a scientist called prof ron mallet claims he has nearly invented a time machine http://www.ric.edu/news/archive/news_012903_uconn.html
what are your thoughts on this subject as it facinating and mind boggling
I’m traveling through time right now! Into the future! At the rate of one day every 24 hours. 
But anyway, I wouldn’t be surprised if time travel were possible. I would, however, be shocked if such a machine was on the brink of being created at the present time.
Traveling forward is happening all the time. Suspended animation or near light speed travel could alter ones aging in relation to normal time, but going backwards presents a problem.
You are moving 1000 miles/min right now. The Earth is orbiting the sun. The sun is orbiting the center of the galaxy. Where exactly was the Earth one month ago. How could a time machine compute that location within a 1/10th of an inch. Being off by a foot might put you in the floor. I’ve never seen this mentioned in a time travel story.
Dal Timgar
what it was i saw this program on this professor on discovery channel they went deep into the idea of time travel after about 30 mins my brain was boiling taking it all in they went into scenarios of a paradox and multiverses the latter being the idea of how you could go back in time i had a discussion bout it with some friends which lead to arguing which was fun personally i think maybe we could travel forwards for instance if you sat on the edge of a black hole and could see the earth for you a year would be say 50 years on earth hence you’ve technically gone forwards in time
Time travel is very possible, it seems.
Time travelling forwards is (relatively) straight forward, time dilation as you approach the speed of light will take care of that.
Some theoretical physicists say that it probably doesn’t break and known laws of nature to travel back in time but the jury is still out of that. They involve forming a stabilitised worm hole in space with the enterence close to the exit, probably stabilised with negative energy (umm, cite and another cite).
Besides, to go from a theoretical model to a practical solution is eff’ing difficult.
From what I am given to understand, there is, surprisingly, no theoretical objection to time travel, as far as quantum physics goes.
The device described could, if I understand it correctly, possibly work.
However, the energy needed would be… of immense scale, enough to create a naked singularity, literally, a black hole.
Posted by Dal Timgar:
Check out Spider Robinson’s new novel, Callahan’s Con (Tor, 2003).
Seriously, I was going to write exactly this story once; I planned to keep it fairly simply by making them able to ‘lock’ the machine to the solar system’s centre of mass, but because of all kinds of wobbles in orbits, it would mean that you couldn’t travel from every moment in time on Earth, to every other moment in time on Earth, so you could have delicious little scenarios like: “yes, we can get home in five hops from here, but one of them is on the surface of the moon, one of the others is in London during the great fire and another is smack in the triassic at a point where our topographic database is dangerously sketchy. By another route, we could do it in three hops, but we don’t have the energy reserves - conservation of momentum would flatten us on the second insertion.”
News articles on time travel (or FTL travel, or teleportation, etc) are generally empty of content. A summary of the article linked is:
- A lot of fluff.
- Some buzzwords.
- A decent paragraph on the basic grandfather paradox, though no mention of the possible resolutions.
- A brief word of GR (general relativity or here “bending space”) presented as if it’s Mallet’s crackpot theory.
- GR and ‘circular lasers’ may warp space allowing time travel.
For people interested try a FAQ like http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/GR/time_travel.html (and check out the whole FAQ if you have time, it could be useful)
My incomplete understanding is that:
- GR theoretically permits time travel.
- If so, the effect would be that you could go for a long walk and end up where and when you started.
- But only if the universe is the right shape (a 4d sphere or plane wouldn’t do, a 4d donut might, etc…) which it probably isn’t.
- There may be ways of distorting space (with gravity) to create this effect artificially, but no-one’s sure, and many people are made nervous by the idea.
- What happens if I try and shoot my earlier self? We’re not sure if quantum mechanics necessarily gives these sorts of paradoxes (in which case time travel must be impossible somehow) or not.
In this case, I guess Mallet has designed an experiment to try and use a physical effect (the gravity of a laser, apparently) to be bend space into an appropriate shape. There’s probably something in it, as someone must be bankrolling him.
As to if it’ll work, who knows? It’d be a revolution if it did, though time-ships’ll probably never appear. And don’t worry, there’s lots of quantum effects we know about which sounds pretty paradoxical, but physics survived those.
Any actual physicists want to chime in?
Is time travel possible?
I’ll tell you last week.
well then get me the last week’s lotto numbers, too.
It sounds like a potentially more likely/interesting spinoff from this research would be artificial gravity.
It’s nonsense. Time travel (backwards) inevitably creates absurdity and it is thus impossible. If you allow the possibility of absurdity you can no longer rely on physics to prove that time travel is possible, as physics depend on logic.
To quote Prof. Ron Mallett (from the above article): [Y]ou can’t go somewhere else in time and make changes that will affect your present. The dynamics predicted by quantum theory won’t let you.
A common mistake in science fiction (and apparently by Prof. Ron Mallett) is to think that “changes that will affect your present” are limited to “big” changes, like killing your grandfather. However, sending as much as a single photon back in time will affect your present (very slightly).
Why is it that every article, book, tv show, or lecture on time travel in the last 50 years mentions the grandfather paradox? I think people get it already, you can’t kill your grandfather! sheesh!
anyway…
This viewpoint (as well as the dreaded grandfather paradox) assumes that there is only one universe (read: one instance of space-time). If in fact, there are an infinite number of universes, as many theories and developing models may suggest, none of the paradoxes would matter when traveling through time. You would simply effect another universe (read: space-time continuum). Of course, this would mean that you would never be able to affect your own past, which is half the fun of time travel, but it also means you can do it without destroying the universe.
Goes to read shade’s posted FAQ
Staale Nordlie:
The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics gets round the paradox problem quite easily. Essentially if you went back in time and changed something, a new universe is created. If you then go forward in time you’re not actually going back to where you started, but you moving forward in that new universe you have created.
For instance, if you go back and kill your mother you create a new universe where your mother dies, and you never exist. The universe that lead to your birth is totally unaffected. Basically you would then be living in a universe you created yourself!
Don’t think this is a crackpot theory either - it is a perfectly valid interpretation of quantum mechanics, and noone has even been able to prove it is incorrect.
Travelling to a different universe is not time travel.
Clarification (?) to my above post: One could argue that every universe has a “different time” by definition. (What is time?) In that case, any journey to a different universe is technically “time travel” (going from one time to another). But that’s just a logical side effect of “universe travel” and not how the term is normally used.
A many-worlds type explanation would fit Back to the Future and Terminator, wouldn’t they?
I think most people would describe these as ‘time travel.’ If anyone wants to give a more exact definition I’ll use it, but I assumed it was being used in the colloquial sense.
For that matter, if everything I do splits off another universe, you could say “Travel to another universe isn’t going forward in time” but I’m still sort of going forward in time,
get ready for a whole load of time travel discussions and articles. i believe michale crieghton’s timeline book is coming out later this summer.
if i remember correctly, his book subscribes to the multiverse theory.