UConn professor to build time travel device
Posted 4/6/2002 - 3:57AM, by Yaz
UConn physicist Ronald Mallett has plans to build a machine to transport a subatomic particle through time. Mallett's experiment will be based ideas introduced in Einstein's theory of gravity, and he hopes to use rotating lasers to warp the space around a particle such as a neutron so that a second neutron from the future would appear.
"I'm not a nut.... I hope to have a working mockup and start experiments this fall," says
Mallett, who will detail his ideas about time travel tonight at Boston's Museum of Science. "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."
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Another physicist, Stanley Deser, a professor at Brandeis University who recently co-authored a paper titled "Time Travel?," says the problem is not the physics, it's the feasibility of making time travel work. "This is about trying to amass all the matter of the universe in a very small region," he says. "Good luck."
Mallett says that sending larger objects through time would require far more energy than what's available to physicists right now, but that's only "an engineering problem" in his eyes. Here's hoping 1.21 gigawatts will be enough to transport something significant.
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