Posted to News on 14th Oct 2007, 00:00
Unravelling the mysteries of travel through time and space
Just suppose that it was possible to travel in time. Well, of course, thanks to Einstein, we know that we can travel forwards in time. His theory of relativity predicted that the faster something moves, the more time slows down. So if you got into a rocket and powered away from the Earth, time would pass more slowly for you than the people you left behind. When you returned to Earth, you would have aged a given amount, but time on Earth would have moved on much further.
>This is not just theory, either; scientists proved it well over three decades ago. They took two perfectly synchronised atomic clocks, kept one stationary, and sent the other flying around the world on a passenger jet. When the two clocks were compared after the flight, the clock on the jet was slower than the clock that had remained on the ground by measurable fractions of a second.
>The popular misconception is that you have to be at or near the speed of light for the time dilation effect to be experienced. But Einstein predicted only that the faster you travelled, the more noticeable the effect would be. The experiment of the 1970s proved that any acceleration will cause a relative slowing of time.
>What about travelling backwards in time, then? Might that also be possible? Those who object to the notion of travelling backwards in time say that it can't be possible because, if it were, someone or something would surely have travelled back from the future by now. That's a reasonable objection; does Einstein have anything to say on the matter? His theories don't rule it out, but it's certainly a lot more difficult than travelling forward in time. One man, though, Dr Ronald Mallett, reckons the ability to travel backwards in time could be a reality within ten years, and he expounds his theory in his book, The Time Traveller. Admittedly, we may not be sending objects back in time; we may be limited to sending information. But that would be hugely significant. In effect, he says, we'd be making an early warning device, telling us of problems in the future that we could correct in the past by taking or not taking certain steps.
>Mallet asserts that, just as speed affects time, so does gravity. He proposes an experiment to use light to control gravity, thus twisting time into a loop. With sufficient funding, he believes we could be seeing the effect of time loops within a decade.
>Of course, the funding is a problem. Mallett needs around £120,000 to build the experiment to test the theory, and at the moment the funding is not forthcoming. But I wonder if a change in approach might yield results. Whilst a full blown transmitter and receiver experiment would certainly either prove or disprove the theory, all we really need to build is a receiver, trusting that someone in the future will build a suitable transmitter.
>It struck me that perhaps we could all learn something from this. In design and manufacturing, it is all too tempting to focus on the really big projects, even though the scale and cost implications may mean the project never comes to fruition. What we should be focusing on are the smaller, more manageable projects. These, at the end of the day, are what will keep the wheels of industry turning.
David Roberts, 14 October 2007
