Reasons why we want time travel to become possible

There are proposals to be able to travel in time, will any of them include the famous "Back to the future" car?
Time travel is a subject that has intrigued humanity throughout the years. The simple fact of being able to change an error, whether personal or social, or to know the history in a direct way and without intermediaries is fascinating. There are even those who relate travel in time as a possibility of becoming immortal. Imagine that today you are in 2015, tomorrow in 2023 and a day later in 2030, you will have aged two days in just 15 years.

For Sir Isaac Newton, time looked like an arrow: once fired it could never deviate from its past and a second on Earth would be equivalent to a second for the entire Universe. Albert Einstein rejected this theory and showed that time is similar to a river, curves throughout the Universe, accelerates and slows down when it meanders through stars and galaxies.

On the other hand, for the Stephen Hawking of 1990, time travel was practically impossible. Logic told him that if possible the world would be full of temporary tourists; However, physicists have not been able to find a law that prevents travel in its entirety in time, therefore, Hawking changed his mind recently.

Throughout history several theories about time travel have been proposed, if an astronaut traveled at the speed of light it would take a minute to reach the nearest stars, but on Earth four years would have passed. He has only lived a few minutes, but for us it was years.

In 1949 the mathematician Kurt Gödel proposed that the Universe revolves, if we traveled around it quickly enough there is the possibility of finding ourselves in the past and arriving at the same point before leaving, therefore, a trip through the Universe would be a journey to the past. In this is the great "but", enemy of all our illusions about seeing the possibility of travel closer, because the evidence points out that the Universe expands, but the net spin is probably zero, that is, the Universe does not have An angular point where it can be turned.

An example of a trip in recent times is the English Richard Gott, who in 1991 presented his theory at the University of Princeton. If one finds gigantic cosmic strings, residues of the original Big Bang, and travels rapidly around said cords in collision, it could go back in time. A great advantage of this experiment is that resources are not necessary already eliminated by other scientists, such as infinite rotating cylinders, rotating universes or black holes, the disadvantage is to find these strings at the precise moment of their collision; In addition, you could only travel to the past for a short period of time.

The most promising design for a time machine is the one known as "practicable wormhole". It is a space-time hole by which a person could walk freely backward or forward in time. In theory, this practicable wormhole can provide not only a faster journey than light, but a successful time travel.

It would consist of two cameras, one of entry and one of exit, although in this there is a great inconvenience, because only one could travel backwards until the time in which said cameras were built, because it would take one to leave. In addition, the wormhole may be tiny, smaller than an atom, and the plates must be squeezed to distances of the Planck length and thus create enough negative energy. Once again, our journey in time is frustrated.

Even an experiment considered as a possible time travel is the fact of freezing your corpse for a future regeneration, because you could be reborn in the year 2045 with the same age you had at death and you would feel as if you had had a long sleep. There was a company in the late 70's called Cryonics Society of California, dedicated to freeze corpses; However, an electrical failure in 1981 caused them to lose many bodies and their popularity with them. It seems that travel in time belongs only to science fiction, because characters like Dr. Emmet Brown have managed to travel simply with a De Lorean DMC-12, a bit of plutonium and a vision.

Visually the car is shown with a futuristic shape: it looks like a spaceship, in addition to its modifications in the rear -tubes and cables mainly- and inside -lights, buttons and switches- give it a machine shape. Before giving any information, Doc demonstrates success in his experiment and sends the dog Einstein for a minute to the future, then explains the logic in the machine: the car works with plutonium and when it reaches a speed of 140 km / h a nuclear reaction is created that gives an energy of 2.21 jigawatts of electricity and the trip is made in time, all this thanks to the flow capacitor.

Something very important: we never explain how the flow capacitor works and what it does, it's just a strange object added to the car and indispensable for time travel. Of course, this device does not exist in real life and has had so much influence in popular culture that many works have used it in films and later series. Another aspect is that the measurement of jig watts does not exist, the creators of Back to the Future admitted not knowing the highest energy measurements and they invented one that sounded bigger; however, Dr. Brown speaks very quickly and in disarray, therefore, these details can go a little unnoticed.

But why does this incredible data become credible in Back to the Future? According to the Spanish philologist Noemí Novell we could consider science fiction as a mixed form between the fantastic and the wonderful genre, that is, that we are presented with an extraordinary and out of the ordinary world, the characteristic of science fiction is that said world it is justified by science-at least, science within history-scientific elements, electronic devices, or names of bombastic measures generate an acceptance of the extraordinary world and make it credible.

Therefore, despite the absence of travel in time, there is nothing in physics that can deny this fantasy. For now, it is a good topic to talk at dinner, write a book, or watch a good movie, all in order to justify this article and lovers of geeks things we can talk about what we like so much.