Dr. Mallett's Book, Time Traveler (Audio Available On Part II) Ken: Today our guest is the renowned physicist and educator Dr. Ronald Mallett. It is a pleasure to have your here doctor. I understand that a movie is being made about your life, can you tell us about it? Dr. Mallett: Sure it's really one of the heights of my personal and professional life. I have written a book called Time Traveler, which is a memoir of my journey through time and why I became interested in time travel and also talks about the basis for it. It is a general book for the public and the gifted film maker Spike Lee became interested in wanting to make a feature film of it. It was one of those things that I just didn't anticipate it happening. He teaches film at New York University and two of his graduate students found out about my book and they read it and brought it to his attention. He was giving a major talk at the University of Connecticut and that is where I work. the department called me and said the film maker Spike Lee would like to talk to you. I felt that they were actually joking at first, but he said that he would like to talk with me and we spent a couple of hours talking about my work and my life and I gave him a copy of my book. He was going back to Italy to finish his film that is now out, Miracle At Santa Anna. The thing is that when he came back he said this is a great book. He said that I am going to make a future film of it. Then it was like Hollywood, I am going to have my people contact your people and we actually signed a contract back in June and I just talked with him a few weeks ago after the premier of his movie and he said that he was now actively working on the script, so he will be co-writing and directing, he will be directing the movie for it. As I said it is going to be very exciting. I think it will be exciting for me personally, but I think it is going to be something that will be fascinating for the general public. I am really looking forward to seeing what this is going to be like in his hands. He said that it is going to be a regular feature film. I'm looking forward to it too. Dr. Mallett: Thank you. Ken: Tell us about the time machine you are designing.
Albert Einstein Dr. Mallett: Sure. The thing is that my work and this is really important, is based on Einstein's theories of relativity. That is really essential to realize and that is why I take it seriously as well as my colleagues. What it is that I have found is that gravity can actually change time in Einstein's theory. That is, according to Einstein, the stronger gravity is, the more time will slow down. This is actually something that has been demonstrated experimentally as a matter of fact. The GPS satellites, which I could go into more detail a little bit later, but the thing is that they had clocks on them and they found that they had actually been effected by the fact that they are at a very high altitude, where gravity is weak and they are actually running faster than clocks here at the surface of the earth. We do know that that's a real effect and what I found was that everyone thinks of matter as creating gravity. The earth creates gravity which keeps us on the earth and the sun creates gravity which keeps the earth in orbit around it and so on. In Einstein's theory not only can matter create gravity, but light can create gravity. Light doesn't have mass, but light can create gravity. It is actually due to its energy. You can begin to see my reasoning that if gravity can affect time and light can create gravity, then light can affect time. My breakthrough was realizing that you could manipulate time by using light. What I found specifically is that if you create a circulating beam of light and this can be done in different ways, you can actually bounce light off mirrors, you can have intersecting light beams, you can get light to go around in a path, you can get a loop out of light. The point is that when you do that, when you get light to go around in a loop, it can actually cause space and time to get twisted and there is a pretty easy way of visualizing what I mean by this twisting of space and time. Let's say a simple analogy is a cup of coffee. Actually you have a cup of coffee sitting in front of you right now. Think of that coffee and the cup being like empty space. Think of your spoon as being like a circulating light beam. What happens if you take the spoon and stir the coffee? Well the coffee starts swirling around. Well that is what the circulating light beam is doing to empty space. Its like the spoon is causing light beams and causing empty space to swirl around. Now you might say if it is empty space, how do I see it whirling around? Let's go back to the coffee. If you take a sugar cube and put it into the coffee and then take the spoon and start stirring it around, what happens is that the sugar cube get dragged around by the coffee. You could know that the coffee is being dragged around by knowing that the sugar cube is being dragged around. In the case of empty space, the thing that plays the role of the sugar cube is a sub-atomic particle that is called a neutron. A neutron. is a part of every atom and if we put the neutron into empty space and if there is a circulating light beam stirring empty space, the space will actually drag the neutron around just as the coffee is dragging the sugar cube around. Even though we can't see the empty space being dragged around, we can see the neutron being dragged around, so we know that space is being stirred up. Now here is