Quantum Physics and Time Travel - Best of Coast to Coast AM - 10/26/17

George Noory and Dr. Paul Halpern explore his theories on quantum physics and the expanding universe, and whether time travel will be possible in the future.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on I Heart Radio.
We are back with Paul Helper in his book The
Quantum Labyrinth. Paul, assuming you could go through a wormhole,
what do you think is on the other side of it?

(00:42):
What does it connect to? Well, so we don't really
know what what would be on the other side. I
mean hypothetically it would be connected to another part of space,
But is it a part of space that we would
have access to. Otherwise we really don't know. Could it
be another part of the universe or part of our universe,

(01:03):
different universe. It's all it's all very hypothetical. One of
the interesting things about worm halls though, is that, according
to Kip Thorne and his colleagues, if you could accelerate
one of the entrances, you could um slow down time
in that in that region, and you could travel through
the worm hall and go backward in time, which is

(01:25):
one of the interesting things. And for some people say,
well that that actually rules out worm halls, because as
everybody knows, according to at least according to that this
trend thought, we can't go back in time. And then
other people say, well, if you could go back in time,
as long as you didn't disrupt the past, as long

(01:46):
as everything is self consistent, then everything would be fine,
and that you wouldn't destroy, uh, the fabric of cause
and effect. So there was a debate in the pages
of very serious physics journals in the Lady these in
about whether or not if you have a worm hall,
if you go through it and could go back in time,

(02:06):
whether or not you could do so in a way
that's consistent with reality, or whether it's completely ruled out
by physics the laws of physics. Some people believe if
you go through a wormhole you get torn to shreds. Well,
that would be certainly if if you went through a
black hole, you would be re torn to shreds. The
worm halls that kip Thorne was talking about where ones

(02:30):
that were tailor made or custom made, perhaps by an
advanced civilization, so that the forces on you as you
went through wouldn't be strong enough to tear you apart.
And what's the difference between a wormhole and a black hole. Well,
the original idea of black holes was if you have

(02:50):
a collapsed star, and the star collapses and it becomes
an incredibly dense region, and it's so dense that basically
distorts space and time and creates kind of a gap
or a hole in space time. And then later people
looked at the solution mathematically and said, well, this whole

(03:11):
could be connected to another part of the universe. So
the whole can't really go to nothing, so it has
to be connected to somewhere. And this was just the
mathematical construct and that's what became the original idea of
of wormholes and then um but of course those kinds
of wormholes, the original kind, were not something you could

(03:34):
travel through without being torn to shreds. You'd be as
as you say, spaghettified, you'd be stretched out of one
direction and compressed in another direction, So it wouldn't be
very pleasant, so no one would really want to do this.
But that's when um kip Thorne and others said, well,
what if we could custom make these objects in a

(03:55):
way that they are traversible, that they are safe. So
it's it's almost like reverse engineering, saying we want something
that works in a way that you could travel through it,
let's reverse to engineer it so that instead of being crushed,
you wouldn't be crushed. Well, the problem, the only problem
is that requires a certain kind of matter, which is

(04:17):
of negative mass, and nobody has ever found any matter
of negative mass, so that that's a little bit of
a catch there. Did you see the movie Contact, based
on Carl Sagan's book, Yes, I did with Jody Foster.
What what did those were wormholes that she was going
through to get to that other planetary system? Right, yeah, exactly.

(04:38):
So that's that was kind of the product of all
this research that Kip Thorne gave this information to Carl
Sagan and Carl Sagan using in his book, and then
it was later used in the movie. So a lot
of stuff in science eventually ends up at science fiction
and then sometimes that science fiction inspires more science. Do

(05:00):
you think one day we will be able to develop
a time machine and go forward and backwards? Well one day. Interestingly,
forward is relatively easy in physics because according to Einstein's
special theory of relativity, if you travel close enough to
the speed of light, your internal clock flows down, so

(05:22):
all you would have to do and and this is
this is hypothetical for humans because we haven't traveled this fast.
But if you could travel of the speed of light
in the spaceship, then your clock would slow down compared
to everybody else, and when you return to Earth, everybody

(05:42):
would be much older, let's say a hundred years older,
and you would have only aged, say one year, And
you'll come back and everybody, all your friends and family
members will be either gone or extremely old, and you'll
seem like you've you've just gone away briefly. And that
is uh, that is something that that all physicists believe in,

(06:03):
because we've done that with particles. We've taken particles that
decay very quickly and accelerated them close to the speed
of light, and then all of a sudden they're much
longer living particles. So we've we've created sort of eternal youth,
so to speak, for in the particle world. But particles
are so much later than people that it's much easier

(06:26):
to accelerate them to high speeds. It's very hard to
accelerate a person too close to the speed of light.
We've we haven't come anywhere from near close to that.
If for some reason, let's say mankind survives five more years,
do you think that in that year that it's conceivable

(06:47):
to have time travel years from now? Well, I think uh.
Once again, there's a difference between the forward and backward time.
No one has really shown that backward time travel is possible,
it's just hypothetical. And forward time travel if we continue
to push space travel forward and we get faster and

(07:10):
faster when we developed new kinds of space drives, I
think forward time travel will be possible. Um, because we've
done it to a very limited extent with high speed flights.
We've we've had these very very sensitive clocks and put
them up on high speed aircraft, and these sense of
cocks show that time is different once you're going closer

(07:33):
to the speed of light. So that this has been
done only very very subtly. So UM, When astronauts go up,
they they age very, very slightly less than people on
Earth because they're traveling so fast. But it's in the nanoseconds.
It's not something that that really makes a big difference
in the lives. They're not going to come back like

(07:55):
Benjamin Button or anything like that. That's right, But but
maybe five years from now space travel will be um
something more common, and certainly if there's interstellar travel, we
might start seeing these effects more seriously. Listen to more
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(08:17):
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