In Search Of... (2018) s01e05 Episode Script
Time Travel
[Zachary Quinto.]
One of the most mysterious parts of our human existance is the nature of time.
What exactly is time? How does it work? Moving from past to present and into the future.
Does time only move forward? Or can we manipulate it and go back? The potential for time travel has been entertained in our wildest imaginations, and in ancient texts.
But some believe it's more than fantasy.
I know that time travel is possible because I've done it.
When I traveled, I jumped through an elliptical boom between a shimmering curtain of radiant energy.
A bluish-white tunnel opened up.
Moving forward in time at a great rate of speed.
It was both awe-inspiring and terrifying.
Contemporary physicists don't realize that time travel was achieved 50 years ago, because the file were kept back from science.
And I aim to change that.
[Quinto.]
Is time flexible, can it be manipulated, and is it actually possible to travel through it? My search begins now.
My Name is Zachary Quinto.
As an actor, I've played many supernatural characters that blurred the line between science and fiction.
I'm drawn to the unknown, the otherworldly, and those experiences so beyond belief, they call everything into question.
I'm exploring some of the most enduring mysteries that continue to haunt mankind in search of the truth wherever it leads me.
[metronome clicking rhythmically.]
[ticking.]
Ever since humans first began tracking time, we've been obsessed with understanding and trying to control it.
With early Egyptian devices like sundials and shadow clocks to later advancements like the hourglass, pendulum clocks, and now the modern smartwatch, time has always been a central topic in religion, philosophy, and science.
But what exactly is time? Is it a purely human construct? Or is it an independent dimension that can be explored and even traveled? Movies and literature have only have only stoked our curiosity.
But what if you could move freely between past, present, and future? Where would you go? What would you see? And if you could travel back in time, would you be able to alter our present reality? [ticking.]
I'm meeting with a man who claims to have answers for many of these questions, because he says he's actually traveled through time.
I understand that you not only believe time is movable and that you can travel through it, but you've actually done this.
Yes.
By the mid-1960s, my father was the nation's leading expert in teleportation when he was a special projects engineer at the Thomas A.
Edison Research Laboratory in West Orange New Jersey.
And I was primarily active in the program from the fall of 1969 until the end of the summer of 1972, with DARPA serving as the umbrella agency.
It's a government agency.
Right? Right.
DARPA is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Mm-hmm.
The primary technical development laboratory for the US military.
So how do you explain the disparity between the scientific point of view, right, which is that we understand time only exists in a forward-moving pattern that there's no other dimension of it and your experience, being able to travel through time? Because that information was kept as official state secrets.
And so, for example, an important discovery was Nikola Tesla's discovery of radiant energy an energy he found that is latent and pervasive in the entire universe and has, among its capabilities, the capability to bend the fabric of time space.
Let me show it to you.
Okay.
Sure.
There was two elliptical booms, about ten feet high and about ten feet apart.
The device is a Tesla invention? Yes.
Mm.
Between these two booms was a shimmering field of radiant energy energy that can bend the fabric of timespace.
My father explained that we were gonna jump through this field of energy.
We would go through a blueish-white tunnel of light.
[Quinto.]
It sounds like science fiction.
On one hand, I feel like this is an incredibly compelling, fascinating, dramatic story.
I would love to believe.
That would be amazing.
But it's like, I'm interested in the tangible.
I'm interested in the thing that we can look at and say that that's what this is irrefutably.
I mean, there's so many questions that I have.
Tesla was a well-documented scientist, and his experiments were chronicled catalogued.
So, if there was a scientific advancement that he discovered, wouldn't that have been inrmation and knowledge that would've been shared with the scientific community at the time? There was a Tesla cover-up.
It was perpetuated by Tesla himself to protect the technology.
Contemporary physicists do not understand how and why we achieved time travel because the information was kept back from them.
They deserve to be told what everybody deserves to be told, and that's the truth.
Andrew presents it like, "This is what I did, and it was a secret government program.
You know, there are obviously other people that you can talk to about things in our government's history that are top secret and are classified.
But there's not that many people like Andrew who are asserting that they've actually traveled through space and time.
So, I-I don't know.
I feel really conflicted about this one.
What he's talking about would be revolutionary and change the world and how we move through this universe.
And that, to me, is really worth exploring.
Andrew is not the only one who claims to have experience with time travel.
There are many other incredible stories about people supposedly going back in time.
Some even have evidence.
Like this 1928 film of a woman who appears to be holding a cell phone decades before that technology existed.
Or this modern-looking man in a photograph from the 1940s.
But if people have learned how to time travel, why don't we all know about it? For years, there have been rumors of time travel research being conducted in secret, like the Montauk Project, an alleged U.
S.
government program experimenting with time travel to use in warfare.
Putting all this evidence together, is it possible that Andrew's story might have some truth? To find out, I need to understand more about how time works.
Hi, Zach.
Good morning.
How are you? Mathematician Tom Van Baak believes that time is not an absolute, and that while clocks appear to tick at the exact same speed, day by day, not all time is created equal.
It was only in the last hundred years, with the theories of Einstein, that he proposed this radical idea that time wasn't fixed.
It's mind-blowing.
How? How is that possible? I mean Well, it seems that gravity and time are somehow related.
If we have two clocks, and one clock is here, at sea level, where gravity is the strongest, and one clock is raised far up into a mountain, where there's less gravity, the clock closer to Earth is actually running slower than the clock that's further away from Earth.
If you have excess gravity, time slows down.
It's incredible.
So, someone who lives in New Orleans, for example, and someone who lives in Denver these two clocks would, theoretically, be running at slightly different speeds? Not just theoretical, but that's an example of something you can actually verify.
Would you like to see how? I would love to.
These are all clocks.
Uh-huh.
And that demonstrate the tremendous evolution of timekeeping.
There are all different types.
We have the classic sand timer.
That old chestnut.
This is a chronometer from the 1950s.
This is a military quartz crystal.
Mm.
But still not as accurate as we would need for a relativity experiment.
Right.
For that, we need an atomic clock.
So here's the inside of an atomic cesium clock.
It allows to measure down to one nanosecond in a day Wow.
for the relativity experiment.
Great.
There's our man.
And he would agree.
He would agree.
Our experiment will test Einstein's theory of relativity by placing two atomic clocks at vastly different elevations.
