Time Travel Possible

[Guest Frank_Nabbit]

Physicist won't backpedal; says time travel possible

 

MICHELLE LEFORT

USA TODAY

 

What do you get when you join a 1981 DeLorean, a "flux capacitor" and a digital dial set to Nov. 5, 1955? If you're the character of Dr. Emmett Brown in the 1985 movie "Back to the Future," you've created a time machine.

The possibility of time travel has occupied the fantasies of philosophers, authors, children and directors. But to some physicists, it's more than pure fancy.

 

In the July issue of Physical Review Letters, Amos Ori, professor of physics at the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, argues that the laws of physics don't stand in the way of building a time machine.

 

Ori hasn't created, or even designed, a physical time machine. He instead constructed a situation - a mathematical model - in which the laws of physics will make one for him.

 

"I write (the situation) mathematically," he says.

 

"That doesn't mean that I know how to implement it practically."

 

He adds that if inhabitants of some highly advanced civilization could set up the conditions he describes, they might be able to travel in time.

 

The time machine Ori proposes isn't quite like the phone booth in "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure" or the DeLorean in "Back to the Future."

 

Ori's solution forms a closed, timelike curve. It's a bit like a song that never ends. Think of each musical note as a point in space. As you sing the notes, you move forward in time. You can travel around the curve - sing the song - but when you get to the end, you are also at the beginning.

 

"If you had a closed, timelike curve, that means that something could run around it forever and ever, always going to the future but always coming back to the beginning," says Ted Jacobson, professor of physics at the University of Maryland.

 

Ori isn't the first physicist to create a theoretical time machine. Unlike previous models, Ori's proposal doesn't require any unknown matter or energy. The previous theories were forced to use unrealistic negative energy to warp space and time.

 

Ori's plan requires absolute emptiness, a vacuum. That means that, in principle, a closed, timelike curve could happen naturally, possibly through cataclysmic astronomical collisions in the abyss of space.

 

It is difficult for experts to imagine the exact conditions, but extremes in the universe, such as very dense black holes, could create the conditions necessary for the formation of a time machine.

 

When Einstein declared that space and time were intimately connected, time travel became a physical possibility. If you could zip around like a beam of light, you wouldn't age, but physics won't let that happen. It remains to be seen whether physics will allow time travel, but Ori's work suggests it will.

 

Einstein opened the door for the scientific pursuit of a time machine, and physicists are searching for solutions. Ori says maybe it's possible, but "this isn't something that we are going to construct soon."

[Ripper 0]

If time travel was possible, someone would have come from the future already. Since they haven't we must conclude that it isn't possible.

[dubq 0]

If time travel was possible, someone would have come from the future already.  Since they haven't we must conclude that it isn't possible.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Either that, or they're just not telling you that they're from the future.

[Red Baron 0]

Or they thought this time period is really boring.

[Guest Undertow]

Well, it's been stated many times before that time travel is theoretically possible.

 

But we really have no way of ever attaining it.

[Dobbs 3K 0]

Theoretically possible, but physically impossible.

[Guest Undertow]

Indeed.

[Nighthawk 0]

Like communism.

[Sideburnious 0]

If time travel was possible, someone would have come from the future already.  Since they haven't we must conclude that it isn't possible.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

If someone came up to you and said that they were from the future, you would say they were crazy. For all we know, there has been time travellers, we just considered them crazy and have them locked up

[caboose 0]

John Titor.

 

What a douche.

[tekcop 0]

That article says absolutely nothing.

[The Metal Maniac 0]

If time travel was possible, someone would have come from the future already. Since they haven't we must conclude that it isn't possible.

 

Perhaps they're worried that by revealing their presence, they'll totally fuck up the timelines and they'll return to a future in which they were never born. Haven't you ever watched movies?

 

Anyway, I still think the whole thing is totally impossible. I consider time to be little more then an abstract concept created by man to explain why things are different now then they were then. It's like claiming that you can travel through love.

[Ced 0]

Somebody already built a time machine and went back in time, but inadvertently altered history so that they never made the time machine in the first place.

 

And screw time travel. Telekinesis is where it's at.

[tekcop 0]

Anyway, I still think the whole thing is totally impossible. I consider time to be little more then an abstract concept created by man to explain why things are different now then they were then. It's like claiming that you can travel through love.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

This pretty much explains what I believe, also.

[LaParkaYourCar 0]

Are you kidding? Someone from the future couldn't reveal themselves. They would be risking causing a rip in the space time continuum that could unravel the very fabric of space!

[Nighthawk 0]

Time is more than an abstract concept, but not for the purposes of this discussion. Spacetime, bitches.

[Jericholic82 0]

so the logical next question is: if you could time travel, what time would you visit? would it be the past or future?

[Sideburnious 0]

Can we only go once or multiple times. If multiple both. If once, probably the future. But can we have some sort of protective bubble or ship for when we go to the future incase theres been a major nuclear apocalypse or a race of cat people exsist that want to eat us.

[kkktookmybabyaway 0]

I travel through time every day. I close my eyes and when I open them I'm 8 hours from where I was before...

[Sideburnious 0]

You fall asleep on a bus or something?

[Nighthawk 0]

Again, spacetime, bitches.

[The Metal Maniac 0]

I'm not sure I fully understand the concept of spacetime, but doesn't it have something to do with the fact that, no matter how fast you go, it would still take you some time to travel across vast distances? Like, basically the two are related, because you can't travel one without the other.

 

I think it has something to do with that and the theory of relativity (which I don't really understand either) but I could be wrong.

[Jericholic82 0]

I travel through time every day. I close my eyes and when I open them I'm 8 hours from where I was before...

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

reminds me of MADTV one time they did a skit where some scientist guy unveiled his new time machine, which was just a bed, he set the alarm clock and said all you have to do is get under the covers and lie down and you will be transported 8 hour sinto the future.

[I like Forums 0]

Einstein travelled to the past to tell the Americans about Atomic bombs so that they could win WWII.

[Guest BrokenWings]

I'm friends with someone who's split personality claims to be Rasputin Almasy, from the year 4030.

[Dandy 0]

Maybe time travelers visit us all the time and they are viewed as UFO's and aliens.

[Art Sandusky 0]

I always thought of that as a distinct possibility. It would explain the generally humanoid appearance that people describe when they meet aliens.

 

I don't know what I'd do if I could move though time. I might go back to something piddling like a year ago so I could see how I really was back then and make improvements, or more likely into the future. Near future only though, I wouldn't feel safe going more than 50 years forward. I don't give this planet good odds past that point.

[kkktookmybabyaway 0]

I travel through time every day. I close my eyes and when I open them I'm 8 hours from where I was before...

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

reminds me of MADTV one time they did a skit where some scientist guy unveiled his new time machine, which was just a bed, he set the alarm clock and said all you have to do is get under the covers and lie down and you will be transported 8 hour sinto the future.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

I ripped off a MADTV skit? Where's my gun?...

[Paul Stanley 0]

You fall asleep on a bus or something?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Aahahahahaha

[The Niggardly King 0]

I'd go back in time and win the lotto 4 or 5 times, and bet om every Super Bowl, World Series, etc.