Posted on 03/10/2007 8:03:48 AM PST by aculeus
One of the most replayed commercials on television right now is the DirecTV ad with Doc Brown from Back to the Future. Doc, we learn, has forgotten to tell Marty McFly to buy DirecTV in the future. Never mind that the 1955 version of Doc never traveled through time, and therefore wouldn't know about DirecTV. More importantly, how's that whole time machine thing coming? When can we rev up the DeLorean and, like Marty, go to our parent's high school dance with our mother?
Never. But not never, never. Just never for us. First, back to the basics.
A physical time machine—a device available at Wal-Mart, as opposed to a natural wormhole somewhere in the cosmos—is possible. You begin with something square. Next, install mirrors at the corners and send a beam of light, perhaps from a laser, at one of the mirrors. The light will bounce to the second mirror, the third, the fourth and back through this cycle forever.
The force of this constantly circulating light will begin twisting the empty space in the middle. Einstein's theory of relativity dictates that everything happening to space must happen to time, so time begins twisting, too.
To fit a human inside this time machine we need to stack a bunch of these mirrors on top of each other, and add more light beams. Eventually, we'll have a cylinder of circulating light. Once we step inside, we're ready to fly through time.
Rubbish, you say? Well, unlike Doc Brown's second-generation DeLorean, which ran on garbage, the model for our time machine is actually testable. Place subatomic particles—pion or muons—on one side of the light cylinder, and a particle detector on the other side. Then send the particles across.
(Excerpt) Read more at smithsonianmagazine.com ...
Has no one read any of the cautionary tales?
"A Sound of Thunder" a dinosaur hunter steps on a butterfly in the Jurasic period. When he gets home his formerly free country is now a communist dictatorship.
"A Gun for Dinosaur" a dinosaur hunter goes after T. Rex but does not have a big enough gun. He is EATEN.
ONE POINT TWO ONE GIGOWATTS?????
well, alrighty, then.
There ain't no gettin' around the first law of thermodynamics.
Well, if Al went back and changed the 2000 election, I believe we would indeed be inhabiting an alternate universe right now.
Now all we need is the shrinking machine from "Honey, I Shrunk The Kids"
Uncle Rico is very excited about right now.
If a time machine could be invented it would already be invented and we would have time travelers showing up messing with things, there appears to be NO time travelers running about so I would have to conclude that a time machine will never be built.
Interesting article.
Let Hillary test it first.....................then turn off the lights.
ping.
ping.
Maybe we could go back in time and convince select pregnant women to have abortions.
The creation of a time travel "machine" will be achieved with the most complicated device known to man, the human brain, as it primary working part. The person's body will go nowhere, but the experience will seem as if it had.
Have you forgot about John Titor?
http://www.johntitor.com/
Inches and seconds away from their first playoff win since 1996, the Cowboys saw their season end in bizarre fashion when Tony Romo dropped a good snap on a 19-yard field goal attempt with 1:14 to play.
In Michael Crichton's "Timeline" the machine consists of mirrors.
Time travel will be possible but only in time after the machine is built.
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