Focus Magazine Wrote:Time Travel
The first time machine might already be with us…
Ronald Mallett was 10 years old when his father died of a massive heart attack, aged just 33. He was devastated. A year later he read The Time Machine by HG Wells, and resolved, there and then, to build a time travel device so he could go back and prevent his father’s premature death.
That was over 50 years ago. Mallett is now Professor of Physics at the University of Connecticut, but his childhood ambition to travel into the past burns as bright as ever.
“Early on, I didn’t tell people what I was doing because I didn’t want it to affect my career – so I studied black holes as a cover story,” he says. “But, on the side, I was always trying to understand more about time and how you might go about building a time machine.”
Over the years, Mallett has perfected what he now believes is a valid design for his device. It works using circulating beams of light to drag space and time around into closed loops, like coffee stirred around in a mug. The idea is that as time spins in a closed loop, some of it has to whirl into the past.
Mallett is now working with an experimental physicist – Professor Chandra Roychoudhuri, also at the University of Connecticut – to test the design. They plan to use an elaborate set-up of lasers to create circulating loops of light, which they hope will be powerful enough to send subatomic particles briefly back through time. They propose to measure the effect by using particles that decay naturally over a well-defined timespan. For example, pion particles have a lifetime of just 26 billionths of a second. If these particles are made to travel back through time then their observed decay lifetime should get shorter. The researchers are now seeking funds for the work, which Mallet estimates will take around 10 years to complete.
Subatomic particles are one thing, but what about sending people back? “That would require international cooperation,” he says. “But I think if we were given unlimited funds we could see this machine in action within this century.”
Mallett’s story is currently being adapted for the screen by Spike Lee.

Prediction: 2100

http://www.bbcfocusmagazine.com/feature/nothing-impossible

(24-11-2009 22:44 )cdm79 Wrote:  That's an interesting article Sooky, but I prefer the Delorean+Flux Capacitor method

Apologies for being boring, but getting back on topic can I ask Modsta why the picture quality on BS1 is not as good as the other channels? It makes Asian Babes look Hi Def (okay that's a bit of an exaggeration, but the image is quite fuzzy).