Posted on 02/06/2008 1:23:05 PM PST by blam
Time travellers from the future 'could be here in weeks'
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
Last Updated: 6:01pm GMT 06/02/2008
The first time travellers from the future could materialise on Earth within a few weeks.
Physicists around the world are excitedly awaiting the start up of the £4.65 billion Large Hadron Collider, LHC - the most powerful atom-smasher ever built - which is supposed to shed new light on the particles and forces at work in the cosmos and reproduce conditions that date to near the Big Bang of creation.
1.21 gigawatts of electricity: Michael J Fox and Christopher Lloyd in the De Lorean time machine from Back to the Future
Prof Irina Aref'eva and Dr Igor Volovich, mathematical physicists at the Steklov Mathematical Institute in Moscow believe that the vast experiment at CERN, the European particle physics centre near Geneva in Switzerland, may turn out to be the world's first time machine, reports New Scientist.
The debut in early summer could provide a landmark because travelling into the past is only possible - if it is possible at all - as far back as the point of creation of the first time machine.
That means 2008 could become "Year Zero" for temporal travel, they argue.
Time travel was born when Albert Einstein's colleague, Kurt Gödel, used Einstein's theory of relativity to show that travel into the past was possible.
Ever since he unveiled this idea in 1949, eminent physicists have argued against time travel because it undermines ideas of cause and effect to create paradoxes: a time traveller could go back to kill his grandfather so that he is never born in the first place.
But, sixty years later, there is still no fundamental reason why time travellers cannot put historians out of business.
But the Russians argue that when the energies of the LHC are concentrated into a subatomic particle - a trillionth the size of a mosquito - they can do strange things to the fabric of the universe, which is a blend of space and time that scientists called spacetime.
While Earth's gravity produces gentle distortions in spacetime the LHC energy can distort time so much that it loops back on itself. These loops are known to physicists as "closed timelike curves" and they ought, at least in theory, to allow us to revisit some past moment.
The scheme chimes with one laid out in 1988, when Prof Kip Thorne and colleagues at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, showed that wormholes, or tunnels through spacetime, would allow time travel, a scheme popularised by Carl Sagan in his novel - made into a film - Contact.
Prof Aref'eva and Dr Volovich believe the LHC could create wormholes and so allow a form of time travel. "We realised that closed timelike curves and wormholes could also be a result of collisions of particles," Prof Aref'eva says.
There are still plenty of obstacles for the likes of Dr Who, however. Not least of them is the fact that these are mini wormholes, so only subatomic particles are small enough to travel through them.
Time travel could be possible ... in the future How the Time Machine works They tell The Daily Telegraph that whether subatomic time travel in the LHC would open the doors for human scale time travellers "is a deep and interesting question" but stress that "these problems, and many others as well, require further investigations."
Probably the best we can hope for is that the LHC may show a signature of the wormholes' existence, Dr Volovich says. If some of the energy from collisions in the LHC goes missing, it could be because the collisions created particles that have travelled into a wormhole and through time.
One sticking point until now for wormhole concepts is finding an exotic kind of material capable of keeping the maw of the wormhole open for time travel.
Dark energy - a mysterious antigravity force that is thought to pervade the universe - could, they say, be just what is needed to keep the entrance to a wormhole open, at least according to one family of ideas about its nature, where it is called phantom energy.
If a blend of colliding particles and phantom energy does create a wormhole in Geneva this year, an advanced civilisation could find it in their history books, pinpoint the moment, and take advantage of their technology to pay us a visit.
"The observational evidence still allows for phantom energy," says Robert Caldwell, a physicist at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. "As for Aref'eva and Volovich's speculation that the LHC will produce the stuff of time machines - ugh!"
A leading scientist who believes that time travel may be possible, Prof David Deutsch of Oxford University, comments: "It's speculative in the extreme, but not cranky. For various reasons I don't think the mechanism they propose would work (i.e. provide a pathway for messages from the future) even if their speculations are true."
Dr Brian Cox of the University of Manchester adds: "The energies of billions of cosmic rays that have been hitting the Earth's atmosphere for five billion years far exceed those we will create at the LHC, so by this logic time travellers should be here already. If these wormholes appear I will personally eat the hat I was given for my first birthday before I received it."
What if you invent the first time machine but don't turn it on?
I've never heard of that theory before. But then, almost all depictions of time travel in pop culture involve travel to the remote past.
James P. Hogan wrote a novel back in the early 1980s called “Thrice Upon a Time”. In this novel, time travel consisted of sending information (e.g., bits) back through time instead of people. This always struck me as much more plausible. The point is that people in future timelines would tell those in the past about things they needed to do or avoid. Since there can be multiple (infinite) parallel timelines branching off from any given instant in time (kinda like a massive tree). So a leaf on the tree can send a message back to its parent, causing the leaf never to have been born. So, as soon as the “time receiver” was turned on for the first time, it started receiving messages from the future. Interesting concept.
I’d love to go back to the time I was a young lad just getting to “know the ladies” and give myself some pointers :-)
I’d love to go back to the time I was a young lad just getting to “know the ladies” and give myself some pointers :-)
Holy moly! Good catch.
TA DA DA DA DA DAH !! With the advent of this thread, I may now reveal that I, Twinkie King Starbucks III, am none other than an illustrious Time Traveler from long ago and far away. I have been here on earth for years. My time capsule malfunctioned and I arrived here sooner than my fellow time travelers from LAAFA who are expected and who will be here in a matter of weeks.
I have tried not to mess with anything vital here on Earth, like any political leader, etc. Since I am the leader of my cadre of fellow Time Travelers, I will soon be meeting them at the TTMP (Time Travelers’ Meeting Place) and we will very soon be offering for sale our book dedicated to serving mankind of this area of the Universe (”To Serve Man”).
But then again, they could have been here yesterday too.
Oh hell yeah, that always happens when I go fishing.
“You should have been here yesterday!
Couldn’t stop them from biting!”
Zay are all in zouth Floreeda enjoying the cheap $$ and soaking up rays
Incidentally, is that 'ee-gore' or 'eye-gore'?
When they get here in two weeks they will probably stay until last month.
There was a young woman named Bright, Who traveled much faster than light. She set out one day In a relative way, And returned on the previous night.
I have been a time traveler ever since I was born.
Got you beat.
curses
foiled again
curses
foiled again
Perhaps its a Y5k bug that won’t allow them to role the date back to today?
Yes. They should have used the term “picomosquito,” although I think “attomosquito” would be more nearly quantitatively accurate.
Goo Backs?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.