One clock will stay at sea level We need to synchronize the clocks Okay.
so they're all equal while the other will be placed on a mountain 6,000 feet above sea level.
[Van Baak.]
Very simple experiment conceptually.
If the theory of relativity is true, the clocks that are on the mountain should come back a tiny bit ahead of the clocks left behind, and that's because the clocks at higher elevation run a little bit faster than clocks at sea level.
[Quinto.]
Theoretically, the greater the distance the bigger the gap in time.
So if time runs at different speeds in these two locations, does that mean that time is not fixed? We're about to see, with our own eyes, just how flexible time can be.
Coming up, I investigateve.
Uh-huh.
Time's not fixed.
There's slight variations possible.
It's mind-blowing.
[Quinto.]
I'm diving in to the true nature of time to see how it works.
For generations, we've believed that time only moves in one direction.
And now I've teamed up with mathematican Tom Van Baak to see for myself how time moves differently at different locations.
By using super-accurate atomic clocks, we're testing the elasticity of time, letting one clock run at sea level while the other runs on top of a mountain.
Tom.
Hey, Zach.
How are you, man? Really good.
Yeah? How have you been since I saw you last? We've had quite an adventure Okay.
the clocks and I.
We went up to Mount Palomar, and we've been gone one day, six hours, 25 minutes.
The prediction of general relativity is that clocks at higher elevation run a little bit faster than clocks running at sea level.
Right.
And these clocks are accurate enough that they should be able to measure that effect.
Okay.
Let's check it out.
So this is the A clock, so Right.
this one went up the mountain, and you can see the time ticking away there.
Mm-hmm.
And we can turn on the time of the base clocks, and the answer is 14 nanoseconds.
Wow.
So sure enough, the A clock, the one I brought down from the mountain, somehow got 14.
3 nanoseconds ahead.
That's amazing.
These measurements are tiny, but they feel significant.
Being able to measure time passing, even if it's down to a nanosecond, in any different way kind of seems like a springboard for other possibilities.
It sounds like you want to be a physicist.
I'm I want to be a time traveler, Tom.
That's what I want to be.
[laughing.]
Yes.
[Quinto.]
Do you think we'll ever see the ability to travel through time? I think what it does is kind of shake the foundations of a naiïve view of the way the universe works.
Mm-hmm.
[Van Baak.]
We don't fully understand everything, and with all the technology that we have, new discoveries are continually made.
[Quinto.]
This experiment reinforces the idea that time is not fixed but can move faster or slower, depending on your location.
But if time is not fixed, could you travel through it, like Andrew Basiago claims he did? There is actually a place where this might be possible.
[bell tolling.]
Famous for being the birthplace of the Beatles, Liverpool, England, has also become known for a very strange phenomenon.
For decades, people have been reporting sudden shifts in time while walking down Liverpool's city streets.
These slips have been experienced by people who don't know each other and have no obvious connection.
Ann Winsper has been investigating the phenomenon of time slips in Liverpool.
Ann.
Hi.
Hi, Zach.
[Quinto.]
And she's one of the many individuals who claims to have had one.
What is going on with these experiences referred to as time slips? It's a very difficult experience to contextualize because, rather than time travel, 'cause that has all the connotations of actually preparing for it, whereas a slip is you just suddenly seem to slip into this different era.
It happens so randomly, and it is like the just slipping back to a place that existed 20 years ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago and then slip back out again.
Can you talk me through how it usually happens? A typical experience would be that someone is just walking along minding their own business, and suddenly the light starts to go dim and sounds seem to go muted.
Everything seems slightly unusual, and then they notice that the people they see seem to be wearing old-fashioned clothes, dressed in long coats, bowler hats, canes, and umbrellas.
And if there' s cars, they seem to be old-fashioned cars.
And then suddenly the light will go back to normal.
The sounds will go back to normal, and they're back in the present day again.
This is so crazy-sounding, right?[laughing.]
I know.
It does sound mad.
So how many people would you say you've talked to that have had this experience? Oh, gosh.
Probably at least 40 people.
Wow.
There's something there because a number of people who have no relationship to one another are telling their experiences, and their experiences are eerily similar.
That is weird.
I mean, there's no two ways about it.
Liverpool has a pretty high concentration of time slips.
What do you think's happening? There's absolutely no way that you can try and pin it down to one single thing because you can't take somebody and stick them in a lab because you've taken them out of the area where it happens, but we came up with an idea.
It might be just to do with the Underground Railway.
There's a lot of electromagnetic fields.
It could be, because it's in a loop, it might be affecting people's perception.
With the electromagnetic fields, people have spoken about it affecting the temporal lobe in the brain.
Do you feel like there is something about this place that has a supernatural connection? And, if that's the case, then what do we do about it? This is one of the problems.
I'm concentrating really at the moment on the psychology of it and is it something that's just happening internally with the person.
Because, if it isn't, how do we look at time? Right.
Is it a slip in time? Are we then moving on to things like multiple dimensions? What is it? It would be unsettling to have one of these experiences, but I almost want to have one just to understand what it is.
If I put myself in the spot where these time slips are happening, can I discover a portal to the past? I'm about to find out.
Coming up There's been a lot of experiences, and of course it's from around this area.
[Quinto.]
I'm on a mission to determine whether or not time travel is possible.
And right now I'm investigating reports of a time altering phenomenon experienced by multiple unrelated people, called time slips where, without warning, everything around them changes and they fall into what appears to be another era in history.
But why is this happening? One widely held theory is that low frequency sounds, or infrasound, occurring at extremely high levels in some areas, may be having harmful effects on parts of the human brain.
And in Liverpool, England, there are clusters of these time slips reported along Bold Street.
Toward the top of the street sits St.
Luke's Church.
Bombed during World War II, the church is situated above a mysterious underground crypt which could have ideal conditions for low frequency sounds.
Steve.
Zach, hi.
Pleasure.
So I've asked paranormal investigator Steve Parsons to come test the area.
Since 2006, he's been collecting audio data at various locations around Liverpool in search of evidence of infrasound.
So how would you explain a soundwave of any frequency having an impact on a human being's experience to the degree that they are suddenly in a different era? Well, there was some research done in Europe on the effects of low frequency sound on truck drivers and how the sound from the big diesel engine was affecting their performance, and it found that, when they were subjected to these sounds, it would put them into a sort of dreamlike state.
So it might be more of a waking dream than a real time slip.
Interesting.
