From: Kelly Peterborough <kellymcg@attcanada.ca>
Date: Sat, 06 Apr 2002 02:04:07 -0500
Fwd Date: Sat, 06 Apr 2002 10:15:16 -0500
Subject: To Bravely Go Back When No One Has Gone Back Before


Source: The Boston Globe

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/095/metro/Professor_s_time_travel_idea_fir=
es_up_the_imagination+.shtml


Professor's time travel idea fires up the imagination

By David Abel, Globe Staff, 4/5/2002

Ronald Mallett, a physicist at the University of Connecticut, believes
he knows how to build a time machine - an actual device that could send
something or someone from the future to the past, or vice versa.

He's not joking.

Unlike other physicists who have pondered the science of time travel,
the 57-year-old professor has devised a machine he believes could
transport anything from an atom to a person from one time to another.

"I'm not a nut. ...I hope to have a working mockup and start
experiments this fall," says Mallett, who will detail his ideas
about time travel tonight at Boston's Museum of Science. "I
would think I was a crackpot, too, if there weren't other
colleagues I knew who were working on it. This isn't Ron
Mallett's theory of matter; it's Einstein's theory of
relativity. I'm not pulling things out of the known laws of
physics."

But Alan Guth, a physics professor at MIT who has studied the
theory of time machines, says he isn't sure it's even
theoretically possible to travel through time. As far as whether
time travel is a possibility, he says: "Definitely not within
our lifetimes."

Another physicist, Stanley Deser, a professor at Brandeis University who
recently co-authored a paper titled "Time Travel?," says the problem
is not the physics, it's the feasibility of making time travel work.
"This is about trying to amass all the matter of the universe in a very
small region," he says. "Good luck."

After 27 years at UConn, Mallett has the confidence of his boss,
William Stwalley, chairman of the university's physics
department. "His ideas certainly have merit," Stwalley says. "I
think some of his ideas are very interesting and they would make
nice tests of general relativity."

Mallett's plan doesn't require some sort of sleigh, the means of
transport in H.G. Wells's "The Time Machine," or reaching 88 miles per
hour in a flying DeLorean as in the movie "Back to the Future." His
time machine merely uses a ring of light.

According to Einstein's theory of gravity, anything that has
mass or energy distorts the space and the passage of time around
it, like a bowling ball dropped on a trampoline. Circulating
laser beams in the right way, by slowing them down and shooting
them through anything from fiber-optic cable to special
crystals, might create a similar distortion that could
theoretically transport someone through different times, Mallett
believes.

The professor and his UConn colleagues plan to build a device to
test whether it's possible to transport a subatomic particle,
probably a neutron, through time. The energy from a rotating
laser beam, Mallett hopes, would warp the space inside the ring
of the light so that gravity forces the neutron to rotate
sideways. With even more energy, it's possible, he believes, a
second neutron would appear. The second particle would be the
first one visiting itself from the future.

While Mallett acknowledges that sending a person through time
may require more energy than physicists today know how to
harness, he sees it merely as "an engineering problem." If it's
possible to use light to send a neutron through time, a feat
that doesn't require as much energy as sending a human, he
believes it wouldn't be long before engineers figure out a way
to send a person.

"What we're talking about is at the edge of current technology,
not beyond current technology," he says.

Since his father, a heavy smoker, died at the age of 33 when
Mallett was 10 years old, Mallett has longed for a way to travel
back in time to warn him about the dangers of cigarettes.

For most of his career, however, Mallett kept secret that his
desire for time travel had drawn him to become a physicist. It
wasn't until a few years ago, when he began researching a book
on the topic, that he arrived at his idea of how to build a time
machine.

If his idea pans out, won't there be a host of potential
paradoxes, such as time travelers killing their parents and
making it impossible for them to exist? No, he says, explaining
that those travelers would continue to exist in a "parallel
universe."

And what about the ethics of changing history?

There would be government laws to control time travel, he believes.

"Any technology has a potential nefarious side to it," he says.
"But I don't think there's a way to stop it. We as a species
have always reached out. We've been doing that since the caves.
I say let's make it so that we better reality. I think we can
bravely do that."

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.

This story ran on page B1 of the Boston Globe on 4/5/2002.
=A9 Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.