Professor Predicts Human Time Travel This Century

[Eva]

physics nuts: is this posible?




Ronald Mallett, Professor at the University of Connecticut, has used Einstein’s equations to design a time machine with circulating laser beams. While his team is still looking for funding, he hopes to build and test the device in the next 10 years.
With a brilliant idea and equations based on Einstein’s relativity theories, Ronald Mallett from the University of Connecticut has devised an experiment to observe a time traveling neutron in a circulating light beam. While his team still needs funding for the project, Mallett calculates that the possibility of time travel using this method could be verified within a decade.

Black holes, wormholes, and cosmic strings – each of these phenomena has been proposed as a method for time travel, but none seem feasible, for (at least) one major reason. Although theoretically they could distort space-time, they all require an unthinkably gigantic amount of mass.

Mallett, a U Conn Physics Professor for 30 years, considered an alternative to these time travel methods based on Einstein’s famous relativity equation: E=mc2.

“Einstein showed that mass and energy are the same thing,” said Mallett, who published his first research on time travel in 2000 in Physics Letters. “The time machine we’ve designed uses light in the form of circulating lasers to warp or loop time instead of using massive objects.”

To determine if time loops exist, Mallett is designing a desktop-sized device that will test his time-warping theory. By arranging mirrors, Mallett can make a circulating light beam which should warp surrounding space. Because some subatomic particles have extremely short lifetimes, Mallett hopes that he will observe these particles to exist for a longer time than expected when placed in the vicinity of the circulating light beam. A longer lifetime means that the particles must have flowed through a time loop into the future.

“Say you have a cup of coffee and a spoon,” Mallett explained to PhysOrg.com. “The coffee is empty space, and the spoon is the circulating light beam. When you stir the coffee with the spoon, the coffee – or the empty space – gets twisted. Suppose you drop a sugar cube in the coffee. If empty space were twisting, you’d be able to detect it by observing a subatomic particle moving around in the space.”

And according to Einstein, whenever you do something to space, you also affect time. Twisting space causes time to be twisted, meaning you could theoretically walk through time as you walk through space.

“As physicists, our experiments deal with subatomic particles,” said Mallett. “How soon humans will be able to time travel depends largely on the success of these experiments, which will take the better part of a decade. And depending on breakthroughs, technology, and funding, I believe that human time travel could happen this century.”

Step back a minute (sorry, only figuratively). How do we know that time is not merely a human invention, and that manipulating it just doesn’t make sense?

“What is time? That is a very, very difficult question,” said Mallett. “Time is a way of separating events from each other. Even without thinking about time, we can see that things change, seasons change, people change. The fact that the world changes is an intrinsic feature of the physical world, and time is independent of whether or not we have a name for it.

“To physicists, time is what’s measured by clocks. Using this definition, we can manipulate time by changing the rate of clocks, which changes the rate at which events occur. Einstein showed that time is affected by motion, and his theories have been demonstrated experimentally by comparing time on an atomic clock that has traveled around the earth on a jet. It’s slower than a clock on earth.”

Although the jet-flying clock regained its normal pace when it landed, it never caught up with earth clocks – which means that we have a time traveler from the past among us already, even though it thinks it’s in the future.

Some people show concern over time traveling, although Mallett – an advocate of the Parallel Universes theory – assures us that time machines will not present any danger.

“The Grandfather Paradox [where you go back in time and kill your grandfather] is not an issue,” said Mallett. “In a sense, time travel means that you’re traveling both in time and into other universes. If you go back into the past, you’ll go into another universe. As soon as you arrive at the past, you’re making a choice and there’ll be a split. Our universe will not be affected by what you do in your visit to the past.”

In light of this causal “safety,” it’s kind of ironic that what prompted Mallett as a child to investigate time travel was a desire to change the past in hopes of a different future. When he was 10 years old, his father died of a heart attack at age 33. After reading The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, Mallett was determined to find a way to go back and warn his father about the dangers of smoking.

This personal element fueled Mallett’s perseverance to study science, master Einstein’s equations, and build a professional career with many high notes. Since the ‘70s, his research has included quantum gravity, relativistic cosmology and gauge theories, and he plans to publish a popular science/memoir book this November 2006. With help from Bruce Henderson, the New York Times best-selling author, the book will be called Time Traveler: A Physicist’s Quest For The Ultimate Breakthrough.

By Lisa Zyga, Copyright 2006 PhysOrg.com

[Choobus]

It's unusual for tenured professors to come out with this sort of thing, unless they have a book coming out and are close to retirement age.

[Eva]

so, is it bullshit or not?

[Choobus]

I don't know because the article says almost nothing about the science. But I'm highly skeptical since lasers do not bend spacetime in my experience, and neutrons are not likely to be affected by lasers in any way.