There's a crypt underneath this church where we've set up to measure those particular band of low frequency, um, soundwaves.
Okay.
I'd be, uh, interested in checking that out.
Let's go check it out.
I'll follow you.
Steve believes there might be evidence of infrasound nearby, and he'll be testing for this in the underground tunnels.
Welcome to the crypt.
[chuckles.]
This is a little bit, um, spooky, you know.
Mm-hmm.
So how do we test for the low frequency sound? We have a sound monitoring device to look at the frequencies that ordinary sound equipment can't detect.
Sound frequencies exist on a spectrum from very high to very low, including inaudible sounds like certain high-pitched noises made by animals [dolphin barking.]
or very low sounds such as sonic booms.
[boom.]
It has been reported that high levels of low frequency sounds can be very harmful to the human brain and one possible cause for time slips.
What we have on the display is low frequency at the left, high frequency at the right.
Mm-hmm.
And what's hearable by the naked ear? You won't hear anything much below 40 or 50 hertz.
Oh, okay.
But you will still be affected by it.
It just takes a a few seconds to self-calibrate.
You'll be able to see the results in real time.
[beep.]
There we go.
There it is.
All right, so obviously there's a whole spectrum of sound.
It's currently peaking around 12 hertz.
Oh, yeah.
Is this a lot? It is a lot.
If I could If I could relate this to a hearing sound Mm-hmm.
you are standing next to something as loud as a jet engine.
Really? Really.
It's that loud, but it's at a frequency that you can't hear.
So are you surprised to see these results, or is this what you expected? Yeah.
These are the sort of figures that could certainly in some people induce those trance-like, dreamlike states.
And do you expect that if we were to take these same measurements up on the street outside that they would be this high? Oh, absolutely.
Steve has been able to provide tangible evidence that there are low frequency inaudible sounds engulfing this region, which could mean that these experiences of slipping through time could all be in someone's head.
But that doesn't explain other important details shared by these time slip reports.
The disconnect for me is why is it that these low frequency sounds would elicit time slips? Why not some other dreamlike trance? One might expect that.
But this is only one potential factor.
Problem is unless we can measure the anomaly at the same time that somebody said, "Whoa, time just slipped" Right.
it's all pretty speculative.
Right.
There, I think, will always remain the conundrum of the paranormal.
Steve has been able to provide tangible evidence that there are low frequency inaudible sounds engulfing this region, which could mean that these experiences of slipping through time could all be in someone's head.
Now I'm heading to an advanced underground research facility called CERN, where a group of scientists may be close to solving the mystery of time travel once and for all.
500 feet beneath the city of Geneva, Switzerland, they've built a $9 billion facility with the most powerful machine in the world.
It's called the Large Hadron Collider, or and it stretches 17 miles long.
Behind elaborate security measures, they're using this machine to run experiments that might actually allow us to peer back in time.
So this is where it all happens.
Yeah.
This is the CERN control center which controls the Large Hadron Collider and monitors it when it's running.
And what is a Hadron Collider? The The LHC is kind of like a time travel machine in that we can recreate the conditions that the universe was like 14 billion years ago, just after the Big Bang.
Wow.
Okay, so the LHC how would you explain how it works? Okay, so we start off with a bunch of hydrogen gas.
[gas hissing.]
Get rid of the electrons.
You're left with a bunch of protons.
When they come into the LHC, they're already going at quite a fast speed.
Once we fill up the entire machine with bunches of protons, we start accelerating them all together.
To accelerate them, we have to give them "kicks" of energy.
When the protons collide, you get a spray of particles Right.
coming out.
It can be anything that nature decides to roll the dice and give us.
Could be creatin some n particle we didn't even know of.
[Quinto.]
By smashing these protons together, they're able to recreate the conditions of the universe at the beginning of time.
And for CERN, this means they might discover something that changes what we know about how the world works and how time runs.
I mean, a hundred years ago, we thought we had physics all wrapped up.
In a century, everything has completely been turned on its head.
It's not unreasonable to think that maybe there are parts of the universe where the laws of physics do change.
Mm-hmm.
Maybe there is a part of the universe where time runs differently.
We don't really know.
It's amazing that the LHC can recreate the conditions of the Big Bang.
But to do this, they're using incredible amounts of energy and power.
And some fear this could lead to ramifications for the whole world.
[Female reporter.]
Critics suggest this mammoth machine could destroy the world.
That's because the Collider is scheduled to generate energies seven times higher than any other machine in history.
In the Large Hadron Collider, we are taking particles, accelerating them to very close to the speed of light, running them in this gigantic ring that has a 17-mile circumference.
And then we slam them together and see what happens.
One of the big concerns with the LHC was that it might open up a black hole through one of these particle collisions.
Now, the danger is there's a lot we don't know about black holes.
It could be a Pandora's box type of situation.
We would have no idea how to close it.
[Quinto.]
There's so much mystery and controversy surrounding CERN.
But to really understand the experiments they do here, I need to take a closer look.
[Automated female voice.]
Thank you.
Please enter.
[Claire Lee.]
These are security doors.
They make sure people are authorized to go underground.
So how dangerous is it here? Yeah, so we have a very, very high-energy particle beam that we're shooting around almost at the speed of light.
Uh, in times that the, uh, beam goes off track, this could cause, uh, potential damage.
Mm-hmm.
Uh, it does produce a lot of radiation.
You want to press the button? All right.
I'll do the honors.
So we're gonna go all the way down.
[laughing.]
Oh, my God.
[Claire.]
These are security doors.
Pretty big, huh? Unbelievable.
That's so massive.
Being in this massive manmade structure designed to look billions of years into the past, it really is dwarfing.
It's kind of ironic that, to see the smallest particles of nature, you have to build something this big.
Yeah, right? What I'm really searching for is how this applies to time travel.
So time is a very tricky thing.
We don't yet understand what time is.
Mm-hmm.
You know, time just happens to us, but we haven't mastered it.
And so one of the things that we're kind of hoping is that we will see something in the detector that nothing can explain.
Okay.
But I also understand, by looking at something this big, how people are afraid of it.
Right.
It's It's huge, and it can be pretty scary.
I know there's some concern around what you're flirting with that could have catastrophic impacts on our planet, you know, create black holes that would swallow the Earth.
The first thing is we hear a lot about big, huge, massive black holes in astronomy: a hundred thousand times the mass of the sun sitting at the center of our galaxy, swallowing up objects as they go.
