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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.
Define "Working Mockup" :)
- This isn't the sig you're looking for. Move along, move along..
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?
I have no idea how physicists approach the question of the creation of a contrafactual timeline which removes its own motive for existing (if his father lived, then he wouldn't create the time machine, and thus etc. etc.) But I think this is more interesting, if tragic, as a story of a man who still misses his father than as a viable line of research.
Say someone in the future develops a time machine using some newly discovered way of exploiting a loophole in the laws of physics. Such a machine would almost certainly be used to travel into the past. And yet in the present, no time travelers from the future have been observed.
I have much more faith in the possibility that a time machine is impossible to construct than the possibility that all time travelers in the future will be so careful that no one will notice them.
Hasn't this story been posted before?
0xB
For most of his career, however, Mallett kept secret that his desire for time travel had drawn him to become a physicist. It wasn't until a few years ago, when he began researching a book on the topic, that he arrived at his idea of how to build a time machine.
Seems to me that's a great reason to become a physicist. Imagine what kind of creativity we could produce if the reply to something like that was "Cool! Here's some books to help you," rather than "You're crazy. That can't happen, so go do something else."
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
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.
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*
like Gott. Great book. Superstrings and all...
They're called "canadians".
My HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCE is on DRUGS.
Time travel is not a new concept, obviously. Time machines have been invented and successfully used for some time now. However, the reason we haven't seen any successful results of them, is that time protects itself from tampering.
If Professor A creates a time machine, and uses it to travel back to the past to alter a certain event, say preventing JFK from getting shot. He may effect the timeline, but he will create a branch at the same time. He will continue along that branch and reality forever.
The rest of us on the main trunk will never see that effect that professor A had on the past, since history has already been written for us. Professor A has been lost forever since he will be living in the history he has created.
You could go back in time, but you will never be able to return to THIS reality. That would be the paradox.
Time travel isn't that big a deal, I mean come on, when you can get a book on How To Build a Time Machine at your local bookstore why are people so amazed at this? The book is real, and it is a serious book (it is not to be confused with the children's book with the same title published previously). The author explains that we know how to travel through time, it is just really expensive at this point. It is a budgetry problem, not a science problem.
This whole interpretation of time travel and the many worlds theory was used quite skillfully in the novel The Proteus Operation by James. P. Hogan in which an american team travels back (from a world where Nazi Germany controls most of the world) to foil Hitler's development of the A-bomb.
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
That the professor is a time traveller?
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I didn't want to leave this space blank.
"The second particle would be the first one visiting itself from the future."
I see two problems with this:
1.) What would keep the particle appearing in the future from appearing in the same spot? Seems like they'd try to occupy the same space..
2.) how will they know it's the same particle? Guage it's spin maybe?
Im concerned that the experiment could produce positive results, but not positively. Kind of like that fusion bubbles thing not too long ago.
Here's a question though: Is it possible this could be a new way to harness energy? Imagine reclaiming energy from the past...
"Derp de derp."
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
If someone in this world time travels, they vanish FOREVER. They can never return to THIS reality,
You see, if they go to the past, it creates a new future, thus a new reality
If they go to the future, its the future but they cant return to the present after they get to the future because the present is no longer the same present, if they return, they'll return to a new present.
basically time travelers arent traveling in time, but traveling through diffrent realities, its more like sliders.
This is based on string theory, and the current ideas of dimensions, and understanding of the multiverse and physics
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When you go to the past, this is assuming time travel to the past is actually possible, it modifies the future, the future is no longer the same. You are now in a totally diffrent dimension, a diffrent reality, one which you created when you entered the time machine.
Time travel is something our minds do on a daily basis, you can imagine future events, sometimes you are right and sometimes you are wrong, traveling into the future allows you to travel into a POSSIBLE future, but no future is THE absolute future,
Time is not mapped, its dynamic, it works like this, everything that can happening, is happening if not in this reality in another.
Its more like sliders than likee the time machine movie, you travel through realities, or mirror universes, according to current theory, its believed theres infinite mirror worlds
A time machine actually isnt a time machine in that sense, its a machine which allows you to go into any reality you want, or create your own reality by modifying the past.
We all create our own reality anyway, the diffrence is with a time machine, YOU have an advantage, you can not only imagine a new reality but literally control the future by modifying the past.