the key, in Einstein's theory whatever you do to space, also happens to time. If I think of time as being a straight line, this is the way in which we live in time, in other words if you imagine that a straight line is time and yesterday was the past and you are moving along that line to today then you continue along that line to tomorrow, the future, then all of us even though we are unconscious of it, we all are stuck along this timeline, to the past, to the present, to the future. The point is that in Einstein's theory, space and time are linked to each other, so whatever I do to space, also happens to time. That means that if I stir space long enough, what will eventually happen is that time line will actually be turned into a loop. I think that you can see what is eventually going to happen then. If I make that line into a loop, in other words it is connected to the top and bottom of the line, if I move from the past along to the present to the future and continue along that timeline I move from the future back into the past. So by stirring space, I can eventually turn time into a loop and along that loop in time I can go back into the past. That is my theory. Ken: Do you think that different intensities of light would make a difference? Dr. Mallett: Oh absolutely. In fact the greater the intensity of light the greater the stirring of space that I am talking about. Also the equations say that it is more than just the stirring of space. It is actually the size of the loop. It turns out that the smaller the loop is, interestingly enough, the stronger the stirring becomes in the region where the loop is, so that is the thing that we are trying to do in my work, we are not trying to send human beings, I want to point that out, only sub-atomic particles and information. The size of the device is going to be quite small to do that and the information we are going to send is going to be in the form of light bits of information that you could actually encode on elementary particles and actually send that back as sort of a coded message that one could interpret in the past with suitable receiving equipment, as information. Ken: Well you know it's funny, I wasn't planning on asking a couple of these questions, but you got me so interested here. Do you ever think that you could get a light that would be intense enough where you wouldn't even have to spin it around? Dr. Mallett: No, the thing is that it is actually the circulation of the light that is doing it, that's the point. The greater the intensity the better, but the circulation of the light is important because that stirring of space is actually what leads eventually to the twisting of time. The equations directly show that. In other words the equations show the link between the twisting of space and the twisting of time. Increasing the intensity will definitely help, but you still will have to have that circulation of the light. Ken: Every Star Trek fan has seen episodes where time travel was accomplished by accelerating to extreme speeds by heading toward the sun then pulling out at the last moment. Do you think that there could be any truth to the fact that if a body can accelerate to several times the speed of light and then can pull up and stop, that this could disturb the fabric of space and possibly cause some sort of time event?
Traveling Through A Wormhole Dr. Mallett: The problem with that is that it is not possible to accelerate objects even to the speed of light, because there is a law of physics that prevents you from doing that. There is a tendency to think of this speed limit, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, being something like the sound barrier because people say we broke the sound barrier so why can't we break the light barrier? The light barrier isn't a barrier in the normal sense. It is actually built into the very fabric of mass and energy and its relationship to space and time. I can actually illustrate very simply why it is that we can't reach the speed of light. It is based on one of the most famous equations, the equation that every school child knows E=Mc2. Imagine that you have something that you are trying to push along a table. Think of anything. A book you are trying to push along a table. In order to get that book to move along the table, in order to get it to go a certain speed, you have to give it energy. Normally in ordinary physics, the more energy you give to an object, the faster you will get it to go. In Einstein's theory there is more to it than that. Remember the equation E=Mc2? Well that equation can be read both ways. People usually think of it as being a little bit of matter creates a lot of energy, but it can also be read in the direction that energy can create matter. That is important because that means that as you are pushing the book, not only are you getting it to go faster, but a little bit of the energy that you are giving to push the book goes into increasing the mass of the book, you see. What that means is that the book becomes more massive and it becomes harder to push it. That means that you have to give it more energy to get it going faster, but as you push with more energy, that more energy not only goes into increasing the speed of the book, but it also goes into making the book more massive. What you find eventually is that as you try and get that book to go at the speed of light the amount of energy that you have to give becomes infinite. It becomes more energy than is available in the entire universe. It is actually the basic