time travel newspaper

share this!

January 12, 2023

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility:

fact-checked

trusted source

How a rotating universe makes time travel possible

by Paul M. Sutter, Universe Today

It turns out that time travel into the past is actually relatively easy. All you need to do is make the universe rotate.

The famous mathematician Kurt Gödel was a friend and neighbor of Albert Einstein at Princeton. He became incredibly curious about Einstein's general theory of relativity , which was and continues to be our modern formulation of the gravitational force. That theory connects the presence of matter and energy to the bending and warping of space and time, and then connects that bending and warping to the behavior of matter and energy.

Gödel was curious as to whether relativity could allow time travel into the past. Einstein's theory purported to be an ultimate framework for the nature of space and time, and as far as we know time travel into the past is forbidden. So Gödel reckoned that general relativity should automatically disallow it.

And Gödel discovered that actually general relativity is perfectly fine with time travel into the past. The trick is to set the universe in motion.

Gödel constructed a relatively simple and artificial model universe to prove his point. This universe is rotating and contains only one ingredient. That ingredient is a negative cosmological constant that resists the centrifugal force of the rotation to keep the universe static.

Gödel found that if you follow a particular path in this rotating universe you can end up in your own past. You would have to travel incredibly far, billions of light years long, to do it, but it can be done. As you travel, you would get caught up in the rotation of the universe. That isn't just a rotation of the stuff in the cosmos, but of both space and time themselves. In essence, the rotation of the universe would so strongly alter your potential paths forward that those paths loop back around to where you started.

You would set off on your journey and never travel faster than the speed of light, and you would find yourself back where you started but in your own past.

The possibility of backwards time travel creates paradoxes and violates our understanding of causality. Thankfully, all observations indicate that the universe is not rotating, so we are protected from Gödel's problem of backwards time travel . But it remains to this day a mystery why general relativity is OK with this seemingly impossible phenomenon. Gödel used the example of the rotating universe to argue that general relativity is incomplete, and he may yet be right.

Provided by Universe Today

Explore further

Feedback to editors

'Open gates' in warming Arctic are expanding salmon range

48 minutes ago

'Painting with light' illuminates photo evidence of air pollution

58 minutes ago

Blood sausages and yak milk: Bronze Age cuisine of Mongolian nomads unveiled

Most collapsed stars fully rotate in seconds: This one takes nearly an hour

New study finds Earth warming at record rate, but no evidence of climate change accelerating

Diversity in farm landscapes helps wildlife, global study finds

2 hours ago

Tiny tropical puddle frogs show that protecting genetic variation is essential for animals to survive the climate crisis

5 hours ago

Rate of global warming caused by humans is at an all-time high, say scientists

10 hours ago

Giant viruses discovered on Greenland ice sheet could reduce ice melt

12 hours ago

New study confirms presence of benzene in natural gas and potential for undetectable indoor leaks

13 hours ago

Relevant PhysicsForums posts

List of verdet constants.

May 31, 2024

Discussion about least squares method

May 29, 2024

Does energy exist?

Calculating vacuum -- these numbers do not make sense.

May 25, 2024

Replacing the Measurement standards (SI units)

May 24, 2024

What drives osmosis? (Statistics or Dynamics?)

May 20, 2024

More from Other Physics Topics

Related Stories

Can we time travel? A theoretical physicist provides some answers

Jun 14, 2022

Research team reconstructs gravity to find a more robust way of understanding the cosmos

Nov 4, 2022

Are black holes time machines? Yes, but there's a catch

Jan 4, 2023

There's no way to measure the speed of light in a single direction

Jan 11, 2021

Time travel could be possible, but only with parallel timelines

Apr 25, 2022

Relativity of rotational motion confirmed

May 12, 2016

Recommended for you

New model suggests partner anti-universe could explain accelerated expansion without the need for dark energy

20 hours ago

Physicists decode mechanics of knitted materials for engineering applications

18 hours ago

New precision measurement program advances understanding of proton halos

Jun 3, 2024

Study shows plant hydraulics create streaming electric potential in sync with biological clock

May 28, 2024

Theory and experiment combine to shine a new light on proton spin

New method can create aquatic levitation at much lower temperature, has implications for cooling nuclear reactors

Let us know if there is a problem with our content.

Use this form if you have come across a typo, inaccuracy or would like to send an edit request for the content on this page. For general inquiries, please use our contact form . For general feedback, use the public comments section below (please adhere to guidelines ).

Please select the most appropriate category to facilitate processing of your request

Thank you for taking time to provide your feedback to the editors.

Your feedback is important to us. However, we do not guarantee individual replies due to the high volume of messages.

E-mail the story

Your email address is used only to let the recipient know who sent the email. Neither your address nor the recipient's address will be used for any other purpose. The information you enter will appear in your e-mail message and is not retained by Phys.org in any form.

Newsletter sign up

Get weekly and/or daily updates delivered to your inbox. You can unsubscribe at any time and we'll never share your details to third parties.

More information Privacy policy

Donate and enjoy an ad-free experience

We keep our content available to everyone. Consider supporting Science X's mission by getting a premium account.

E-mail newsletter

April 26, 2023

Is Time Travel Possible?

The laws of physics allow time travel. So why haven’t people become chronological hoppers?

By Sarah Scoles

yuanyuan yan/Getty Images

In the movies, time travelers typically step inside a machine and—poof—disappear. They then reappear instantaneously among cowboys, knights or dinosaurs. What these films show is basically time teleportation .

Scientists don’t think this conception is likely in the real world, but they also don’t relegate time travel to the crackpot realm. In fact, the laws of physics might allow chronological hopping, but the devil is in the details.

Time traveling to the near future is easy: you’re doing it right now at a rate of one second per second, and physicists say that rate can change. According to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, time’s flow depends on how fast you’re moving. The quicker you travel, the slower seconds pass. And according to Einstein’s general theory of relativity , gravity also affects clocks: the more forceful the gravity nearby, the slower time goes.

On supporting science journalism

If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing . By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

“Near massive bodies—near the surface of neutron stars or even at the surface of the Earth, although it’s a tiny effect—time runs slower than it does far away,” says Dave Goldberg, a cosmologist at Drexel University.

If a person were to hang out near the edge of a black hole , where gravity is prodigious, Goldberg says, only a few hours might pass for them while 1,000 years went by for someone on Earth. If the person who was near the black hole returned to this planet, they would have effectively traveled to the future. “That is a real effect,” he says. “That is completely uncontroversial.”

Going backward in time gets thorny, though (thornier than getting ripped to shreds inside a black hole). Scientists have come up with a few ways it might be possible, and they have been aware of time travel paradoxes in general relativity for decades. Fabio Costa, a physicist at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics, notes that an early solution with time travel began with a scenario written in the 1920s. That idea involved massive long cylinder that spun fast in the manner of straw rolled between your palms and that twisted spacetime along with it. The understanding that this object could act as a time machine allowing one to travel to the past only happened in the 1970s, a few decades after scientists had discovered a phenomenon called “closed timelike curves.”

“A closed timelike curve describes the trajectory of a hypothetical observer that, while always traveling forward in time from their own perspective, at some point finds themselves at the same place and time where they started, creating a loop,” Costa says. “This is possible in a region of spacetime that, warped by gravity, loops into itself.”

“Einstein read [about closed timelike curves] and was very disturbed by this idea,” he adds. The phenomenon nevertheless spurred later research.

Science began to take time travel seriously in the 1980s. In 1990, for instance, Russian physicist Igor Novikov and American physicist Kip Thorne collaborated on a research paper about closed time-like curves. “They started to study not only how one could try to build a time machine but also how it would work,” Costa says.

