| Manu | Date: Sunday, 07-May-2017, 3:50 AM | Message # 1 |
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| A researcher crunches the numbers on time travel using his own TARDIS. Also, a weird new material could be the real-world version of a flux capacitor.
Pull out your list of regrets, mistakes and runs of just plain bad luck, because it turns out you can go back. A University of British Columbia professor has run the numbers on the feasibility of time travel, and he says they check out.
"People think of time travel as something fictional," math and physics instructor Ben Tippett said in a news release Thursday. "And we tend to think it's not possible because we don't actually do it. But, mathematically, it is possible."
It's a finding that's sure to inject new energy and vigor into late-night, half-sober arguments about the morality of traveling back in time to assassinate Adolf Hitler before his rise to power.
Tippett created a formula based on Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, which states that huge cosmic objects like stars and black holes distort space and time. The recent detection of gravitational waves created by distant colliding black holes confirmed Einstein's theory.
Large stars can actually cause the fabric of the space-time continuum to curve, which Tippett says contributes to the curved orbits of planets as they move through space.
"The time direction of the space-time surface also shows curvature. There is evidence showing the closer to a black hole we get, time moves slower," he explains. "My model of a time machine uses the curved space-time -- to bend time into a circle for the passengers, not in a straight line. That circle takes us back in time."
Oh, cool. So all we have to do is build this time-bending machine and we're off to 2012 to bet everything we have on the then-laughably long odds of a European Union without the UK, a US president named Trump and the world champion Chicago Cubs.
Actually, Tippett says not so fast, McFly.
"While is it mathematically feasible, it is not yet possible to build a space-time machine because we need materials -- which we call exotic matter -- to bend space-time in these impossible ways, but they have yet to be discovered."
Full article/source - https://www.cnet.com/au....ve-mass
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