Fantasy or science? Scientists claim that it is possible to return to the past with the help of a ring wormhole

Theoretical physicists and lawyers have much in common. Both are looking for loopholes and inconsistencies in the rules that could somehow be used to their advantage.

Valery P. Frolov and Andrey Zelnikov of the University of Alberta in Canada and Pavel Krtoush of Charles University in Prague may not be able to get you out of a speeding ticket, but they can find enough freedom in the laws of physics to send you back in time and prevent your violation.

Shortcuts through space-time, known as wormholes, are not recognized features of the cosmos. But for nearly a century, scientists have wondered if relativity-determined fabric and curvature prescribe ways for quantum fluctuations – or even entire particles – to break out of their locality.

In their most fantastical form, such rearrangements in the fabric of the universe would allow human masses to travel light years to cross galaxies in an instant, or perhaps travel through time as fast as one can navigate through one’s kitchen.

At the very least, exercises that explore the more exotic side of spacetime behavior could fuel speculation about the mysterious meeting point of quantum physics and general relativity.

Wormholes are, in fact, nothing more than forms . We are used to dealing with one-dimensional lines, two-dimensional drawings and three-dimensional objects in everyday life. Some of them we can intuitively fold, shape and punch holes.

Physics allows us to explore these changes in situations that we cannot intuitively understand. At the smallest levels, quantum effects give distances and time some freedom.

On much larger scales, spacetime can contract and expand with gravity in ways that cannot be estimated without a whole bunch of equations to help you. For example, if shove enough mass in one place (conveniently ignoring any charge it might have or if it’s spinning), spacetime will curve in such a way that it has two outer surfaces. What connects them? Wormhole, of course.

Matter will not be able to move through this mathematical structure, although some suspect that objects on opposite sides that happen to be entangled will remain connected.

For decades, there has been a search for scenarios – both possible and purely theoretical – that could allow quantum effects, and even whole particles, to pass through exotic forms of space-time without damage.

Frolov, Krtoush and Zelnikov’s time travel proposal includes what is called a ring wormhole, first described in 2016 by Cambridge University theoretical physicist Gary Gibbons and Tour University physicist Mikhail Volkov.

Unlike the spherical distortions of space-time that we can attribute to black holes, the ring wormhole proposed by Gibbons and Volkov connects regions of the universe (or different universes) that we call flat.

By considering the interactions of electric and magnetic fields, called duality rotations, and applying some selective transformations, the annular masses could create some interesting distortions in what would otherwise be flat spacetime.

And voila! A hole in the universe that connects you to… well, somewhere else.

Frolov, Krtoush and Zelnikov took this hole and tested it in different scenarios. For example, what effect can another, immovable mass have on the ring? What if the input ring and the output ring are in the same universe?

The solutions they found included what is called closed timelike curve . As it sounds, this describes an object or beam of light that travels along a line, returning to exactly the same point as before. Not only in space, but also in time.

Before embarking on a paradoxical trip around the world to the future and back, many obstacles can easily interfere with such a cycle. The late physicist Stephen Hawking thought exactly that.

But who knows? With the right air of a space lawyer, we can appeal our verdict of one-way travel into the future with a little help from a pair of massive rings.

This study available on the arXiv pre-server and was accepted for publication in Physical Review D.