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A circulating beam of light as a way to time travel
Ronald Mallett's physics career grew from an early fascination with an offbeat concept.
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Should this experiment prove successful, the team will apply for funding to conduct studies to see if time bending is evident inside the circle of light.
Dr. Mark Silverman at Trinity College in nearby Hartford has suggested a possible way to see evidence of time bending: Two identical samples of a radioactive substance would be prepared with identical half-lives. One would be introduced into the time machine circulating in the same direction as the light, the other in the opposite direction. If, at the end of the experiment, one sample had decayed further than the other, Mallett's theories of time travel would be supported.
Where the experiments will go from there is unclear. There is a vast difference between slowing the decay rate of a radioactive particle and sending a human back in time. Science aside, sending people through time creates philosophical issues as well as physical ones.
Consider the "Grandparent Paradox" in which a time traveler goes back in time and kills her grandparents, thus negating her entire existence. If she were never born, then she couldn't go back in time in the first place. Mallett explains paradoxes such as these with a parallel-universe theory. He believes that with every decision we make, another version of us makes the opposite decision and splits off into a parallel universe. Thus the time traveler was born in the universe where she did not kill her grandparents.
This is where the line between philosophy and physics seems to blur. "All of these things have their root in philosophy," says Mallett. But he explains that the difference between physics and philosophy is experiment. "All of these things would be philosophy without experimentation," he says. True, the parallel-universe theory has not been directly supported by experiment, but Mallett uses the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle to explain why the parallel universe theory is probable.
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle says that we cannot predict both the position of an electron and its spin at any given moment. Without this principle, "the universe should have collapsed immediately after it was formed," says Mallett.
A hydrogen atom, one of the building blocks of our universe, consists of a proton and an electron. Since the proton and electron have opposite charges they should be attracted to each other, collide, and destroy the atom. But if that happened, we would know both the position of the electron (the point of impact with the proton) and its spin (none); therefore it is impossible for them to collide.
Similar to the Uncertainty Principle, quantum mechanics works on the theory that one can't make a definite prediction about anything that will happen next. Therefore the parallel-universe theory works well. What will happen next can't be predicted because in fact, everything happens next.
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