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An emeritus professor at the University of Connecticut believes that he has ‘cracked time travel’ and now wants to go back to 1955 and save his father’s life. Now Professor Ronald Mallett thinks that he has found the trick to bending spacetime and being able to go back in time. Mallet believes that he can twist the fabric of space-time with a ring of rotating lasers to make a loop and allow you to travel backwards.
As silly as it may sound, there is scientific evidence out there to support his idea, but how to put it into practice is another story altogether. The 77-year-old astrophysicist has been on his mission for nearly half a century but believes that modern advances in computing and technology are making his dream more viable by the day.
“The thing is, that what is necessary first is being able to show that we can twist space — not time — twist space with light. Such a conclusion would allow the rest of the theory to unfold. But for now, more research needs to be done.”
In fact, the Centre for Time at the University of Sydney is currently working to prove time travel is possible, and it’s not just them. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is currently working on a “time-reversal machine” to detect dark matter. Whether it would be possible to go back in time is still a source of debate amongst scholars, but the theory holds.
Researchers at the California Institute of Technology even made two small black holes in a quantum computer, noting that the tunnel shared characteristics of a “baby wormhole”. One of his optimistic critics is Alonso-Serrano, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Germany:
“In the moment that you curve spacetime, you can play with that curvature to make the time come in a circle and make a time machine.”
Although possible, it might be too soon to begin building a flux capacitor in your basement. Although the mathematics of time travel is well known and even considered possible, the amount of energy required to bend space and time is beyond anything we humans can produce.
Some of Mallett’s critics have objected that his time machine would have to be the size of the known universe, thus completely impractical.
According to The Guardian, Professor Mallett agrees, but notes that ‘what is necessary first is being able to show that we can twist space – not time – twist space with light’. For now, all that the professor can tell us is that the time machine will look like a cylinder of rotating light beams.
Despite his motivation to see his father again, the prof admits that any success in creating a time machine will not allow him to go back to 1955, as the time machine will only be able to ‘circle back’ to the moment the ‘loop is created’.
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We’ve always been fascinated with the idea of time travel, and movies like Back to the Future have entertained us all with the possibilities of being able to go back and influence history. But the reality of it is rather dull as the technology and costs appear to stay just beyond the horizon for humanity.
“I’ve opened the door to the possibility. And I think that my father would have been really proud about that.”
As the optimistic professor notes, the Wright brothers could not reasonably be expected to know how we will get to the moon immediately after inventing the flying machine.
Who knows what the future will bring?
