News & Analysis
ESC Chicago keynote makes case for time travel
Karen Field
6/8/2010 3:55 PM EDT
And that day, Mallett claimed, is not so far in the future as one might think.
“Time travel one of mankind’s oldest fantasies. But is it really possible? All of us have wondered what’s going to happen in the future, and we’ve contemplated the question, ‘What if I could back and change something in my past?” said Mallet. “I am here to tell you we are on the threshold of making time travel a reality, and it’s based on real physics.”
Author of “Time Traveler: A Scientist’s Personal Mission to Make Time Travel a Reality,” Mallett explained how the trauma of his father’s unexpected death when he was just ten and H.G. Well’s book The Time Machine set him on a mission to travel back in time and save his father’s life. “Thankfully, I was astute enough not to tell other people about my plan—they were already worried about me,” Mallett .
That mission became a lifelong preoccupation, though Mallet says that for many years he used “black holes” as his cover story. “Black holes were considered a crazy idea, but legitimate crazy. That’s what helped me survive academia,” he said. “It wasn’t until I got tenure and was made a full professor that I came out of the time travel closet.”
Now other theoretical physicists are looking at time travel, he said, and people are working with him to verify his theories, which are based on Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Mallett did an admirable job explaining the theory, which shows the real possibility of using light to manipulate time, with no math and in less than ten minutes. Possibly it helped that the audience was mainly engineers.
How weird it must have been, he mused, for 19th century scientists to discover through their experiments that the speed of light was constant.
“The only way that speed of light can stay the same is that something else has to be altered. That something else is time—it has to slow down, as experiments have shown,” he said. He described a 1971 experiment conducted by the Naval Observatory, in which one atomic clock was kept stationary, and another atomic clock was put on an ordinary passenger jet and flown around world at the speed of sound. The clock on the passenger jet had slowed down--it had lost time exactly way Einstein had predicted.
According to Einstein’s theory, gravity will also cause clocks to slow down. Mallett pointed out that everyone in the room was familiar with the phenomenon. He described how early GPS systems did not work properly because engineers failed to take into account that the ground-based units were running noticeably lower than the clocks onboard the satellite. “They actually had to use Einstein’s theory to correct the problem.”
Because of the strong gravitational force associated with a black hole, Mallett pointed out that it could be used as a kind of natural time machine, though the fact that you’d be ripped apart in the process might not be so pleasant.
Mallett’s time machine, based upon a ring laser’s properties, may be a more practical approach. His theory of a time machine, he explained, involves creating a circulating beam of light. The energy would produce a gravitational field, which could then be exploited to produce a mechanism for time travel. He’s currently seeking funding for further experiments.
He concluded by acknowledging that although he believes we truly are on the threshold of time travel technically, it’s important to realize that it’s only the moment that counts. “I want you all to enjoy your journey through time,” he concluded.
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Patrick Mannion
6/9/2010 7:50 AM EDT
It was, like you said, a pretty mind-bending discussion. I was going to ask him afterward: If we invent time travel in the future, how come no-one's coming back to tell us about it?
Of course, then he brought up the whole grandfather paradox (if you prevent your grandparents from getting hitched, you can never be born) and the notion that if you travel back in time you're actually in a parallel universe. What happened before, continues to happen in the 'other' universe, but in your 'new' universe, things happen differently. So, I guess people are by now (define 'now'?) bouncing all over time in different parallel universes, so I guess they can't tell us 'here' about it. We'll have to figure it out ourselves...
Does anyone see light at the end of the time-tunnel here?
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SallyF
6/9/2010 12:52 PM EDT
Mallet is simply wrong. Physics is not mathematics. At a macroscopic scale thermodynamics is clear proof that a complex system cannot reorder itself. Complex systems that change over time experience entropy and re-ordering such a system requires not only energy input but guidance at the quantum scale and knowledge of each state of each quantum particle at every instant in the system's history. Re-ordering would be no different than recreating the system at an infinite number of time slices. Thus time reversal of complex systems is not achievable and "time-travel" is an imaginary concept. Mallet should consider that there is more to existence than the material measurable universe and search for the maker who is capable of restoring all things whose name is Jeesus.
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pavitra
6/10/2010 6:00 AM EDT
I think the same think was said of the man who invented the telephone ... and now we reap the benefits of that invention.
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antiquus
6/10/2010 5:41 PM EDT
It seems, for the moment, that one can only travel forward in time. You get on your rocket and fly around for a while, and when you land civilization has moved forward a few centuries. Not only does this avoid the paradox problem, but it pretty much eliminates cryogenics as the solution to medical issues. You fly around and return ... meanwhile your bank account grows ... if you don't get a cure, you take some of your money and fly around again ... meanwhile your bank account grows ... and so on. Your relatives don't get your money or your body.
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whatelse
6/13/2010 9:45 AM EDT
According to "sources" , those "GPS Scientists" knew in advance what the clock errors would be.
Essentially a built in correction factor was initiated and all was well.
At their altitude (distance from the earths gravitational center) the clocks ran ~7us faster per day.
Due to the velocity they ran ~45us slower per day.
Thus the total difference -- the satellite clocks were running 38 us per day slower relative to the earth clocks.
This was yet another affirmation of Einstein's theory. Ron R
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Fermata
6/14/2010 7:58 PM EDT
Fantasy or fiction? What do others think?
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dspSurfGuy
6/18/2010 3:46 AM EDT
Good in theory, but hard to implement. Still a long way away. However on a similar note I quite like the idea of negative group delay filters!
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SpacedustSC
6/20/2010 11:50 PM EDT
Man's first entanglment device has been developed and being tested as we text.
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SpacedustSC
6/20/2010 11:54 PM EDT
Think of Space/Time matrix or the Contiuum for short as the road. Think of the photon as the auto that follows the road. Gravity bends the road but since the photon has no rest mass is not effected by gravity but only follows the road. The key Dr. Mallett is to bend the road and the auto will follow. You are using the auto to bend the road. Use plasma to bend the road and the auto will follow. True warp of Time and Space. SpacedustSC
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Ylo
8/18/2010 3:23 PM EDT
Probably violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics, causality, quantum mechanics and a host of other laws of physics, assuming we have any of this even approximately right.
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Code Monkey
5/6/2011 3:35 PM EDT
Hmm, sounds like a good reason to not study it.
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Frank Eory
8/18/2010 3:49 PM EDT
Even with his ring laser idea, the fundamental problem is still the enormous gravitational field required to bend the space-time continuum in any meaningful way. It is the same gravitational survivability problem that exists with the "natural time machine" of a black hole.
Meanwhile, we have the same time travel option we have always had -- moving one reference frame at really high speed relative to another. This is what makes astronauts age just a little bit less during a mission than they would have if they had stayed on Earth. But as time travel goes, it's a one-way trip...
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