DeLorean Tremens. Hold onto your flux capacitors, time machines have nearly arrived

Smithsonian Magazine.com ^ | March 10, 2007 | by Eric Jaffe

[aculeus]

One of the most replayed commercials on television right now is the DirecTV ad with Doc Brown from Back to the Future. Doc, we learn, has forgotten to tell Marty McFly to buy DirecTV in the future. Never mind that the 1955 version of Doc never traveled through time, and therefore wouldn't know about DirecTV. More importantly, how's that whole time machine thing coming? When can we rev up the DeLorean and, like Marty, go to our parent's high school dance with our mother?

Never. But not never, never. Just never for us. First, back to the basics.

A physical time machine—a device available at Wal-Mart, as opposed to a natural wormhole somewhere in the cosmos—is possible. You begin with something square. Next, install mirrors at the corners and send a beam of light, perhaps from a laser, at one of the mirrors. The light will bounce to the second mirror, the third, the fourth and back through this cycle forever.

The force of this constantly circulating light will begin twisting the empty space in the middle. Einstein's theory of relativity dictates that everything happening to space must happen to time, so time begins twisting, too.

To fit a human inside this time machine we need to stack a bunch of these mirrors on top of each other, and add more light beams. Eventually, we'll have a cylinder of circulating light. Once we step inside, we're ready to fly through time.

Rubbish, you say? Well, unlike Doc Brown's second-generation DeLorean, which ran on garbage, the model for our time machine is actually testable. Place subatomic particles—pion or muons—on one side of the light cylinder, and a particle detector on the other side. Then send the particles across.

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Although I think I read somewhere once that if aliens had a telescope powerful enough to see Earth from, say, thirty light years away, they would have seen Earth as it was in the Seventies, disco and all, because the light from Earth would have taken that long to reach them, because when we look at distant stars and galaxies, we're seeing what they looked like thousands or even millions of years ago.

For sending information back in time, Gregory Benford's Timescape is a classic in this regard.

[who_would_fardels_bear]

From the article you referenced:

"The Caltech group was able to read the atomic structure of a photon"

Last time I checked, photons don't have atomic structure.

So I'm not so sure about teleportation.

Also, from my understanding the entanglement is very important to this process. One would need to get a bunch of photons entangled and then transport half of them to some other distant location, presumably by traditional methods such as rockets, solar sails, etc.

Then one could use the entangled photons to transport stuff from Point A to Point B.

So if superintelligent space aliens want to instantly teleport battlestars within photon torpedo range of Earth, they would first have to shuttle over countless entagled photons to Earth by much more traditional means.

[IslandJeff]

Gives good food for thought. We haven't seen extraterrestrials likely because of the vast distances between star systems, and societies just don't last long enough.

By the time we'd be able to traverse time, the Sun will have gone red giant and we'd be grains of sand on a distant, dead beach way down the line.

[Grizzled Bear]

Now hyperdrives are as common as buttholes, right?

---

No; but "Butthole Hyperdrive" used to open for "The Sex Pistols."

[WestVirginiaRebel]

I thought a hyperedrive butthole was what you got when you ate too much chili...

[WestVirginiaRebel]

I thought a hyperdrive butthole was what you got when you ate too much chili...

[Old Professer]

Dave Barry didn't really retire, reality overtook him.

[RebelTex]

"DON'T BUILD IT!"

Too late - Bill Clintoon has already built it and he has gone back in time about 1400 years, changed his name to Mohammed, and started a religion.

[RockinRight]

Mrs. Kerry...Mrs. Edwards...Mrs. Rodham...

[reagan_fanatic]

From the link:

By entangling photons B and C, researchers can extract some information about photon A, and the remaining information would be passed on to B by way of entanglement, and then on to photon C. When researchers apply the information from photon A to photon C, they can create an exact replica of photon A. However, photon A no longer exists as it did before the information was sent to photon C.

In other words, when Captain Kirk beams down to an alien planet, an analysis of his atomic structure is passed through the transporter room to his desired location, where a replica of Kirk is created and the original is destroyed.

That's a little unsettling.

[WestVirginiaRebel]

I noticed that...I think in the non-canon Star Trek novel Federation, they explained to Zefram Cochrane that the transporter worked on a quantum level when he asked them about this very question. And I think Picard was replicated in one early episode where he was trapped in the trasporter after merging with an alien.