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.

Comments

Waves of light

[naoursla]

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.

From the article...

[Silver222]

While Mallett acknowledges that sending a person through time may require more energy than physicists today know how to harness, he sees it merely as "an engineering problem."

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.

hey...

[DanThe1Man]

If he has a working model nexy fall, why dosn't he just send it back to our time so we have it now?

Re:Haiku

[0xB]

Don't you mean "Could send me forward to the first time you have sex"?

Awesome idea....

[Herak]

Alright guys...

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!

/.er: Listen to me. DO NOT build the time travel device! You'll ruin everything! You must understand-- the fabric of spacetime will tear! The universe will be doomed!!

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*

Have you considered the possibility

[xX_sticky_Xx]

That the professor is a time traveller?

Re:The best he can build is a disintegration chamb

[Twilight1]

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

Re:Poignant.

[Anthony Boyd]

he wants to go back in time and warn his father, who died of cancer when he was 10, of the danger of cigarettes.

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???

Dude...

[Greyfox]

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?

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?