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This 4 part article is a bit old (sept 2002) but very interesting if you're one that believes
that this is possible.. I for one, am always entertaining such thoughts.
what do you all think ? a wormhole generator/towing machine ?
Scientific American-- article
Ahem..... are you holding something back on us? :DQuote:
This 4 part article is a bit old (sept 2002)
ah shoot, that mag must be in a worm hole itself.. and here I was thinking that I was in 2003. :D
but indeed, it's a sept 2002 article according to that page..
That article made my head hurt! :confused:
Interesting read nontheless. :)
WEEeeeeee, Great read. This just reinforces my dream of traveling distances greater than the speed of light. I hope to work at CERN in the next few years to do research on my own theories.
Unfortunately, time travel via wormhole isn't possible. Sorry. Here's why:
Picture an ant on a piece of paper. That's us, on the fabric of space. Now, wrap the paper into a tube, with the ant on the inside. that's us on space-time. Now, if the ant wants to go back in time, he needs to go through the paper and to the point he needs to be, then back through. This requires a wormhole.
Scientific American says we can make wormholes. In order ot amke one large enough to transport a person / thing, we'd need all the matter in the universe's worth of energy just to go IN, then the same amount to come back out. Einstein proved that with E = mc^2, proving effectively the only way to travel in time is to travel very very fast, and the only way to create a wormhole of any significance is with energy equivalent to many many times what you're transporting.
I know, it sucks.
But that's physics for you. Now, if you're into supersring theory and bvelieve in the testament of human perserverance, you might say we'll eventually be able to bend the 10th dimension, so we can simply WALK into the past. That, however, is far, far FAR off.
Also, if time travel were possible, wouldn't we already know?
Awesome read.. Hopefully I can get rid of this headache though from figuring that out. Good read nonetheless.
You guys should read the book Timeline by Michael Crichton, it deals with that and was an AWSOME book i must say.
I agree with punchthebaby about wormholes being not the right way to do this. Maybe Einstein is wrong and it still could be possible, but that's something else.
If you're going to bend dimensions it would almost be the same thing as using wormholes, if your looking at superstring technology and 11 dimensions. The way most people visualiza a wormhole it already goes true another dimension, which would be nonsense if you're thinking about the matter/energy thingies. A wormho;e itself already is something weird if it "bows" dimensions by using only the 3rd.
OK I know I'm saying this really wrong and non-understandable, but I can't make it more clear because I don't have enough english vocabulary to express it right. Sorry for that, and don't bother if you think I'm not right or if you don't even understand it. I just can't speak.
as some may know, i work for a small rag in ne ohio. we got a letter in from some guy, think i have it, have to dig it up... who was in despeerate need of a time machine. apparently, he had some kind of disease that he acquired at some point or another and he needed to go back to a certain time, where he could possibly avoid this catastrophy and needed certain ingredients to obtain this. something about a north/south polarized vortex and a blue glowing moon crystal. altogether an intesting e-mail and a cry for help?
Props on the article man. I'm always game for some good science conjecture. I have read Enstien in depth though it hard to get through his genius. Its too bad he never really finished many of his thoughts. Even his standing theories of specific and general relativity are almost mutually exclusive. Oh well, unviserval theories will develop as our understanding grows with time. Good article though.
it's not hard to time travel really... all you need is to "bend" time... this is much easier then a worm hole... i'll see if i can find that theory about "bending" time, it was quite fun
Punchthebaby, I actually think it is very possible. The technology nor the energy source is readily available now, but in the future there may be many different sources of energy.
I myself have made it a dream of mine to do work at CERN or whatever the largest accelerator is in 3 years time. Using gravitational time dialation you can bend spacetime to pretty much whatever you want. Using a particle accelerator you can speed particles very close to the speed of light, thus increaseing its mass and energy, thus creating gravity.
Don't ask me what this has to do with worm holes, well actually it has to do alot with wormholes. If you take this same idea of creating a gravity field, and use dark matter to hold the worm hole open, then........ my head hurts..
Okay, I'll give you that, gravitational time dilation makes sense. But the article sites "Time Travel In Einsteins Universe" by Gott, which i read, and in the book he states basically that if you could decompress and then form a 4 foot ball out of JUPITER, you'd have neough mass to bend time to a serious degree, and then if you could find your way out of the center of the sphere, you'd be in the future. Only a supercivilization could bend that much matter to it's will.
Now, on the other hand, if we were to find a way to convert energy to matter, and a way to open a wormhole, we could harness unbelievable amounts of energy from the farthest reaches of the universe lickety split. Then we might be going somewhere.
However, we have to keep things constant. If we create this big of a ball right next to us, by the time we're halfway done we'll already have stopped aging to a point of being dead to the now-future world.
OR, if we did have one made out of Jupiter, who's to say that jupiter right now isn't affecting our timestream (ie: all bodies act on each other gravitationally, so perhaps we all experience differnt times even at the same velocities, to combine the wisdom of Newton and Einstein.)
I think it's possible, but the means we have now are theoretical and not fit for consumptino by any race, truthfully. The ultimate solution to this quandry will probably be based on lower-level universal laws that we're not yet farmiliar with, and that make what we're discussing now look like mindless babble.
Which it almost is.
If you're intersted in more physics talk, I'd love to chit chat about things. Email me sometime, xmaddness.
"punchthebaby" LMAO... Now thats a funny nic.....
Anyway to the point. Here is an interesting site on time travel theorum.
http://merlin.alfred.edu/degraff/TimeTravel/
My favorite crux in this issue is the "grandfather" paradox. Ie... If I travel back in time and kill my grandfather. Do I still exist in current time or do I return as an unknown in current time as I was not born due to my grandfather not producing an heir being my father. Or do only exist at that point in the time that I commited the murder? Now my brain hurts too.........!
Ahhhh....but with a better understanding of quantum theory this all may change due to the fact that quantum mechanics shreds the laws of physics and then tosses them out the window...
JMHO
if you kill your grandfather.... wouldn't you cease to exist completely... potentially though, this sort of an action could even cause a rip in the fabric of time according to some theories. crazy stuff...
The "grandfather pinciple" is something of heated debate in the physics world. Another hot topic in the scheme of time travel is the "jinn"
A Jinn is an object without a time. Example: The classic story of an old woman who gives a man a watch before she dies, and the watch sends the man back in time, where he meets a woman, and falls in love with her, and then he gives her the watch as a gift and she dissappears. This was the old woman who gave the man the watch, and thus we must ask, "where does the watch exist?"
In response to allenb1963, i agree that quantum mechanics does obliterate much of classical mechanics. For the uninformed, quantum mechanics is the mechanics (study of movements) of tiny, tiny, microscopinc objects (like electrons).. for some reason, we can't explain in the same set of rules how planets move AND how electrons jump. The search for the grand unified theory, a hugely important part of theoretical physics, is the search for a set of underlying rules that explains ALL forces in the universe. It may turn out some day that quantum mechanics is as similar to classical mechanics as biology is to botany: same basic ideas, different focus and scope.
GReat reading! I somehow keeps some of my dreams alive!
But you guys sure know how to take them away again, don´t you? :D