October 29, 2010

Scientists believe time travel possible, diss writers

by

 

The Large Hadron Collider is at odds with pigeons, its future self and now sci-fi writers.

Time travel is not only possible but the most important facet, the time machine itself, already exists. Or so say Russian physicists in an article for the once mighty Pravda.

The machine they’re talking about is the Large Hadron Collider. Remember the LHC? The giant machine that was maybe going to open up a world consuming tear in the fabric of the space-time continuum.

It seems that if the LHC would actually work and not breakdown in extremely comical ways then scientists could learn quite a bit about the universe and in particular what may or may not be on the other side of those possible space-time rifts.

And it isn’t just the Russians who think the LHC can achieve this remarkable feat. Kip Thorne of the California Institute of Technology points out that time travel is so close to being a reality that it is now out of the hands of writers and into capable pincers of science.

Once upon a time, time travel was the exclusive prerogative of writers. Serious scientists were shunning it like the plague, even when they were writing novels under a pseudonym or were secretly reading them. The times have changed! Now in serious scientific journals you can find a scientific analysis of time travel, authored by outstanding theoretical physicists. Why this change? Physics simply understood that the nature of time is too important to give it to the mercy of writers.

Mercy? Were Bradbury and Wells taking it easy on the subject of time travel? Or were they too harsh? Was Wells’ machine not convincing enough for you or were the Morlocks too sinister?

Boy, these guys smash a few rocks together and they think they own the place.

Time travel in literature has never been about invention or even explicitly about the nature of time itself. No doubt science fiction often has elements of technological speculation, sometimes stunningly prescient (more often way off the mark), and in the case of time travel there is nearly always a general theory of horology constructed but only as narrative conceit. None of these things have been the driving purpose of time travel in sci-fi. The question of what if and the caution that question might entail have instead been the hallmark of great science fiction.

So what if the LHC opens a time portal and what if we step through and journey back in time? Someone thought enough to ask the new masters of time travel that very question.

Is it possible to have a paradox described by Bradbury, when a traveler caught in the past accidentally steps on a butterfly, which results in coming to power of a different president in his time?

We expected such issues, says professor Volovich. We came to this conclusion: time travel may change the course of history, but not very significantly.

Right. So no amount of assassinations or manipulations could drastically alter the world’s course? Tell that to the CIA. Here are a few names: John Calvin. Karl Marx. Adolf Hitler. Mark Zuckerberg. Remove any one of those names from history and you have a very different world. Well, maybe not Marx. Sorry eggheads but I’m with Ray Bradbury on this one. Time travel may be the riskiest impossibility going.

The good news for those of us inhabiting this particular narrative of time is that the LHC is fragile and perhaps even at war with its own future and thus will be a long time in opening up any functional wormholes to the past. The bad news is that we’ll have to wait a bit longer to go back and redo the 2000 election.

When the time comes I say we pass out grip strengtheners in Fort Lauderdale.

Paul Oliver is the marketing manager of Melville House. Previously he was co-owner of Wolfgang Books in Philadelphia.

  • Dr.K.S.Rajput

    If a person travels to past, how can he interact with the objects there? Feynman in his book on quantum-electrodynamics, draws a world-line of an electron going to future and turning back to past. He calls the electron travelling to past as a positron. If his statement be true, a person travelling to past will behave as composed of antimatter. If he touches the object there, there may be an explosion resulting in annihilation and production of gamma-rays. In order to protect the history of events, we have to think that the person can not interact with objects in the past.

  • Dr.K.S.Rajput

    If a person travels to past, how can he interact with the objects there? Feynman in his book on quantum-electrodynamics, draws a world-line of an electron going to future and turning back to past. He calls the electron travelling to past as a positron. If his statement be true, a person travelling to past will behave as composed of antimatter. If he touches the object there, there may be an explosion resulting in annihilation and production of gamma-rays. In order to protect the history of events, we have to think that the person can not interact with objects in the past.

