Scientists at Vanderbilt University say they’ve found a way to test a possible case of real-life time-travel, albeit on a tiny scale. They’d be looking for it at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. That’s where they say some of the pieces of smashed atoms might appear a few trillionths of a second before they’re created.
It’s hard to make the math check out for time-travel in the four dimensions we’re familiar with: three for space, plus time. Luckily for researchers looking at the tiny particles everything’s made of, they think there are more like eleven dimensions – some of which aren’t bound by the rules we’re used to.
“A compactified dimension would be a circle.”
Vanderbilt physicist Thomas Weiler (WHY-ler) says one extra dimension could be round. When researchers at the Large Hadron Collider smash an atom, Weiler says a piece called a Higgs singlet could be slung through time by that circular dimension.
Graphic courtesy Jenni Ohnstad / Vanderbilt.
“So people will scratch their heads and say, ‘Well, where is it?’ And then they will see it at a slightly different location, maybe separated by a millimeter. And they’ll say ‘Oh, there it is’ – but then their time stamp will say ‘But wait a minute, it’s appearing before it was created, not after it was created.’ And if they don’t throw that event away as being too bizarre, that would be the evidence for the Higgs singlet going backwards in time.”
Even so, Weiler and the theory’s co-author, Chui Man Ho, say it will still be a long while before scientists can use it to send messages through time. “Baby steps,” Weiler says; be patient.
On Air - 90.3 WPLN-FM