Ronald L. Mallett
Ph.D., Professor of Physics
Oh my God... the "Anti-Methamphetamine Child Protection Safety Enforcement Time Travel Act of 2034"
After what they've done in the name of regulating interstate commerce, imagine when they can file stuff under regulation of interdimensional commerce...
and to tell him to buy Microsoft at $5.
Great. Just great. The first time traveller is a liberal. He'll come back from the Constitutional Convention and report that the intention of the founding fathers was for government to babysit us all.
This could very well mean that I have the secret to time travel in my very own garage, and possibly my wife's walk-in closet.
I have a question.. Where was the earth physically located (in the universe) 20 years ago? If he sends a person back in time, and time only, they will flail about, suffocating in outer space! The solar system and thus the earth, travel at a good clip in orbit around the galactic center. He better send em back in a spaceship.
If time travel were possible, someone from the future would've already done it, and they'd be here now, showing us the way out of all our problems... But they aren't.
Yes, you are!
Put your money on Guth.
Gravitational Field of Circulating Light Beams
In Einstein's general theory of relativity, energy as well as matter produces gravity. This means that the energy of a pure light beam can gravitationally affect matter. A portion of my current research deals with considering the gravitational field produced by a single continuously circulating beam of light in a unidirectional ring laser. It is predicted that a spinning neutral particle, when placed in the ring, is dragged around by the resulting gravitational field (Mallett, R.L. 2000. Weak gravitational field of the electromagnetic radiation in a ring laser. Phys. Lett. A 269: 214).
Another aspect of this research explores the effect on time of the unidirectional circulating light beam. It is shown that an increase in the intensity of the beam of light results in the formation of closed loops in time.
Cosmic Degenerate Bose-Einstein Dark Matter
In collaboration with Mark P. Silverman of the Department of Physics of Trinity College, a general relativistically covariant theory of a self coupled scalar field has been developed as a possible solution of the missing mass problem. We have shown that spontaneous symmetry breaking of a neutral scalar field coupled to gravity leads directly to ultra-low mass bosons, with a critical temperature far above the temperature of the universe, for most of its duration. The particles are therefore expected to condense into a degenerate Bose Einstein gas, providing a potential candidate for nonbaryonic nonluminous matter (Silverman, M.P. and R.L. Mallett. 2001. Cosmic degenerate matter: a possible solution to the problem of missing mass. Class. Quantum Grav. 18 L37).
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....
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.
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?
Oh, great! Those will work about as well as our current immigration laws.