The black holes that we would create inside the LHC, if we could create them, are so small.
They're smaller than the size of a proton.
In fact, what actually happens is these black holes just evaporate in a puff of particles.
Uh-huh.
So I'm not worried that we're going to do anything that's going to destroy us.
Uh-huh.
While the researchers at CERN continue their quest to understand the mysteries of time I've already found, through my own exploration, how time can change based on external factors like gravity, magnetic fields, and infrasound.
If time is actually flexible, then there might even be more ways we can bend and travel through it.
One way to think about time is as a measure of our experiences.
Each day we travel through time, going through a series of events that add up to the same number of hours, minutes, and seconds.
In other words, time seems to be constant and unchanging, but that's not how we experience it.
Some days whisk by while others drag on.
There's another side to time beyond counting and calendars that is fluid.
But why? What is actually going on that creates our ever-changing perception of time? And can it be controlled? What gives us our perception of time? There is something interesting with time when it comes to our own experience.
[Paul Sutter.]
When in a state of heightened awareness of extreme danger, of important moments, all our senses are alive.
We are paying attention to those tiny detailed moments that usually just pass us by, that we ignore.
So we get the sense that time is movings slower.
Even though our clock still only ticks one second at a time, and that rate stays fixed, our perception of those moments increases.
[Quinto.]
Coming up And while it seems to flow in one direction, we know from our own everyday experience that time does not always feel like it's moving at the same speed.
If our perception of time is also flexible, does that mean we have the power to change how we experience it? Many people say their perception of time changes when they're in extreme situations.
And I want to experience for myself how and why that happens by leaping out of a plane from 13,000 feet.
Hey, man.
I'm Zach.
Nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you, Zach.
Neuroscientist Chess Stetson has a theory about how our brains are actually controlling the passage of time.
In my work in particular, we started studying this feeling that time slows down when you get really, really scared.
That's what we're gonna get a chance testing our probe today, which I'm pretty excited about.
I'm literally jumping out of an airplane.
I spent a lot of time in my life being afraid of that idea.
Wow.
My brain's like, "I can't believe you're about to do this.
" Adrenaline certainly will be rushing.
I mean, I imagine I'll be probably pretty scared.
Perfect.
We talked about that adrenaline that you're likely to feel, and in the brain that's called epinephrine.
That can cause more memories to be laid down.
Hmm.
When you're in a really heightened fear scenario Chess' theory is that, when a person goes into survival mode, their brain not only perceives but also stores more information than normal, effectively making more memories and causing it to feel like time slows down.
To test Chess' theory, I'll be wearing special goggles during the jump that will flash images, and I'll try to memorize as many of them as I can to see if my brain actually stores more information when I'm in a state of fear.
But in the meantime, we're gonna try that on the ground, and that'll be our controlled experiment.
Uh-huh.
So we're basically gonna show you a bunch of images flashing in front of your eyes.
And then, when it's over, I'm gonna wait ten minutes and ask you to tell me what they were.
All right.
Okay.
Okay.
So let's wait ten minutes.
Do you want to go meet the guys that are gonna do the jump with? Yeah.
Let's do it.
Fantastic.
Hey, man.
All right, you ready to do this? I think I am.
Put your foot in there.
We're going up to 13,000 feet, and we're gonna be hitting about 120 miles an hour.
Yeah.
Why not? All I'll have you do is kind of hold on the harness, and then I'll tap you when to release.
Okay.
And after that, you're on a roller coaster ride.
Okay.
Okay, Zach, so now tell me what you saw.
Okay, uh, there was a fireplace, a piggy bank, a rainbow, a candle, um and I think that's all I have.
You don't remember any others, do you? Uh-uh.
Okay.
Oh, octopus.
Aha.
I knew there night be something back there.
Yeah.
So you're around half.
Okay.
We'll do the same thing after you've been falling for 50 seconds through thin air.
All right, let's do it.
All right, Zach, watch your head on top.
Whoo.
All right.
As we get closer to the moment, I'm getting more and more like, uh, freaked out about it.
Now I'm gonna strap us into the airplane.
All right, Zach, here we go, man.
I am tense and really nervous.
I'm gonna hit the ground one way or another.
Oh, my God, you guys! there was almost like a white noise quality to everything that was around me.
Time just elongated.
When I just took the goggles down, the the ground flying toward you and the air rushing around you.
And then, when the chute opens there's this incredible slowing down of everything.
So cool.
You just go into a mode where self-preservation kicks in.
The moments felt like they were taking longer, and there was much more heightened.
Time lost all meaning.
It really did.
Stand up.
All the way up.
Wow.
Oh! [laughing.]
[woman.]
All right.
Nice diving.
Oh, my God, it was so crazy! I was so scared.
I was so scared up there.
[laughing.]
I definitely got the sense that time passed more slowly.
But was it actually because my brain was taking in more information? One way to find out is to see how many images I can recall from the memory test.
Okay, so, Zach, can you tell me now what were the images that you saw when you were in free fall? Uh tennis racquet, teddy bear, bow tie, a rainbow, a candle, fireplace, comb, like a cruise ship, um pine cone um maybe a match? All right.
That might actually be everything.
Really? Wow.
It's amazing that you could see all of that while you were falling.
What I kind of think might be going on is you're not necessarily taking in more information, but more of the information that you are taking in gets stored.
And that's why it feel like more time passed.
It's also possible that my ability to memorize lines as an actor may have given me an edge.
I mean, I don't know if maybe you actually are a little bit of a Vulcan.
Maybe, maybe.
Uh, but, uh When I left the plane, I was just falling.
There's this, like, constant ticking in my head of, like, I can't believe that this is actually happening.
I think I was much more aware of the moments when we were sailing down.
I definitely think that's a little kind of portal that you slip into.
I get it.
There's something really powerful about it.
Time is the thing that I was curious about coming here, and time's the thing that I feel like I leave having at least a better sense of understanding how it can bend and change.
It's really cool.
Time is a riddle that we may never fully solve.
We know you can physically move through time faster or slower, depending on where you are and what you're doing.
It felt like minutes between when I jumped out of the plane and when the chute was opened.
And we know some people believe they've actually traveled back in time.
When I first teleported, I was 6 years old.
You just suddenly seem to slip into this different era.
While time travel has been explored by some of the most brilliant minds in history tomorrow we might just discover that we can travel through time in ways we never thought possible.
