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Time Travellers From The Future 'Could Be here In Weeks'
The Telegraph (UK) ^ | 2-6-2008 | Roger Highfield

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."


TOPICS: News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: callingartbell; future; greatscott; stringtheory; time; timemachine; timetravel; travellers
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1 posted on 02/06/2008 1:23:13 PM PST by blam
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To: blam
Time Travel Could Be Possible ... In The Future
2 posted on 02/06/2008 1:24:32 PM PST by blam (Secure the border and enforce the law)
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To: blam

3 posted on 02/06/2008 1:25:38 PM PST by Borges
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To: blam

What good is time travel if you can’t do stuff like go back in time and kill Hitler, or prevent Jimmy Carter from getting elected? I guess the future lucks out, but not us.


4 posted on 02/06/2008 1:25:49 PM PST by Shadow44
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To: blam

LOL! If time travel could *ever* be possible, it’d be possible right now—because our future selves would be here showing us how.


5 posted on 02/06/2008 1:25:55 PM PST by ShadowAce (Linux -- The Ultimate Windows Service Pack)
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To: blam
" If these wormholes appear I will personally eat the hat I was given for my first birthday before I received it."

LOL!
6 posted on 02/06/2008 1:26:21 PM PST by reagan_fanatic (The fix is in for McCain. God save the Republic.)
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To: blam

If time travel is possible anytime in the future, then we would already be doing it in the past.


7 posted on 02/06/2008 1:26:41 PM PST by GregoTX (The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.)
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To: blam

It’s also possible that the collider will tear a hole in the fabric of spacetime, and the universe will come unraveled before our eyes.

Hey, at least we’ll be saved from The Agony of Hillary.


8 posted on 02/06/2008 1:26:45 PM PST by Brilliant
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To: ShadowAce
Was it Asimov who said that the surest proof that time travel is not possible is the fact that we haven’t been inundated with tourists from the future.
9 posted on 02/06/2008 1:27:10 PM PST by Borges
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To: blam

When you flick the “on” switch to one end of a two-ended time machine, you’d better step back, because a whole lot of people will be coming through.


10 posted on 02/06/2008 1:28:13 PM PST by kidd
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To: blam

Who?

11 posted on 02/06/2008 1:28:19 PM PST by CholeraJoe (Super What? How much longer until Nascar starts?)
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To: blam

I’m here to tell you that time travel is already possible. For example, I traveled forward in time about 5 minutes as I read that article...


12 posted on 02/06/2008 1:29:04 PM PST by Hegemony Cricket (IX-XI -- numquam didici)
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To: Borges

My favorite of the Doctors.


13 posted on 02/06/2008 1:29:12 PM PST by jimfree (Freep and Ye shall find.)
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To: blam

I’ve always loved this scenario.

Let’s say that they do invent a time machine. Some guy steps into the machine and decides to go back to last year. He presses the buttons and -— whammo! -— he’s sitting in the middle of interstellar space. The Earth, the solar system, and everything else in the galaxy (and universe) are all in motion. He might be one year in the past at the same spot, but the planet has long since moved on to another location.

Until someone fixes that problem, I’m not worrying about time travelers.


14 posted on 02/06/2008 1:29:50 PM PST by redpoll
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To: ShadowAce
LOL! If time travel could *ever* be possible, it’d be possible right now—because our future selves would be here showing us how.

Maybe they're here showing us right now?

http://www.earthfiles.com/news.php?ID=1382&category=Environment

15 posted on 02/06/2008 1:29:35 PM PST by DCPatriot ("It aint what you don't know that kills you. It's what you know that aint so" Theodore Sturgeon))
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To: Borges
Probably. The thing about time travel is that it will be invented simultaneously in every year.

Since we don't have it, it is not possible.

16 posted on 02/06/2008 1:29:35 PM PST by ShadowAce (Linux -- The Ultimate Windows Service Pack)
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To: ShadowAce
LOL! If time travel could *ever* be possible, it’d be possible right now—because our future selves would be here showing us how.

That would violate the prime directive...uhh...I mean...uhh....nevermind.

17 posted on 02/06/2008 1:29:55 PM PST by Pete (That goat is looking at me.)
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To: ShadowAce
LOL! If time travel could *ever* be possible, it’d be possible right now—because our future selves would be here showing us how.

Yes. We have been. But you won't pay attention.

18 posted on 02/06/2008 1:29:54 PM PST by ElkGroveDan (I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired of all the politics in politics.)
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To: blam
Maybe we could travel back in time and tell the “greatest generation” to keep their children in line. Just a thought.
19 posted on 02/06/2008 1:29:57 PM PST by Shortwave (Islamo Fascism is NOT America's greatest enemy, our apathy is.)
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To: blam
Time Travellers From The Future Could Be here In Weeks

Well then, guess we'd better get the guest room ready and head to the grocery store. Wonder how long they plan to stay?

20 posted on 02/06/2008 1:30:05 PM PST by SirJohnBarleycorn
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