by Nick Reese

Created on: February 26, 2007   Last Updated: May 02, 2007

Science fiction has at times translated into science fact. Could this still be the case in our modern age? Could the vivid imaginations of sci-fi writers be somehow made into fact by our kind's most brilliant minds? One such piece of science fiction that attracts attention of amateurs and scientists alike is time travel. Could we go back in time to change the past for instance kill Hitler or warn the citizens of Chicago of Mrs. O'Leary's cow?

The scientific answer to that is drawn from the theoretical physics division of science where brilliant minds work on figuring out what we cannot see with math and creativity. Leading physicists on the subject are Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne and Roger Penrose. These men are easily considered the best physicists of our time and they have devoted time to and even bet on the possibility of time travel.
Most time machines in movies are depicted to be almost alien-looking craft that speed off with incredible speed into toward the past. This approach is out because traveling faster than the speed of light is prohibited by Einstein's Theory of General Relativity. Anything accelerating to the speed of light would have to be able to increase its mass infinitely since energy equals mass (E=mC2). The one possibility considered by physics experts to be possible, be it slim, is the theoretical Einstein-Rosen Bridge.
An Einstein-Rosen Bridge is better known as a wormhole. A wormhole is caused by black hole having so much gravity that it actually bends the fabric of space-time so much that it creates a passage between two points that is shorter than a straight line. Think of space-time as a piece of paper with the black hole being a black dot at one end of the page. The gravity of the dot black hole would be so great that it would bend the paper around until the opposite end of the page was directly below the end bearing the dot. Then stick a pen into the paper, through the dot and in turn through the other side of the paper now under the dot. What you will have created is a wormhole. Imagine the dot as the entrance to the tunnel. The pen would be the tunnel itself and where the pen broke through would be a point in space that would take millions of light-years to reach using any conventional space craft. Now instead the trip could take only minutes or hours. No one knows for sure obviously since the existence of wormholes and black holes is purely in theory. Even if they do exist, humans would have to fly into one to prove what is indeed

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