The scientist who devoted his life to building a time machine (and the moving story that inspired him)



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Mallett constructed a device to demonstrate the principles that he claimed to allow in the future to build a machine in real time

And this is not just a fantasy: Mallett is a physicist respected and a professor at the University of Connecticut in the United States.

"I see myself as an ordinary pbadionate person, and my pbadion is the opportunity to travel in time ," said Mallett, whose work was the theme of this week's science program. Horizon, BBC

And the physicist, 73, confessed that his great pbadion came from a personal tragedy

  Ron Mallett

"Revisit My Father"

] Mallett's father, an inveterate smoker, died of a heart attack while he was only 33 years old, when his son was 10 years old.

Mallett was devastated and took refuge in the books.

Image captionMallett dreamed when the child to build a time machine to see his father, died when the physicist was 10.

"A year after the death of my father I found a book that changed my life.The book was "The Time Machine" by HG Wells. "

" The cover caught my eye. was captivated was what he said inside: "Scientists know that time is a form of space and that we can come and go in time, as we let's do it … in the "When I read that I told myself, that if I could build a time machine, I could go back to the past, review my father and such" The idea of ​​a time machine may seem crazy, but scientists are already looking for answers that could one day become a reality "] l Mallett's Vision

Albert Einstein pointed out that the three dimensions of space are time-dependent, a fourth dimension.

Einstein called this system space-time and is the model currently used to explain the universe. 19659004] But Einstein also thought that it was possible fold space time and create a bridge . The phenomenon is called " wormhole " and can be visualized as a tunnel with two outputs, each at a different point in space-time.

Worm holes could exist naturally in the cosmos and scientists in Russia use radio telescopes to try to detect them

Dark energy

But using wormholes to travel in time will not be easy .

The closest could be several light years away. And although we can reach them and survive the journey we do not know where we would meet.

  Wormhole

The "wormhole" and can be visualized as a tunnel with two outputs, each a different point in space-time.

The mysterious phenomenon of black energy could offer a solution.

In the 90s, astronomers found that the expansion of the universe accelerated

"Something has an anti-gravitational effect We do not know what it's, but it's in much of the Universe, we call it dark energy, "said Tamara Davis, a cosmologist at the University of Queensland. Australia.

A wormhole would only work if the entrance or the "mouth" could stay open long enough. And that requires negative energy, which does not exist in everyday life.

But according to Davis, black energy could keep tunnel openings as long as necessary.

"We do not know if we can create a wormhole, if something like this would be in our technical capacity, but who knows what a future human civilization will reach ", says the cosmologist

"Technology has progressed so fast that maybe someday we will reach"

"Like when you stir up a cup of coffee"

Ron Mallett has another proposal

The Plan from Mallett for a Time Machine Inspired from a book on Einstein's Equations that read when he was 12 years old .

The physicist at the University of Connecticut has built a device to illustrate the principles that would build a real machine in the future. According to the BBC,

The device uses a laser to generate a circular beam. The space inside this ring of light should curl, "as when stirring a cup of coffee," says Mallett.

And because space and time are intimately linked, curving space would be curved the hour . Mallett's work has shown that if the laser had the necessary intensity in a sufficiently small space, it would be possible to modify the linear time in which we live.

All that existed is in space – time

The idea of ​​Mallett that would require large amounts of energy and would work on the microscopic scale.

And even if we managed to build a time machine, using it successfully would require a greater understanding of time itself.

The generally accepted idea is that the universe is a block of space-time.

"What is important with this model is the idea that the past, the present and the future are also real, so you may think that what existed, exists or will exist is t in some a place in space time ", explains Kristie Miller, Director of the Center of 39, t T Study of the University of Sydney, Australia

This means that "the dinosaurs are there in the past, we are here now and all the future is somewhere in the world. space-time ", he explains.

The way to visualize this model is to think of points in time as places in the space

"I am in Sydney, but there are others people in Singapore or London. And these places are perfectly real, "said Miller.

" The pbadage of time is real "

This model implies, however, that the past, present and future are already written and even though we could travel in

The block model treats our everyday experience of time as an illusion, a way humans rationalize reality.

But Lee Smolin, of the Perimeter Institute of Waterloo, Canada, believes that the pbadage of time is a fundamental and real phenomenon

  Smolin

For Smolin, the pbadage of time is not a mere illusion and "there is nowhere to go".

with time probably impossible ", Smolin told the BBC

" If the real is the present moment, the past is only real in the sense that we have memories or recordings of it and The future does not exist yet, do There is nowhere to travel. "

" Nunc you should never say "

Neil Turok, director of the Perimeter Institute, believes that the strange world of quantum physics may be crucial in solving the puzzle.

On the tiny scales of quantum physics the rules of clbadical physics that are taught in collegiate texts do not work.

In the quantum world, for example, a particle can be in many places at once [19659004] "I think that it is possible that we can go back. in time. In quantum physics, nothing is impossible ", explains Turok

For now, traveling back in time is still a distant hope because" no one really has a plausible idea about how to go back in time. Time. "

But Turok says that" you should never say never. "

" Someone very smart could tell us how to change the rules. "

BBC

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