[clock ticking.]
One of the most mysterious parts of our human existance is the nature of time.
What exactly is time? How does it work? Moving from past to present and into the future.
Does time only move forward? Or can we manipulate it and go back? The potential for time travel has been entertained in our wildest imaginations, and in ancient texts.
But some believe it's more than fantasy.
I know that time travel is possible because I've done it.
When I traveled, I jumped through an elliptical boom between a shimmering curtain of radiant energy.
A bluish-white tunnel opened up.
Moving forward in time at a great rate of speed.
It was both awe-inspiring and terrifying.
Contemporary physicists don't realize that time travel was achieved 50 years ago, because the file were kept back from science.
And I aim to change that.
[Quinto.]
Is time flexible, can it be manipulated, and is it actually possible to travel through it? My search begins now.
My Name is Zachary Quinto.
As an actor, I've played many supernatural characters that blurred the line between science and fiction.
I'm drawn to the unknown, the otherworldly, and those experiences so beyond belief, they call everything into question.
I'm exploring some of the most enduring mysteries that continue to haunt mankind in search of the truth wherever it leads me.
[metronome clicking rhythmically.]
[ticking.]
Ever since humans first began tracking time, we've been obsessed with understanding and trying to control it.
With early Egyptian devices like sundials and shadow clocks to later advancements like the hourglass, pendulum clocks, and now the modern smartwatch, time has always been a central topic in religion, philosophy, and science.
But what exactly is time? Is it a purely human construct? Or is it an independent dimension that can be explored and even traveled? Movies and literature have only have only stoked our curiosity.
But what if you could move freely between past, present, and future? Where would you go? What would you see? And if you could travel back in time, would you be able to alter our present reality? [ticking.]
I'm meeting with a man who claims to have answers for many of these questions, because he says he's actually traveled through time.
I understand that you not only believe time is movable and that you can travel through it, but you've actually done this.
Yes.
By the mid-1960s, my father was the nation's leading expert in teleportation when he was a special projects engineer at the Thomas A.
Edison Research Laboratory in West Orange New Jersey.
And I was primarily active in the program from the fall of 1969 until the end of the summer of 1972, with DARPA serving as the umbrella agency.
It's a government agency.
Right? Right.
DARPA is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Mm-hmm.
The primary technical development laboratory for the US military.
So how do you explain the disparity between the scientific point of view, right, which is that we understand time only exists in a forward-moving pattern that there's no other dimension of it and your experience, being able to travel through time? Because that information was kept as official state secrets.
And so, for example, an important discovery was Nikola Tesla's discovery of radiant energy an energy he found that is latent and pervasive in the entire universe and has, among its capabilities, the capability to bend the fabric of time space.
Let me show it to you.
Okay.
Sure.
There was two elliptical booms, about ten feet high and about ten feet apart.
The device is a Tesla invention? Yes.
Mm.
Between these two booms was a shimmering field of radiant energy energy that can bend the fabric of timespace.
My father explained that we were gonna jump through this field of energy.
We would go through a blueish-white tunnel of light.
[Quinto.]
It sounds like science fiction.
On one hand, I feel like this is an incredibly compelling, fascinating, dramatic story.
I would love to believe.
That would be amazing.
But it's like, I'm interested in the tangible.
I'm interested in the thing that we can look at and say that that's what this is irrefutably.
I mean, there's so many questions that I have.
Tesla was a well-documented scientist, and his experiments were chronicled catalogued.
So, if there was a scientific advancement that he discovered, wouldn't that have been inrmation and knowledge that would've been shared with the scientific community at the time? There was a Tesla cover-up.
It was perpetuated by Tesla himself to protect the technology.
Contemporary physicists do not understand how and why we achieved time travel because the information was kept back from them.
They deserve to be told what everybody deserves to be told, and that's the truth.
Andrew presents it like, "This is what I did, and it was a secret government program.
You know, there are obviously other people that you can talk to about things in our government's history that are top secret and are classified.
But there's not that many people like Andrew who are asserting that they've actually traveled through space and time.
So, I-I don't know.
I feel really conflicted about this one.
What he's talking about would be revolutionary and change the world and how we move through this universe.
And that, to me, is really worth exploring.
Andrew is not the only one who claims to have experience with time travel.
There are many other incredible stories about people supposedly going back in time.
Some even have evidence.
Like this 1928 film of a woman who appears to be holding a cell phone decades before that technology existed.
Or this modern-looking man in a photograph from the 1940s.
But if people have learned how to time travel, why don't we all know about it? For years, there have been rumors of time travel research being conducted in secret, like the Montauk Project, an alleged U.
S.
government program experimenting with time travel to use in warfare.
Putting all this evidence together, is it possible that Andrew's story might have some truth? To find out, I need to understand more about how time works.
Hi, Zach.
Good morning.
How are you? Mathematician Tom Van Baak believes that time is not an absolute, and that while clocks appear to tick at the exact same speed, day by day, not all time is created equal.
It was only in the last hundred years, with the theories of Einstein, that he proposed this radical idea that time wasn't fixed.
It's mind-blowing.
How? How is that possible? I mean Well, it seems that gravity and time are somehow related.
If we have two clocks, and one clock is here, at sea level, where gravity is the strongest, and one clock is raised far up into a mountain, where there's less gravity, the clock closer to Earth is actually running slower than the clock that's further away from Earth.
If you have excess gravity, time slows down.
It's incredible.
So, someone who lives in New Orleans, for example, and someone who lives in Denver these two clocks would, theoretically, be running at slightly different speeds? Not just theoretical, but that's an example of something you can actually verify.
Would you like to see how? I would love to.
These are all clocks.
Uh-huh.
And that demonstrate the tremendous evolution of timekeeping.
There are all different types.
We have the classic sand timer.
That old chestnut.
This is a chronometer from the 1950s.
This is a military quartz crystal.
Mm.
But still not as accurate as we would need for a relativity experiment.
Right.
For that, we need an atomic clock.
So here's the inside of an atomic cesium clock.
It allows to measure down to one nanosecond in a day Wow.
for the relativity experiment.
Great.
There's our man.
And he would agree.
He would agree.
Our experiment will test Einstein's theory of relativity by placing two atomic clocks at vastly different elevations.
One clock will stay at sea level We need to synchronize the clocks Okay.
so they're all equal while the other will be placed on a mountain 6,000 feet above sea level.
