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Time Travel

Posted by michael on from the gladly-pay-you-tuesday-for-a-hamburger-today dept.

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.

7 of 1,071 comments (clear)

  1. Re:hey... by $uperjay · · Score: 2, Informative
    It's because in some theories of time travel, you get younger as you go back. This (sort of) gets around the meeting-yourself problem, as well as not horribly screwing up thermodynamics, because it conserves the amount of matter and energy in the universe (by not making duplicates of you). This has a few implications, if it is true:
    • You and your time machine had better stay put for a while, or you'll end up moving to where you were at the target time when you timetravel.
    • You'd better hope that your time machine is younger than you, or you might time travel to before you were born - and there's not a heck of a lot you can do when you're just a sperm and an egg!
    • You probably won't remember anything, because your brain will return to its prior state when you travel back in time. Bad!
    • Should you go back in time and then scuttle your time machine or otherwise prevent yourself from time-traveling back, icky bad stuff will happen!
    • Finally, since you and everything around you will be exactly as it was at the target time, you probably won't change anything at all - because you won't even know you've gone back in time!
    All these effects, in sum, make time travel pretty useless. S'not a great theory in my boat, actually.
  2. Re:He's either a fruit that's a little nutty... by doooras · · Score: 3, Informative

    like Gott. Great book. Superstrings and all...

  3. Re:Umm particles from the future? by wagnerer · · Score: 2, Informative

    Pauli exclusion principle.

  4. Facts and Theories by sterno · · Score: 5, Informative

    Fact: Knowledge or information based on real occurrences

    Theory: A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomenon

    You cannot base a fact on a theory, but rather it's the other way around, basing a theory on a fact. Superstring theory is just that, a theory We have, at this point, no practical way to determine the results of time travel since we have no way to time travel (with the possible exception of sitting here and waiting a while).

    While I tend to think superstring theory, from what I understand of it, makes sense, lets not go suggesting that it is in any way a fact. Hopefully in time we will find enough facts to suggest whether it is the correct theory or not.

    --
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  5. -pedantic by Iffy+Bonzoolie · · Score: 2, Informative

    In line at Back to the Future: The Ride at Universal Studios Hollywood they said 1.2 Jigowatts...

    -If

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    Run a pencil-and-paper RPG campaign with your far-off friends: Gametable!
  6. Re:Waves of light by kaiidth · · Score: 2, Informative

    Incidentally, here's the actual paper, the one referred to from the guy's own web site (minimal), published in Phys. Lett. A... Gravitational Field of Circulating Light Beams.

    Beware; it's a little drier than the Boston Globe would like to make it...

    I say the actual paper; in fact, this particular paper naturally doesn't make any suggestions of the "Hey, look, this research gives me a way to go back in time and save my father from the evils of cigarettes" type - if it did, it would never have made it into any serious journals. Mallett mentions two papers on his site, one on Bose-Einstein condensation and dark matter, one on this...

    He has done other work - this , for example, not to mention work on Hawking radiation and probably a bunch of other stuff. His newest one is apparently "Gravitational Perturbations of a Radiating Spacetime", which looks relevant, not to mention full of terrifying maths. "The principal aim of our study is to understand how gravitational waves are scattered by a background radiating spacetime".

  7. Disappointing by Christopher+Danforth · · Score: 2, Informative

    Its too bad the Boston Globe article was the only one posted in this story. It does not go into any detail on his actual ideas. I suggest reading:
    USA Today
    ABC News
    Mallett's Personal Homepage