Just as importantly, though, they investigated the problems with time travel. What if, for instance, you tossed a billiard ball into a time machine, and it traveled to the past and then collided with its past self in a way that meant its present self could never enter the time machine? “That looks like a paradox,” Costa says.

Since the 1990s, he says, there’s been on-and-off interest in the topic yet no big breakthrough. The field isn’t very active today, in part because every proposed model of a time machine has problems. “It has some attractive features, possibly some potential, but then when one starts to sort of unravel the details, there ends up being some kind of a roadblock,” says Gaurav Khanna of the University of Rhode Island.

For instance, most time travel models require negative mass —and hence negative energy because, as Albert Einstein revealed when he discovered E = mc 2 , mass and energy are one and the same. In theory, at least, just as an electric charge can be positive or negative, so can mass—though no one’s ever found an example of negative mass. Why does time travel depend on such exotic matter? In many cases, it is needed to hold open a wormhole—a tunnel in spacetime predicted by general relativity that connects one point in the cosmos to another.

Without negative mass, gravity would cause this tunnel to collapse. “You can think of it as counteracting the positive mass or energy that wants to traverse the wormhole,” Goldberg says.

Khanna and Goldberg concur that it’s unlikely matter with negative mass even exists, although Khanna notes that some quantum phenomena show promise, for instance, for negative energy on very small scales. But that would be “nowhere close to the scale that would be needed” for a realistic time machine, he says.

These challenges explain why Khanna initially discouraged Caroline Mallary, then his graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, from doing a time travel project. Mallary and Khanna went forward anyway and came up with a theoretical time machine that didn’t require negative mass. In its simplistic form, Mallary’s idea involves two parallel cars, each made of regular matter. If you leave one parked and zoom the other with extreme acceleration, a closed timelike curve will form between them.

Easy, right? But while Mallary’s model gets rid of the need for negative matter, it adds another hurdle: it requires infinite density inside the cars for them to affect spacetime in a way that would be useful for time travel. Infinite density can be found inside a black hole, where gravity is so intense that it squishes matter into a mind-bogglingly small space called a singularity. In the model, each of the cars needs to contain such a singularity. “One of the reasons that there's not a lot of active research on this sort of thing is because of these constraints,” Mallary says.

Other researchers have created models of time travel that involve a wormhole, or a tunnel in spacetime from one point in the cosmos to another. “It's sort of a shortcut through the universe,” Goldberg says. Imagine accelerating one end of the wormhole to near the speed of light and then sending it back to where it came from. “Those two sides are no longer synced,” he says. “One is in the past; one is in the future.” Walk between them, and you’re time traveling.

You could accomplish something similar by moving one end of the wormhole near a big gravitational field—such as a black hole—while keeping the other end near a smaller gravitational force. In that way, time would slow down on the big gravity side, essentially allowing a particle or some other chunk of mass to reside in the past relative to the other side of the wormhole.

Making a wormhole requires pesky negative mass and energy, however. A wormhole created from normal mass would collapse because of gravity. “Most designs tend to have some similar sorts of issues,” Goldberg says. They’re theoretically possible, but there’s currently no feasible way to make them, kind of like a good-tasting pizza with no calories.

And maybe the problem is not just that we don’t know how to make time travel machines but also that it’s not possible to do so except on microscopic scales—a belief held by the late physicist Stephen Hawking. He proposed the chronology protection conjecture: The universe doesn’t allow time travel because it doesn’t allow alterations to the past. “It seems there is a chronology protection agency, which prevents the appearance of closed timelike curves and so makes the universe safe for historians,” Hawking wrote in a 1992 paper in Physical Review D .

Part of his reasoning involved the paradoxes time travel would create such as the aforementioned situation with a billiard ball and its more famous counterpart, the grandfather paradox : If you go back in time and kill your grandfather before he has children, you can’t be born, and therefore you can’t time travel, and therefore you couldn’t have killed your grandfather. And yet there you are.

Those complications are what interests Massachusetts Institute of Technology philosopher Agustin Rayo, however, because the paradoxes don’t just call causality and chronology into question. They also make free will seem suspect. If physics says you can go back in time, then why can’t you kill your grandfather? “What stops you?” he says. Are you not free?

Rayo suspects that time travel is consistent with free will, though. “What’s past is past,” he says. “So if, in fact, my grandfather survived long enough to have children, traveling back in time isn’t going to change that. Why will I fail if I try? I don’t know because I don’t have enough information about the past. What I do know is that I’ll fail somehow.”

If you went to kill your grandfather, in other words, you’d perhaps slip on a banana en route or miss the bus. “It's not like you would find some special force compelling you not to do it,” Costa says. “You would fail to do it for perfectly mundane reasons.”

In 2020 Costa worked with Germain Tobar, then his undergraduate student at the University of Queensland in Australia, on the math that would underlie a similar idea: that time travel is possible without paradoxes and with freedom of choice.

Goldberg agrees with them in a way. “I definitely fall into the category of [thinking that] if there is time travel, it will be constructed in such a way that it produces one self-consistent view of history,” he says. “Because that seems to be the way that all the rest of our physical laws are constructed.”

No one knows what the future of time travel to the past will hold. And so far, no time travelers have come to tell us about it.

Is time travel even possible? An astrophysicist explains the science behind the science fiction

Assistant Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Disclosure statement

Adi Foord does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

University of Maryland, Baltimore County provides funding as a member of The Conversation US.

View all partners

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to [email protected] .

Will it ever be possible for time travel to occur? – Alana C., age 12, Queens, New York

Have you ever dreamed of traveling through time, like characters do in science fiction movies? For centuries, the concept of time travel has captivated people’s imaginations. Time travel is the concept of moving between different points in time, just like you move between different places. In movies, you might have seen characters using special machines, magical devices or even hopping into a futuristic car to travel backward or forward in time.

But is this just a fun idea for movies, or could it really happen?

The question of whether time is reversible remains one of the biggest unresolved questions in science. If the universe follows the laws of thermodynamics , it may not be possible. The second law of thermodynamics states that things in the universe can either remain the same or become more disordered over time.

It’s a bit like saying you can’t unscramble eggs once they’ve been cooked. According to this law, the universe can never go back exactly to how it was before. Time can only go forward, like a one-way street.

Time is relative

However, physicist Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity suggests that time passes at different rates for different people. Someone speeding along on a spaceship moving close to the speed of light – 671 million miles per hour! – will experience time slower than a person on Earth.

People have yet to build spaceships that can move at speeds anywhere near as fast as light, but astronauts who visit the International Space Station orbit around the Earth at speeds close to 17,500 mph. Astronaut Scott Kelly has spent 520 days at the International Space Station, and as a result has aged a little more slowly than his twin brother – and fellow astronaut – Mark Kelly. Scott used to be 6 minutes younger than his twin brother. Now, because Scott was traveling so much faster than Mark and for so many days, he is 6 minutes and 5 milliseconds younger .

Some scientists are exploring other ideas that could theoretically allow time travel. One concept involves wormholes , or hypothetical tunnels in space that could create shortcuts for journeys across the universe. If someone could build a wormhole and then figure out a way to move one end at close to the speed of light – like the hypothetical spaceship mentioned above – the moving end would age more slowly than the stationary end. Someone who entered the moving end and exited the wormhole through the stationary end would come out in their past.

However, wormholes remain theoretical: Scientists have yet to spot one. It also looks like it would be incredibly challenging to send humans through a wormhole space tunnel.

Paradoxes and failed dinner parties

There are also paradoxes associated with time travel. The famous “ grandfather paradox ” is a hypothetical problem that could arise if someone traveled back in time and accidentally prevented their grandparents from meeting. This would create a paradox where you were never born, which raises the question: How could you have traveled back in time in the first place? It’s a mind-boggling puzzle that adds to the mystery of time travel.

