Ronald Mallett, Professor at the University of Connecticut, has used Einstein’s equations to design a time machine with circulating laser beams. While his team is still looking for funding, he hopes to build and test the device in the next 10 years.
Posted on 04/04/2006 10:40:50 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
With a brilliant idea and equations based on Einstein’s relativity theories, Ronald Mallett from the University of Connecticut has devised an experiment to observe a time traveling neutron in a circulating light beam. While his team still needs funding for the project, Mallett calculates that the possibility of time travel using this method could be verified within a decade.
Black holes, wormholes, and cosmic strings – each of these phenomena has been proposed as a method for time travel, but none seem feasible, for (at least) one major reason. Although theoretically they could distort space-time, they all require an unthinkably gigantic amount of mass.
Mallett, a U Conn Physics Professor for 30 years, considered an alternative to these time travel methods based on Einstein’s famous relativity equation: E=mc2.
“Einstein showed that mass and energy are the same thing,” said Mallett, who published his first research on time travel in 2000 in Physics Letters. “The time machine we’ve designed uses light in the form of circulating lasers to warp or loop time instead of using massive objects.”
To determine if time loops exist, Mallett is designing a desktop-sized device that will test his time-warping theory. By arranging mirrors, Mallett can make a circulating light beam which should warp surrounding space. Because some subatomic particles have extremely short lifetimes, Mallett hopes that he will observe these particles to exist for a longer time than expected when placed in the vicinity of the circulating light beam. A longer lifetime means that the particles must have flowed through a time loop into the future.
“Say you have a cup of coffee and a spoon,” Mallett explained to PhysOrg.com. “The coffee is empty space, and the spoon is the circulating light beam. When you stir the coffee with the spoon, the coffee – or the empty space – gets twisted. Suppose you drop a sugar cube in the coffee. If empty space were twisting, you’d be able to detect it by observing a subatomic particle moving around in the space.”
And according to Einstein, whenever you do something to space, you also affect time. Twisting space causes time to be twisted, meaning you could theoretically walk through time as you walk through space.
“As physicists, our experiments deal with subatomic particles,” said Mallett. “How soon humans will be able to time travel depends largely on the success of these experiments, which will take the better part of a decade. And depending on breakthroughs, technology, and funding, I believe that human time travel could happen this century.”
Step back a minute (sorry, only figuratively). How do we know that time is not merely a human invention, and that manipulating it just doesn’t make sense?
“What is time? That is a very, very difficult question,” said Mallett. “Time is a way of separating events from each other. Even without thinking about time, we can see that things change, seasons change, people change. The fact that the world changes is an intrinsic feature of the physical world, and time is independent of whether or not we have a name for it.
“To physicists, time is what’s measured by clocks. Using this definition, we can manipulate time by changing the rate of clocks, which changes the rate at which events occur. Einstein showed that time is affected by motion, and his theories have been demonstrated experimentally by comparing time on an atomic clock that has traveled around the earth on a jet. It’s slower than a clock on earth.”
Although the jet-flying clock regained its normal pace when it landed, it never caught up with earth clocks – which means that we have a time traveler from the past among us already, even though it thinks it’s in the future.
Some people show concern over time traveling, although Mallett – an advocate of the Parallel Universes theory – assures us that time machines will not present any danger.
“The Grandfather Paradox [where you go back in time and kill your grandfather] is not an issue,” said Mallett. “In a sense, time travel means that you’re traveling both in time and into other universes. If you go back into the past, you’ll go into another universe. As soon as you arrive at the past, you’re making a choice and there’ll be a split. Our universe will not be affected by what you do in your visit to the past.”
In light of this causal “safety,” it’s kind of ironic that what prompted Mallett as a child to investigate time travel was a desire to change the past in hopes of a different future. When he was 10 years old, his father died of a heart attack at age 33. After reading The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, Mallett was determined to find a way to go back and warn his father about the dangers of smoking.
This personal element fueled Mallett’s perseverance to study science, master Einstein’s equations, and build a professional career with many high notes. Since the ‘70s, his research has included quantum gravity, relativistic cosmology and gauge theories, and he plans to publish a popular science/memoir book this November 2006. With help from Bruce Henderson, the New York Times best-selling author, the book will be called Time Traveler: A Physicist’s Quest For The Ultimate Breakthrough.
Thank you very much for the explanation. I had 12 hours of Chemistry in college (6 basic and 6 organic (with labs)), but never took Physics. So thanks.
As an aside, my son, on the other hand, has taken calculus based physics. But when he took basic physics, I seem to remember him telling me that when calculating if it is possible to travel in time you end up with a result that is divided by zero, which does not exist and which then means time travel is not possible. Does this make sense to you and if so, did I understand him correctly?
That would suggest that there may be future stuff here already, if time travel is possible...
btt
If your speed is equal to the speed of light (the v), you're dividing by zero. If your speed is greater than the speed of light, your factor is imaginary, or complex, and has no physical meaning.
Your son probably did something along this line.
Re the whole Earth moving through space thing: In the TV sereis Seven Days they dealt with this by having their hero use an escape pod-like thing to follow the Earth back along its orbit. In Quantum Leap Sam's mind (?) seems to be able to travel through space when he Leaps into another body. Or maybe they will all just use flux capacitors.
Actually, I have done it several times. Just fly from Hong Kong to LA. You arrive in LA before you leave Hong Kong. In theory, just keep flying clockwise around the earth and you become younger.
I've always found it amusing that all throught the 40s, 50s, 60s and early 70s people who claimed they were abducted by aliens described a wide range of aliens - insectoid creatures, octopus like beings, aliens with two heads or three eyes, etc.
All of a sudden in the late 70s everybody started describing the same kind of alien - big head, big eyes gray skin, etc.
In fact, people who believe this stuff say the fact that everybody describes the same type of alien PROVES that it must be true.
What I find funny is that the similar descriptions all started right after E.T. and Close Encounters were released! There's your proof!
Heinlein's "The Door Into Summer."
Or you could try e-mailing a parts list to 100 million or so addresses. http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,60141,00.html
Message from a Time Traveler
Dan Simmons - Official Web Site | April 1, 2006 | Dan Simmons
Posted on 04/06/2006 7:33:24 AM EDT by Mr170IQ
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1610142/posts
"'You were a philosophy major or minor at that podunk little college you went to long ago,' said the Time Traveler. 'Do you remember what Category Error is?'
"It rang a bell. But I was too irritated at hearing my alma mater being called a 'podunk little college' to be able to concentrate fully.
"'I’ll tell you what it is,' said the Time Traveler. 'In philosophy and formal logic, and it has its equivalents in science and business management, Category Error is the term for having stated or defined a problem so poorly that it becomes impossible to solve that problem, through dialectic or any other means.'"
Soon..
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