Space and Physics
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If you had all of space-time to visit, all of the history of the universe at your fingertips… where would you go? A team of physicists and artists hopes the Caltech Time Travel Gathering will be among your destinations, taking place on Friday May 29, 2026 at Caltech in Pasadena, California.
This isn't the first time a meeting of time travelers has been organized. In 2005, MIT had a time travelers’ convention. Just a few years later, in 2009, Stephen Hawking hosted a time travelers' party. In both cases, the results were a bust. No time travelers showed up – maybe the issue was with the hosts?
Experiential futurist Stuart Candy, actor Kari Coleman, and physicist Spiros Michalakis have approached it in a new way, thanks to insights into quantum mechanics that weren't available two decades ago.
Maybe time travelers just don't like places called Cambridge...
When I questioned them about how they plan to succeed where MIT and Hawking failed, it was clear we were going to have a great time: the answers are in a superposition of being both very silly and very serious. Which is an ethos we are 100 percent on board with!
“The weather is just better over here,” Michalakis told IFLScience. “Plus, if a time machine is ever invented, it will be at Caltech.”
With all of time and space at their guests' disposal, however, is the sunny Californian weather going to be enough to entice them? Maybe. But it isn't the only thing they've considered.
“We are taking measures to improve the odds, such as lodging the physical invitation with long-duration archives at Caltech and the Huntington Library, to communicate this opportunity to future generations for as long as records exist,” Candy explained. “We are also providing cover for potential travelers to make the journey less risky and more appealing for them.”
A special requirement for guests has been set up to help attendees tell if someone is a time traveler. Visitors from the future will have to show off an item… one that has yet to be created!
“We have arranged for a specific item to be created and a limited quantity of it to be distributed after the event is over," said Michalakis. "If anyone shows up with this item at the event, well…”
There's something familiar about this time travel plot...
The crucial scientific idea at the heart of this is that space-time might be an emergent structure on top of a quantum substrate. Manipulating this substrate directly could theoretically allow someone to travel backwards in time, landing in a parallel timeline but in the past. So, one can’t create paradoxes.
What you do in the past won’t affect your timeline. If you are thinking, 'Hey, this is the plot of Avengers: Infinity War,' you won’t be surprised to find out that Michalakis is a consultant for Marvel on time travel.
Before you suggest it, don't think you can just walk up there claiming you are from a timeline that never produced the secret items… because if you do, you'd better know physics beyond our current understanding.
“I will be there to challenge their knowledge of quantum mechanics. Specifically, how they managed to get around the quantum null energy condition on their way here,” Michalakis told us.
The Quantum Null Energy Condition, or QNEC, is a theorem in quantum field theory that allows for energy to be temporarily negative; it solves some quantum issues with black holes and prevents macroscopic violation of energy conservation. Relevant to the time-traveling problem, QNEC forbids faster-than-light travel and semiclassical time machines.
Still, the QNEC doesn’t preclude the existence of quantum time machines. So there is hope the event will feature visitors from another time.
And perhaps more than just hope, as it will certainly feature someone from a long time ago and a galaxy far, far away: Ahmed Best, known for playing Jar Jar Binks and Jedi Master Kelleran Beq in Star Wars, will be serving as master of ceremonies for the evening.
Cher has the chance to do the funniest thing on Friday
Since H.G. Wells' masterpiece, The Time Machine, science and the arts have been fascinated by the possibility of traveling to the past and future. Albert Einstein showed that traveling to the future is possible, you just need to go fast enough, but the past remains somewhere we can’t revisit.
The art and science collaboration aims to challenge this standard narrative and bring awareness to quantum discoveries about space-time, as well as emphasizing how much we still don't understand the nature of reality.
“This gathering aims not just to acknowledge, but to imaginatively inhabit, our quantum reality more fully,” Candy told IFLScience.
“This event is designed as an apparatus for propagating a different consciousness of time. Put another way, it's a way to turn one of humanity's most captivating thought experiments into a real one. If someone gets to meet a time traveler, then clearly we will have succeeded. But if at any point someone gets the feeling that they might just have met a time traveler, we will also have succeeded.”
“We want to build bridges of trust between creative minds across the sciences and the arts so that, if we ever do build a time machine to the past, we won’t need to activate it. Let’s be nostalgic for the future, instead,” Michalakis concluded.
So if you are reading this from after Friday, get into your Tardis, prep your Enterprise to perform a daring maneuver around the Sun, or simply get your DeLorean to 88 miles an hour, and head on over to Caltech. There's free parking.
