 years ago, a profile of one named John Titor circulated in the newly created dynamic web (which allowed interaction between the various Internet users), claiming within a pseudoscientific forum to come from a future time, exactly from the year 2036, And for several months, he interacted with site visitors predicting scientific and social events that never actually happened.

Beyond the curious, rather goliardic, mysterious character behind the profile of John Titor, probably wanted to share with other people a theme that actually has a solid scientific foundation, although only riding purely theoretical concepts (for now).

According to the Theory of General Relativity formulated by Albert Einstein, space and time are two interconnected quantities, not to be visualized as linear paths but rather as a real fabric, a flexible four-dimensional canvas, deformable, prone to bend, to stretch, to compress, based on the objects it hosts and that interact with each other and, in particular, their mass and the gravitational energy they generate.

2. Grafic illustration of a wormhole.

The German scientist, in conjunction with the American physicist Nathan Rosen, developed one of the many hypotheses related to the theory of relativity (which however was inspired by previous theories of other physicists): the space-time gallery, better known as wormhole, that is, a tunnel formed by a gravitational force so high that it folds space-time tissue in two and allows an object to pass to a point of arrival which, otherwise, would be too far to reach within a reasonable time, both in time and space, even by light. In the hypothetical scenario the transition is possible due to the fact that the starting point is perpendicular to the end point. The theory is supported by complex mathematical calculations.

The twentieth century saw the birth of a new material that, together with general relativity, has assembled the structure of modern physics: quantum mechanics. With this turning point the understanding of energetic events is completed by the concept of quantum, that is, an indivisible particle unit that accompanies the wave phenomena: for example, if the light in the past was considered as a simple electromagnetic wave, now it must be assimilated by our brains as a particle flow of energy packets called photons, as well as quantum, which make up the electromagnetic field of light.

3. D-Wave, the Google quantum computer.

A branch of quantum mechanics, quantum computing, has taken advantage of the quantum to facilitate and speed up the storage and processing of computer data. If so far relativity has allowed us to treat time-space travel in macroscopic scales, quantum theory becomes useful in order to imagine the same scenario at particle level.

However, this time our imagination is not only reconciled with mathematical calculations, but fortunately also with experimental data. In fact, quantum teleportation is a technique already widely used in the field of quantum computing: science fiction has become science.

What has actually been made possible by scientists is not the disappearance and reappearance of a particle from a point A to a point B, but rather the transfer of the quantum state, the energy state, from a particle A to a more distant particle B. We are therefore witnessing an energy transition in space, at a time comparable to the speed at which light travels.

Although the experimentation of these events is in an embryonic state, in little more than two decades the research centers have made great strides: in 2012 an ESA team of researchers managed to teleport photons away 140 km in the observatory of Tenerife, to the observatory of La Palma!

At the beginning of 2020, the news of the first transfer of information between two chips, via quantum teleportation, was announced.

Who knows if one day instead of particles we could tell these same events with different protagonists, maybe a little more massive as Mr John Titor!