The first desktop model of the Big Bang reportedly showed why time travel doesn’t work. But a new look suggests time travel may be possible after all, at least on the lab bench.
In April, electrical engineers Igor Smolyaninov and Yu-Ju Hung of the University of Maryland announced that their model Big Bang, made from metamaterials that moved light just as particles move through mathematical representations of space and time, suggested time travel’s impossibility.
Light couldn’t be steered in a circle, they said. Therefore particles couldn’t loop back to the space-time point where they began. So much for time travel.
But physicist Ulf Leonhardt of the University of St Andrews in Scotland disagrees. “They considered the wrong polarization,” he said. “Making a loop in space is perfectly possible in their model. Therefore, for this model, time travel is possible.”
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