Ronald L. Mallett
Ph.D., Professor of Physics
Posted on 04/06/2002 11:18:28 AM PST by Hellmouth
Edited on 04/13/2004 2:07:39 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
Oh my God... the "Anti-Methamphetamine Child Protection Safety Enforcement Time Travel Act of 2034"
After what they've done in the name of regulating interstate commerce, imagine when they can file stuff under regulation of interdimensional commerce...
and to tell him to buy Microsoft at $5.
Great. Just great. The first time traveller is a liberal. He'll come back from the Constitutional Convention and report that the intention of the founding fathers was for government to babysit us all.
This could very well mean that I have the secret to time travel in my very own garage, and possibly my wife's walk-in closet.
I have a question.. Where was the earth physically located (in the universe) 20 years ago? If he sends a person back in time, and time only, they will flail about, suffocating in outer space! The solar system and thus the earth, travel at a good clip in orbit around the galactic center. He better send em back in a spaceship.
If time travel were possible, someone from the future would've already done it, and they'd be here now, showing us the way out of all our problems... But they aren't.
coolidge
Yes, you are!
Put your money on Guth.
Gravitational Field of Circulating Light Beams
In Einstein's general theory of relativity, energy as well as matter produces gravity. This means that the energy of a pure light beam can gravitationally affect matter. A portion of my current research deals with considering the gravitational field produced by a single continuously circulating beam of light in a unidirectional ring laser. It is predicted that a spinning neutral particle, when placed in the ring, is dragged around by the resulting gravitational field (Mallett, R.L. 2000. Weak gravitational field of the electromagnetic radiation in a ring laser. Phys. Lett. A 269: 214).
Another aspect of this research explores the effect on time of the unidirectional circulating light beam. It is shown that an increase in the intensity of the beam of light results in the formation of closed loops in time.
Cosmic Degenerate Bose-Einstein Dark Matter
In collaboration with Mark P. Silverman of the Department of Physics of Trinity College, a general relativistically covariant theory of a self coupled scalar field has been developed as a possible solution of the missing mass problem. We have shown that spontaneous symmetry breaking of a neutral scalar field coupled to gravity leads directly to ultra-low mass bosons, with a critical temperature far above the temperature of the universe, for most of its duration. The particles are therefore expected to condense into a degenerate Bose Einstein gas, providing a potential candidate for nonbaryonic nonluminous matter (Silverman, M.P. and R.L. Mallett. 2001. Cosmic degenerate matter: a possible solution to the problem of missing mass. Class. Quantum Grav. 18 L37).
I've come back from the year 2057. I'm a history student at Geraldo Rivera University. The government of Mexico in Washington has asked me to research the origins of the majority party, the Libertarians. I understand that our founder, Bill Mahr, frequented this chat room using the undercover name of "OWK". Have you heard of him?
Good science and emotionally-motivated wishful fantasy don't mix too well. I fear the professor thinks his "time machine" WILL work because he desperately WANTS it to work. Good science occurs when the data comes first, then the hypothesis....
They did.... I mean they will... errr... they do...
Ferget it.
I do agree that the space problem actually might be a bigger problem than the time problem. The earth moves rapidly through space. Unless you could calculate a time where the earth for some odd reason was exactly spinning over the same hunk of space 2 times, which is basically impossible, you would need a space ship to do this. Then you would probably have to travel a long long time to get back to where the earth currently resides. There is no way to predict if you don't pop out in the middle of say the sun, or an asteroid with any certainty. All the supercomputers around today combined would have an impossible time calculating the maths.
Wasn't Einstein motivated to develop Relativity because he was obsessed with the idea of travelling on a light beam?
That's not him...He's Eschoir!
Honestly, I don't know. Perhaps he wondered about what it might be like to travel on a light beam, but I doubt he ever thought it would be physically possible to "ride" on a light beam.
More to the point, the data existed first: the Michaelson-Morley experiment showed that something was wrong with classical physics, and suggested that the speed with which light propagated was invariant regardless of the observer's frame of reference. This is the basic premise of Einstien's Special Relativity: that light travels at the same speed as measured by all observers, regardless of their frame of reference. Starting from this premise, which was suggested by experimental data, Einstein then followed it to the logical conclusion, which was Special Relativity.
This guy is motivated by his father's untimely death to study physics, develop the theory and practice of time travel, returns to a time before his father took up smoking and shows him the Surgeon General's notice on the side of the cigarette package, by which his not-yet-father takes a vow not to smoke, thereby avoiding a painful death from lung cancer at the age of 33, so his son is NOT motivated by his father's untimely death to study physics preferring instead to become a MacDonald's hamburger fryer so time travel IS NOT invented and the hamburger flipper DOES NOT go back to convince his father of the evils of king tobacco and his father DOES take up smoking and DOES die a horrible death which sends us back to the beginning of this merry-go-round!
Yup, I think I understand it...
Hmmm, would the second one have a visitor from the future, too? And the third, and the fourth?
Could this be how the Big Bang started?
And it took some 15 billion years before somebody F's up again? ;-)
If time travel is possible and time travel enabled one to change the past, then no time travel machine will ever be invented.
Here's the proof:
Assume that time travel is possible and one can change the past. Then, as people travel back in time, "reality" is in constant flux as the past changes again and again. This will continue until the past in changed in such a way that no time travel machine is ever invented, anywhere, at anytime. Once that happens, reality is fixed with no time machines ever being invented.
Oh, great! Those will work about as well as our current immigration laws.
Qwest Communications rides on a light beam. Or is that a blight beam?
The problem here is , that what is observable for elementary particles is never observed for macroscopic objects, like people. You can send a particle through a potential barrier easily enough, but it is harder to send a person through a brick wall. What this guy needs is to work on sending people through brick walls first, then send them through time.
Isn't that what grad students are for?
Assume Hallett puts a collection of free neutrons into a trap, he will measure decay products at a predictable rate.
Hallett now turns on his light circulator, he puts the neutrons into closed timelike spacetime trajectories.
What does he now observe, zero decay products (because decay now occurs in the past? Does he measure decays products before he turns on the circulator?
Maybe Muhammad was a time traveler, who went back to make himself into a god.
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