Famously, physicist Stephen Hawking tested the possibility of time travel by throwing a dinner party where invitations noting the date, time and coordinates were not sent out until after it had happened. His hope was that his invitation would be read by someone living in the future, who had capabilities to travel back in time. But no one showed up.

As he pointed out : “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.”

Telescopes are time machines

Interestingly, astrophysicists armed with powerful telescopes possess a unique form of time travel. As they peer into the vast expanse of the cosmos, they gaze into the past universe. Light from all galaxies and stars takes time to travel, and these beams of light carry information from the distant past. When astrophysicists observe a star or a galaxy through a telescope, they are not seeing it as it is in the present, but as it existed when the light began its journey to Earth millions to billions of years ago.

NASA’s newest space telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope , is peering at galaxies that were formed at the very beginning of the Big Bang, about 13.7 billion years ago.

While we aren’t likely to have time machines like the ones in movies anytime soon, scientists are actively researching and exploring new ideas. But for now, we’ll have to enjoy the idea of time travel in our favorite books, movies and dreams.

Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to [email protected] . Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.

And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.

• Time travel
• Special Relativity
• Thermodynamics
• Stephen Hawking
• Curious Kids
• Curious Kids US
• Time travel paradox

Head of School, School of Arts & Social Sciences, Monash University Malaysia

Chief Operating Officer (COO)

Clinical Teaching Fellow

Data Manager

Director, Social Policy

• June 4, 2024 | Emerging Threat: New RNA Virus Found in Human Neurons
• June 4, 2024 | Venus’ Evil Twin or Earth’s Long-Lost Sibling? The Intriguing Case of Gliese 12 b
• June 4, 2024 | Scientists Warn: Rate of Human-Caused Global Warming at All-Time High
• June 4, 2024 | New Study: Light Therapy Enhances Brain Connectivity After Injury
• June 4, 2024 | From Space to Soil, Tracking the Explosive Rise of Greenhouses in China

Time Travel News

Physics November 16, 2023

Exploring the Reality of Time Travel: Science Fact vs. Science Fiction

Will it ever be possible for time travel to occur? Have you ever dreamed of traveling through time, like characters do in science fiction movies?…

Physics September 24, 2020

Paradox-Free Time Travel Is Theoretically Possible: Physicist “Squares the Numbers” on Time Travel

Paradox-free time travel is theoretically possible, according to the mathematical modeling of a prodigious University of Queensland (UQ) undergraduate student. Fourth-year Bachelor of Advanced Science…

Physics August 2, 2020

Butterfly Effect in Quantum Realm Disproven by Simulating Quantum ‘Time Travel’

Evolving quantum processes backwards on a quantum computer to damage information in the simulated past causes little change when returned to the ‘present.’ Using a…

Physics December 10, 2013

Study Shows That it is Possible to Clone Quantum Information from the Past

A newly published study shows that it is possible to clone quantum information from the past, allowing for a particle, or a time traveler, to…

Science December 12, 2011

Will Time Travel Become Reality?

116 years ago, H.G. Wells introduced us to “The Time Machine” and it seems like time travel has been a subject of debate since then….

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

• LISTEN & FOLLOW
• Apple Podcasts
• Google Podcasts
• Amazon Music
• Amazon Alexa

Your support helps make our show possible and unlocks access to our sponsor-free feed.

Paradox-Free Time Travel Is Theoretically Possible, Researchers Say

Matthew S. Schwartz

A dog dressed as Marty McFly from Back to the Future attends the Tompkins Square Halloween Dog Parade in 2015. New research says time travel might be possible without the problems McFly encountered. Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

A dog dressed as Marty McFly from Back to the Future attends the Tompkins Square Halloween Dog Parade in 2015. New research says time travel might be possible without the problems McFly encountered.

"The past is obdurate," Stephen King wrote in his book about a man who goes back in time to prevent the Kennedy assassination. "It doesn't want to be changed."

Turns out, King might have been on to something.

Countless science fiction tales have explored the paradox of what would happen if you went back in time and did something in the past that endangered the future. Perhaps one of the most famous pop culture examples is in Back to the Future , when Marty McFly goes back in time and accidentally stops his parents from meeting, putting his own existence in jeopardy.

But maybe McFly wasn't in much danger after all. According a new paper from researchers at the University of Queensland, even if time travel were possible, the paradox couldn't actually exist.

Researchers ran the numbers and determined that even if you made a change in the past, the timeline would essentially self-correct, ensuring that whatever happened to send you back in time would still happen.

"Say you traveled in time in an attempt to stop COVID-19's patient zero from being exposed to the virus," University of Queensland scientist Fabio Costa told the university's news service .

"However, if you stopped that individual from becoming infected, that would eliminate the motivation for you to go back and stop the pandemic in the first place," said Costa, who co-authored the paper with honors undergraduate student Germain Tobar.

"This is a paradox — an inconsistency that often leads people to think that time travel cannot occur in our universe."

A variation is known as the "grandfather paradox" — in which a time traveler kills their own grandfather, in the process preventing the time traveler's birth.

The logical paradox has given researchers a headache, in part because according to Einstein's theory of general relativity, "closed timelike curves" are possible, theoretically allowing an observer to travel back in time and interact with their past self — potentially endangering their own existence.

But these researchers say that such a paradox wouldn't necessarily exist, because events would adjust themselves.

Take the coronavirus patient zero example. "You might try and stop patient zero from becoming infected, but in doing so, you would catch the virus and become patient zero, or someone else would," Tobar told the university's news service.

In other words, a time traveler could make changes, but the original outcome would still find a way to happen — maybe not the same way it happened in the first timeline but close enough so that the time traveler would still exist and would still be motivated to go back in time.

"No matter what you did, the salient events would just recalibrate around you," Tobar said.

The paper, "Reversible dynamics with closed time-like curves and freedom of choice," was published last week in the peer-reviewed journal Classical and Quantum Gravity . The findings seem consistent with another time travel study published this summer in the peer-reviewed journal Physical Review Letters. That study found that changes made in the past won't drastically alter the future.

Bestselling science fiction author Blake Crouch, who has written extensively about time travel, said the new study seems to support what certain time travel tropes have posited all along.

"The universe is deterministic and attempts to alter Past Event X are destined to be the forces which bring Past Event X into being," Crouch told NPR via email. "So the future can affect the past. Or maybe time is just an illusion. But I guess it's cool that the math checks out."

• time travel
• grandfather paradox

Time travel is theoretically possible, calculations show. But that doesn't mean you could change the past.

• Time travel is possible based on the laws of physics, according to researchers.
• But time-travelers wouldn't be able to alter the past in a measurable way, they say. 
• And the future would essentially stay the same, according to the reseachers. 

Imagine you could hop into a time machine, press a button, and journey back to 2019, before the novel coronavirus made the leap from animals to humans.  

What if you could find and isolate patient zero? Theoretically, the COVID-19 pandemic wouldn't happen, right? 

Not quite, because then future-you wouldn't have decided to time travel in the first place.

For decades, physicists have been studying and debating versions of this paradox: If we could travel back in time and change the past, what would happen to the future?

A 2020 study offered a potential answer: Nothing.

"Events readjust around anything that could cause a paradox, so the paradox does not happen," Germain Tobar, the study's author previously told IFLScience .

Tobar's work, published in the peer-reviewed journal Classical and Quantum Gravity in September 2020, suggests that according to the rules of theoretical physics, anything you tried to change in the past would be corrected by subsequent events.

Related stories

Put simply: It's theoretically possible to go back in time, but you couldn't change history.

The grandfather paradox

Physicists have considered time travel to be theoretically possible since Albert Einstein came up with his theory of relativity. Einstein's calculations suggest it's possible for an object in our universe to travel through space and time in a circular direction, eventually ending up at a point on its journey where it's been before – a path called a closed time-like curve.

