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 ...
CPT invariance, which is necessarily respected by quantum field theories, implies that a positron is mathematically equivalent to a negatively charged electron travelling backwards in time. This cannot be exploited to violate causality, however. Electrons have no "hair": they are quantum-mechanically indistinguishable from each other, so there is no way for information to be written onto an electron and shipped somewhere. Information can be encoded only into arrangements of electrons or positrons, and those arrangements (owing to the causal structure of spacetime) move strictly forward in time. Information only goes one way.
You can interpret CPT invariance however you like. I prefer to think of positrons as being time-retarded electrons, because it greatly simplifies the conceptual picture of quantum electrodynamics. If you want to propagate an electron from point A to point B, all you have to do is add up, with an appropriate weighting scheme, all possible paths from A to B, including those paths that go forwards and backwards in time, and you get the correct wavefunction.
One morning he wakes up and doesn't, er, evacuate at all. He decides that this is a really bad sign, divests himself of everything, and sells short. Hours later, a coup is announced in China, and the communist system is overthrown for free-market capitalism. The world markets shoot upwards, and he loses everything and more. That night, in an attempt to undo the damage, our hero gobbles as many pimentos as his stomach can hold...so many that he constipates himself.
Not bad. I had envisioned him installing a bank of phones in the john, so he could call his brokers all over the world as soon as he got his "market signal." And as his diet of pimentos grew steadily more demanding, and his health deteriorated, he had to spend more and more time in the john, waiting with his phones for the "signal," emerging only to acquire and devour ever more pimentos ... and of course he's hopelessly hooked, because when he gets a profitable signal, he has no recourse but to consume more pimentos, because he can't afford NOT to send the signal ... so he's hopelessly trapped in his market manipulations, his pimento binging, and his increasingly erratic "signaling" system ... and that's where I didn't know how to end it. I never thought of your scenario. This (thankfully) unwritten tale is titled: The Man Whose Colon Traveled through Time.
Hillary Clinton cornered the commodities futures market for pimentos.
Y'know, I try to tell a pleasant little story, and you have to go and make it nasty.
hey, you want your story published?
Political intrigue, crime, and deviant sex are mandatory requirements if you want it to ever get published.
Hillary delivers on all accounts.
BUT but but......... they are already doing that.
Ever hear og little gray men....... or is that green.
Oh, please. You just put a new spin on that old TV series "Time Tunnel", that's all. Only instead of running through a time tunnel, the tunnel runs through them, in a manner of speaking.
Ick. Whit Bissel would not approve.
According to Albert Einstien, if you could exceed the speed of light(186,000mps)then you will experience negative time. Nothing we have observed does this, but he also argued that it wouldn't be detectable to us, because of the our frame of reference. Hence the time/space traveler's need for his own frame of reference, which Al dubbed Special Relativity.
IOW: To return to a previous time, you also must travel to it's previous place. To travel to a future time, you must travel to it's future place, (all at faster than light speed)which is potentially risky if you are without life support. Any error, no matter how small could have very profound consequenses. No thanks, not this guy.
Now if you could send just a message back on a beam to a proir location, say just an hour....say the right six numbers... Now you can see why I need the vectored speed :-) It's also a bit of a paradox as it would take all you could win to build and send said message:-)
P.S. Don't think about all this too hard or you will realize the reason that you are always tired, will argue that you were going much faster, when that policeman gives you a ticket for going 70 in a 55, and you will make those that invest in headace remedies richer than they already are.
By the way, I highly recommend the short story, 'The Billiard Ball' by Isaac Asimov to anybody out there who enjoys short stories. If I recall, it is included in Asimov's I, Robot.
typo man strikes again!
Likewise for reverse time travel. Clues might not exist in the present for such travel.
Now the age-old/new argument will evolve....When chad hunters from the DNC traveled back in time to the 2000 Presidential Elections to change the Florida outcome, did they succeed in a parallel universe? Or did the conservative physicists succeed in reversing their actions to wit nobody knows the better?
Thank you, this clarifies the issue for me.
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