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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.

3 of 1,071 comments (clear)

  1. The best he can build is a disintegration chamber by Cogos · · Score: 5, Insightful

    According to the quote in the article there is a big flaw in the plan"If his idea pans out, won't there be a host of potential paradoxes, such as time travelers killing their parents and making it impossible for them to exist? No, he says, explaining that those travelers would continue to exist in a ''parallel universe.''

    In other words, anyone or anything sent into the past create some sort of parallel universe. Which means we will never see any evidence that the time machine works. At best he'll be able to create an effect where you toss something in and it disappears. Sounds to me like a great way to get rid of garbage but a less than ideal way to travel.

    Of course there should also be plenty of parallel universes where stray neutrons, lab rats, and grad students will appear out of no where. THOSE timelines will have proof time travel works. But unless that happens I'm not getting into any so called time machine.

  2. One little problem - reference system by vlad_petric · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Assuming that an object can travel backwards in time, it does it relative to a reference systems. What would that reference system be ? The Sun ? The center of the galaxy ? The center of the universe ? I definitely don't like the idea of being teleported into dark, empty space.

    Well, it could be the machine, but that means you can only go back to the moment when the machine started funtioning. So I don't really buy the father thing. (April 1st joke, I guess)

    Vlad

    --

    The Raven

  3. Slashdot at its best by Jay+L · · Score: 5, Insightful

    As we all know, Slashdot is mostly about a bunch of geeks arguing about topics they don't really know about but claim to be experts on. (And yes, I include myself in that group for most values of "topic".)

    This article is about time travel. None of us are in the field. None of us have done it. None of us have seen anyone else do it. Few, if any, of us have read a single front-to-back thesis on which the proto-science is based, or anything else more detailed than SciAm. Yet the thread now has SEVEN HUNDRED COMMENTS, filled with the usual "I hate to introduce facts into the conversation" and "No, no, you just don't get how it works!"

    It doesn't get any better than this.