Still, physicists continue to struggle with scenarios like the coronavirus example above, in which time-travelers alter events that already happened. The most famous example is known as the grandfather paradox: Say a time-traveler goes back to the past and kills a younger version of his or her grandfather. The grandfather then wouldn't have any children, erasing the time-traveler's parents and, of course, the time-traveler, too. But then who would kill Grandpa?

A take on this paradox appears in the movie "Back to the Future," when Marty McFly almost stops his parents from meeting in the past – potentially causing himself to disappear. 

To address the paradox, Tobar and his supervisor, Dr. Fabio Costa, used the "billiard-ball model," which imagines cause and effect as a series of colliding billiard balls, and a circular pool table as a closed time-like curve.

Imagine a bunch of billiard balls laid out across that circular table. If you push one ball from position X, it bangs around the table, hitting others in a particular pattern. 

The researchers calculated that even if you mess with the ball's pattern at some point in its journey, future interactions with other balls can correct its path, leading it to come back to the same position and speed that it would have had you not interfered.

"Regardless of the choice, the ball will fall into the same place," Dr Yasunori Nomura, a theoretical physicist at UC Berkeley, previously told Insider.

Tobar's model, in other words, says you could travel back in time, but you couldn't change how events unfolded significantly enough to alter the future, Nomura said. Applied to the grandfather paradox, then, this would mean that something would always get in the way of your attempt to kill your grandfather. Or at least by the time he did die, your grandmother would already be pregnant with your mother. 

Back to the coronavirus example. Let's say you were to travel back to 2019 and intervene in patient zero's life. According to Tobar's line of thinking, the pandemic would still happen somehow.

"You might try and stop patient zero from becoming infected, but in doing so you would catch the virus and become patient zero, or someone else would," Tobar said, according to Australia's University of Queensland , where Tobar graduated from. 

Nomura said that although the model is too simple to represent the full range of cause and effect in our universe, it's a good starting point for future physicists.  

Watch: There are 2 types of time travel and physicists agree that one of them is possible

• Main content

Is Time Travel Possible?

We all travel in time! We travel one year in time between birthdays, for example. And we are all traveling in time at approximately the same speed: 1 second per second.

We typically experience time at one second per second. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA's space telescopes also give us a way to look back in time. Telescopes help us see stars and galaxies that are very far away . It takes a long time for the light from faraway galaxies to reach us. So, when we look into the sky with a telescope, we are seeing what those stars and galaxies looked like a very long time ago.

However, when we think of the phrase "time travel," we are usually thinking of traveling faster than 1 second per second. That kind of time travel sounds like something you'd only see in movies or science fiction books. Could it be real? Science says yes!

This image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows galaxies that are very far away as they existed a very long time ago. Credit: NASA, ESA and R. Thompson (Univ. Arizona)

How do we know that time travel is possible?

More than 100 years ago, a famous scientist named Albert Einstein came up with an idea about how time works. He called it relativity. This theory says that time and space are linked together. Einstein also said our universe has a speed limit: nothing can travel faster than the speed of light (186,000 miles per second).

Einstein's theory of relativity says that space and time are linked together. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

What does this mean for time travel? Well, according to this theory, the faster you travel, the slower you experience time. Scientists have done some experiments to show that this is true.

For example, there was an experiment that used two clocks set to the exact same time. One clock stayed on Earth, while the other flew in an airplane (going in the same direction Earth rotates).

After the airplane flew around the world, scientists compared the two clocks. The clock on the fast-moving airplane was slightly behind the clock on the ground. So, the clock on the airplane was traveling slightly slower in time than 1 second per second.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Can we use time travel in everyday life?

We can't use a time machine to travel hundreds of years into the past or future. That kind of time travel only happens in books and movies. But the math of time travel does affect the things we use every day.

For example, we use GPS satellites to help us figure out how to get to new places. (Check out our video about how GPS satellites work .) NASA scientists also use a high-accuracy version of GPS to keep track of where satellites are in space. But did you know that GPS relies on time-travel calculations to help you get around town?

GPS satellites orbit around Earth very quickly at about 8,700 miles (14,000 kilometers) per hour. This slows down GPS satellite clocks by a small fraction of a second (similar to the airplane example above).

GPS satellites orbit around Earth at about 8,700 miles (14,000 kilometers) per hour. Credit: GPS.gov

However, the satellites are also orbiting Earth about 12,550 miles (20,200 km) above the surface. This actually speeds up GPS satellite clocks by a slighter larger fraction of a second.

Here's how: Einstein's theory also says that gravity curves space and time, causing the passage of time to slow down. High up where the satellites orbit, Earth's gravity is much weaker. This causes the clocks on GPS satellites to run faster than clocks on the ground.

The combined result is that the clocks on GPS satellites experience time at a rate slightly faster than 1 second per second. Luckily, scientists can use math to correct these differences in time.

If scientists didn't correct the GPS clocks, there would be big problems. GPS satellites wouldn't be able to correctly calculate their position or yours. The errors would add up to a few miles each day, which is a big deal. GPS maps might think your home is nowhere near where it actually is!

In Summary:

Yes, time travel is indeed a real thing. But it's not quite what you've probably seen in the movies. Under certain conditions, it is possible to experience time passing at a different rate than 1 second per second. And there are important reasons why we need to understand this real-world form of time travel.

If you liked this, you may like:

Astrophysicist says he has cracked the code for time travel

Can you imagine going back in time to visit a lost loved one? This heartwrenching desire is what propelled astrophysicist Professor Ron Mallett on a lifelong quest to build a time machine. After years of research, Professor Mallett claims to have finally developed the revolutionary equation for time travel.

The idea of bending time to our will – revisiting the past, altering history, or glimpsing into the future – has been a staple of science fiction for over a century. But could it move from fantasy to reality?

The inspiration: A father’s love and a classic novel

Professor Mallett’s obsession with time travel and its equation has its roots in a shattering childhood experience. When he was just ten years old, his father, a television repairman who fostered his son’s love of science, tragically passed away from a heart attack.

Devastated, the young Mallett sought solace in books. It was H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine that sparked a lifelong fascination.

Wells’ opening lines became his mantra: “Scientific people know very well that Time is only a kind of Space. And why cannot we move in Time as we move about in the other dimensions of Space?”

This profound question ignited Mallett’s scientific journey. He dedicated himself to understanding the nature of time, determined to find a way to revisit the past and see his beloved father once more.

Time travel equation in the hospital

Decades of research into black holes and Einstein’s theories of relativity led to the time travel equation.

While hospitalized for a heart condition, Mallett had a revelation. “It turns out that black holes can create a gravitational field that could lead to the creation of time loops that could allow us to go back in time,” he explained.

Imagine the fabric of spacetime as a river. While time usually flows in one direction, Mallett theorizes that the immense gravity of a spinning black hole can create whirlpools, where time twists back on itself.

The time machine blueprint

Mallett’s vision for a time machine centers on what he calls “an intense and continuous rotating beam of light” to manipulate gravity. His device would use a ring of lasers to mimic the spacetime-distorting effects of a black hole.

“Let’s say you have a cup of coffee in front of you. Start stirring the coffee with the spoon. It started to spin, right? That’s what a spinning black hole does,” explained Mallett.

“In Einstein’s theory, space and time are related to each other. That’s why it’s called space-time. So when the black hole spins, it will actually cause time to shift.”

“Eventually, a rotating beam of laser lights can be used as a kind of time machine and cause a time warp that will allow us to go back to the past,” said Mallett. Perhaps, what began as a son’s wish to see his father one last time might one day transform our understanding of time itself.

Challenges and limitations

The obstacles on the path from time travel equation to machine are immense. Mallett acknowledges the “galactic amounts of energy” needed to power such a device – energy levels far beyond our current capabilities.