[Van Baak.]
Very simple experiment conceptually.
If the theory of relativity is true, the clocks that are on the mountain should come back a tiny bit ahead of the clocks left behind, and that's because the clocks at higher elevation run a little bit faster than clocks at sea level.
[Quinto.]
Theoretically, the greater the distance the bigger the gap in time.
So if time runs at different speeds in these two locations, does that mean that time is not fixed? We're about to see, with our own eyes, just how flexible time can be.
Coming up, I investigateve.
Uh-huh.
Time's not fixed.
There's slight variations possible.
It's mind-blowing.
[Quinto.]
I'm diving in to the true nature of time to see how it works.
For generations, we've believed that time only moves in one direction.
And now I've teamed up with mathematican Tom Van Baak to see for myself how time moves differently at different locations.
By using super-accurate atomic clocks, we're testing the elasticity of time, letting one clock run at sea level while the other runs on top of a mountain.
Tom.
Hey, Zach.
How are you, man? Really good.
Yeah? How have you been since I saw you last? We've had quite an adventure Okay.
the clocks and I.
We went up to Mount Palomar, and we've been gone one day, six hours, 25 minutes.
The prediction of general relativity is that clocks at higher elevation run a little bit faster than clocks running at sea level.
Right.
And these clocks are accurate enough that they should be able to measure that effect.
Okay.
Let's check it out.
So this is the A clock, so Right.
this one went up the mountain, and you can see the time ticking away there.
Mm-hmm.
And we can turn on the time of the base clocks, and the answer is 14 nanoseconds.
Wow.
So sure enough, the A clock, the one I brought down from the mountain, somehow got 14.
3 nanoseconds ahead.
That's amazing.
These measurements are tiny, but they feel significant.
Being able to measure time passing, even if it's down to a nanosecond, in any different way kind of seems like a springboard for other possibilities.
It sounds like you want to be a physicist.
I'm I want to be a time traveler, Tom.
That's what I want to be.
[laughing.]
Yes.
[Quinto.]
Do you think we'll ever see the ability to travel through time? I think what it does is kind of shake the foundations of a naiïve view of the way the universe works.
Mm-hmm.
[Van Baak.]
We don't fully understand everything, and with all the technology that we have, new discoveries are continually made.
[Quinto.]
This experiment reinforces the idea that time is not fixed but can move faster or slower, depending on your location.
But if time is not fixed, could you travel through it, like Andrew Basiago claims he did? There is actually a place where this might be possible.
[bell tolling.]
Famous for being the birthplace of the Beatles, Liverpool, England, has also become known for a very strange phenomenon.
For decades, people have been reporting sudden shifts in time while walking down Liverpool's city streets.
These slips have been experienced by people who don't know each other and have no obvious connection.
Ann Winsper has been investigating the phenomenon of time slips in Liverpool.
Ann.
Hi.
Hi, Zach.
[Quinto.]
And she's one of the many individuals who claims to have had one.
What is going on with these experiences referred to as time slips? It's a very difficult experience to contextualize because, rather than time travel, 'cause that has all the connotations of actually preparing for it, whereas a slip is you just suddenly seem to slip into this different era.
It happens so randomly, and it is like the just slipping back to a place that existed 20 years ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago and then slip back out again.
Can you talk me through how it usually happens? A typical experience would be that someone is just walking along minding their own business, and suddenly the light starts to go dim and sounds seem to go muted.
Everything seems slightly unusual, and then they notice that the people they see seem to be wearing old-fashioned clothes, dressed in long coats, bowler hats, canes, and umbrellas.
And if there' s cars, they seem to be old-fashioned cars.
And then suddenly the light will go back to normal.
The sounds will go back to normal, and they're back in the present day again.
This is so crazy-sounding, right?[laughing.]
I know.
It does sound mad.
So how many people would you say you've talked to that have had this experience? Oh, gosh.
Probably at least 40 people.
Wow.
There's something there because a number of people who have no relationship to one another are telling their experiences, and their experiences are eerily similar.
That is weird.
I mean, there's no two ways about it.
Liverpool has a pretty high concentration of time slips.
What do you think's happening? There's absolutely no way that you can try and pin it down to one single thing because you can't take somebody and stick them in a lab because you've taken them out of the area where it happens, but we came up with an idea.
It might be just to do with the Underground Railway.
There's a lot of electromagnetic fields.
It could be, because it's in a loop, it might be affecting people's perception.
With the electromagnetic fields, people have spoken about it affecting the temporal lobe in the brain.
Do you feel like there is something about this place that has a supernatural connection? And, if that's the case, then what do we do about it? This is one of the problems.
I'm concentrating really at the moment on the psychology of it and is it something that's just happening internally with the person.
Because, if it isn't, how do we look at time? Right.
Is it a slip in time? Are we then moving on to things like multiple dimensions? What is it? It would be unsettling to have one of these experiences, but I almost want to have one just to understand what it is.
If I put myself in the spot where these time slips are happening, can I discover a portal to the past? I'm about to find out.
Coming up There's been a lot of experiences, and of course it's from around this area.
[Quinto.]
I'm on a mission to determine whether or not time travel is possible.
And right now I'm investigating reports of a time altering phenomenon experienced by multiple unrelated people, called time slips where, without warning, everything around them changes and they fall into what appears to be another era in history.
But why is this happening? One widely held theory is that low frequency sounds, or infrasound, occurring at extremely high levels in some areas, may be having harmful effects on parts of the human brain.
And in Liverpool, England, there are clusters of these time slips reported along Bold Street.
Toward the top of the street sits St.
Luke's Church.
Bombed during World War II, the church is situated above a mysterious underground crypt which could have ideal conditions for low frequency sounds.
Steve.
Zach, hi.
Pleasure.
So I've asked paranormal investigator Steve Parsons to come test the area.
Since 2006, he's been collecting audio data at various locations around Liverpool in search of evidence of infrasound.
So how would you explain a soundwave of any frequency having an impact on a human being's experience to the degree that they are suddenly in a different era? Well, there was some research done in Europe on the effects of low frequency sound on truck drivers and how the sound from the big diesel engine was affecting their performance, and it found that, when they were subjected to these sounds, it would put them into a sort of dreamlike state.
So it might be more of a waking dream than a real time slip.
Interesting.
There's a crypt underneath this church where we've set up to measure those particular band of low frequency, um, soundwaves.
