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.

[PMCarey]

I like Niven's Law on Time Travel. Basically the law states:

If time travel is possible and time travel enabled one to change the past, then no time travel machine will ever be invented.

Here's the proof:

Assume that time travel is possible and one can change the past. Then, as people travel back in time, "reality" is in constant flux as the past changes again and again. This will continue until the past in changed in such a way that no time travel machine is ever invented, anywhere, at anytime. Once that happens, reality is fixed with no time machines ever being invented.

[alley cat]

There would be government laws to control time travel, he believes.

Oh, great! Those will work about as well as our current immigration laws.

[WRhine]

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.

Qwest Communications rides on a light beam. Or is that a blight beam?

[PatrickHenry]

Worth a ping.

[mcsparkie]

While Mallett acknowledges that sending a person through time may require more energy than physicists today know how to harness,

The problem here is , that what is observable for elementary particles is never observed for macroscopic objects, like people. You can send a particle through a potential barrier easily enough, but it is harder to send a person through a brick wall. What this guy needs is to work on sending people through brick walls first, then send them through time.

Isn't that what grad students are for?

[Fitzcarraldo]

An isolated neutron has a half-life of 1013 seconds, decaying into a proton, electron and neutrino.

Assume Hallett puts a collection of free neutrons into a trap, he will measure decay products at a predictable rate.

Hallett now turns on his light circulator, he puts the neutrons into closed timelike spacetime trajectories.

What does he now observe, zero decay products (because decay now occurs in the past? Does he measure decays products before he turns on the circulator?

[mcsparkie]

I would go back and stop the begining of Islam.

Maybe Muhammad was a time traveler, who went back to make himself into a god.

[mcsparkie]

The "Back to the Future" series of movies highlights some of the problems and paradoxes of time travel. If you go back to the past, you will undoubtedly obliterate the very timeline that gave you your own existence. You will have no home to return to, or it will be different in a lot of ways. Then you can only hope to go back to the past again and prevent yourself from screwing up the future in the first place.

[sourcery]

Check out post #20.

[IonInsights]

I had this same idea. Except put the lasers on a giant space station in solar orbit. Giant solar panels would generate the amount of energy needed. The cylindrical space station would have laser beams and billions of mirrors to reflect the laser energy. A spacecraft, with a mission to travel through time and space, would fly at high speed through the center of the space station, and would be bathed in high energy laser light, causing it to shift its reality to a different space-time continuim.

[Scully]

Thanks for the ping, PH.

Don't we have some evidence that certain subatomic particles travel "backwards" in time? Perhaps I read about this somewhere a few years ago...(no pun intended)

[Scully]

Isn't that what grad students are for?

Ouch! I remember those days all too clearly. :(

[PatrickHenry]

The whole concept is absurd. Just imagine if lots of people had a time machine. Think of the crowds trying to change history at various well-known events. Millions of people trying to storm the Book Depository in Dallas would make the place look like the biggest battlefield in the world. Virtually every event would be constantly changed and re-changed, and the time travelers would be getting into fistfights -- or worse -- trying to interfere with each other. If this guy's technology works, that's the world we'd be living in. And we're not.

[Preech1]

Well, just before doing the time travel experiment, could we...um...test the power of those lasers and focus them on Baghdad or Meccah??? Just an idea...

[john in missouri]

 

The man who invents time travel?

[B. A. Conservative]

Too late. Five thousand Democrats already did that in Chicago during the Kenndy/Nixon election.

[longshadow]

Don't we have some evidence that certain subatomic particles travel "backwards" in time?

I believe that certain quantum events can be analyzed by treating it as though a particle were traveling backward in time, but I don't believe that the particles ACTUALY travel backwards in time.

[PatrickHenry]

Don't we have some evidence that certain subatomic particles travel "backwards" in time?

Donno. I once had an idea for a silly time-travel story, about a guy whose digestive tract was twisted though the 4th dimension and it was a day ahead of time. The appearance of his, ah ... stool in the morning would tell him whether the stock market would go up that day. And if it went up (and he made money) he would have to gobble pimentos or something that night, to give himself the signal that he had already received that morning. Well, he gets himself into a roaring bull market, and he's gobbling tons of pimentos every night, and his wife thinks he's nuts, but he's making a fortune. I never figured out an ending. And I can't imagine that anyone would publish it anyway.