[Eva]

soooo, he's just mentally wanking......

ok.
goes to show it always pays to go to the professionals.

[Choobus]

Eva wrote

soooo, he's just mentally wanking......

ok.
goes to show it always pays to go to the professionals.

there's nothing wrong with mentally wanking; just don't try to come on my face and tell me you're Feynman.

If this idea has any merit it will get funded. If not (as I suspect) it won't.

Here's why it's bullshit:

If you could travel back in time, it would be done at some point in the future. If it is done in the future, it will be used to gank the past... leaving evidence of itself in the process. In order to believe that it WON'T be used to gank the past, you have to believe that EVERY HUMAN in the future has such high ethical standards they wouldn't use it to examine or change the past.

I think I'd put my money on Pascal's wager first.

[Tenspace]

Points to ponder:

Ren, you are right, but keep in mind that he is not saying you could travel to a time before the machine's existence. Using short-lived particles example, the machine was built before the particles were inserted, so no problems there.

The past is unobtainable, regardless of the specific reason. Maybe it's my timeless theory. Maybe it's the Deutsch theory that travel to the past is actually travel to other universes. Whatever it might be, I propose that 1) if it is possible, then someone in the future has already figured it out, and 2) it is not lethal to our existence, because we are still here.

Choobus, this is an idea that's been floating aroud for awhile (I first heard of it about two years ago) - it builds off the anomalies discovered by rotating laser beams. I don't know if this analogy flies, but for the same reason particles make multiple laps around an accelerator, building relativistic speed, that laser energy could somehow accumulate through rotation. I shall see if I can find more on this for everyone.

[Tenspace]

By the way, the lasers I'm referring to are atom lasers that utilize a BEC as the stimulated emission source.

[Jahrta]

RenaissanceMan wrote

Here's why it's bullshit:

If you could travel back in time, it would be done at some point in the future. If it is done in the future, it will be used to gank the past... leaving evidence of itself in the process. In order to believe that it WON'T be used to gank the past, you have to believe that EVERY HUMAN in the future has such high ethical standards they wouldn't use it to examine or change the past.

I think I'd put my money on Pascal's wager first.

What? You've never seen Time Cop? There will be a goverment-funded group with unimagineable funding and power that will be tasked with policing time travel - guh. And who better to trust with something as potentially devastating as time travel than the gubermint?

What? Are you saying that Doctor Who isn't real? Noooooooo!

I had such high hopes that he'd show up, and I'd get to be his new time traveling companion.

[Jahrta]

Yes, the good doctor could use a hot lesbian as a sidekick :)

[anthonyjfuchs]

Tenspace wrote

Ren, you are right, but keep in mind that he is not saying you could travel to a time before the machine's existence. Using short-lived particles example, the machine was built before the particles were inserted, so no problems there.

The past is unobtainable, regardless of the specific reason. Maybe it's my timeless theory. Maybe it's the Deutsch theory that travel to the past is actually travel to other universes. Whatever it might be, I propose that 1) if it is possible, then someone in the future has already figured it out, and 2) it is not lethal to our existence, because we are still here.

I've read the theory that if time travel were possible, and changing the past were also in turn possible, then each change to the past would result in an altered timeline. Following that to its conclusion, it is almost certain that enough changes to the past will eventually lead to a timeline in which time travel is never invented/discovered. It is also possible that our current timeline is that timeline.

Two. I don't go anywhere alone, you know.

For the record, I tend to agree with Ren. Time travel into the past is impossible. Traveling into the future isn't time travel, it's just skipping a bit--unless you can return to the present(That is, the point you left from). Which would violate the same laws as traveling into the past(before the time you left from).

Douglas Adams had a bit about strip-mining the past as an energy source, I seem to recall. It'd be about right, too, with the added bonus of turning it into a battleground, as each side of the conflict tried to keep the other from forming.

[Single Serving Jack]

Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding the idea here but if you scale up his desktop 'time machine' to bung your run of the mill human bean in it, it doesn't appear to me that it would be much use.

You have your new room-sized time-warpin' machine ready to go. Subject walks into machine, shuts door. Scientist flicks switch to turn on machine. Say they plan to send the subject one week into his future - now the machine doesn't actually freeze his subjective time, just slows it, right? So from the scientists point of view it could take two weeks of machine running to slow the subjects time enough for him to lose a week? Seems a bit pointless - after the two weeks the subject would leave the machine having only aged a week (so from his point of view travelled a week into the future).

Unless you're mega-rich and can afford a machine that can warp time enough to slow down the subject's time massively and have the machine running non-stop for a couple of centuries (presumably by the scientists grandchildren by then) in some secure bunker somewhere, it just wouldn't be worth the bother would it?

Ok I've just read that back and I have a feeling I've got it ALL wrong somehow. :D