Posted on 04/06/2002 11:18:28 AM PST by Hellmouth
Edited on 04/13/2004 2:07:39 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Ronald Mallett, a physicist at the University of Connecticut, believes he knows how to build a time machine - an actual device that could send something or someone from the future to the past, or vice versa.
He's not joking.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
Good science and emotionally-motivated wishful fantasy don't mix too well. I fear the professor thinks his "time machine" WILL work because he desperately WANTS it to work. Good science occurs when the data comes first, then the hypothesis....
They did.... I mean they will... errr... they do...
Ferget it.
I do agree that the space problem actually might be a bigger problem than the time problem. The earth moves rapidly through space. Unless you could calculate a time where the earth for some odd reason was exactly spinning over the same hunk of space 2 times, which is basically impossible, you would need a space ship to do this. Then you would probably have to travel a long long time to get back to where the earth currently resides. There is no way to predict if you don't pop out in the middle of say the sun, or an asteroid with any certainty. All the supercomputers around today combined would have an impossible time calculating the maths.
Wasn't Einstein motivated to develop Relativity because he was obsessed with the idea of travelling on a light beam?
That's not him...He's Eschoir!
Honestly, I don't know. Perhaps he wondered about what it might be like to travel on a light beam, but I doubt he ever thought it would be physically possible to "ride" on a light beam.
More to the point, the data existed first: the Michaelson-Morley experiment showed that something was wrong with classical physics, and suggested that the speed with which light propagated was invariant regardless of the observer's frame of reference. This is the basic premise of Einstien's Special Relativity: that light travels at the same speed as measured by all observers, regardless of their frame of reference. Starting from this premise, which was suggested by experimental data, Einstein then followed it to the logical conclusion, which was Special Relativity.
This guy is motivated by his father's untimely death to study physics, develop the theory and practice of time travel, returns to a time before his father took up smoking and shows him the Surgeon General's notice on the side of the cigarette package, by which his not-yet-father takes a vow not to smoke, thereby avoiding a painful death from lung cancer at the age of 33, so his son is NOT motivated by his father's untimely death to study physics preferring instead to become a MacDonald's hamburger fryer so time travel IS NOT invented and the hamburger flipper DOES NOT go back to convince his father of the evils of king tobacco and his father DOES take up smoking and DOES die a horrible death which sends us back to the beginning of this merry-go-round!
Yup, I think I understand it...
Hmmm, would the second one have a visitor from the future, too? And the third, and the fourth?
Could this be how the Big Bang started?
And it took some 15 billion years before somebody F's up again? ;-)
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.