The sheer size of a theoretical time machine is also unknown. While Mallett optimistically states, “I figured out how to do it. In theory, it is possible,” the reality is that he may not live to see the machine built.

Furthermore, Mallett’s theory comes with a significant constraint. “You can send information back, but you can only send it back to the point where you started operating the device.”

In this sense, the time machine is like a one-way message service to the past. You can’t travel to a point before the machine existed.

Mallet’s lifetime of dedication to time travel

Despite the daunting challenges, Mallett’s remarkable journey is a testament to the human spirit. Alongside his time travel research, he’s led a distinguished academic career, teaching physics at the University of Connecticut .

Now in his seventies, his work has been propelled by an unwavering belief in the possibility of the seemingly impossible.

Equation vs. reality of time travel

Whether Mallett’s time machine will ever transcend the realm of theory is uncertain. Skeptics point to the vast technological hurdles and potential paradoxes raised by tampering with time.

Yet, the mere possibility that science might one day unlock the secrets of temporal travel is enough to ignite the imagination. Could we rewrite our regrets, learn from past mistakes, or witness historical events firsthand?

Perhaps Professor Mallett’s greatest legacy won’t be a time travel equation itself, but the inspiration he provides – a reminder that audacious dreams and unrelenting curiosity have the power to push the boundaries of what we believe is possible.

Read more about Professor Mallett’s work here .

More about space-time

As discussed above, space-time, a concept that feels as vast and complex as the universe itself, forms the backbone of our cosmic understanding.

At its core, it blends the dimensions of space and time into a single four-dimensional continuum, challenging our perceptions of reality. This intertwined nature of space and time underpins everything from the motion of planets to the flow of time itself.

Einstein’s groundbreaking contribution

Albert Einstein, with his theory of relativity, revolutionized our understanding of space-time. He posited that space and time are not separate entities but are connected in a dynamic relationship affected by mass and energy.

This relationship implies that the presence of a massive object, like a planet or a star, can warp the fabric of space-time around it. It’s a concept that turns the notion of a flat, unchanging universe on its head, suggesting that the very structure of the cosmos is malleable.

The warp and weft of the cosmos

Imagine space-time as a vast sheet of fabric. When a heavy object sits on this fabric, it creates a dip or curve. This curvature is what we perceive as gravity.

Planets orbit stars not because they are being “pulled” in a straight line towards them, but because they are following the curved space-time geometry that these massive objects create.

This curvature of space-time is not just a theoretical concept; it’s observable and measurable, especially in the presence of extremely massive and dense objects, like black holes.

Gravitational waves: Echoes of cosmic events

One of the most compelling pieces of evidence for the theory of relativity and the dynamic nature of space-time comes from the detection of gravitational waves.

These waves are ripples in the fabric of space-time, generated by some of the most violent and energetic processes in the universe, such as colliding black holes.

Their discovery not only confirmed Einstein’s predictions but also opened a new window into observing cosmic events that were previously invisible to us.

Practical impact of space-time

While these concepts might seem distant from daily life, they have real-world applications, particularly in technology. The Global Positioning System (GPS), a technology integral to modern navigation, relies on an understanding of space-time.

Satellites orbiting Earth need to account for the effects of gravitational time dilation — a consequence of the curvature of space-time — to provide accurate location data to users on the ground.

In summary, space-time is a framework that shapes our understanding of the universe. From guiding the planets in their orbits to enabling precise navigation on Earth, its effects are both profoundly cosmic and surprisingly practical.

As we continue to explore and understand the intricacies of space-time, we edge closer to unraveling the mysteries of the cosmos, one gravitational wave at a time.

How black holes are linked to time travel

Playing a major role in Dr. Mallett’s time machine, black holes exert a gravitational pull so immense that not even light can escape their grasp. This intense gravity fundamentally alters the fabric of space-time around the black hole.

The stronger the gravity, the more pronounced these effects become, leading to what scientists call gravitational time dilation — a phenomenon where time itself warps, slowing down relative to an observer far from the gravitational pull.

Time dilation explained

At the heart of this phenomenon lies Albert Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, which posits that gravity is the result of masses warping the space-time around them.

In the vicinity of a black hole, this warping becomes so extreme that it significantly affects the flow of time.

An observer standing at a safe distance would perceive time to pass much slower for someone closer to the black hole.

This effect intensifies as one approaches the event horizon, the point of no return beyond which the gravitational pull becomes inescapable.

Boundary between time zones

The event horizon of a black hole marks a stark boundary in the universe, where time as we understand it undergoes a dramatic transformation.

To an external observer, objects approaching the event horizon appear to slow down and almost freeze in time, never quite crossing the threshold.

This illusion results from the light from those objects taking longer and longer to reach the observer as the objects move closer to the event horizon, due to the extreme gravitational pull affecting the light’s path.

Theoretical implications and observations

This warping of time around black holes is not just a theoretical curiosity. As Dr. Mallett explained previously in this article, it has practical implications for our understanding of the universe. For instance, it plays a crucial role in the behavior of binary systems where one star orbits a black hole.

Moreover, advancements in technology, such as precise atomic clocks and observations from space telescopes, have allowed scientists to measure these effects, further confirming the predictions of General Relativity.

In summary, black holes serve as natural laboratories for testing the limits of our understanding of physics, offering insights into the complex interplay between gravity and the fabric of space-time.

The phenomenon of time dilation near these cosmic behemoths challenges our notions of time and space, inviting us to explore beyond the boundaries of our current knowledge.

As we continue to observe and study these fascinating objects, we inch closer to unraveling the mysteries of the universe.

—–

Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates. 

Check us out on EarthSnap , a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls and Earth.com.

Cruise Ship Diverts to Bahamas to Avoid Seizure in U.S.

Here Are the Most 'Attractive' Global Cities

There's a Travel Ban on Dogs, and You Can Blame COVID-19

U.S. Lawmaker Wants to Ban Booze ‘To Go’ at Airports

Biden Reinstates International Travel Restrictions

The latest ban would prevent most non-u.s. citizens from entry if they have recently been in south africa, where a new strain of the virus has been identified.

Passenger on Cruise to Nowhere Tests Positive for COVID-19

Royal caribbean international and genting cruise lines have been running cruises to nowhere as singapore aims to bolster its tourism sector.

America's Travel Guru Rick Steves Talks About Staying in One Place, What America Is Getting Wrong, and Dreaming of Escargots

This summer, i traveled. there were sun-soaked italian hill towns; a sleepy portuguese fishing village; a musty, centuries-old timber church in romania. i saw it all from my couch, or sometimes the faded hammock on....

Europe Hopes Summer Tourism Will Boost Economy

Europe's recovery from covid-19 depends on the return of summer vacations.

It's Definitely Worth Following Gary the Cat for Travel Inspiration. Despite His Instagram Fame, He's Still 'Just a Cat.'

The traveling cat’s instagram feed is inspiring.

Cruise Sailing for Mexico After Being Denied Entry Over Coronavirus Fears

Msc meraviglia has received “formal and final authorization” to call in cozumel, mexico.

Why It May Be Impossible to Stop Every Traveler With Coronavirus

Experts say its difficult to screen for covid-19 because of its long incubation period and mild symptoms.

'Diamond Princess' Crew Begin Second Quarantine

As passengers started leaving the diamond princess wednesday following a quarantine that saw them largely confined to their rooms for two weeks, another quarantine is about to begin.the 1,000-some crew members still left on the....

Inside Life Below Decks on the Stricken Cruise Ship

At least 454 cases of covid-19 have been confirmed on the diamond princess, where over 1,000 crew members continue to serve passengers on board.

U.S. Cruise Ship Passenger Now Has Coronavirus

An 83-year-old american woman tested positive for covid-19 after disembarking.

Cruise Passengers Back in U.S.

