Laser time machine

Video

Saw this on TV a while ago, and thought it was pretty cool. Anyone know what power lasers he would need to achieve "time travel"? Seems like many of the most powerful lasers they have today! Who knows, in 20 years we could be taking apart media burners to make time machines.

You'd like a laser time machine? You are in luck!

I have one for sale, the laser unit is fine, but it is stuck in first gear forward - yours for $100, as-is.

My head hurts thinking about what would happen when they turn it on. You know, if it isn't complete and utter BS.

Wow a laser time machine, that's great news. My FLUX CAPACITOR is running out of uranium.

Yeah it would be awesome.

I'm just wondering if it did work would it be controlled... I'm sure they don't completely understand it.

Ronald Mallett - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Objections

In a recent paper by Ken Olum and Allen Everett[8] the authors claimed to have found problems with Mallett's analysis. One of their objections is that the spacetime which Mallett used in his analysis contains a singularity even when the power to the laser is off and is not the spacetime that would be expected to arise naturally if the circulating laser were activated in previously empty space. Mallett has not offered a published response to Olum and Everett, but in his book Time Traveler he mentions that he was unable to directly model the optical fiber or photonic crystal which bends the light's path as it travels through it, so the light circulates around rather than moving in a straight line; as a substitute he chose to include a "line source" (a type of one-dimensional singularity) which would act as a "geometric constraint", bending spacetime in such a way that the light would circulate around on a helix-shaped path in a vacuum[9] (for an older solution involving an infinite cylinder which creates CTCs, in this case due to the cylinder's own rotation rather than light circulating around it, see the Tipler cylinder). He notes that closed timelike curves are present in a spacetime containing both the line source and the circulating light, while they are not present in a spacetime containing only the line source, so that "the closed loops in time had been produced by the circulating flow of light, and not by the non-moving line source."[10] However, he does not provide any additional argument as to why we should expect to see closed timelike curves in a different spacetime where there is no line source, and where the light is caused to circulate due to passing through a physical substance like a photonic crystal rather than circulating in a vacuum due to the curved spacetime around the line source.

Another objection by Olum and Everett is that even if Mallett's choice of spacetime were correct, the energy required to twist spacetime sufficiently would be huge, and that with lasers of the type in use today the ring would have to be much larger in circumference than the observable universe. At one point Mallett agreed that in a vacuum the energy requirements would be impractical but noted that the energy required goes down as the speed of light goes down. He then argued that if the light is slowed down significantly by passing it through a medium (as in the experiments of Lene Hau where light was passed through a superfluid and slowed to about 17 metres per second) the needed energy would be attainable.[11] However, the physicist J. Richard Gott argues that slowing down light by passing it through a medium cannot be treated as equivalent to lowering the constant c (the speed of light in a vacuum) in the equations of General Relativity, saying:[12]

One has to distinguish between the speed of light in a vacuum, which is a constant, and through any other medium, which can vary enormously. Light travels more slowly through water than through empty space, for example, but this does not mean that you age more slowly while scuba diving or that it is easier to twist space-time underwater.
The experiments done so far don't lower the speed of light in empty space; they just lower the speed of light in a medium and should not make it easier to twist space-time. Thus, it should not take any less mass-energy to form a black hole or a time machine of a given size in such a medium.

Later, Mallett abandoned the idea of using slowed light to reduce the energy, writing that, "For a time, I considered the possibility that slowing down light might increase the gravitational frame dragging effect of the ring laser ... Slow light, however, turned out not to be helpful for my research."[13]

Finally, Olum and Everett note a theorem proven by Stephen Hawking in a 1992 paper on the Chronology Protection Conjecture,[14] which demonstrated that according to General Relativity it should be impossible to create closed timelike curves in any finite region that satisfies the weak energy condition, meaning that the region contains no exotic matter with negative energy. Mallett's original solution involved a spacetime containing a line source of infinite length, so it did not violate this theorem despite the absence of exotic matter, but Olum and Everett point out that the theorem "would, however, rule out the creation of CTC's in any finite-sized approximation to this spacetime."

Hmmm, very interesting. I'm wondering...

... will this machine allow me to go back in time and regain the 5minutes32seconds I wasted watching the video!

M

these actually exist one time my wife was washing the pots and pans
and i showed her the 1k 473 rpl i bought an $$$ expensive one the next thing i knew it was the next day ,I was lying on the couch and when i went through time warp i musta banged my head good
cause i had a big a$$ed knot on it

:crackup::crackup::crackup:John That was Priceless!

Not only will it not work but anything based on Einsteins theories with light and time will end in failure. Not saying hes a bad guy... he was just born in the wrong time period

I just don't think time travel is possible fullstop (if you really think about the idea of time travel, you'll see why I think it's impossible).

Hmmm, very interesting. I'm wondering...

... will this machine allow me to go back in time and regain the 5minutes32seconds I wasted watching the video!

Click to expand...

LOL.. video went for 5:30 btw it sounds like a load of bs to me.... we'll see in due time!

It has been proven that time does slow down as you travel faster and
faster... the phenomenon it is called Time Dilation...

Here is a site that was used on the TV show NOVA that is an interesting read...
a bit long though (for the impatient)..

Time Travel


Jerry

lasersbee said:

It has been proven that time does slow down as you travel faster and
faster... the phenomenon it is called Time Dilation...

Here is a site that was used on the TV show NOVA that is an interesting read...
a bit long though (for the impatient)..

Time Travel


Jerry

Click to expand...

A lot of theories but nothing solid. You have to remember that the tools they're using succumb to the laws of physics not yet discovered either. Now I believe... and don't judge me to harshly on this... that time really doesn't exist but rather the question is, "What is where, now?"

The theory about time slowing down when you move faster seems flawed in several fundemental ways. As far as I remember they tested it by flying a nuclear clock through space, and when it returned it was some ridiculously small amount of time behind another one which had been kept on Earth. To me that simply means that whatever makes the clock work was slowed down a tiny bit by movement. For that to be "slowing down time", it would mean that cooling down food to slow degradation would be slowing down time for that food. Walking slowly instead of at normal pace would mean you did less in the same time period as you usually do more - just like the clock.
Either time is relative and it will be possible to slow it down or speed it up depending on how fast you do things, or time is as it is, and what happened to that clock didn't prove anything.
I really don't believe in the concept of traveling back in time.

Crazy Jay said it pretty well.

Seb

Jaseth said:

The theory about time slowing down when you move faster seems flawed in several fundemental ways. As far as I remember they tested it by flying a nuclear clock through space, and when it returned it was some ridiculously small amount of time behind another one which had been kept on Earth. To me that simply means that whatever makes the clock work was slowed down a tiny bit by movement. For that to be "slowing down time", it would mean that cooling down food to slow degradation would be slowing down time for that food. Walking slowly instead of at normal pace would mean you did less in the same time period as you usually do more - just like the clock.
Either time is relative and it will be possible to slow it down or speed it up depending on how fast you do things, or time is as it is, and what happened to that clock didn't prove anything.
I really don't believe in the concept of traveling back in time.

Crazy Jay said it pretty well.

Seb

Click to expand...

JASETH!! You have got to be kidding me!! That thing about the clock is exactly what I heard and based my thinking on! Holy Crap dude ... Great minds think alike huh?