What would you change if you could go back in time and make one change? We’re not going back in time just yet, however much fun as that question may be to explore.

However, this hasn’t stopped researchers from trying to find out how humans might one day be able to change the order of events in the timeline. The principles of physics that could be bent just enough to make it happen were recently the subject of a paper released by a group of theoretical physicists.

Wormholes, in particular a kind of wormhole known as a ring wormhole, are the key to the entire concept. Wormholes are already purely hypothetical, therefore this conversation is about to get strange. Additionally, ring wormholes are stranger than “normal” wormholes.

Wormholes, as we commonly refer to them, are essentially holes made in spacetime by the powerful gravitational pull of black holes. Scientists have frequently proposed that the strong gravity wells in the centers of these objects could serve as portals to alternate universes or alternate eras.

However, ring wormholes are independent of black holes. Instead, the (again, extremely theoretical) things are produced by circles of mass with negative energy, a phenomenon that can only be explained by the peculiarities of the quantum world. It would be possible to enter another universe by this circle of negative energy without passing through a black hole tunnel.

According to Andrei Zelnikov, one of the paper’s authors, “You could go through and not even notice that you went to another universe.”

Zelnikov and his team’s study, which was published in the journal Physical Review D, presents calculations that suggest a ring wormhole may serve as both a time machine and a teleport from one universe to another.

Heavy-duty math crunching indicates that the ring wormholes may produce a “closed timelike curve” if one of the wormholes’ “mouths” was close to a large amount of mass and the other was far away. The closed timelike curves produced can then transform a portal into a time machine if the conditions are just right at the wormhole mouths.

Toby Wiseman, an Imperial College London professor of theoretical physics who was not involved in the work, told New Scientist that “the time machine is a natural consequence of the wormhole existing.” “There’s nothing too wild being postulated here, aside from the crazy matter that makes up the wormhole, and the result is something even more crazy.”

You can determine whether suggesting a technique for time travel is “too wild.” Though scientists are still committed to fully comprehending all of the principles of time and space—and precisely how we may bend them to make the coolest things possible—whether they are wild or not.