law=Mc2. It is the reason that we can not get a massive object to go at the speed of light. So we can never get it to go at the speed of light. Now the thing is that one of the things that they talk about in Star Trek is this whole notion of warp. Eventually when we do try and get interstellar travel I do believe that we are going to have to use Einstein's theory of General Relativity which says that we can warp space and time with matter and that this warping of space and time will allow us to create things like wormholes and the bending of space. This warping of space could possibly allow us to get from one place to another faster than if we were trying to go at the speed of light. Eventually this notion of warping space and time is something that is going to be, but trying to go faster than the speed of light, that will never work. Ken: Dr. Mallett I don't think so, unless we could find documents that directly show that was what they were trying to do. There have been speculations that the Germans tried to do a time machine project, I have actually heard people talk about that. The problem is that if you look at their lack of success in their atomic bomb project, compared to what we were doing, they were not getting very far at all. It seems to me highly unlikely that they would have been successful in something like a time machine project which would require vastly more sophisticated technology than they had at that time. Unless we uncover surprising explicit documents that show that they were doing that and at what stage they were doing that, I find that highly unlikely. Ken: Do you agree with the following statement: If someone was able to travel into the future, people there might have to keep them there to avoid them gaining technology to take back to the past and thus changing the future and wouldn't the fact that they are kept, change our future? Dr. Mallett The thing is that they might try and keep someone from coming back if that was the scenario that happened, but it is likely that they wouldn't be able to prevent the information from being sent back, even if they kept the person. Remember that I was saying that the revolution with time and with time machines is going to be sending information back to the past rather than people and that's something that's much more difficult to control to try and prevent someone from doing that, but yes there is a possibility that if someone sent information back to the past they definitely would change the future. The future would now be an altered future in which technologies are present, accelerated technologies that weren't present in that future. Now that brings up the question, can we really change the past and the paradoxes that are associated with that? That is a major question, the so called grandfather paradox, which is a classic example of that. That is to say that if we go back into the past and prevent our grandparents from meeting each other, then they don't have our parents and our parents don't have us. So how could we go back and do that? That is the classic one. Physics offers a way out of that which could even be used with this example that you were giving of bringing technology back. There is this other notion. Another activity in physics is Quantum Theory, and quantum theory opens up the very real possibility of parallel universes. Even though it sounds bizarre, it says that our universe may not be alone, it may merely be simply one of many parallel universes. One may be similar to our and differ only very very slightly. That could resolve this paradox because what it says is simply that if you arrive in the past you go back to a parallel universe and in that parallel universe you can't alter things and that will lead to a whole new development in that universe, however you do not alter the universe that you came from, so the universe that you came from goes on its way and leads to the technologies that were the original development. Now of course we don't know which scenario is going to happen, whether it is parallel universes or the universe is already determined or weather we really effect the entire universe. That is only going to be known once we actually do the experiment. Ken: Dr. Mallett Its potentially possible, the thing is that whenever you are entering into new domains of energy, new realms, it is impossible to predict. The main thing that they are looking for, the Hadron Collider was actually developed to look for specific elementary particles, but the thing that we have found before and that we are likely to find again, gives us surprises that we didn't anticipate. It is possible, but it is hard to tell until they start running the experiments continuously. It could lead us to new insights that might help us develop effectively time travel, yeah. Ken: Dr. Mallett It would depend on who is doing it and the point that you are bringing up is a subtle one. The reason that I say that is that the time travelers will remember, their memories won't change. They will find themselves in a world where other people won't remember what they remember. The point is that in Einstein's theory there is always two observers, you are always talking about two different observers, one who is traveling and one who isn't. This means that the person that is actually going back in time and changing things will keep the memories that they have, those won't alter, however the world in which they are affecting, those things will alter. The people there will remember different things than the time travelers.