Okay.
I'd be, uh, interested in checking that out.
Let's go check it out.
I'll follow you.
Steve believes there might be evidence of infrasound nearby, and he'll be testing for this in the underground tunnels.
Welcome to the crypt.
[chuckles.]
This is a little bit, um, spooky, you know.
Mm-hmm.
So how do we test for the low frequency sound? We have a sound monitoring device to look at the frequencies that ordinary sound equipment can't detect.
Sound frequencies exist on a spectrum from very high to very low, including inaudible sounds like certain high-pitched noises made by animals [dolphin barking.]
or very low sounds such as sonic booms.
[boom.]
It has been reported that high levels of low frequency sounds can be very harmful to the human brain and one possible cause for time slips.
What we have on the display is low frequency at the left, high frequency at the right.
Mm-hmm.
And what's hearable by the naked ear? You won't hear anything much below 40 or 50 hertz.
Oh, okay.
But you will still be affected by it.
It just takes a a few seconds to self-calibrate.
You'll be able to see the results in real time.
[beep.]
There we go.
There it is.
All right, so obviously there's a whole spectrum of sound.
It's currently peaking around 12 hertz.
Oh, yeah.
Is this a lot? It is a lot.
If I could If I could relate this to a hearing sound Mm-hmm.
you are standing next to something as loud as a jet engine.
Really? Really.
It's that loud, but it's at a frequency that you can't hear.
So are you surprised to see these results, or is this what you expected? Yeah.
These are the sort of figures that could certainly in some people induce those trance-like, dreamlike states.
And do you expect that if we were to take these same measurements up on the street outside that they would be this high? Oh, absolutely.
Steve has been able to provide tangible evidence that there are low frequency inaudible sounds engulfing this region, which could mean that these experiences of slipping through time could all be in someone's head.
But that doesn't explain other important details shared by these time slip reports.
The disconnect for me is why is it that these low frequency sounds would elicit time slips? Why not some other dreamlike trance? One might expect that.
But this is only one potential factor.
Problem is unless we can measure the anomaly at the same time that somebody said, "Whoa, time just slipped" Right.
it's all pretty speculative.
Right.
There, I think, will always remain the conundrum of the paranormal.
Steve has been able to provide tangible evidence that there are low frequency inaudible sounds engulfing this region, which could mean that these experiences of slipping through time could all be in someone's head.
Now I'm heading to an advanced underground research facility called CERN, where a group of scientists may be close to solving the mystery of time travel once and for all.
500 feet beneath the city of Geneva, Switzerland, they've built a $9 billion facility with the most powerful machine in the world.
It's called the Large Hadron Collider, or and it stretches 17 miles long.
Behind elaborate security measures, they're using this machine to run experiments that might actually allow us to peer back in time.
So this is where it all happens.
Yeah.
This is the CERN control center which controls the Large Hadron Collider and monitors it when it's running.
And what is a Hadron Collider? The The LHC is kind of like a time travel machine in that we can recreate the conditions that the universe was like 14 billion years ago, just after the Big Bang.
Wow.
Okay, so the LHC how would you explain how it works? Okay, so we start off with a bunch of hydrogen gas.
[gas hissing.]
Get rid of the electrons.
You're left with a bunch of protons.
When they come into the LHC, they're already going at quite a fast speed.
Once we fill up the entire machine with bunches of protons, we start accelerating them all together.
To accelerate them, we have to give them "kicks" of energy.
When the protons collide, you get a spray of particles Right.
coming out.
It can be anything that nature decides to roll the dice and give us.
Could be creatin some n particle we didn't even know of.
[Quinto.]
By smashing these protons together, they're able to recreate the conditions of the universe at the beginning of time.
And for CERN, this means they might discover something that changes what we know about how the world works and how time runs.
I mean, a hundred years ago, we thought we had physics all wrapped up.
In a century, everything has completely been turned on its head.
It's not unreasonable to think that maybe there are parts of the universe where the laws of physics do change.
Mm-hmm.
Maybe there is a part of the universe where time runs differently.
We don't really know.
It's amazing that the LHC can recreate the conditions of the Big Bang.
But to do this, they're using incredible amounts of energy and power.
And some fear this could lead to ramifications for the whole world.
[Female reporter.]
Critics suggest this mammoth machine could destroy the world.
That's because the Collider is scheduled to generate energies seven times higher than any other machine in history.
In the Large Hadron Collider, we are taking particles, accelerating them to very close to the speed of light, running them in this gigantic ring that has a 17-mile circumference.
And then we slam them together and see what happens.
One of the big concerns with the LHC was that it might open up a black hole through one of these particle collisions.
Now, the danger is there's a lot we don't know about black holes.
It could be a Pandora's box type of situation.
We would have no idea how to close it.
[Quinto.]
There's so much mystery and controversy surrounding CERN.
But to really understand the experiments they do here, I need to take a closer look.
[Automated female voice.]
Thank you.
Please enter.
[Claire Lee.]
These are security doors.
They make sure people are authorized to go underground.
So how dangerous is it here? Yeah, so we have a very, very high-energy particle beam that we're shooting around almost at the speed of light.
Uh, in times that the, uh, beam goes off track, this could cause, uh, potential damage.
Mm-hmm.
Uh, it does produce a lot of radiation.
You want to press the button? All right.
I'll do the honors.
So we're gonna go all the way down.
[laughing.]
Oh, my God.
[Claire.]
These are security doors.
Pretty big, huh? Unbelievable.
That's so massive.
Being in this massive manmade structure designed to look billions of years into the past, it really is dwarfing.
It's kind of ironic that, to see the smallest particles of nature, you have to build something this big.
Yeah, right? What I'm really searching for is how this applies to time travel.
So time is a very tricky thing.
We don't yet understand what time is.
Mm-hmm.
You know, time just happens to us, but we haven't mastered it.
And so one of the things that we're kind of hoping is that we will see something in the detector that nothing can explain.
Okay.
But I also understand, by looking at something this big, how people are afraid of it.
Right.
It's It's huge, and it can be pretty scary.
I know there's some concern around what you're flirting with that could have catastrophic impacts on our planet, you know, create black holes that would swallow the Earth.
The first thing is we hear a lot about big, huge, massive black holes in astronomy: a hundred thousand times the mass of the sun sitting at the center of our galaxy, swallowing up objects as they go.
