How to realistically build a time machine?
In 1890's H.G. Wells famously takes a "science fiction" approach to time travel by building a machine that can move freely through time as a dimension. It was made of clockwork "” mechanical gears and such. Gears can perform ordinary motion in precise ways, but nothing about that enables doing something that normal motion doesn't.
Later treatments use whatever the technology of the day may be: electronics and then cybernetics. But again, that's completely implausible, since electomagnetism experiences time in the normal way just as gears do, and calculating fast is supposed to do what exactly?
Now, we really do know about some "hard" S-F approaches, but these require giga-scale engineering and exotic ingrediants like negative energy.
I'm not talking about the projects of a K-â…¢ civilization, though, or even a national scale project like a major particle accelerator. I'm wondering how a small scale effort, like a mad scientist or university professor, could (more) plausibly build a time machine. To clarify, he uses the machine to go back in time. (Forward is easy!) The setting is "near future" (like 15 years or so).
You have to consider why it hasn't been done already if it's doable using ordinary stuff involving current technology. Technology based on new principles only just becoming available must have some plausible reason for allowing time travel, and not just be something new and mysterious. I won't rule out distinguished artifacts per se, but I want the solution to be something that anyone could have done "” finding the crashed UFO in your own basement is simply cheating.
Notes
The science-based explicitly rules out pseudoscience, but we allow generous handwaving. This kind of handwaving, done well, is exactly what would make for "plausible" storytelling. Specifically, the movie Primer was delightful in using an effect that I'd read about, which provides for interaction between gravity and electromagnetism via a superconductor. This was in New Scientist, and the theory is crazy pseudoscience. For someone who hasn't looked into it, though, it comes across as plausible if you don't push the details.
Note that I'm definitly allowing for invented physics beyond what we know. It just has to be "plausible", and is best if it's something we're expecting like string theory ref.
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1 answer
If you want a "realistic" time travel "anyone" could plausibly do, you will have to look at the gaps in modern physics. New Scientist magazine (out of the UK) recently listed 11 things modern physics cannot explain; including the inflation necessary for a Big Bang, particle entanglement, how the force of gravity is conveyed, whether black holes exist (as a point-like gravitational source), dark matter, dark energy, zero-point energy (or alternatively why it is a hundred orders of magnitude smaller than theory demands), etc. Perhaps most importantly, Einsteinian General Relativity and Quantum Theory are irrevocably irreconcilable; they cannot both be correct. the super-majority of physicists have their money on Quantum theory, and assume Einstein's use of infinities is a fudge. We definitely know from quantum dynamics and experiments within that position is uncertain; in fact tunnelling transistors are tech based on that very phenomenon. There really is a quantum foam, etc. GR does not reflect reality at any extreme: There are black holes, but they do not collapse to an infinitely small point, because those do not really exist!
Physics as it stands is plagued by infinities (even for quantum problems), which (the infinities) probably are not "real". The point of the Loop Quantum Gravity formulation, which is far along but still incomplete, is to forgo infinities: Meaning space is not infinitely divisible, it too comes in smallest-possible quantums like energy. (When one works out the maths starting with this assumption; the results force these smallest units of space to be like a chain-mail mesh of linked loops; hence the name.)
Remember science fiction is fiction so you need somebody investigating one of these unknowns to find a property of it (something you invent) they can manipulate to send something back in time, either information or something physical like a person.
Note that if time travel is possible; it means that all times exist simultaneously throughout the universe. If Loop theory is correct and there is no infinitely small sub-division of space or time, then there is a quantum of time, too; a smallest possible 'duration'.
So the answer is, for realism, pick something current science does not explain, invent a solution to that problem that demands time travel, and then discover a way to exploit that to allow your scientist to time travel.
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