Dr. Stephen Hawking Ken: Dr. Mallett The thing is that this is very simply answered. It is interesting that it is overlooked. You have to remember that even in the work that I am doing, the circulating light is what is creating the loops in time. That means that if I turned the device on today for example and I left it on for 100 years, someone a 100 years from now could come back 25, 50, 75 years from now. All the way back to the point where the machine was turned on. They can't go earlier than that because it is the machine that is creating the effect. Consequently that means that the time traveler has to have a device back where they are coming to in order for them to materialize into. So the answer to that question is very straight forward, the reason that we are not inundated with time travelers from the future is that a human size time machine hasn't been built yet, because that would have to have been built now for the time traveler to come back and in fact one of the things that I tell my students is that if anyone tells you that I am a time traveler from the future, I always say be polite with them and say that's nice, can you show me your machine? This holds for any real time machine. It doesn't matter if you are talking about wormholes or cosmic strings, it's the phenomena that is creating the effect and you can't go back earlier than when the phenomena occurred. Ken: Well I can't help but ask you the following question now. You peaked my interest again. If you design a time machine that will send data into the past, do you expect to start receiving data from the future? Dr. Mallett Well no, not automatically, that is the other thing. You have to remember that there has to be intentionality. What I mean by that is that you can not just simply receive information, you have to have a receiver to do that. It is like your radio, radio waves are around us all the time. We don't know that, the only way that we are able to detect radio waves is with a radio receiver. Even then we have to tune it to a particular station to get specific information. The thing is that it is the same here, if I want to get information from the future, I will have to have set up with my experiment a specific kind of detector to detect the information that I plan in the future to send to myself. Then I would expect to get information out. Ken: Well the reason that I asked you that question was that if you perfect that machine, won't it become an historical event that will be well known to everybody in the future? Dr. Mallett Oh. it would be, but never the less I would still have to have test it and the only way that I could test it is to send myself specific information. It's like the Alexander Graham Bell thing, you know. I would have to have a specific detector attached to the device and this would be happening in steps, so yes people in the future would know about it, but for me here in the present I would have had to have a specific detector and then have a controlled experiment in which a couple of weeks from now I was sending data back to myself of a specific sort, saying hi Ron it worked, something that I would be able to interpret. When I turn it on nothing is going to happen unless I set things up with a specific type of detector that detects something. Ken: Dr. Mallett Potentially yes, but you have to remember that any technology is vastly potentially dangerous. All we have to do is think of aircraft. The benefits of those are too many for me to even enumerate, but all we have to do is think of 9/11 to see the consequences of that. The point is that the key here is regulation. In other words this technology is not going to be technology that you are going to be able to to to Walmart and pick up, It is going to require both sophisticated technology and it is going to require control. That is where the both the public and the government has to take part in, so yes there is that potential danger, but there is potential danger with any technology what so ever and there will definitely have to be regulation. Ken: Dr. Mallett Well just the misuse of it. It is possible to send back information that could be used for either good or ill. That is even now in our every day world, so that fact to me is..., you know that this is the age of information and that is why I said that this whole idea of sending information back would be a quantum leap in the information revolution. To me it would be the misuse of information that is what I see as the potential danger. Ken: Dr. Mallett No according to Einstein's theories, what will happen is that the person doing the time traveling, whether it is into the future or into the past, will age the normal rate. Their time line will have separated from everyone else's timeline but within their timeline they will age at a normal rate, so if they go back into the past they can meet a younger version of themselves and they can meet their grandparents or something like that, assuming that the machine had been built. They will have aged at a normal rate, there is no way that they can control their rate of age, just their rate of aging relative to everyone else. Ken:
Expanding Universe Time Line Dr. Mallett Ken: Dr. Mallett Oh yeah, in fact that was what I was mentioning earlier with the grandfather paradox, definitely there could be a connection and it could lead to the resolution of the so called grandfather paradox because one could end up in the past of a parallel universe. You could affect that new universe, but you wouldn't affect the original universe, so yes that would be the connection. Ken: Dr. Mallett Anti-matter does exist, but anti-time would be the same thing as time, just backwards. As a matter of fact, interestingly enough, one of the theories that was developed by Richard Feynman, who was really one of the most brilliant physicists that existed in the last century, in the 20th century, he proposed that what we call antimatter specifically, in other words for every particle there is an anti-particle and the electron is something that is made up in every atom. What we feel is that there is an anti-particle called the positron and we actually do know that these positrons, which are essentially anti-electrons exist. What Feynman proposed and he was able to compose a consistent theory to demonstrate that, was that the positron, the anti-electron, can actually be thought of as the electron moving backward in time. An electron moving back in time would look to us like an anti-electron or a positron moving into the future. The difference, a positron and an electron is that they have exactly the same mass, but there is a difference in their charge. An electron is a negative charge and a positron is a positive charge. So according to Feynman, when we see anti-electrons, positrons, those are actually electrons that are moving backward in time. Continued on Part II |
 |
 |
 |
This entire site with all contents, except where stated otherwise, is Copyright © 2008 by About Facts Net and its licensors. All rights reserved. |