The black holes that we would create inside the LHC, if we could create them, are so small.
They're smaller than the size of a proton.
In fact, what actually happens is these black holes just evaporate in a puff of particles.
Uh-huh.
So I'm not worried that we're going to do anything that's going to destroy us.
Uh-huh.
While the researchers at CERN continue their quest to understand the mysteries of time I've already found, through my own exploration, how time can change based on external factors like gravity, magnetic fields, and infrasound.
If time is actually flexible, then there might even be more ways we can bend and travel through it.
One way to think about time is as a measure of our experiences.
Each day we travel through time, going through a series of events that add up to the same number of hours, minutes, and seconds.
In other words, time seems to be constant and unchanging, but that's not how we experience it.
Some days whisk by while others drag on.
There's another side to time beyond counting and calendars that is fluid.
But why? What is actually going on that creates our ever-changing perception of time? And can it be controlled? What gives us our perception of time? There is something interesting with time when it comes to our own experience.
[Paul Sutter.]
When in a state of heightened awareness of extreme danger, of important moments, all our senses are alive.
We are paying attention to those tiny detailed moments that usually just pass us by, that we ignore.
So we get the sense that time is movings slower.
Even though our clock still only ticks one second at a time, and that rate stays fixed, our perception of those moments increases.
[Quinto.]
Coming up And while it seems to flow in one direction, we know from our own everyday experience that time does not always feel like it's moving at the same speed.
If our perception of time is also flexible, does that mean we have the power to change how we experience it? Many people say their perception of time changes when they're in extreme situations.
And I want to experience for myself how and why that happens by leaping out of a plane from 13,000 feet.
Hey, man.
I'm Zach.
Nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you, Zach.
Neuroscientist Chess Stetson has a theory about how our brains are actually controlling the passage of time.
In my work in particular, we started studying this feeling that time slows down when you get really, really scared.
That's what we're gonna get a chance testing our probe today, which I'm pretty excited about.
I'm literally jumping out of an airplane.
I spent a lot of time in my life being afraid of that idea.
Wow.
My brain's like, "I can't believe you're about to do this.
" Adrenaline certainly will be rushing.
I mean, I imagine I'll be probably pretty scared.
Perfect.
We talked about that adrenaline that you're likely to feel, and in the brain that's called epinephrine.
That can cause more memories to be laid down.
Hmm.
When you're in a really heightened fear scenario Chess' theory is that, when a person goes into survival mode, their brain not only perceives but also stores more information than normal, effectively making more memories and causing it to feel like time slows down.
To test Chess' theory, I'll be wearing special goggles during the jump that will flash images, and I'll try to memorize as many of them as I can to see if my brain actually stores more information when I'm in a state of fear.
But in the meantime, we're gonna try that on the ground, and that'll be our controlled experiment.
Uh-huh.
So we're basically gonna show you a bunch of images flashing in front of your eyes.
And then, when it's over, I'm gonna wait ten minutes and ask you to tell me what they were.
All right.
Okay.
Okay.
So let's wait ten minutes.
Do you want to go meet the guys that are gonna do the jump with? Yeah.
Let's do it.
Fantastic.
Hey, man.
All right, you ready to do this? I think I am.
Put your foot in there.
We're going up to 13,000 feet, and we're gonna be hitting about 120 miles an hour.
Yeah.
Why not? All I'll have you do is kind of hold on the harness, and then I'll tap you when to release.
Okay.
And after that, you're on a roller coaster ride.
Okay.
Okay, Zach, so now tell me what you saw.
Okay, uh, there was a fireplace, a piggy bank, a rainbow, a candle, um and I think that's all I have.
You don't remember any others, do you? Uh-uh.
Okay.
Oh, octopus.
Aha.
I knew there night be something back there.
Yeah.
So you're around half.
Okay.
We'll do the same thing after you've been falling for 50 seconds through thin air.
All right, let's do it.
All right, Zach, watch your head on top.
Whoo.
All right.
As we get closer to the moment, I'm getting more and more like, uh, freaked out about it.
Now I'm gonna strap us into the airplane.
All right, Zach, here we go, man.
I am tense and really nervous.
I'm gonna hit the ground one way or another.
Oh, my God, you guys! there was almost like a white noise quality to everything that was around me.
Time just elongated.
When I just took the goggles down, the the ground flying toward you and the air rushing around you.
And then, when the chute opens there's this incredible slowing down of everything.
So cool.
You just go into a mode where self-preservation kicks in.
The moments felt like they were taking longer, and there was much more heightened.
Time lost all meaning.
It really did.
Stand up.
All the way up.
Wow.
Oh! [laughing.]
[woman.]
All right.
Nice diving.
Oh, my God, it was so crazy! I was so scared.
I was so scared up there.
[laughing.]
I definitely got the sense that time passed more slowly.
But was it actually because my brain was taking in more information? One way to find out is to see how many images I can recall from the memory test.
Okay, so, Zach, can you tell me now what were the images that you saw when you were in free fall? Uh tennis racquet, teddy bear, bow tie, a rainbow, a candle, fireplace, comb, like a cruise ship, um pine cone um maybe a match? All right.
That might actually be everything.
Really? Wow.
It's amazing that you could see all of that while you were falling.
What I kind of think might be going on is you're not necessarily taking in more information, but more of the information that you are taking in gets stored.
And that's why it feel like more time passed.
It's also possible that my ability to memorize lines as an actor may have given me an edge.
I mean, I don't know if maybe you actually are a little bit of a Vulcan.
Maybe, maybe.
Uh, but, uh When I left the plane, I was just falling.
There's this, like, constant ticking in my head of, like, I can't believe that this is actually happening.
I think I was much more aware of the moments when we were sailing down.
I definitely think that's a little kind of portal that you slip into.
I get it.
There's something really powerful about it.
Time is the thing that I was curious about coming here, and time's the thing that I feel like I leave having at least a better sense of understanding how it can bend and change.
It's really cool.
Time is a riddle that we may never fully solve.
We know you can physically move through time faster or slower, depending on where you are and what you're doing.
It felt like minutes between when I jumped out of the plane and when the chute was opened.
And we know some people believe they've actually traveled back in time.
When I first teleported, I was 6 years old.
You just suddenly seem to slip into this different era.
While time travel has been explored by some of the most brilliant minds in history tomorrow we might just discover that we can travel through time in ways we never thought possible.
[clock ticking.]