The ability to travel through time—to change your past, to see the future—has been a dream of mankind for thousands of years. Many stories have been created upon such fantasy, and people even like to resolve unexplained phenomena, such as the disappearances of the derelict of the Ellen Austin and of Flight 19, by invoking time travel. For instance, Rob MacGregor and Bruce Gernon, the first-hand witnesses and survivors of a Bermuda Triangle incident, made the assertion of time-travel, in their book, The Fog, where they explained the phenomenon was probably caused by “an electronic fog”. As they were flying over the Bahamas on December 4, 1970, they encountered strange cloud phenomena—a tunnel-shaped vortex—all of the plane's electronic and magnetic navigational instruments malfunctioned and the magnetic compass spun inexplicably. After flying for 34 minutes, they found themselves over Miami Beach—a flight that normally would have taken 75 minutes!
Although famous scientists, like Stephen Hawking, have studied the possibility for a time travel, yet no one has really been on the trip. In short, there are three well-known ways by which one might travel through time: using wormholes or black holes, or exceeding the speed of light. Obviously, the ships and planes did not travel close to a black hole and they did not achieve light speed, but what about wormholes?
Wormholes, as defined, are tiny tunnel linking different points in space and time. If the two ends of the wormhole lie at the same location, but at different times, then we just need to go through that “gate-like” wormhole, and land in the past or the future. So is it possible that the ships or the aircraft traveled through one of those wormholes? The answer is no, unless an advanced civilization tinkered with the wormhole to make the mouths larger and to make them more stable.
To travel through the wormhole, according to astrophysicist Eric W. Davis, of the EarthTech International Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin, we still face quite many challenges. The reason a time machine would work is because if it moves at speeds near that of light, by special relativity, time would slow down for it. Therefore, if we can grab one end of a wormhole and move it around at speeds near that of light, then time slows down at that end, creating a time difference between the two ends. Then eventually we move the two ends close to each other. In addition, keeping the wormhole stable enough to traverse requires a very unusual form of energy—exotic matter, a material that has negative mass/energy. However exotic matter has only been observed in very small amounts—not nearly enough to hold open a wormhole. Since the existence of the exotic matter is still debatable, it is impossible to be certain of whether time travel is possible yet.
Therefore, we need better explanations than time travelling for all the incidents that happened at Bermuda Triangle. And regarding the exploration of time travelling, it is extremely unlikely that in our generation, someone will actually travel through time. We still have a long way to go if we want to make our dream become true…
Yitian Feng
