Physicists Are Looking At How We Might Take A Trip Through Time

Wall Street Journal ^ | 21 November 2003 | SHARON BEGLEY

[PatrickHenry]

Ronald Mallett hadn't even heard of physics when he read H.G. Wells' 1895 classic, "The Time Machine," just a few months after his father died at age 33.

The 10-year old assumed that to build such a device, and see his father again, he should go into electronics, his dad's field. It was only during his stint at the Strategic Air Command that he learned that it was physicists who were discovering seeming impossibilities: that space can bend, time can slow, particles can be waves and waves, particles. It was physics, he realized, that offered the hope of making Wells' fiction -- and his boyhood hope -- a reality.

[Consort]

If a 20-year old man travels back in time 10 years, will he still be the 20-year old man he is or will he become the 10 year old he once was? If he goes back 19 years, will he be a 1-year old again or still the 20-year old of today? If he goes back 40 years, will he be the man or woman he was in a previous life? If so, then he or she could kill his grandfather.

[Senator Pardek]

I see what you mean, but it would be impossible to prevent the creation of the wormhole.

[PatrickHenry]

If so, then he or she could kill his grandfather.

It has been suggested that if we could travel to the future, the first thing you should do is kill your grandchildren. In self defense!

[Physicist]

Recommended book: The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov.

Recommended movie: 12 Monkeys by Terry Gilliam.

[PatrickHenry]

... it would be impossible to prevent the creation of the wormhole

Correct. To do that, you'd have to arrive before it existed.

[kcordell]

Once you travel to Nov. 21, 2011, could you move the origin of the worm hole from your end and place it in any year in the past? Or can you only manuver a worm hole from it's origin?

[Willie Green]

ummmmmmmmYEAH!!!

[Consort]

It has been suggested that if we could travel to the future, the first thing you should do is kill your grandchildren. In self defense!

Yes, but there might be countless variations where we will have grandchildren as well as where we won't have grandchildren. How do we cover them all?

[PatrickHenry]

Recommended book: The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov.

Yes. My favorite for time travel stories is Kieth Laumer (also beloved for his Bolo fururistic military stories). I think it was his Dinasaur Beach in which he managed the amazing coup of having seven different eras in conflict all at once, and still you could follow the plot.

[Aquinasfan]

I don't know about travel into the future, but travel into the past must be logically impossible. The effect would precede the cause.

[reagan_fanatic]

I wish I'd have read this tomorrow when I had the chance...

[PatrickHenry]

could you move the origin of the worm hole from your end and place it in any year in the past?

I don't think so. But I'm not a wormhole engineer.

[FreedomCalls]

If you could spin a light source, say a lazar light source, at [near to] the speed of light, what would happen to the beam of light?

The light beam would spiral out away from the source like a water hose squirting water as you twirl around. It doesn't increase the speed of the tip past the speed of light if that is what you are thinking.

[PatrickHenry]

I don't know about travel into the future, but travel into the past must be logically impossible. The effect would precede the cause.

One would think so. Which should make the wormholes one-way systems. But in quantum mechanics, they say that there are causeless events. I have confidence in people who work in that field, but I still have doubts.

[Physicist]

There can be no discussion of time travel in science fiction without paying homage to Jack Finney. All hail Jack Finney!

Also recommended: The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold. It absolutely wallows in issues of temporal "entanglement" (and also, I must warn you, homosexuality). Very well written; also very gay.

[KellyAdmirer]

I think you have to find the wormhole and go wherever it leads. But you can always use the holodeck to go visit Mark Twain, I saw it on Star Trek.

[PatrickHenry]

Right. Gerrold managed to work just about every paradox imaginable into that novel. Including temporally enabled self-love. Finney's Time and Again is excellent. A bit weak in the theory department, however. His time travel is on a par with Edgar Rice Burroughs' space travel.

[Erasmus]

And for that matter All You Zombies by Robert Heinlein.

[rightwingreligiousfanatic]

I'm My Own Grandpa...

Many many years ago when I was twenty-three, I got married to a widow who was pretty as could be.

This widow had a grown-up daughter Who had hair of red, My father fell in love with her, And soon the two were wed.

This made my dad my son-in-law And changed my very life, My daughter was my mother, For she was my father's wife.

To complicate the matters worse, Although it brought me joy, I soon became the father Of a bouncing baby boy.

My little baby then became A brother-in-law to dad, And so became my uncle, Though it made me very sad.

For if he was my uncle, Then that also made him brother To the widow's grown-up daughter Who, of course, was my step-mother.

Father's wife then had a son, Who kept them on the run, And he became my grandson, For he was my daughter's son.

My wife is now my mother's mother And it makes me blue, Because, although she is my wife, She's my grandmother, too.

If my wife is my grandmother, Then I am her grandchild, And every time I think of it, It simply drives me wild.

For now I have become The strangest case you ever saw, As the husband of my grandmother, I am my own grandpa!

"Chorus" I'm my own grandpa, I'm my own grandpa It sounds funny I know, but it really is so, I'm my own grandpa!

[EyesWideOpen]

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