There were around 400 americans on the quarantined diamond princess, of which 44 had tested positive for covid-19.

This Cruise Ship Has the Highest Infection Rate in the World

Passengers on the diamond princess cruise ship, docked at japan's yokohama bay, are halfway through their 14-day quarantine.

Stranded U.S. Cruise Ship Docks in Cambodia

The ship docked in cambodia after rejections from thailand, japan, guam, the philippines and taiwan over coronavirus fears.

Fly From Hong Kong to New York for Just $193 — If You’re Willing to Stop in Wuhan

The coronavirus, which originated in wuhan, china, has killed more than 200 and it's not clear how long the crisis will last.

Hong Kong Wants Disney Land for Affordable Housing

The city is home to some of the most unaffordable housing in the world.

Japan Airlines Is Giving Away 50,000 Free Flights to Tourists

Tourists flying to japan with japan airlines this summer can win free tickets to a surprise destination in the country.

Elections Today

Recent projections, delegate tracker, latest election news, airfare costs expected to rise, expert shares what travelers need to know to save.

Brian Kelly breaks down news from the International Air Transport Association.

Aviation industry executives gathered in Dubai for the annual International Air Transport Association meeting this week, where they revealed that despite record high profit projections, airfare will continue to climb in the coming months.

The Associated Press first reported the trade group's pricing prediction, which the group says is partly due to global inflation and long-term recovery from massive groundings during the pandemic, paired with additional expenses and overhead -- including high fuel prices -- that will push passenger ticket prices higher.

Bucket list travel on a budget: Expert tips for airfare, loyalty programs, credit card perks and more

Brian Kelly, founder of The Points Guy, joined "Good Morning America" on Tuesday to break down the top takeaways American travelers need to know, plus ways to keep saving where possible.

"There's good news and bad news today. The good news is in the U.S., our airfare has come down 9%. And we're looking at pre-pandemic levels," Kelly said of the current prices. "The bad news is the airlines are still making record profits and they're doing that because they're sneaky. They're finding ways to charge more for what we already pay for. Most of the major airlines are now charging more for checked bags."

Expert tips to save on airfare as prices continue to rise

"I highly recommend to consumers, if you fly the same airline and check bags once a year, getting that airline co-branded [credit] card could save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars," Kelly said. "Do not pay the hundreds in bag fees when a credit card that's $95 can save you money for you and all your companions."

Flexibility is key when it comes to finding deals, and Kelly reiterated the Goldilocks method that people should use to find the best booking window -- not too far in advance and not too last minute.

Trending Reader Picks

How Trump’s conviction will impact the election

• May 30, 5:23 PM

What Americans think of Trump's verdict: POLL

• Jun 2, 9:01 AM

Key voting groups' thoughts on Trump conviction

• Jun 3, 5:06 PM

"There's a sweet spot ... everyone who wants to find a cheap fare, you need to learn to use Google Flights," Kelly said, adding that it helps people easily compare and shop, set alerts and reverse engineer flight booking plans.

He recommended another site, point.me, which he described as "kind of like Google Flights but for award tickets" to be able to use miles instead of cash.

"So if you've got Amex points or Chase points, it will tell you how to transfer the points. The foreign frequent flyer programs are where the best deals are," he said.

More tips to find the best fares:

• Fly in the morning
• Book in advance
• Fly midweek

Kelly also noted that timing is slightly different for domestic and international travel.

"For international airfare, you're looking two to three months [out] minimum," he said. "When you start booking last-minute international, that's when the prices sky rocket."

Related Topics

New launch date for Boeing's Starliner mission

• May 23, 12:30 PM

Biden slams Trump for 'breaking point' warning

• Jun 3, 4:07 PM

ABC News Live

24/7 coverage of breaking news and live events

Watch CBS News

Trump may face travel restrictions in some countries after his New York conviction

By Kathryn Watson

May 31, 2024 / 7:09 PM EDT / CBS News

Former President Donald Trump, whose administration imposed multiple versions of a travel ban against people coming from Muslim-majority nations, may now face restrictions on his own international travel, following his felony conviction in New York Thursday. 

At this point, Trump faces no specific travel restrictions from Justice Juan Merchan, who presided over the "hush money" criminal trial in New York, in which the former president was found guilty of 34 felony counts. His sentencing is scheduled to take place on July 11, four days before the Republican National Convention, which will formalize his nomination to the presidency. Trump, who's in the middle of a presidential campaign and has  three other criminal trials pending, has announced no international travel plans. 

The U.S. doesn't allow foreigners with felony convictions to enter the country, and neither do a number of other countries. Allies including the U.K. and Australia have strict restrictions on traveling there as a convicted felon, according to the European Travel Information and Authorisation System. Canada, which will be hosing the G7 summit of world leaders in 2025, also has strict requirements for visitors with a criminal history. And felons are banned from entering China. 

But it's possible international leaders would make exceptions for Trump if he wins the presidency again. Former President George W. Bush had to apply for a special waiver to enter Canada on an official state visit, because he had pleaded guilty decades earlier to a 1976 drunk driving charge. And that was a misdemeanor offense, not a felony. 

Trump has plans to renew and revamp travel restrictions to the U.S., if he's president again. Last year, he said he would bring back a travel ban "even bigger than before," alluding to his administration's restrictions on travelers from several countries that have largely Muslim populations. 

The Supreme Court eventually upheld a version of his travel ban, 5-4, in 2018. Chief Justice John Roberts, wrote in the majority opinion that presidents have substantial power to regulate immigration. "The sole prerequisite," Roberts wrote, is "that the entry of the covered aliens 'would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.' The President has undoubtedly fulfilled that requirement here." He also noted that Trump had ordered an evaluation of every country's compliance with the risk assessment baseline and then issued the findings.

When he talks about the spike in numbers of undocumented migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, the former president also regularly paints them broadly as "criminals."

"So we are moving criminals out of our country, and we are getting them out in record numbers, and those are the people we are after," the former president said toward the beginning of his term during a 2017 interview with the Associated Press. 

As he awaits his sentencing in the "hush money" case, Trump maintains he did nothing wrong. 

"I'm willing to do whatever I have to do to save our country and to save our Constitution. I don't mind," he said in remarks at Trump Tower on Friday. 

• Donald Trump

Kathryn Watson is a politics reporter for CBS News Digital, based in Washington, D.C.

More from CBS News

Trump asks to have gag order lifted in New York criminal trial

Some Black Americans find irony in Trump's reaction to guilty verdict

Views of Trump trial unchanged following verdict — CBS News poll

Transcript: Matt Pottinger, former deputy National Security Adviser, on "Face the Nation," June 2, 2024

Southwest Airlines offers a different experience: What first-time flyers should know

• Southwest Airlines now lists its fares on Google Flights after long shying away.
• The airline doesn't assign passengers seats.
• Southwest lets all passengers check up to two bags for free.

Southwest is not a regular airline; it’s a cool airline, and flying on it is a slightly different experience than the other major U.S. carriers. With no assigned seats in its all-economy cabins and fewer fees than most other airlines, Southwest has its super fans, but its shtick can catch some travelers off-guard if they’re not familiar with it.

While the airline’s CEO suggested that changes may be coming to its operations in the near future, its trademark service remains in place for now.

The airline, a long-time holdout among the major U.S. airlines, recently started posting airfares on Google Flights .

So, if you’re traveling on Southwest Airlines for the first time, here are four things you need to know .

1. No assigned seating

Probably the biggest difference between Southwest and other airlines is that it doesn’t assign passengers seats.

Instead, every passenger receives a boarding position at check-in. Southwest flights are boarded by lettered groups (A, B, and C), and there are up to 60 positions in each group. Most Southwest gates have columns to help people line up in order prior to boarding.

