He was a physics genius at school, won a scholarship to attend university, we lost touch - caught up for the first time in 20 years this new years, he is on holidays - he got real drunk and i started pressuring him to tell me what he knows about what is really going on there at cern with the lhc - he insisted he couldnt say much as he has signed a 'non-disclosure' contract and if he told anyone anything he could be jailed - i convinced him to play hot and cold - you know the game, you ask a question and either you are 'hot' as in close to the truth, or 'cold' far away from the truth. i kept feeding him homemade blackberry schnapps - 60 proof and he was getting ego fat the more curious i became - so my questions went something like this.
CERN is real life IMC (from the film contact) = WARM
LHC is a stargate - GETTING STEAMY
LHC is a 'time machine' = STEAMY
at this point i practically shouted 'NO SHIT' and the whole party turned and stared at me - he got all paranoid and started to clam up.
before he left, some hours later, after i had all but given up, he said - do you
really want to know what the large hadron collider is for? and handed me a piece of paper with this web address - [
link to www.theage.com.au] and then he said - read the paragraph near dr. paul davies photograph - you figure out the fukn rest you nosy bastard.
here is the paragraph from the address - the interesting bit i have bolded... so, i did the math, i think i have figured it out - what do you guys think?
For that reason, theoretical physicists are focused, instead, on unravelling the mysteries of travelling backwards in time, not forwards. While allowed by Einstein's theories, it is extremely contentious. Travelling forwards in time merely requires that one travel very fast. Travelling backwards in time involves exotic and dubious feats of engineering.
Davies outlined the most popular backwards-in-time model, a man-made variant of a black hole called a wormhole, in his 2001 book How to Build a Time Machine. Black holes are formed from large stars that have burnt out and then imploded. Making a time machine out of them requires building a pair of linked black holes, known as a wormhole. The wormhole would be, literally, a portal into the past.
American physicist Kip Thorne in the mid-1980s first examined how this might be done, and Davies' book outlines how 21st-century technology might build one.
Firstly, a minuscule wormhole would be created in a particle accelerator, a synchrotron-like structure such as that at CERN in Switzerland or Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York.
Secondly, the wormhole would be inflated and maintained using as-yet-undeveloped "exotic matter" such as antigravity. Thirdly, one mouth of the wormhole would be whirled around in the particle accelerator at close to the speed of light for a decade to establish a time dilation difference between the two wormhole mouths. Bring the two mouths back together, and - presto! - one back-in-time machine.This model has certain limitations: the earliest one could travel back to would be to when the wormhole, and its "exit" mouth, was built. This rules out travel to, say, World War II, and explains why tourists from the future haven't arrived. However, such a machine faces spectacular engineering and philosophical problems. "My money would be on the fact that it probably couldn't be built, but I couldn't say that for sure and I don't think anyone else could say it for sure either," says Luckock.
"No-one can say the physics says it's not possible," says Dr Leo Brewin, a senior lecturer in mathematics at Monash University. "What is problematic is the sense of scale . . . the energy required to construct wormholes is enormous. It's hard to see how one could go about making them."
Professor Ray Volkas, a researcher of theoretical particles at Melbourne University, said the engineering challenges of building wormholes are "extremely considerable". "Einstein's general relativity can allow this wormhole-type situation (so) it's worth thinking about ... . . it's still an open question as to whether this sort of gizmo is possible."
Could we ever be Time Lords?
 |
| The northern lights dance and swirl over the Chuguch Mountains near Anchorage, Alaska. 
|
The prospect of time travel has, for long, caught the imagination of many. Stephen Cauchi attempts to find out how realistic it really is.
Stephen Hawking, the famously disabled British physicist whose book, A Brief History of Time, brought cosmology to the masses, turned 60 last year. Scientists marked the occasion by gathering at Cambridge University to discuss the vexing issue of time travel.
