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]

68 responses total.

Reminds me of the device in the movie "Contact" with Jodie Foster.  I 
can't wait to hear a little more about the science behind this.  Or in 
front of it.  Whichever.  Whenever.

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.

        Among the groups of people I'd distrust with a time machine, ANY
existing goverment on our planet pretty much ends up on the list.

thinking about this shit really hurts my brain. 

I think the date on this article must be off.  Presumably it was
scheduled for the beginning of the month.

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

There actually is a "serious" design for a time machine, which ought to
work according to modern physics theory, but it isn't at all practical.
I believe it requires something like super-dense matter rotating at 1/2
c, which definitely puts it out of the league of anything we could build
using materials found in the solar system.  A more interesting question
is whether it's possible to send *information* backwards in time.  I
don't believe anyone has a definitive proof on that, but so far, no
convincing solutions have appeared.

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Now, if you go back in time and change something, does that mean that here
in the present we will notice changes that others have made. Wont the
consequences be deadly? If someone goes back and kills my mom, or my mom's
mom, would I then disappear. Or is this where spontaneous human combustion
come from? Hm.... the possibilities. I suppose I wont know until it happens.

didn't you see that Invader Zim episode?!

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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.

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

sez you.  The 'sound of one hand clapping' surely doesn't exist,
yet it has 'effects' and thus the converse must be true - 
"If you see jesus standing by the road then kill him".  But this 
is more the relm of another science called philosophy which to
many scientists is the sound a tree falling in the middle of
the forest with nobody to hear makes.  I seem to recall a number
of experiments which seem to on the surface imply that events 
occured before their cause but at such a small level that I can
hardly imagine any practical applications - 'cept maybe encryption
and only then if the distance can be increased.  The alternative
is that the speed of light is not a constant kinda
thingy- but that would be rather disturbing wouldn't it.

There was the recent article(s) about that guy out east that
'sees' the 'color' of numbers (without doing drugs) but I suppose
since it effects dude in question even if neither you or I see it,
the 'phenomenon' still exists?

Lets design a thought experiment.  You have a high speed switch
that either input from A or B will light a light. You push the
button for A and if the switch is set for A, the light will go
on and if it is set for B it will not.  Your button is limited
by 'c' - the speed of light.  The high speed switch has an input
'C' that switches which input A or B lights the light.  Your switch
A or B also has that C channel which is not limited by 'c' it seems
as it is based on the experiment(s) alluded to above.  The light
will never light and thus an example of 'time travel'.

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

Nothing in #15 identifies an existing phenomenon that has no identifiable
effects. 

The nonlocality effects alluded to are existing phenomena with
identifiable effects.

Mental phenomena (philosophy) exist and have identifiable effects.

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Your insistence upon a limited form or locality of an identifiable effect
is not part of my assertion.

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All changes are *identifable*. That one does not identify some, or
cannot at the present time identify some (because of access or
instrumental limitations) is not relevant to *identifiability*
in principle.

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re 21:  So, perhaps, there might be effects now of future time travel that
we cannot presently identify? 

Do I dare?  Heck, why not...  There might even be evidence of the existence
of God that we cannot at present time identify.  You know, maybe our
instruments are limited or something.  

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Re #22: I and others have been talking about the assertion in #14,  not
#12. #12 is a probabilistic argument, since there is an infinity of
time yet to occur (as far as physics can ascertain) hence an infinity of
opportunities for discovering time travel if it can exist, but no
evidence for it has arisen  from that infinity of opportunity. It was
then argued that you could not observe time travel backward if it did
occur, which I pointed out is a case of claiming an effect can exist
for which  observation is not possible, so here we are again....

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Give it up - he's obviously training for a job as an accountant at
Enron.

That's jp2's answer to everything anyway: "you are still wrong". 

He must have a pretty sad life.  Though I remember I had a phase when 
everybody who disagreed with me was wrong - whether they actually were 
or not.

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He's delusional, too.

Yeah, but he's good for a little amusement once in a while.

        *laughs and points*

I don't even want to think where this would lead to.

if history cahnged it would possibly affect my memory as well. thi is
explanation for those queezy deja vu experiences ..

No, I think you can blame the clientele for that.  

Re: 12 -- 
-----
One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of
accidentally becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem involved
in becoming your own father or mother that a broadminded and well-adjusted
family can't cope with. There is also no problem about changing the course
of history --- the course of history does not change because it all fits
together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the
things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end.

The major problem is quite simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult
in this matter is Dr Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveller's Handbook of 1001
Tense Formations. It will tell you for instance how to describe something that
was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping
forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be described differently
according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own
natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past
and is further complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations
whilst you are actually travelling from one time to another with the intention
of becoming your own father or mother.

Most readers get as far as the Future Semi-Conditionally Modified Subinverted
Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up: and in fact in later
editions of the book all the pages beyond this point have been left blank to
save on printing costs.
-----

And its not even 1 April....or is it?

#37 was an unattributed verbatim lifting of some writing by Douglas 
Adams.

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