Physicist believes we will travel through time this century

[futuretalk]

University of Connecticut’s Dr. Ronald Mallett thinks he has found a practical way to build a time machine using light. He hopes to verify the concept within 10 years, and expects a machine built this century. “No known laws of physics forbids time travel”, Mallett says, “and in theory, shunting matter back and forth through time shouldn’t be that difficult”.
But what about wormholes, those clever little tunnels in spacetime that supposedly enables travel from one moment to another? Though wormholes seem a perfectly respectable way to travel through time on paper, developing them would require capturing energy from all 400 billion stars in our galaxy, a feat that for now remains far out of reach to say the least.
Mallett however, who is a theoretical physics professor believes he has found a route to the past that uses something much more down to earth: light. His team discovered that light beams can create a vortex that force the past, present and future to circle one another until the future precedes the past.
Their research suggests that tiny bits of matter can be moved from the present to the past. And if it works for matter, in theory, it can transport us.
As you enter Mallet’s futuristic time machine, your mind senses that you are moving forward, but because of the spacetime vortex, you are actually going backwards through time. You can exit the machine at a preset time and place in your past.
But journeying to the past opens controversies. Say for example, we travel back in time and prevent our parents from getting together: this would prevent us from being born; we would not exist, therefore our journey in time couldn’t happen. This creates a paradox – a past different from one that already exists.
Luckily, mischievous time travelers cannot alter our present. People do not suddenly disappear because a rerun of events has prevented their birth. Therefore, something must be preventing time travelers from making changes that affect today’s world, and physicists Daniel Greenberger and Karl Svozil believe they have the answer.
Before we observe an event, there are many possible outcomes, but once we become aware of the end result, the possibilities shrink to one. If you know your parents were together, there is no possibility of them not getting together. If you tried separating them for instance, you might arrive after they left the room, could not find them, or changed your mind. Something will always prevent the past from being changed.
However, another theory rapidly gaining popularity includes the multiverse. If you travel back in time and change history, you immediately thrust yourself into a parallel universe. In our universe, your parents were together and you are here; in the universe you jumped into, they never met, and you appear as a stranger from another universe. Be careful though, once transferred, you can never return home.
None of these paradoxes worries Mallet. He thinks the multiverse theory is probably correct, and quickly adds that just because we don’t fully understand our universe, doesn’t mean that time travel can’t happen.
Will our “magical future” include time travel? Only time will tell!

[orbsycli]

Hahaha it would be so fun to do that,
Hang out with your buddies,
get drunk,
go fight off dinosaurs with bazookas.


It's a shame y'all look at time as a linear thing
because you can time travel every night.

[orbsycli]

Only time will tell,
I'd love to see something that crazy actually occur.

[Buffy]

Originally Posted by orbsycli

Only time will tell.

There's the argument of course that time should have told already: where are those Time Tourists? Do ya think they coulda messed up our timeline already? Tourists are notoriously gauche, even with technology to hide (and like Orby sez, blasting dinos with bazookas would be fun, so why would they *hide*) wouldn't you expect at least a few of them to be noticed with their space age cameras and plaid Bermuda shorts? Ooooh, temporal physics gives me a headache!

Seriously, its not been proven that you can't time travel, and really smart people (like Kip Thorne at CalTech) have come up with possible (although so far impractical) methods for time travel. And of course Einstein sez that time travel into the future is *easy* if you can just move fast enough....Heady stuff, Thanks for the post!!!

Unstuck in time,
Buffy

[orbsycli]

If it will happen,
that means it was all going to happen all along,
and if it's going to happen,
it's already happened in an infinite ammount of ways?
ahhhhh

[InfiniteNow]

I too thought of Kip Thorne's work when reading this post. It is interesting on all number of levels.

Time itself is a concept which is strongly resistent to easy interpretation (paraphrasing a quote I heard from Carl Sagan)...

[Racoon]

Sounds Rad!

I wouldn't want to be the first Guinea Pig though...

[futuretalk]

Mallett’s idea of one day transporting humans through time in a vortex created by swirling light beams may happen – or not. I think that it could only happen if future science solves issues involved in converting our bodies into some kind of a molecular form for transmission, then rebuilding them on the “other side”.

Mallett’s system cannot send anyone to a time before construction of the first machine, but development of wormholes, expected by some in 300 years, offers the potential to visit any time in the past.

I firmly believe that one day, we will understand how to send informational ‘bots back in time to scan lost loved one’s minds the night before they died; bring that scanned copy into our future time and allow them to continue their lives.

Go “magical future”.

[orbsycli]

Ugh,
saving loved ones?
That is so stupid.

Let the humans die,
I'll say this 6 billion times,
there are too many of us. The last thing we need to do is save more lives.

First,
the human brain needs to evolve with our mind to be able to fathom what time is like as an omnidirectional dimension,
rather than how we view time now,
as linear.

This will happen very soon,
considering the time scale paradigm of human evolution.

Once "we" can move along time freely,
we won't need a machine

ingannilo did it,
I do it,
and sorcerers 6,000 years ago did it.

Biological evolution is slowwwwwwwwww,
whatever evolution is occuring now's speed up
and UP
AND UP
CRESENDO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

When?
It's happening right now.

[InfiniteNow]

Right now????