Doc Brown’s Flux Capacitor in
Back to the Future was genius, sure. But to really bend time you need more than some swiped Libyan plutonium, a DeLorean, and a weird relationship with an impres-sionable high school boy. Namely, you need way more power, says Lawrence Krauss, author of
The Physics of Star Trek and director of the Origins Initiative at Arizona State University. “Doc was on track, in that you need a great burst of energy to create the wholly separate form of energy that’s required for time travel. This new energy is the theoretical negative energy. Unlike regular energy, which is sucked in by gravity, negative energy is repelled by gravity and, if harnessed, could push you through time or a wormhole in space,” says Krauss.
Got that? Good. So, will 1.21 jigawatts give us the bang we need? “Well, 1 gigawatt, a billion watts, could light a small city, but it wouldn’t even take you back to 2008, not even in a Ferrari,” says Krauss. “Ultimately, you’d need the power output of about a trillion suns.” Whoa, heavy.
