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After some serious number crunching, a University of British Columbia (Okanagan Campus) researcher has come up with a mathematical model for a viable time machine.
Ben Tippett, a mathematics and physics instructor at University of British Columbia's Okanagan campus, recently published a study about the feasibility of time travel. Tippett, whose field of expertise is Einstein's theory of general relativity, studies black holes and science fiction when he's not teaching. Using math and physics, he has created a formula that describes a method for time travel.
"People think of time travel as something as fiction," says Tippett. "And we tend to think it's not possible because we don't actually do it. But, mathematically, it is possible."
"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," says Tippett. "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."
The division of space into three dimensions, with time in a separate dimension by itself, is incorrect, says Tippett. The four dimensions should be imagined simultaneously, where different directions are connected, as a space-time continuum. Using Einstein's theory, Tippett says that the curvature of space-time accounts for the curved orbits of the planets.
[...] "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."
[...] For his research, Tippett created a mathematical model of a Traversable Acausal Retrograde Domain in Space-time (TARDIS). He describes it as a bubble of space-time geometry which carries its contents backward and forwards through space and time as it tours a large circular path. The bubble moves through space-time at speeds greater than the speed of light at times, allowing it to move backward in time.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/04/170427091717.htm
[Abstract] Traversable acausal retrograde domains in spacetime
What do you think ?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 28 2017, @02:16PM
If you go back in time, even if you got access to the big doughnut (can get divergence down to 1/100th, way better than those portable General Electric dual-singularity jumpers), you're never going to travel precisely to the same timeline that you departed from. It's not possible to reach 0 divergence. It's an asymptote, and you'd need infinite energy.
Here's how your scenario would work.
1. Get some time on the big doughnut, say.
2. Arrive before you would have been born. (It would be a safe assumption to assume this would otherwise happen when you arrive with a 0.01±0.002 divergence). Make sure your parents never meet, etc.
3. In that timeline, the other you won't exist.
4. So, the other you obviously can't get any time on the big doughnut, but that's fine.
You won't fade away or anything like Back to the Future. You're still quite real, because the timeline that resulted in your birth and survival of N-day is also still quite real. Your return journey will be complicated, however. You probably won't be able to make it back to a timeline where you exist and survive N-day, certainly not with a jumper that fits into a car. You will be able to observe what the future is like without you when you return, but it's highly unlikely you'll ever be able to get back to a timeline where people know who you are.