A Thesis On Time Dilation (A short story)

Once confined to fantasy and science fiction, time travel is now simply an engineering problem.
-MICHIO KAKU, Wired Magazine, Aug. 2003

The professor who most students refer to as the “twerd on campus,” that is, the tweed nerd, entered the lecture hall with the same familiar air of nonchalantness that all of the students were accustomed to. He laid his leather briefcase on the podium, and opened it, taking out his lecture notes for the day. Clearing his throat, he retrieved his glasses from the breast pocket of his shirt and placed them on his face. His long, crooked nose held them up effortlessly, and his tiny block-like ears lazily supported their fair share of weight. As he opened his mouth to begin the day’s lecture, some students sat up in attention while others continued with their morning nap.
“So far in the semester, we've blown through black holes and wormholes, but there's yet another possible means of time traveling via theoretic cosmic phenomena. For this scheme, we turn to physicist J. Richard Gott, who introduced the idea of cosmic string back in 1991. As the name suggests, these are string-like objects that some scientists believe were formed in the early universe. These strings may weave throughout the entire universe, thinner than an atom and under immense pressure. Naturally, this means they'd pack quite a gravitational pull on anything that passes near them, enabling objects attached to a cosmic string to travel at incredible speeds and benefit from time dilation. By pulling two cosmic strings close together or stretching one string close to a black hole, it might be possible to warp space-time enough to create what's called a closed time-like curve. Using the gravity produced by the two cosmic strings (or the string and black hole), a spaceship theoretically could propel itself into the past. To do this, it would loop around the cosmic strings.”