- This video is sponsored by Likewise TV.
Do you ever feel like
you were designed
for a life of leisure.
But instead, you're stuck toiling away
at a day job that you can probably tolerate
for the rest of your life
if you really have to.
And you'll probably have to?
Sure, you could go to med school
or kick start the next Herbalife,
but that takes work
and that's exactly
what we're all trying to avoid.
What you need
is to become a trust fund kid.
It's the easiest way to live
a life of absolute leisure
with absolutely zero anxiety
about ever running out of money, or privilege.
The only problem is
if your grandparent isn't already
the inventor of something baller,
like the Slinky,
that drip ship has sailed
and disappeared over the horizon.
Or has it?
What if you had the ability
to go back in time,
give your favorite grandparent
the design for the world's favorite toy
that's just a piece of thin metal,
and turn yourself into
the trust fund wielding hero
you've always known
you were meant to be?
Could a little Sci-Fi magic
be all you need
for a one-way ticket to leisure-town?
Let's find out on this Science is Hard:
Can we use time travel
to become a trust fund kid?
But before we get into it,
I wanna tell you about this video's sponsor,
Likewise TV, which lets you access
all your favorite streaming services
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Thanks again to them
for sponsoring this video.
Now, back to the show.
Now when we say "time travel,"
we aren't talking about the weak-ass,
"putting your body in stasis
"and waking up in the future"
type of time travel
Fry does in Futurama.
We also sure as hell
aren't talking about
pulling an Ebenezer Scrooge
and sending your consciousness
back and forth in time
to re-evaluate why you took out
so many student loans
and didn't try harder
to date the heiress of Foster Farms.
No, we're talking about the real deal,
sending your actual human body
through space and time to 1946
to give your grandpa Richard T. James'
blueprints for America's
favorite walking helix.
With over 300 million Slinkys
sold in its 60 years of existence,
you'll be Scrooge McDuck-ing
your way through mountains of gold in no time!
Let's say you want to make
like Doc and Marty from "Back to the Future"
and accelerate the Delorean back to 1946.
You might do this by generating
a traversable wormhole.
That's basically two entangled black holes
separated by some distance in spacetime
that can spit you out
from one end of spacetime
to another almost instantaneously.
This is basically what happens
in the movie "Interstellar."
All you'd have to do is make
a wormhole large and stable enough
to create a time dilation
between the two ends of the wormhole
which would make an older and a younger end.
This would allow you
to enter the "older" end of the wormhole
and emerge from the "younger" end into the 1940s.
This would also involve
some casual light-speed travel,
which is what makes time travel
so weird in the first place.
Now that you have a flawlessly
time-dilated wormhole,
you're ready to blow Gramp's mind
with the genius of Susie the Slinky Worm.
Sorry to be a Debbie Downer,
but there are two problems.
Traveling back to anytime
before the moment you created your wormhole,
like, say the 1940s, is off-limits.
What's more, to stabilize the wormhole,
you'd most likely need
dark matter or dark energy,
a hypothetical type of matter
thought to make up 85% of the matter
in the universe
and which cannot be seen directly.
So, unless you figure out
how to magically find it,
this isn't going to happen.
Looks like you'll be clocking in
until you're in your 70s or dead.
But wait, what if you found
a naturally occurring wormhole instead?
Due to quantum fluctuations,
which are random changes
to the amount of energy in a point in space,
au naturale wormholes
may be popping in and out
of existence all the time,
just like my intrusive thoughts.
But, while you might technically
be able to use one to travel back in time,
you would end up somewhere
or some time completely random,
like 200 AD Jacksonville
or the Smoochy Slug Planet,
which everyone knows is located
on the dark side of the universe,
and for good reason.
Wormholes may not unlock your dreams
of buying MonkeyBall NFTs
and creating a "meh" designer sock line,
here's looking at you, Rob Kardashian!
But there's still hope,
and her name is quantum entanglement!
When two or more particles
are linked in a special way
so that their states
remain linked no matter
the distance they're separated,
that's quantum entanglement.
