In the sci-fi epic Interstellar, strange patterns appear in the dust on the floor of young Murph Cooper’s bedroom after a dust storm sweeps through the house. Murph thinks a ghost is responsible, but her father, former NASA pilot Joseph “Coop” Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), recognizes the patterns as a gravitational anomaly encoding binary coordinates. Years later, after Coop travels through a wormhole, he finds himself inside a tesseract—a higher-dimensional space constructed by future beings—where he can manipulate gravity across time. From there, he sends messages backward through time to Murph by creating the very gravitational anomalies they once observed together.
Because of time dilation, in which time slows down for an object moving at incredibly high speeds, years passed on Earth while only hours elapsed for Coop. From within the tesseract, he was able to send messages across time to his daughter—it turned out he had been the “ghost” behind the gravitational anomaly all along. It all makes for a great movie—but sending a message backward in time might not be as far-fetched as it seems. According to recent research in quantum physics, it really might be possible.
Time loops may provide a mechanism for sending messages into the past like Cooper did in Interstellar. General relativity allows for a closed timelike curve (CTC), which occurs when an object’s trajectory through spacetime takes it to the future and then back to the past. Another possible mechanism is quantum entanglement: If Cooper and Murph were quantum-entangled, they could share information backward through time. Particles that are quantum-entangled are always sensitive to each other’s state, so even if one gets catapulted through space so far and so fast that it ends up in the future, it’s still transmitting information to the one left behind in the past.
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