Slashdot Mirror
Time Travel
Almost Anonymous writes "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 plans to have a working mockup this fall. For all those doubters, he assures people that "I'm not a nut"." Uh-huh.
Where do you find the Plutonium, and the Flux copacitor.
Also can you maybe make it out of, oh i dont know, a ferrari?
It is interesting that he wants to focus light in ways to distort space time. The recent time machine movie alluded to just that technique. Maybe he will go into the future, see a bunch of canabalistic humans then try to come back to warn us but over-shoot the mark and end up talking to HG Wells.
Oh, just an engineering problem. That's great. Maybe after Mallett perfects time travel, he can get to work on cold fusion and a perpetual motion machine.
By the way, that reminds me of the Simpsons where Lisa builds a perpetual motion machine, and shows Homer. Homer gets mad and yells, "Lisa, in this house we obey the Laws of Thermodynamics!!"
I guess this guy doesn't have a Homer to yell at him.
"It's not a war on drugs, it's a war on personal freedom. Keep that in mind at all times." Bill Hicks
If he has a working model nexy fall, why dosn't he just send it back to our time so we have it now?
This could be a first post!
"Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha" (monotone computer-synthesized voice)
- Stephen Hawking
Hasn't this story been posted before?
0xB
Don't you mean "Could send me forward to the first time you have sex"?
0xB
One of us has got to dress up like Ronald Mallett-- all out, with a mask and everything, plus a scorched labcoat and frizzy hair-- and show up at his doorstep.
Slashdotter: Ron! Ron, it's me, your future self! You must listen to me!
Ronald Mallett: Who... who are you? You look like me!
RM: How do I know you're really me, and not a robot imposter from the future?
etc.
Better yet, we can send him an "aged" letter from himself postmarked April 6th, 1843. *evil grin*
They're called "canadians".
My HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCE is on DRUGS.
That the professor is a time traveller?
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I didn't want to leave this space blank.
exactly how in the hell was this article posted at 2:30 anyway?
2:00am - 3:00am didn't happen today...
maybe it was the time machine...
Hey, I have one of these! Aparrently someone else built the thing and disguised it as my washing machine and dryer. I wonder if it was him... and if it was... why in the hell did he build it into a washer and dryer?
;)
Somewhere... out there... in a parallel universe... people get free socks out of thin air. Of course, these socks are always half of a pair. It's not possible to send both socks in a pair into one of these parallel universes. I'm not sure which law of physics this would falls under.
I wonder... if I tied a string to a pair of socks... and one went into the parallel universe and the other remained in my dryer... where would the string lead to? Oh well... I'll leave the string theories to the experts.
-Twilight1
My God. A 10 year-old died of cancer? From smoking cigarettes? And this 10 year-old fathered a son before dying? And that son is now trying to build a time machine? What the hell kind of genes are running in this family???
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
You have to promise me that you'll never do that. You could end up ripping a hole in the space/time continuum! Who knows what could happen! All the socks that ever disappeared could simultaneously materialize in your dryer! Can you imagine the devistation it would cause?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
My God. A 10 year-old died of cancer? From smoking cigarettes? And this 10 year-old fathered a son before dying?
"You obviously don't know Newfies" - Judi Dench as Agnis Hamm in "The Shipping News".
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
unfortunately, this has been posted already.
Sorry to disappoint everyone.
I speak seven different body languages fluently, including ToughGuy and Swinger.
There are many unspeakable horrors that await us if we begin to monkey with this technology; many bizarre paradoxes that we can't predict or even comprehend.
For instance, what if we use a time machine to travel back to the 70's, then we return to the present day. Everything appears normal, but then we go to download some pr0n, and all we can find is cheesey 70's pr0n with bad soundtracks and mediocre women. AAaarrrrgggghhhhh!
Evil is the money of root.
Travelling into the future is no big deal, only technical. theoretically just jump to near light speed a short while, jump back and thousend years will have passed on earth.
However travelling into the past _is_ a big deal, as it questions a lot of physical fundamentals.
Easy: You move back in time by moving *SLOWER* than light. Just sit there and wait..I like the parallel universes explanation mself, but it doesn't solve this. So we won't see any time travelers, fine. Where the hell are all the extra-dimensional sliders coming here for a tour of Bizarro-Earth? "Look folks, on your right, we have the earth where Dubya actually beame president of the united states! As you can see, even the weirdest, most retarded things can happen here..."
I can definitely prove without a doubt, that in 2009, time travel was perfected. So, remembering the slashdot article that inspired me, I decided to come back and let you guys know, so that we could end this silly debate.
Bonus: Intel is going to announce something new on April 15th that will totally kick ass. Look for the share price to jump $50 in the following 2 months.
Note to the SEC: This is a joke, so don't you dare try to prosecute, you asswads.
Subject says it all.
This isn't so far out. I just time travelled this morning somehow. I woke up and somehow during the night I skipped over an hour.
I think this guy should attempt to send me the powerball numbers from the future and I will determine if his time machine works.
http://Lenny.com
after myst came out, i loved it, and wanted to work for cyan on riven. O OO oh course EVERYONE wanted to work for cyan on riven. OOO OOO so i wrote them a letter, on a clay tablet, O OO O explaining that they needed to hire me, so that OOOOO we could discover time travel, so that they OOOO OO could come back in time and save me where i'd OOOOOOOO been stranded by my broken time machine. OOOOO OO OOOOOOOO i got the job anyway. OOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOO K.
Well my young friend I hate to lay a big downer on you but when you take your "required courses in Physics" you will not see enough of this type of material to prove or disprove anything like this. Assuming that you are heading toward a degree in engineering, you are after all reading and posting on SlashDot, you will have to take probably two semesters of introductory, "classic", physics.
Your first year will pound into your head lots of basic F=ma type stuff, and plenty of acceleration is the first derivative of velocity and velocity is the first derivative of position blah blah blah. By they time you finish this semester you will be so tired of figuring out where and when a ball will hit the earth, given that it was thrown at a certain angle and at a certain initial velocity, of course we are neglecting friction due to air.
Your second and last required semester will turn to electricity and magnetism, here let me sum up that semester for you: Electrical fields and Magnetic fields always co-exist orthogonaly.
If you go on to get a minor in physics, as I did, you basically spend a semester or two learning the heavy duty math needed to do heavy duty physics problems yet not taught over in the math dept. Then, you effectually repeat the first semester but no longer neglecting friction. Almost all the problems are impossible to actually solve and you really learn how to accurately estimate solutions, except of course for the really easy ones, which are solvable using coupled differential equations.
Finally, you get to take your upper level electives, one or two may be introductions to quantum physics. I say introductions because all the real juicy stuff is at the PhD level.
At this point none of your questions about time travel will be answered, but you will realize that you need to get you a55 over to your department and finish the degree that will be your bread winner and all your background in physics will do is allow you to do is write a lame post like this on an internet discussion, kind of sad, isn't it?
Maybe we'll finally get to learn what REALLY happens when matter materializes INSIDE OTHER MATTER.
Personally, I believe that the matter is displaced towards the nearest empty area while taking 3d6 damage, but my proof is insufficiently rigorous to post yet.