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posted by martyb on Friday April 28 2017, @07:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the just-take-a-long-nap dept.

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 ?


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 28 2017, @04:37PM (2 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday April 28 2017, @04:37PM (#501211)

    As do many many other TV series and movies... the "multiverse" is the writers' answer to the time travel paradox.

    How they deal with the "multiverse" varies: do the characters believe in the multiverse when they first travel? Usually not, though Fringe comes at the Multiverse sort of head-on but somehow interacts with just one "otherverse," while Sliders deals with an infinity of multiverses and the improbability of ever "getting home."

    Larry Niven's "All the myriad ways," was an earlier take on the concept https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Myriad_Ways [wikipedia.org]

    If you have trouble with Sagan's Billions of stars per galaxy and Billions of galaxies per universe with Billions of Billions of atoms per star system, then you'll have serious infinity angst with the concept that for every indeterminate quantum state in the universe, all possible outcomes happen and there are Billions ^ Billions ^ Billions of universes, each following one possible outcome chain - and our experience and perception stretches back only through one of these near infinity of possibilities.

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  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday April 28 2017, @06:30PM

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 28 2017, @06:30PM (#501258) Journal

    you'll have serious infinity angst with the concept that for every indeterminate quantum state in the universe, all possible outcomes happen

    Maybe the system is implemented like the fork() call with copy on write for resource efficiency when simulating our reality.

    Maybe only the outcomes happen which we observe. Maybe the outcomes we observe go in a direction towards certain goals. We might be able to determine that other outcomes also occur and exist, but if we can't really see them, then the simulation doesn't have to provide them. So the infinity angst might be over things that don't get simulated unless you can measure them.

    An interesting implementation question would be destructors or GC?

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  • (Score: 2) by edIII on Friday April 28 2017, @06:42PM

    by edIII (791) on Friday April 28 2017, @06:42PM (#501266)

    The most interesting idea I've come across is that you can "time travel" simply by conventional travel through our own "universe".

    I'm not a polymath, but I was reading about models for the Big Bang. In these models when they "attached" to it gravity or something it looked normal, but if they did it with radiation or whatever they got something that looked like a multiverse. There would be sections of this overall universe moving at different speeds, sometimes infinitely. The consequence being that some parts of the universe begin expanding backwards into the Big Bang which was quasi-time travel (it would appear as time travel to the observer), some parts would have infinite voids, but the big take away was that were infinities of possibilities being expressed in all of that chaos.

    In that description it seemed to me that a sister universe could be literally a neighbor but separated by an infinitely fast expanding void of space pushing us apart, or literally be next door like that episode in Futurama where they go the edge and look at their other selves looking at them. Theoretically, if you could jump from one point to the next with space folding you could time travel simply by moving to an area of this mega-universe expressing the probabilities that result in a universe containing a world that matches your expectations.

    Unfortunately, I'm not a polymath so I probably mangled the crap out the description :)

    Time travel, but not time travel.

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