Professor's time travel idea fires up the imagination

Boston Globe ^ | 4/5/2002 | David Abel

[Hellmouth]

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.

[Fitzcarraldo]

Meet "The Brother from Another Time".

[longshadow]

Since his father, a heavy smoker, died at the age of 33 when Mallett was 10 years old, Mallett has longed for a way to travel back in time to warn him about the dangers of cigarettes.

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....

[Harrison Bergeron]

"If time travel were possible, someone from the future would've already done it,"

They did.... I mean they will... errr... they do...

Ferget it.

[KevinDavis]

I would go back and stop the begining of Islam.

[dogbyte12]

According to Einstein's theories, if I remember through the hangover I had that day in physics, you could "time travel" by going in a space craft near the speed of light for 10 light years, returning back to earth unaged, while everyone else is 10 years older.

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.

[Fitzcarraldo]

Good science and emotionally-motivated wishful fantasy don't mix too well.

Wasn't Einstein motivated to develop Relativity because he was obsessed with the idea of travelling on a light beam?

[CindyDawg]

Maybe you have. Remember he talked about government control. Americans have to blame someone. Maybe the future is why the present is such a mess. Or it could be the present is responsible for the past..... (lol)

[Risky Schemer]

If I could do it I would just go back two seconds
If I could do it I would just go back two seconds
If I could do it I would just go back two seconds
If I could do it I would just go back two seconds
If I could do it I would just go back two seconds
If I could do it I would just go back two seconds
If I could do it I would just go back two seconds . . .

[Fitzcarraldo]

[Swordmaker]

Are we absolutely certain this was not announced on April 1st?

[MarketR]

I understand that our founder, Bill Mahr, frequented this chat room using the undercover name of "OWK". Have you heard of him?

That's not him...He's Eschoir!

[longshadow]

Wasn't Einstein motivated to develop Relativity because he was obsessed with the idea of travelling on a light beam?

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.

[gcruse]

If the key is a spinning gravitational field, then black holes are the ideal time machines. Unfortunately, since time slows almost to a stop inside the event horizon, no one outside it would ever know the results of the travel. Unless the traveler went back in time and snuck up behind the observer and popped a paper bag!

[Swordmaker]

Let's see... have I got this right?

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...

[T. P. Pole]

With even more energy, it's possible, he believes, a second neutron would appear. The second particle would be the first one visiting itself from the future.

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?

[StriperSniper]

I understand your point about location, how would universal expansion factor into that? (Or would it?)

[StriperSniper]

Could this be how the Big Bang started?

And it took some 15 billion years before somebody F's up again? ;-)

[codebreaker]

Now that's a great movie right there!