When it comes to time travel, most people imagine a fantastic opportunity to return to the past to correct mistakes. This idea is often used in cinema, literature and on television: from “ Time machine ” Herbert Wells to the time travel in “Back to the Future”. However, for the majority, this remains only with science fiction, since physical laws suggest that we can only move forward in time.
According to Einstein, space and time are not separate entities, but are a single whole – a spatio-temporal continuum. This continuum allows you to describe the movement of objects through time and space together. When the object is at rest, it moves in time at the maximum speed – forward, at a speed of one second per second. But if the object moves in space, its movement in time slows down due to a phenomenon known as time dilation. The faster the object moves in space, the slower it moves in time. When the speed of light is reached, time for the object stops.
In the 1930s, Einstein and his student Nathan Rosen suggested that space can be curved in such a way as to create bridges between remote points in the space-time continuum. These bridges, known as wormholes or Einstein-Rosen bridges could allow instant movement between two points. Imagine space-time as a sheet of paper: if you fold it in such a way that the two