Constable: Despite Einstein theory confirmation, Argonne physicist dashes time travel hope

Last week's announcement that the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory confirmed Albert Einstein's century-old theory of general relativity and proved the existence of gravitational waves will go down as "one of the biggest discoveries of all time," says Diego Fazi, an Argonne physicist who worked on the LIGO project from 2005 until 2012.

Explaining it to those us of who often confuse cosmology and cosmetology requires a little more effort. Researching the LIGO discovery on my own, I stumble upon Boz Scaggs' "Lido Shuffle" and news of the Soldier Field replica at Legoland Discovery Center in Schaumburg before I get to the LIGO homepage announcing that scientists have observed "ripples in the fabric of space-time." That phrase reminds me of Doc Brown's warning in "Back to the Future 2" that tinkering with such things could "unravel the very fabric of the space-time continuum and destroy the entire universe."

So, I need answers.

"These concepts are not the easiest to explain," says Fazi as he dunks a sweet roll in his Monday morning coffee. Using his napkin to represent the fabric of the universe, and his fingertip to represent a black hole, Fazi demonstrates how a heavy object can warp space and time in the continuum. The collision of two black holes more than a billion years ago converted a portion of their mass into energy that LIGO detected as gravitational waves.

Einstein laid out his theory before scientists had a method to test it. In the last half-century, scientists have been creating better and better devices to detect the presence of gravity waves, and coaxing the National Science Foundation for more funding.

"They don't want to give you a big giant check and say, 'OK. We trust you,'" Fazi says. Scientists complete one step, show that it should work, and then get money to take the next step.

"And we didn't find anything. Wait. Nothing. Wait. Nothing," Fazi says in describing his time at LIGO. "But we knew our instruments were not quite sensitive enough yet. We hoped."

The new technology uses a pair of giant detection arms that are nearly 3 miles long, massive mirrors and lasers.

Though Fazi left the project before the breakthrough, that's not the same as, say, Starlin Castro getting traded from the Cubs before the team wins the World Series.

"Sure, when you've been a part of something and you leave, and it succeeds, you think it would have been nice to be part of it. But I am part of it," says Fazi, who wrote some of the software used by the scientists who made the discovery.

These kinds of scientific experiments have led to technology from lasers and touch screens to cellphones and GPS. Just as the moon landing in 1969 convinced me that I'd be driving a flying car by 2016, this ripple in the space-time continuum makes me think time travel is on the horizon.

"This is something people like to think about and movies play with," Fazi says.

He and his wife, Laura, have a 1-year-old daughter named Aria, and he sometimes does standup comedy at clubs, so Fazi knows how to make the concept of time travel a bit easier for my brain to comprehend.

"There are some situations where it is conceptually possible to time travel. You could travel through a black hole and end up at a time before that," Fazi says, using his index to poke a hole through the napkin used to represent the fabric of the universe.

Continuing to push his finger, the 36-year-old physicist rips another hole in the napkin, allowing his finger to start in one hole and emerge from another.

"In principle, you could go through it and go back in time. Potentially there are conditions where these wormholes could be stable," he says.

Then he crushes the time traveler's dreams.

"There are no black holes close to us. There are no black holes in our solar system. So that's one problem," Fazi says.

If we did have a black hole nearby "it would eat us up," he continues. "If we had a smaller black hole and you tried to get close to it, its gravity is so strong that it would rip you to pieces. There's no hope of going through a small black hole without being destroyed."

Thrilling as it may be for scientists, "this discovery hasn't brought us any closer to time travel," Fazi concludes. "At this point, the chance of that happening is zero."

But the discovery creates excitement about the possibilities.

"I was sitting in my bedroom playing with Legos and I was so convinced I could build a spaceship and fly into space," Fazi says of his childhood in Fabriano, Italy. That started him on a scientific journey from Lego to LIGO, studying the "weird things out there," he says.

It won't be tomorrow, the next decade, the next century or even the next millennium. But one day, future scientists might be able to pass through a wormhole in the space-time fabric and drop in on a young Fazi.