Physics professor confident that his time machine

[crosis]

:s9

http://www.ananova.com/yournews/story/sm_560851.html

thoughts on this ? :sq

[Althalus]

I say good luck to him, if he is a physics professor, then he won't be for long if it doesn't work, they'll laff him out of the establishment.

Still, interesting though, I hope it works, imagine going back to improve your life so that you didn't crash your dads car into next doors tree when you were 17 or something else like that.

[Homer]

Here's a time travel paradox for you, and this has already been discussed. What if the particle from the future killed the particle from the present? Wouldn't the death of the particle from the present PREVENT the particle from the future from even existing?

I have very limited information on this, but I believe I read someplace that no two completely identical atoms can share the same space at the same time.  

If time travel could ever be achieved, it is my opinion that it will be in the form of observing only, and not interacting with whatever time period you 'visit', therefore having no influence at all during that time period.

[SpaceyKC]

             Homer,

          I guess we were just sharing the same wave length,  because I had written this thought,  in thinking about a time machine:

           'Say we successfully could go back in time,  but only to observe,  since we couldn't be in two time periods at the same time.'   :s01

[PurpleStuart]

As i've posted before, time travel has already been invented - about a year or two ago - but only at particle level and only in the space of a few milliseconds back. So if your an adventurous proton that wants to see what the world was like 0.001 seconds ago you're sorted...

;D

That said, what is new is that this guy reckons he can go into the future - i'd love to hear the physics behind this... maybe i'm daft , but i've a penchant for hearing/reading scientific explainations i haven't got a chance in hell of understanding  ;D

[Homer]

Here's a different concept of time traveling into the future. Time goes by slower, relative to Earth's time, the closer you get to the speed of light. This terminology is called time dilation. There are actual charts designed to show specific time dilation at any given speed, whether that's proven to be accurate I have no idea. Anyways, you calculate at what speed you need to go for how long of time, relative to Earth's time, and when you come back to Earth, due to time dilation, you are now in the future. For example, if I travel at .999999 the speed of light, almost 2 years pass in Earth time for every day on my fast moving "time traveler/spaceship". So I take off for a day and come back and I travel 2 years into the future.

I know it's not time travel in the traditional sense, but it's another way of looking at forward moving time travel.

Although there are a variety of sites that have charts for time dilation, this will give you an easy to understand reference for time dilation if you're interested. CLICK HERE

[Althalus]

Time dilation has been proven, a while back now, a group of people at an airfield decided to try it out, and what they did was sycronised watches, one person with one watch got into a plane, and the other stayed on the ground, the plane took off, andwhenthey landed they compared watches, the one in the plane was a couple of seconds to a minute or to behind the one that remained on the ground.  i can't remember the exact difference in time.

[Homer]

I knew time dilation itself was proven to exist, but I what didn't know, and in fact still don't know, is how accurate the ratios of time to speed are at any given speed.

But more to the point, since one would have to actually go somewhere in a super fast vehicle so time can dilate, I can't think of any practical uses this might have.

Here is another concept, although still directly related to the previous one. What if you didn't actually have to go anywhere? What would happen if you were placed in a type of container and it had the compressed oxygen and everything needed to sustain life, and the container simply spun in a circle at close to light speed. Inside the container was a clock attached to the wall of the container, and the container was traveling/spinning at .999999 the speed of light for 24 hours relative to the clock's time. The person inside didn't actually go anywhere, yet due to time dilation, is that person now in the future by one day relative to the clock's time at the beginning of the 'journey', or two years into the future?

Time dilation is cool 8)

[Loonboy]

[blue]What happens if you want to go back in time?

You just slip the ship into reverse?

[/blue] :sg

[Homer]

Loonboy,

Good question. The closer one approaches the speed of light, the slower time goes relative to the observer. So that when one goes faster than the speed of light, time will actually go backwards, at least in theory. However, the speed of light will never be achieved by anything with mass, so to go backwards in time isn't impossible utilizing that method.

To learn more about the theory, just check out our own A to Z index under time travel. CLICK HERE

Time travel is cool 8)

[Mentalcase]

Does time travel have to be physical? It seems we always assume that we will be in a craft or container as Homer said. Would if our minds or spirits could be sped up on some kinda Internet type format. I posted something about this about a year ago, I went all in to detail about various possibilities.  Like a program that could receive messages from the future or past. This seems more probable then physical time travel, but then again....who knows ???

Mental

[PurpleStuart]

Well if you could transfer yourself into data, data has a tiny amount of mass (dependant on media/format) so the closer you could approach the speed of light the more time dilation there would be.

So in theory - yes - but theres lots of if's