It's like how you
and your high school sweetheart
thought that you were
so romantically entangled
that going to college 2,000 miles
away wouldn't affect your bond.
Except, in this case,
the particles really do stay linked
no matter how far apart they are in space.
Think of the particles like Slinky Dog
where his head and tail
are the particles,
and the spring is the time
and distance between them.
If we move the head,
you can bet that adorable
little puppy booty
is also going to shake
all over the place.
So too will a change
in one particle instantaneously result
in a change in the other.
This "change" can be used
to transfer quantum information
from one particle to the other
in a process known as quantum teleportation.
Again, think of "Interstellar,"
when that guy from the Lincoln commercials
teaches his daughter about time travel
from inside a black hole.
So, while you,
the beautiful blob of billions
of particles that you are,
may not be able to go back in time,
you might be able to send information
to your golden goose of a grandpa
in the 40s.
You'd just have to use
an entangled particle
to somehow communicate information like,
"And don't forget to use high-grade
"blue-black Swedish steel"
and your grandpa's particle
in the past would change
to reflect your message, simple!
Unfortunately, there's no way
to confirm that this actually works,
since you can't exactly receive
a letter or a thumbs-up,
or a, "Wait, what the (beep)?"
from your G-pa in the past.
Because his gesture or letter
or additional questions
would be bound by the speed of light,
it would never reach you
in your position here in the present,
negating any effects of "time travel."
At this point,
the promise of a never-ending weekend
is still out of our grasp,
so we phoned a friend,
and physicist Hugh Everett answered!
I mean, not literally,
but you know what we mean.
His Many Worlds Interpretation
of quantum mechanics
boils down to the idea
that when a quantum particle is observed,
every possible outcome
of the observation happens at once.
More simply put,
everything that can happen will happen.
Using this interpretation,
and just a dash of quantum teleportation,
you could hypothetically travel
back to the 1940s,
give your grandpa a crash course
in Hooke's Law
and the effects of gravitation,
and put those bouncy bad boys on the market!
Unlimited improv classes
and poor Keurig Juice investments,
here you come!
And by "you,"
I mean the other-world "you,"
because your grandpa inventing
the slinky instead of Richard T. James
would create a completely different timeline.
Meanwhile, your world and status
as a cog in the capitalist machine
would remain exactly the same.
So you're helping yourself,
but not like, your actual self,
but another version of yourself
in another dimension and universe
that you'll never meet.
You might have seen the Many Worlds principle
explored in "Avengers: Endgame,"
where our mostly jacked heroes
gather sparkly rocks
from different points in time,
triggering the creation of parallel universes.
They use the rock magic
to David-Copperfield
their friends back into existence,
then put the fruity pebbles
back where they found them
to reset the timeline back to normal.
They're able to pull this off
by traveling through the Quantum Realm,
a place below the smallest dimension
of space where time seemingly
doesn't exist as we know it.
But unlike Captain Abs-ica,
you know like, Captain America,
but his abs are real strong,
you don't have a quantum ticket to ride.
So, while Quantum Mechanics offers
some cool ideas on how time travel
might be possible,
all fall short against the problem
that you cannot change the past
or send information back in time.
String Theory and 11-Dimensional Spacetime
are other options,
but there's no way of observing it,
so we're not gonna waste our time on that one.
So, there you have it.
Your most promising option
to becoming Slinky royalty
is to travel through a wormhole.
But, with so many large hurdles to overcome,
it's almost definitely
not going to happen in any of our lifetimes.
Or maybe ever.
As Stephen Hawking wisely observed,
"The best evidence we have that time travel
"is not possible,
"and never will be,
"is that we have not been invaded
"by hordes of tourists from the future."
That we know of.
When it comes to becoming a trust fund kid,
time is not on your side.
Thanks for sticking around
for another Science is Hard.
And remember, if you can't retroactively
turn yourself into a trust fund kid
via time travel,
maybe you can marry someone
with a trust fund!
Just be sure not to sign a prenup.
Let us know what you think in the comments,
and be sure to hit that subscribe button
like you're trying to smash a particle
to another point in the universe.
Thanks again for hanging out
and we'll catch you next time, later.