Once on the plane, passengers can sit in any open seat.

Southwest’s boarding procedure means the sooner you board, the more likely you are to get your choice of seat, which is why elite members of its Rapid Rewards frequent flyer program and holders of some of its co-branded credit cards get priority boarding as a perk. Otherwise, your boarding position is assigned based on when you check in.

Under that system, it’s best to check in as soon as possible. Southwest recommends downloading its app on your phone and checking in as soon as the option becomes available, 24 hours before departure, to get the best possible boarding position.

The airline also sells EarlyBird Check-In, which allows you to get your boarding pass and position up to 36 hours before your flight, and Upgraded Boarding, which guarantees an A1-A15 position when available.

Southwest recently announced it will be raising the maximum price for EarlyBird Check-In and Upgraded Boarding. 

2. Few fees

Southwest lets all passengers check up to two bags for free, and doesn’t charge change or cancellation fees if your travel plans change. You’ll have to pay the difference in the fare if your new ticket is more expensive. All flights are fully refundable up to 24 hours after purchase. Beyond that window, only Business Select fares are refundable to your payment method. Wanna Get Away and Wanna Get Away Plus fares are redeemable for future flight credit if you cancel your trip more than 24 hours after purchasing the ticket.

Cruising Altitude: Want a free upgrade to first class? The only hack is your wallet.

3. Inflight entertainment

Southwest doesn’t have seatback screens, but many of its planes have Wi-Fi that lets passengers stream from its entertainment portal. Options include movies and TV shows, as well as live TV. The Wi-Fi also lets passengers use iMessage and Whatsapp, so long as the apps are downloaded before the flight.

4. Snacks and drinks

Southwest provides water and Coca-Cola soft drinks for free, as well as a selection of snacks. The airline also offers beer, wine, spirits and pre-mixed cocktails for purchase.

Check out the full guide to see current onboard selections. 

Zach Wichter is a travel reporter for USA TODAY based in New York. You can reach him at [email protected].

The Key Points at the top of this article were created with the assistance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and reviewed by a journalist before publication. No other parts of the article were generated using AI. Learn more .

Current time by city

For example, New York

Current time by country

For example, Japan

Time difference

For example, London

For example, Dubai

Coordinates

For example, Hong Kong

For example, Delhi

For example, Sydney

Time difference between Leicester, United Kingdom and Elektrostal, Moscow Oblast, Russia

Leicester, united kingdom, elektrostal, russia.

Time in Elektrostal , Moscow Oblast, Russia now

• Tokyo 06:58PM
• Beijing 05:58PM
• Kyiv 12:58PM
• Paris 11:58AM
• London 10:58AM
• New York 05:58AM
• Los Angeles 02:58AM

Time zone info for Elektrostal

• The time in Elektrostal is 8 hours ahead of the time in New York when New York is on standard time, and 7 hours ahead of the time in New York when New York is on daylight saving time.
• Elektrostal does not change between summer time and winter time.
• The IANA time zone identifier for Elektrostal is Europe/Moscow.

Time difference from Elektrostal

Sunrise, sunset, day length and solar time for elektrostal.

• Sunrise: 03:43AM
• Sunset: 09:07PM
• Day length: 17h 24m
• Solar noon: 12:25PM
• The current local time in Elektrostal is 25 minutes ahead of apparent solar time.

Elektrostal on the map

• Location: Moscow Oblast, Russia
• Latitude: 55.79. Longitude: 38.46
• Population: 144,000

Best restaurants in Elektrostal

• #1 Tolsty medved - Steakhouses food
• #2 Ermitazh - European and japanese food
• #3 Pechka - European and french food

Find best places to eat in Elektrostal

• Best steak restaurants in Elektrostal
• Best bbqs in Elektrostal
• Best breakfast restaurants in Elektrostal

The 50 largest cities in Russia

🥎 Oklahoma walks off Florida in WCWS semis

⚾️ DI baseball super regional hosts, game times set

⚾️ DIII baseball finals

🥎 DIII softball finals

NCAA staff | June 4, 2024

• 8 super regional hosts and game times announced for the 2024 NCAA Division I baseball championship

INDIANAPOLIS — The eight super-regional hosts were announced today by the NCAA Division I Baseball Committee.

The following four super regionals will be played Friday, June 7 and Saturday, June 8, with Sunday, June 9 for if necessary or weather-delayed games. The national seed is indicated before the team name, while updated records through the regionals are in parentheses.

GAMES BEGIN FRIDAY, JUNE 7 - All times are Eastern

Note: Game times and ESPN Network subject to change

• 3 p.m. (ESPN2), 11 a.m. (ESPN2), 6 p.m. (ESPNU)
• noon (ESPN), 11 a.m. (ESPN), noon (ESPN2)
• 7 p.m. (ESPNU), 3 p.m. (ESPNU), 3 p.m. (ESPNU)
• 6 p.m. (ESPN2), 8 p.m. (ESPN2), 3 p.m. (ESPN2)

The following four super regionals will be played Saturday, June 8 and Sunday, June 9, with Monday, June 10 for if necessary or weather-delayed games.

GAMES BEGIN SATURDAY, JUNE 8 – All times are Eastern

• 6 p.m. (ESPNU), 9 p.m. (ESPNU), TBD (TBD)
• noon (ESPNU), 12 noon (ESPNU), TBD (TBD)
• 2 p.m. (ESPN), 2:30 p.m. (ESPN), TBD (TBD)
• 2 p.m. (ESPN2), 7:30 p.m. (ESPN2), TBD (TBD)

The determination of the Men’s College World Series order of first-round games both Friday, June 14, and Saturday, June 15, will be announced Monday, June 10. The ESPN family of networks and www.ncaa.com/mcws will release the MCWS game dates and times as soon as they are available. The Men’s College World Series begins play Friday, June 14, at Charles Schwab Field Omaha in Omaha, Nebraska.

'Now we know we belong:' Meet the Cardiac Crimson Hawks

• Storylines to watch in the 2024 NCAA baseball super regionals

• 2024 NCAA baseball bracket: Men's College World Series scores, schedule
• Championship Info
• Game Program

Men's College World Series

• 🗓️ 2024 schedule
• 🔮 Future dates
• 🤔 How the MCWS works
• 🏆 Programs with the most MCWS titles
• 💪 Coaches with the most MCWS wins
• ⚾ Every champion in tournament history

Everything you need to know about how the Men's College World Series works

Di baseball news.

• Full 9th inning from East Carolina-Wake Forest NCAA regional elimination game
• 'We're hungry man': Kentucky baseball is starving for its first trip to Omaha

College baseball career home run leaders

Here are the baseball programs with the most Men's College World Series titles

The 7 longest home runs in MCWS history (that we know of)

Follow di baseball.

We've detected unusual activity from your computer network

To continue, please click the box below to let us know you're not a robot.

Why did this happen?

Please make sure your browser supports JavaScript and cookies and that you are not blocking them from loading. For more information you can review our Terms of Service and Cookie Policy .

For inquiries related to this message please contact our support team and provide the reference ID below.

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

A Girls’ Trip to Costa Rica. But With No Phones, Did It Happen?

Travelers are signing up for phone-free tours, to try to escape technology’s tether on daily life. But would it make for a better experience?

By Christine Chung

We were on a quintessential girl’s trip to Costa Rica. Together, we gulped icy drinks by the hotel pool, were battered by waves during a surf lesson, had our tarot cards read aboard a catamaran, and danced our hearts out, powered by espresso martinis, to early 2000s anthems on a rooftop.

But we didn’t capture any of this on our phones. No Instagram stories were posted of the fun being had. No TikToks either. We didn’t text photos to friends and family in far colder climates back home.

