Physicists of the world cannot wait for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to be launched. This expensive – LHC is worth 4.65 billion pounds – device is the most powerful particle accelerator ever made in this world. Scientists expect the collider to reveal new facts about particles and forces of surrounding space, as well as simulating environment after so-called “Big Bang”, which created our Universe.

Russian scientists, fellows of Steklov Institute of Mathematics claim this experiment, which will be performed in CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) near Geneva, may result in creating of a first time machine in the world. LHC is scheduled for launch this summer, thus 2008 may become a reference point for traveling to the past. 

The idea of traveling in time was born in the genial brain of Kurt Gödel, Albert Einstein’s colleague, who used relativity theory for proving possibility of traveling to the past. Gödel’s hypothesis was published in 1949 and since that time eminent physicists kept rebutting his idea, because time travels shake causality principle and threaten our life with paradoxes: time traveler can accidentally or intentionally kill his own grandfather and thus won’t be born ever. 

Russian scientists claim that when collider’s energy concentrates on a subatomic particle, substance of our Universe, which we know as space-time continuum, can change, and these changes can be quite strange. Earth’s gravity slightly curves space-time continuum, and LHC can curve time until it forms a “ring”. This phenomenon is known as “closed time-like curve”, which in theory allows returning to the past.

This scheme crosses with the theory, which appeared in 1988, when American physicists from California Institute of Technology demonstrated that time and space tunnels – “wormholes” – can serve for traveling in time. Russian scientists keep thinking that LHC is able to form wormholes, thus providing necessary conditions for time traveling. “We know that closed time-like curves and wormholes appear as a result of particle colliding”, they say.

However, there are many barriers on the way to time traveling. One of them is the size of mini-wormholes, allowing only subatomic particles to pass through them. This problem requires further studies. Scientists hope that LHC will demonstrate such wormholes really exist. If collision energy partly disappears, this can be explained by formation of particles, which pierce time via wormholes.

Another sticking point in wormholes concept is an exotic force, keeping these tunnels open for traveling in time. Some scientists tend to think that dark energy, a mysterious antigravitational force, can be that very force, keeping wormholes open. If particle collision and dark energy helps to create a wormhole this year in Geneva, civilizations of the future can find out about this event in history textbooks and pay us a visit.

However, American physicists do not agree with their Russian colleagues – researchers from New-Hampshire claim existing data do not preclude the presence of dark or “phantom” energy, however, talks about possible time machine in LHC are just speculation. Eminent physicist from Oxford stands for time traveling, but only for fundamental theory. In practice, mechanism for visiting the past won’t work.

Another contradiction for time traveling is that billions of cosmic rays have pierced Earth’s atmosphere for billions of years, and their energy is much higher that that of LHC could ever create. If wormholes existed, time travelers should have already arrived.

Sources:

• Science News
• New Scientist

Kizilova Anna