  • http://www.mhpbooks.com Cassandra Langridge

    According to this news article, time travel may have already happened without us knowing it! – http://bbc.in/d5QaEM

  • http://www.mhpbooks.com Cassandra Langridge

    According to this news article, time travel may have already happened without us knowing it! – http://bbc.in/d5QaEM

  • http://leerourke.blogspot.com Lee Rourke

    How odd, my next novel ‘Amber’ is about time and the LHC. Amongst other stuff.

    lee

  • http://leerourke.blogspot.com Lee Rourke

    How odd, my next novel ‘Amber’ is about time and the LHC. Amongst other stuff.

    lee

  • Yankee at large

    One wonders about the shy UFO’s as being possible time travellers. Radar contacts (u-wave reflections)demonstrate a form of physical contact, but I don’t know about the reported physical encounters. There are no words to describe these events because we simply don’t understand them. How do you describe the colour pink to a blind man who was blind since birth? Yes indeed there are time travelling, and my feeling (unscientific word) is that they don’t want to know us. That shouldn’t be surprising when you consider the behaviour of humanity. All I can conclude is that time travel is possible, but we aren’t ready to deal with it.

  • Yankee at large

    One wonders about the shy UFO’s as being possible time travellers. Radar contacts (u-wave reflections)demonstrate a form of physical contact, but I don’t know about the reported physical encounters. There are no words to describe these events because we simply don’t understand them. How do you describe the colour pink to a blind man who was blind since birth? Yes indeed there are time travelling, and my feeling (unscientific word) is that they don’t want to know us. That shouldn’t be surprising when you consider the behaviour of humanity. All I can conclude is that time travel is possible, but we aren’t ready to deal with it.

  • Gregor

    Yes,Dr.K.S Rajput Comment by Dr.K.S.Rajput — October 29, 2010 @ 10:48 am,is right,but I would go further to say that we can contain the composed of antimatter,and that we are working on a mall of the African coast,where one can only do time travel to and from,the foundations has been laid and the project has received the green light,but because of the sensitive nature were not sure if we are going to continue with it.Furthermore to build a Time-Travel machine that does not affect one’s static energy would be much more costly and would therefore not be feasible,However it does not affect one in any other way than time travel,meaning it is absolutely safe;tests have proven this.Where the cheaper option works with Helium and Hadron particles being bombarded and through treating the materials that come out and twisting it one can still do time travel,but were not sure what the affect would be,though it is 100% safe were not sure,remember time travel is a very sensitive issue and your whole body must be replaced by a different time zone.

  • Gregor

    Yes,Dr.K.S Rajput Comment by Dr.K.S.Rajput — October 29, 2010 @ 10:48 am,is right,but I would go further to say that we can contain the composed of antimatter,and that we are working on a mall of the African coast,where one can only do time travel to and from,the foundations has been laid and the project has received the green light,but because of the sensitive nature were not sure if we are going to continue with it.Furthermore to build a Time-Travel machine that does not affect one’s static energy would be much more costly and would therefore not be feasible,However it does not affect one in any other way than time travel,meaning it is absolutely safe;tests have proven this.Where the cheaper option works with Helium and Hadron particles being bombarded and through treating the materials that come out and twisting it one can still do time travel,but were not sure what the affect would be,though it is 100% safe were not sure,remember time travel is a very sensitive issue and your whole body must be replaced by a different time zone.

  • http://www.subliminalsales.com/pcvideogamespot.html mugen man

    One corollary of the delayed start-up of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest particle accelerator, is that it gives physicists—and the rest of the world—more time to mull the much-discussed possibility that the LHC could produce Earth-gobbling black holes.

