A 77-yr old Scientist believes that he had found the key to make time travelling real, by using spinning lasers that can bend time.
There’s a bunch of science theories and researches happening behind working for bringing time travel to reality. The academic departments of renowned universities around the world dedicates a part for studying the possibility of time travel. MIT is working on a “time-reversal machine” to detect dark matter and University of Sydney has a “Centre for Time” to uncover the mysterious riddle.
Even though, with all the known physics that’s available now and often pulled up as a concept in science-fiction movies, time travel is not clearly yet been comprehended to practicality. However, this scientist says he cracked the code to time travel by experimenting with lasers.
Limitations of Time Travel
Laws of physics has no clues for time travel to be real, forbidding to travel back in time mainly due to grandfather paradox, causality. While grandfather paradox seems to be untied theoretically, it had not in reality. Causality on the other hand means, events cannot happen before their causes.
For example, if you go back in time and change a particular event on your favor, the change-of-event would have no cause of happening in the past and your attempt will go in vain. And though altering the cause of an event, the cause might happen for sure, one time or another due to the past events, as also explained by this young physicist. Again, your wish of changing the event would be nil.
Just remember that an ‘event’ will only happen after having ‘several causes’. And changing the event will have no related cause in the past, also changing a ‘cause’ will still have the event to happen, as there isn’t a single cause but multiple for any event to happen. So, no changes are allowed by physics. Read this twice for a clear understanding.
This is the short version of explaining the knot of time travel. Albeit Einstein’s theory of general relativity and the idea of wormholes explain time travel as possible for real, the models are based on guesswork and conditions that aren’t yet practical. Time travel is yet now only a concept for fiction movies, when they want to lengthen the script.
Rotating Black Hole twists the Time
But, a physicist and emeritus professor at University of Connecticut, who is 77 years old named “Ronald Mallett” believes, have found a loophole. Mallett’s idea is to create an artificial black hole, which could generate a gravitational field that could lead to time loops and the ability to travel to the past, The Guardian’s article cites. Mallett started to dwell upon time travel from his childhood days, when he lost his father due to heart attack at his 10. He desired to bring back his father, through time travel.
“In Einstein’s theory, space and time relate to each other. That’s why it’s called space-time. So as the black hole is rotating, it will cause a twisting of time,” he added. Rotating black holes can create a gravitational field that could lead to loops of time being created that can allow to go to the past.
A spinning black hole, unlike a normal black hole, has two event horizons – an inner and outer one. Between these two event horizons, something called frame dragging – the dragging of space-time occurs.
Mallett explains analogically as “Let’s say you have a cup of coffee in front of you right now. Start stirring the coffee with the spoon. It started swirling around, right? That’s what a rotating black hole does.”
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Spinning Laser device as Time Machine
As black holes are short in supply and too far away in corners of Milky way, Mallett thinks he may have found an artificial alternative black hole in a device called “ring laser”. The ring laser can create an intense and continuous rotating beam of light.
According to Mallett, “light can create gravity, and if gravity can influence time, then light itself can influence time.”
However, the critics had dissented his ring laser, that for this time machine would have to be the size of the known universe to work, thus completely impractical. Acknowledging that, he still is unsure of the size either but says, at first he has to focus on being able to twist space with light, though not time. The rest has to be done then.
Still far away of making a real time-machine, at this moment his time machine, however big, will look like a cylinder of rotating light beams.
Further, even if his time-machine started to work, it would only allow travel back to the time when the loop was created and cannot go as far as desired.
Speaking on the device, that it has a long way to go for making time travel happen, “It was sad for me but it wasn’t tragic. I dreamt of having a time machine and I have figured out how it can be done,” Mallett told. Mallett hopes that the enormous potential of his machine could one day predict precisely when earthquakes are going to occur or tsunamis.
“So, for me, I’ve opened the door to the possibility. And I think that my father would have been really proud about that”, he concluded.
(For more such interesting informational, technology and innovation stuffs, keep reading The Inner Detail).