Kip Thorne, the theoretical physicist who won the Nobel prize for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves, has claimed that attempting time travel through a wormhole would be self-destructive.
He said a violent explosion will take place in the wormhole when it attempts to travel across the time, and if somebody is there in this theoretical passage, they will end up dying without any trace.
Will time travelling bring death?
The Nobel laureate warned that the warping of space in a wormhole is so intense and it is similar to the warping of space in a stretched rubber membrane. Thorne made it clear that the wormhole always wants to shrink and pinch off, and when people try to travel through it, they inevitably die.
"I was forced to realize that there's a universal mechanism when you are trying to turn a wormhole into a time machine in this way – a universal mechanism that always creates a violent explosion that very likely destroys the wormhole right at the moment when it begins to make time travel possible," Thorne told Closer to Truth.
However, the theoretical physicist assured that time travel is possible. But the self-destructing nature of wormhole is something which we cannot repair with the current technological advancement.
Travel above the speed of light and defeat time
It was Albert Einstein who first proposed time travel as theoretically possible. It can be achieved if we travel above the speed of light, he said. Close on the heels of this theory, Brian Greene, a theoretical physicist at the Columbia University says time travel can be accomplished by travelling in space at the speed of light and coming back to earth.
"You can build a spaceship, go out into space and travel near the speed of light, turn around and come back. Imagine you go out for six months and you turn around and you come back for six months. When you step out of your ship, you're one year older but Earth has gone through many, many years. It can have gone through 10,000, 100,000 or a million years depending on how close to the speed of light you travelled," explained Greene.
Greene has also made it clear that travelling through time demands a huge amount of energy, and the stress exerted on the body due to the centrifugal force that may turn deadly.
