time travel

Bouncing around in my head, several notebooks, and some digital files is a time travel epic, the origins of which can be traced back 21 years to the first film I made (with my best friend at the time, Pat). More years ago then I want to think about I came up with this same method of time travel that Stephen Hawking talks about in an article for the Daily Mail:

Down at the smallest of scales, smaller even than molecules, smaller than atoms, we get to a place called the quantum foam. This is where wormholes exist. Tiny tunnels or shortcuts through space and time constantly form, disappear, and reform within this quantum world. And they actually link two separate places and two different times.

Unfortunately, these real-life time tunnels are just a billion-trillion-trillionths of a centimetre across. Way too small for a human to pass through – but here’s where the notion of wormhole time machines is leading. Some scientists think it may be possible to capture a wormhole and enlarge it many trillions of times to make it big enough for a human or even a spaceship to enter.

Of course he then goes on to say that radiation feedback would make the wormhole collapse before you could travel through it. Still, rather nice to read that my idea continues to have some scientific backing.

Addendum: A few years back I realized an even more potentially catastrophic problem for time travelers: the Earth doesn’t sit still. Not only does it orbit the sun, but the sun orbits the galaxy, and the galaxy as a whole is moving too. So if you did manage to travel back in time 100 years, but didn’t move in space, you’d find yourself floating in a vacuum instead of standing on the Earth. Thus whatever device is used for the trip would also have to calculate the exact position of the planet at any time in the past and then move you through space as well as time. Or alternately some form of GPS (a Temporal Positioning System, if you will) could be employed to provide the machine with coordinates from a universal mapping system.