Ronald Mallett, a physicist at the University of Connecticut,
believes he knows how to build a time machine. He has
designed a machine that can transport anything from an
atom to a person from one time to another. ?I hope to have a
working mockup and start experiments this fall,? he says. ?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.?
Alan Guth, a physics professor at MIT who has studied the
theory of time machines, says he doesn?t think time travel is
a possibility, ?Definitely not within our lifetimes.?
Physicist Stanley Deser, of Brandeis University, says the
problem is not the physics, it?s whether time travel can be
made to work. ?This is about trying to amass all the matter
of the universe in a very small region,? he says. ?Good luck.?
Mallett?s boss, William Stwalley, chairman of the physics
department, says, ?His ideas certainly have merit. I think
some of his ideas are very interesting and they would make
nice tests of general relativity.?
Mallett?s time machine uses only 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.
Mallett and his 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 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 that a second
neutron will appear. The second particle would be the first
one visiting itself from the future.
While Mallett realizes 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, he
believes it won?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.
Ever since his father died of lung cancer at the age of 33,
when Mallett was 10 years old, Mallett has longed to travel
back in time to warn him about the dangers of cigarettes.
But it wasn?t until a few years ago that he arrived at his idea
of how to build a time machine.
He doesn?t worry about potential paradoxes, such as time
travelers killing their parents and making it impossible for
them to exist, because time travelers would exist in a
parallel universe. He says, ?Any technology has a potential
nefarious side to it, 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.?
To learn another way to time travel, read ?Psychonavigation:
Travel Beyond Time? by John Perkins,
click
here.
For more information, click here.