    In a paper posted recently to arxiv.org, physicist Roberto Casadio of the University of Bologna in Italy and his co-authors argue against such a scenario. But the bulk of the attention following their analysis has focused on their observation that microscopic LHC black holes, should they arise, could persist for seconds before decaying. (To wit, Fox News’s story headlined: “Scientists Not So Sure ‘Doomsday Machine’ Won’t Destroy World.”)
    Large Hadron Collider

    It’s worth pointing out that these collider-induced black holes only arise in certain theoretical frameworks, which posit that we reside in a universe of more dimensions than the four (three for space, one for time) that we’re used to. In fact, the Casadio team’s analysis presumes a certain five-dimensional theoretical model of the universe known as the Randall-Sundrum (RS) model. Although the RS model has its adherents, many alternatives exist—in fact, it is hoped that the LHC will help illuminate which of the competing big-picture theories is correct (or at least more likely to be correct).

    It’s also worth pointing out that such concerns have been raised before. As noted in a 2007 New Yorker feature about the LHC, a similar argument was raised in 1999 around the start-up of Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The article points out that Scientific American played a role in the controversy by printing a letter asking whether a black hole at Brookhaven could devour the Earth in minutes, along with a reply from physicist Frank Wilczek, then of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. In his response, Wilczek dismissed the black-hole scenario but mused that an alternate disaster might theoretically arise via the production of strangelets, a hypothesized form of matter. Although he cautioned that such a catastrophe was “not plausible,” the media seized on the mention and Brookhaven was forced to convene a panel of physicists to vouch for the collider’s safety. (The RHIC has been running since 2000.)

    Even presuming we live in a universe in which the LHC is capable of producing black holes, and even presuming that the initial conditions are such that the miniature gobblers can survive for some seconds, Casadio and colleagues calculate that such black holes would be unable to grow to catastrophic size before decaying. But, like Wilczek’s strangelet comment, the extended black-hole lifetimes hypothesized by Casadio and his co-authors are bringing collider safety concerns back to the fore.

  • http://www.subliminalsales.com/pcvideogamespot.html mugen man

    One corollary of the delayed start-up of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest particle accelerator, is that it gives physicists—and the rest of the world—more time to mull the much-discussed possibility that the LHC could produce Earth-gobbling black holes.

    In a paper posted recently to arxiv.org, physicist Roberto Casadio of the University of Bologna in Italy and his co-authors argue against such a scenario. But the bulk of the attention following their analysis has focused on their observation that microscopic LHC black holes, should they arise, could persist for seconds before decaying. (To wit, Fox News’s story headlined: “Scientists Not So Sure ‘Doomsday Machine’ Won’t Destroy World.”)
    Large Hadron Collider

    It’s worth pointing out that these collider-induced black holes only arise in certain theoretical frameworks, which posit that we reside in a universe of more dimensions than the four (three for space, one for time) that we’re used to. In fact, the Casadio team’s analysis presumes a certain five-dimensional theoretical model of the universe known as the Randall-Sundrum (RS) model. Although the RS model has its adherents, many alternatives exist—in fact, it is hoped that the LHC will help illuminate which of the competing big-picture theories is correct (or at least more likely to be correct).

    It’s also worth pointing out that such concerns have been raised before. As noted in a 2007 New Yorker feature about the LHC, a similar argument was raised in 1999 around the start-up of Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The article points out that Scientific American played a role in the controversy by printing a letter asking whether a black hole at Brookhaven could devour the Earth in minutes, along with a reply from physicist Frank Wilczek, then of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. In his response, Wilczek dismissed the black-hole scenario but mused that an alternate disaster might theoretically arise via the production of strangelets, a hypothesized form of matter. Although he cautioned that such a catastrophe was “not plausible,” the media seized on the mention and Brookhaven was forced to convene a panel of physicists to vouch for the collider’s safety. (The RHIC has been running since 2000.)

    Even presuming we live in a universe in which the LHC is capable of producing black holes, and even presuming that the initial conditions are such that the miniature gobblers can survive for some seconds, Casadio and colleagues calculate that such black holes would be unable to grow to catastrophic size before decaying. But, like Wilczek’s strangelet comment, the extended black-hole lifetimes hypothesized by Casadio and his co-authors are bringing collider safety concerns back to the fore.

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