Its like gambling but cheating.
A time machine allows you to essentially cheat.
The reason we dont see anyone coming from the future is, when you travel to the future, the past changes, you can never go back to the original past, if you do go back to the past its a new past thats a mirror of the original one.
I'm convinced anyone who will time travel into the future will never return, basically they'll vanish forever and all will vanish with them
Anyone who travels to the past will vanish forever from our reality
basically time travel is a one way trip.
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Its a known fact based on super stringn theory, that there are other dimensions, up to 11 others, according to M theory, and string theory, and the newest theories in physics, Time travel if it is possible in terms of what we understand from physics, would create a fork in reality where the time traveler would go through the fork in the road and join the future, we'd continue on our own fork in the road and go to our future, this person who time traveled would simply be missing from our reality and placed into the other. It would be a transfer of matter from one reality to the next, like if you create a fork in a pipe and you send a ball through one of the forks, the ball can either split up and be in both forks at once (which i doubt) or the ball can go into one fork or the other.
If the ball goes in both forks at once then they'd be able to return back to our time and tell us what happened, if the ball leaves our reality, it can never return back.
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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?
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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A much simpler explanation for why he hasn't gone back in time to tell himself: If he's able to succeed on his own (that is, without interference from himself), he wouldn't need to. If he isn't, he would never be able to.
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
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.
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.
I have what I think amounts to an interesting theory disproving any possibility of time travel. Perhaps somebody else has already brought this up (not necessarily on Slashdot), but here goes.
I believe that, in this case, "absence of evidence is evidence of absence". In other words, the fact that we don't already know about time travel is evidence that time travel will never be possible. This gets confusing quickly, but if time travel ever becomes possible, somebody will surely travel to what is our past. While early attempts might be "covert" (a la "Back to the Future") to prevent altering the future, this could only be successful for so long. Even if attempts continued to be made to keep it a secret, somebody at some point would have either told somebody that they met in the past or there would have been rumors or something.
But all references that we hear to the possibility of time travel are based in the future, such as this story about a guy who's "going to do it". Of course, we all know he will fail, because otherwise, we would have already known of his success. At the very least, if he was to ever be successful, we would not be living in a world where he was trying to travel in time to save his dad from cigarettes, but rather in a world where his dad had been saved from cigarettes by his son.
In fact, if time travel were to ever be successful, we would have always known about it, and the quest for time travel would not exist.
It gets more interesting and more confusing as you think about it...
RP
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.
I don't think this person is necessarily on crack, though I am skeptical he is going to achieve conclusive evidence of time travel. I would very much like to read a paper on the theory of how this thing is supposed to work.
However, the page you linked to looks to be pretty much a crackpot. Basically, his claim is that since it doesn't make any sense (to him) for time to be relative, it can't be. This is primarily based on an attemt to "reason" if it can be called that, about relatavistic physics based on non relatavistic assumtions.
The big givaway for people who don't understand enough physics to realize this is that he starts off his rant by resorting to namecalling at people who believed things he can't understand and therefore must be impossible, without any evidence other than his lack of understanding.
Take for instance, Godel. He claims, "He is known for his incompleteness theorem, the most obfuscated, non-scientific, chicken feather voodoo nonsense ever penned by a member of the human species... The only thing Gödel proved, in my opinion, was the incompleteness of his frontal lobe."
He never actually even says what he thinks is wrong with Godel's incompleteness theorom, which is probably because there are legions of mathematicians who would dearly love for it to be wrong, but have been unable to find any problem with it. This is the mark of a crackpot. If he can restate his objections in a form more convincing than "this obviously doesn't make any sense" and restrict himself to science and leave the namecalling out of it, I might be inclinded to read it and figure out if it made sense or not.
OK, say you manage to travel through time, via a device located on earth. When you exit, time has passed, or (the opposite) and suddenly you end up in space, alone and unprotected. Why? simply because the earth is NOT in the same place you left it. The revolution of the earth around the sun has occured, and the rotation of the earth around its axis has occured, and the movement of our sun through the galaxy has occured, and the movement of our galaxy has occured, and so on. Therefore any time machine must also be a translocation machine like a transporter in star trek speak. Also it must compute all these variables to place you back at the correct place.
Lousy facepalm.
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.