Scientists see time travel as triumph of 'bulk over brane'

Time travel could be a possibility for some tiny particles in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), say scientists.

Chui Man Ho and Tom Weiler of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, explain that the latest theories of the universe see it as an 11-dimensional structure called the 'bulk'.

Within this is our own four-dimensional world (length, width, depth and time) which is termed the 'brane'.

By producing the Higgs boson - one of the ultimate aims of the LHC - the scientists suggest that a Higgs singlet could appear at the same time.

These latter particles may be able to pass into one of the remaining seven dimensions, re-entering the brane at a different point in time.

As a result, they could be manipulated to send a message into the future, or into the past, although humans still could not travel through time by this method.

The scientists argue that this enhances the elegance of the theory further, by removing the possibility for paradoxes to arise due to human action.