And if there wasn’t a picture, well, did it happen? I had wondered if a vacation without my phone would reprogram my iPhone-addled brain, whether it might deepen the connections I made or improve my travel experiences. So, in mid-April, I joined a group of 10 other women in their 20s and 30s for a four-day, phone-free tour of Costa Rica’s Guanacaste Province, on the country’s northwestern coast, a picturesque place of breathtaking beaches, tropical forests and, everywhere around you, the chance of a surreal wildlife sighting.

To document my vacation, I brought only a pen, a notebook and a disposable camera.

‘More present in the moment’

FTLO Travel , which started offering group tours in 2016 for solo travelers 25 to 39 years old, organized our phone-free trip. Most FTLO clients are women, said Tara Cappel, the company’s founder and chief executive, and the majority of them are traveling solo for the first time.

The company has long had a rule prohibiting phones at dinner, she said, and the phone-free trips, which began this year, are an extension of this. “Removing that sort of temptation has always helped facilitate better bonding and conversation,” said Ms. Cappel, 35.

The hope in providing an entirely phone-free experience, she continued, is that travelers could “be present in the experience and the destination and with each other.”

She added that FTLO’s phone-free trips this year, which start at $1,699 and also head to Iceland, Mexico, Cuba and Puerto Rico, are in strong demand . My Costa Rica trip was sold out and overall, the company anticipates about 3,000 travelers across the hundreds of trips they’re offering this year. .

The interest in these trips stem in part from a growing trend among travelers to try to escape technology’s tether on daily life. Operators are moving beyond offering meditation retreats and truly remote locations — even cruises and hotels in buzzy vacation hot spots these days market their disconnection experiences. At the Grand Velas Resorts , on Mexico’s Riviera Maya, guests can opt for a detox concierge, who will remove the hotel room’s flat screen television and lock all personal electronics in a safe. With Unplugged , a company specializing in tech-free escapes, you can book a “digital detox cabin” to spend three tech-free days in the English countryside.

Heather Orton, a nurse practitioner and my roommate in Costa Rica, said that going phone-free was the main reason she’d booked the FTLO trip. She’d previously gone on two trips with FTLO, to Crete and to Morocco, experiences where she made lasting friendships.

“At work I have to always have my phone on, be responsive to texts, emails and calls,” said Ms. Orton, 37, of Ohio. “It’s nice to turn that off and get away.” She said she felt she was “more present in the moment” and fully immersed in Costa Rica.

A bit like sleepaway camp

We’d come from all over the United States, including Texas, Alabama, California and Minnesota, and most of us were meeting for the very first time.

It felt like sleepaway camp, or college orientation — it was a social situation structured around group activities that quickly gave rise to new friendships, even if they were brittle ones. Two ebullient trip leaders corralled us to various activities and recited facts about local flora and fauna, all adding to the feeling of a camp for adults, and at times like being chaperoned on a school trip.

They directed us to their favorite restaurants and watering holes, and attempted to draw everyone into conversation and ensure no one felt left out. One afternoon, Mandy, one of the co-leaders and a certified yoga instructor, led a trio of us in a restorative flow at our hotel. Dani, the other trip leader, who was born in Costa Rica, was on crutches because of a recent ankle injury, but he hobbled along energetically on nights out, swaying to dance music on one leg.

Companies targeting younger travelers, like FTLO, G Adventures , Flashpack and others, aren’t touting their ability to get you to a place, but the connection they can deliver.

“The inspiration was really to help people go abroad who had the desire but didn’t necessarily have people to go with,” Ms. Cappel said of creating FTLO.

Sambavi Venkatesen, a 32-year-old therapist who lives in Austin, Texas, told me she had booked the trip after turning to TikTok to research group travel for people of color.

“The opportunity to meet other diverse women is not something that’s easily accessible in your 30s. That was kind of a big appeal,” she said, adding that she felt a real connection to other tour participants by trip's end. “I genuinely want to see people again and hope they visit me.”

Unscheduled time

We were based in Tamarindo, a lively tourist playground set along the Pacific Ocean that spanned just a few blocks, making it easy to navigate without GPS. We were given a printed map of the town, which I barely used. With my phone and laptop locked in the hotel room safe, gone were all the tools I usually rely on while traveling (and check frenetically): map and translation apps, social media and internet, for restaurant and activity searches. But thanks to the tour, this work had already been done.

We spent an afternoon ziplining through canyons and then crossed a rickety suspension bridge to plunge into the icy, refreshing waters by a waterfall. We surfed and drank beer — two activities I do not generally voluntarily sign up for. We lounged on the netted deck of a catamaran, where we watched a deep-red sun sink into the sea. Nearly every night we frequented a different nightclub.

We started the trip knowing nothing about each other’s lives, from our ages to interests. Our first night was characterized by icebreakers (“share a fun fact about yourself”) and the occasional awkward silence. But by the third night, we were screaming the lyrics to Lil Jon’s “Get Low” in the club. And the conversation grew more nuanced, as we shared stories about jobs, relationships, beloved pets and the rhythms of lives back home.

Some of the best moments happened during the time left unscheduled, when I made my own decisions about activities. A highlight of the trip was an excursion my roommate and I booked on our own, through the hotel, to kayak in a mangrove-bordered estuary, where we spotted iguanas, howler monkeys and a crocodile, watchful and still in the murky waters.

A fuzzy food photo

Overall, I didn’t miss my phone. The absence of Slack notifications and countless other digital intrusions was bliss. Conversations unspooled more fluidly than I expected they would without the crutch of a phone for idly filling silence. I slept deeper than I had in months. But my phone’s phantom presence loomed large. I swiveled my head, a Pavlovian response, when I heard the ping of another tourist's phone. My bag felt too light, which made me feel uneasy.

Mainly, I missed a good camera. Others had wisely brought digital cameras along, but I had to ration the pictures on my disposable camera, and only allowed myself to take one food photo. It’s fuzzy.

Not everyone on the trip was fully committed to the screen time ban. One night, as I tried to capture sunset using my disposable, one of my trip mates pulled out her phone and took a picture. I’m sure her photo is better than mine.

Toward the end of the trip, I learned that some other travelers had surreptitiously used their phones throughout (to text and call their moms, mostly).

But we delighted in seeing a drowsy tapir, a large mammal almost mythical because of its rarity, wake from an afternoon nap in Hacienda Guachipelin , a private property by Rincon de la Vieja National Park . There were also dozens of howler monkeys perched atop mangroves swaying in the wind, and one night, a man who was absolutely shredding on the guitar at a beachfront bar. All were incredible moments that I’ve already revisited in my memory.

On the last day of the trip, we switched our phones back on, literally jolting us back to real life with pings and vibrations. We shared Instagram handles to connect online, and I returned, almost without realizing it, to a stream of information, push notifications, digital itineraries, unfettered scrolling and the expectation of a quick reply to a message.

I’ve tried, however, to maintain the feeling of being phone-free in Tamarindo: the delicious lack of immediacy, the way time seemed to expand languidly.

Simply put, I’m using my phone less.

Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2024 .

Christine Chung is a Times reporter covering airlines and consumer travel. More about Christine Chung

Open Up Your World

Considering a trip, or just some armchair traveling here are some ideas..

52 Places:  Why do we travel? For food, culture, adventure, natural beauty? Our 2024 list has all those elements, and more .

The Alaska Highway:  On an epic road trip, a family plots a course from Alaska to the Lower 48, passing through some of Canada’s most spectacular scenery .

Minorca:  Spend 36 hours on this slow-paced Spanish island , which offers a quieter and wilder retreat than its more touristy neighbors.

Japan:  A new high-speed train stop unlocks Kaga, a destination for hot springs, nourishing food and traditional crafts , as an easy-to-reach getaway from Tokyo.

London:  The Victoria and Albert Museum is a treasure trove of art and design. Here’s one besotted visitor’s plan for taking it all in .