UConn Prof to build time machine -- by fall 2002! (Boston Globe)

Apr 7 15:15 UTC 2002

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/095/metro/
Professor_s_time_travel_idea_fires_up_the_imaginationP.shtml

Professor's time travel idea fires up the imagination 
-By David Abel, Globe Staff, 4/5/2002 

 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's not joking. 

 Unlike other physicists who have pondered the science of time travel, 
the 57-year-old professor has devised a machine he believes could 
transport anything from an atom to a person from one time to another. 

 ''I'm not a nut. ... I hope to have a working mockup and start 
experiments this fall,'' says Mallett, who will detail his ideas about 
time travel tonight at Boston's Museum of Science. ''I would think I was 
a crackpot, too, if there weren't other colleagues I knew who were 
working on it. This isn't Ron Mallett's theory of matter; it's Einstein's 
theory of relativity. I'm not pulling things out of the known laws of 
physics.'' 

 But Alan Guth, a physics professor at MIT who has studied the theory of 
time machines, says he isn't sure it's even theoretically possible to 
travel through time. As far as whether time travel is a possibility, he 
says: ''Definitely not within our lifetimes.'' 

 Another physicist, Stanley Deser, a professor at Brandeis University who 
recently co-authored a paper titled ''Time Travel?,'' says the problem is 
not the physics, it's the feasibility of making time travel work. ''This 
is about trying to amass all the matter of the universe in a very small 
region,'' he says. ''Good luck.'' 

 After 27 years at UConn, Mallett has the confidence of his boss, William 
Stwalley, chairman of the university's physics department. ''His ideas 
certainly have merit,'' Stwalley says. ''I think some of his ideas are 
very interesting and they would make nice tests of general relativity.'' 

 Mallett's plan doesn't require some sort of sleigh, the means of 
transport in H.G. Wells's ''The Time Machine,'' or reaching 88 miles per 
hour in a flying DeLorean as in the movie ''Back to the Future.'' His 
time machine merely uses a ring of light. 

 According to Einstein's theory of gravity, anything that has mass or 
energy distorts the space and the passage of time around it, like a 
bowling ball dropped on a trampoline. Circulating laser beams in the 
right way, by slowing them down and shooting them through anything from 
fiber-optic cable to special crystals, might create a similar distortion 
that could theoretically transport someone through different times, 
Mallett believes. 

 The professor and his UConn colleagues plan to build a device to test 
whether it's possible to transport a subatomic particle, probably a 
neutron, through time. The energy from a rotating laser beam, Mallett 
hopes, would warp the space inside the ring of the light so that gravity 
forces the neutron to rotate sideways. With even more energy, it's 
possible, he believes, a second neutron would appear. The second particle 
would be the first one visiting itself from the future. 

 While Mallett acknowledges that sending a person through time may 
require more energy than physicists today know how to harness, he sees it 
merely as ''an engineering problem.'' If it's possible to use light to 
send a neutron through time, a feat that doesn't require as much energy 
as sending a human, he believes it wouldn't be long before engineers 
figure out a way to send a person. 

 ''What we're talking about is at the edge of current technology, not 
beyond current technology,'' he says. 

 Since his father, a heavy smoker, died at the age of 33 when Mallett was 
10 years old, Mallett has longed for a way to travel back in time to warn 
him about the dangers of cigarettes. 

 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. 

 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.'' 

 And what about the ethics of changing history? 

 There would be government laws to control time travel, he believes. 

 ''Any technology has a potential nefarious side to it,'' he says. ''But 
I don't think there's a way to stop it. We as a species have always 
reached out. We've been doing that since the caves. I say let's make it 
so that we better reality. I think we can bravely do that.'' 

-David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com. 
-This story ran on page B1 of the Boston Globe on 4/5/2002. 
-© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company. 
[reposted without permission]

response 2 of 68:

Apr 7 19:23 UTC 2002

I did find it interesting that the time travel paradox in "The Time MAchine"
(the new movie, at least... dunno about the book) was resolved by allowing
the maker of the time travel to go back in time to change events, but they
had to be changed into another set of events that would still cause him to
invent the time machine.

response 4 of 68:

Apr 7 22:57 UTC 2002

thinking about this shit really hurts my brain. 

response 6 of 68:

Apr 8 15:37 UTC 2002

Yeah but then someone stepped into their TIME MACHINE and jumped ahead 
6 days. woooo. CREEPY

response 10 of 68:

Apr 8 23:20 UTC 2002

didn't you see that Invader Zim episode?!

response 12 of 68:

Apr 9 00:11 UTC 2002

The fact that we don't observe dramatic (or even any) glitches in the flow
of events in time, in our lives or in all of the measurements ever made in
physics, means that backward time travel by agents that can affect the
past thereafter, will never occur at any future time.

response 14 of 68:

Apr 9 05:25 UTC 2002

If the phenomenon has no identifiable  effects, then it does not exist.

response 16 of 68:

Apr 9 12:40 UTC 2002

The sound of one hand clapping does so exist, just ask someone who has 
double-jointed knuckles, like my friend Zach. :p