"Most physicists view time travel as being problematic, if not downright repugnant," says New Zealand relativity expert Professor Matt Visser, citing the well-known paradox of a time traveller killing his grandmother in the cradle. But he concedes there is no mathematical proof that rules out a time traveller changing the past. "Is chronology protected? Despite a decade's work, we don't know for certain."
It is easy to write off time travel as Dr Who-style science fiction. But at least one detailed model for a time machine has forced physicists such as Hawking to try and find some "chronology protection conjecture" that would ban time travel into the past. As the laws of physics permit cause-and-effect mix ups such as the grandmother paradox, there is something about our understanding of the universe that is lacking.
Furthermore, time travel into the future, in small amounts, is already commonplace. Einstein's special and general theories of relativity, written in 1905 and 1916 respectively, showed that superfast speeds or strong gravitational fields could warp time like a bowling ball on a rubber sheet. The higher the speed, or the stronger the gravity, the greater the warp (known technically as dilation).
Orbiting satellites, for example, travel at about five kilometres per second. This is enough to cause their clocks to run fractionally slower than those on Earth, and over time the difference builds up. "These clocks undergo time dilation because they're moving through space and they're at a different point in the gravitational field," says Dr Hugh Luckock, a senior lecturer in mathematics at Sydney University. "When they're designing these satellite global positioning systems, they have to allow for time dilation or they'd get totally the wrong results."
. . . what happens if you go back in time and kill your grandmother?
Time travel, as portrayed in the movies, is an extreme version of this. In The Time Machine, the hero takes only minutes to travel years into the future. He sees clocks in the outside world move super-quickly. But if outside observers were able to watch the clock on his control panel, they would see it move super-slowly. Eventually, the clocks are decades apart.
"We know that going into the future as far as you like is allowed by the theory of relativity," says Paul Davies, popular science author and professor of natural philosophy at Macquarie University. "It's something that depends on money and not on physics."
For that reason, theoretical physicists are focused, instead, on unravelling the mysteries of travelling backwards in time, not forwards. While allowed by Einstein's theories, it is extremely contentious. Travelling forwards in time merely requires that one travel very fast. Travelling backwards in time involves exotic and dubious feats of engineering.
Davies outlined the most popular backwards-in-time model, a man-made variant of a black hole called a wormhole, in his 2001 book How to Build a Time Machine. Black holes are formed from large stars that have burnt out and then imploded. Making a time machine out of them requires building a pair of linked black holes, known as a wormhole. The wormhole would be, literally, a portal into the past.
American physicist Kip Thorne in the mid-1980s first examined how this might be done, and Davies' book outlines how 21st-century technology might build one.
Firstly, a minuscule wormhole would be created in a particle accelerator, a synchrotron-like structure such as that at CERN in Switzerland or Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. Secondly, the wormhole would be inflated and maintained using as-yet-undeveloped "exotic matter" such as antigravity. Thirdly, one mouth of the wormhole would be whirled around in the particle accelerator at close to the speed of light for a decade to establish a time dilation difference between the two wormhole mouths. Bring the two mouths back together, and - presto! - one back-in-time machine.
This model has certain limitations: the earliest one could travel back to would be to when the wormhole, and its "exit" mouth, was built. This rules out travel to, say, World War II, and explains why tourists from the future haven't arrived. However, such a machine faces spectacular engineering and philosophical problems. "My money would be on the fact that it probably couldn't be built, but I couldn't say that for sure and I don't think anyone else could say it for sure either," says Luckock.
"No-one can say the physics says it's not possible," says Dr Leo Brewin, a senior lecturer in mathematics at Monash University. "What is problematic is the sense of scale . . . the energy required to construct wormholes is enormous. It's hard to see how one could go about making them."
Professor Ray Volkas, a researcher of theoretical particles at Melbourne University, said the engineering challenges of building wormholes are "extremely considerable". "Einstein's general relativity can allow this wormhole-type situation (so) it's worth thinking about ... . . it's still an open question as to whether this sort of gizmo is possible."
