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Ron Mallett has a dream that he dedicated his life to: traveling back in time .
And it's not just a fantasy: Mallett is a respected physicist and professor at the University of Connecticut, United States
"I see myself as an ordinary, passionate person, and my passion is the ability to travel on time "said Mallett, whose work was the theme of this week's Horizon Science Program. , from the BBC.
And the physicist, 73, admitted that his great passion had its origin in a personal tragedy.
— "Return to see my father" —
Mallett's father, a fat smoker, died of a heart attack only 33 years old, when his son was 10 years old .
Mallett was devastated and took refuge in the books.
A year after my father's death, I found a book that changed my life, the book was "The Time Machine". from HG Wells. "[196] 59002]" The cover caught my attention. But what captivated me was what he said inside: "Scholars know that time is a form of space and that we can come and go in time, as we do in space ""
"When I read that, I thought," If I could build a time machine, I could go back into the past, find my father and maybe save his life. " Scientific
— A Tunnel to the Past —
The idea of a time machine may seem crazy, but scientists are already looking for answers that might someday become a reality 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 currently the model used to explain the universe
. But Einstein also thought that it was possible to curve the 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.
Wormholes can exist naturally in the cosmos and scientists in Russia are using radio telescopes to try to detect them
— Dark Energy —
But use wormholes to travel in the weather 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 end .
The mysterious phenomenon of black energy could offer a solution.
In the 90s Astronomers found that the expansion of the universe was accelerating.
"Something has an anti-gravitational effect We do not know what it is, but we call it dark energy in much of the Universe". to the BBC Tamara Davis, cosmologist at the University of Queensland Australia
A wormhole would only work if the entrance or the "mouth" could remain open long enough. And that requires negative energy, which does not exist in everyday life.
But according to Davis, the dark energy could keep the tunnel openings as long as necessary.
"We do not know if we can create a wormhole, if anything like this would be in our technical capacity, but who knows what a future human civilization will reach ", declared the cosmologist.
"Technology has progressed so fast that maybe someday we will achieve control over space and time."
— "Like when you stir up a cup of coffee" — [19659028] Ron Mallett has another proposal
Mallett's plan for a time machine is inspired by a book on Einstein's equations that he read when he had 12 .
The physicist at the University of Connecticut has built a device to illustrate principles that would build a machine in the future. eal, 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, would bend space. Mallett's work has shown that if the laser has 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 — [19659034] The idea of Mallett would require large amounts of energy and work at the scale microscopic.
And even if we managed to build a time machine, using it successfully would require a better understanding of the time yes
The generally accepted idea is that the universe is a block of space-time.
"The important thing in this model is the idea that the past, the present, and the future are also real – to think that everything that existed, exists, or will exist somewhere in the world. 39, space-time "says Kristie Miller, director of the Center for the Study of Time at the University of Sydney, Australia.
This means that" the dinosaurs are there in the past, we are here now and the whole future is somewhere in space-time, "he explains.
One way to visualize this model is to think about points of Time as places in space
"I am in Sydney, but there are other people in Singapore or London. And these places are perfectly real, "said Miller.
—" The passage of time is real "—
This model implies, however, that the past, present, and future are already written Although we can travel back in time, we could not change them.
The block model treats our everyday experience of time as an illusion, a way humans rationalize reality.
But Lee Smolin , of the Perimeter Institute Waterloo, Canada, believes that the passage of time is a fundamental and real phenomenon.
"Traveling in time is probably impossible ," Smolin told the BBC
"If the truth is the present moment, the past is real only in the sense that we have memories or archives and the future does not exist yet, so there is none. where to travel. "
—" You Should Never Say Never "
Neil Turok, director of the Perimeter Institute, believes that the weird world of quantum physics may be crucial in the resolution of the puzzle
In the smaller scales of quantum physics, the rules of classical physics that are taught in college texts do not work
For example, a particle may be in several places at the same time.
"I think there is a possibility 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 of walking in time. "
But Turok says that" you should never say never. "
" Someone very smart might tell us one day how to change the rules. "
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