Mad about time III. Time machines.

In a recent movie about H.G. Wells’ novel ‘The time machine’ there is a scene where the main actor is asking a virtual librarian about time travel and time machines. The holographic projection with an incredible registers of all the human history answer him that those things are only possible for science fiction. However, there have been real time machines in human history despite of the science fiction record and moreover, it has been believed that real time travel have existed and even some scientific project could be make real the time travel.

Time travels appear in a lot of books. Travels to the future are the most possible and old concept. A representative book about this is the Rip Van Winkle story written by Washington Irving. In this tale Rip Van Winkle sleeps so many time that travels to the future. Another novel is ‘A Christmas carol’ from Charles Dickens where Mr. Scrooge can travel to the past, present and future Christmas days driven by ghosts. However, the most important novel about time travel is for sure ‘The time machine’ from H.G. Wells. Nevertheless Wells never describes the machine characteristics and how it works. He also didn’t manage the time paradoxes or the cause-effect problem.

When the movies started to be made, time machines were popular themes for the plots. You can travel only with your mind power as ‘Somewhere in time’ or taking the advantage of electromagnetic perturbations as ‘Philadelphia experiment’ or using black holes as ‘Contact’, or even building a time machine with a car as ‘Back to the future’.

Till here, time travel has been only possible for science fiction. Hasn’t it?

The obsession about time travel has taken some people for the searching of how to do it or at least how to communicate with somebody in the future or in the past. There are many stories about time travel as the one of Fracois Brune, a paranormal author, who says that the Vatican has a viewer for the future and past epochs since the middle of XX century. Nobody knows about it. But on the other hand, some stories about time machines are true.

Since his father’s dead, the American physicist Ronald Mallet has been interested in the possibility to invent a time machine. Since the end of the 90’s he has been worked with the experimental scientist Chandra Roychoudhuri to build that machine. In 2003 he had a patent for his machine which could be the first time machine as it was pointed in the news of that year. The Mallet’s machine uses a laser in a cylinder circulating in the same direction. According to Mallet, the light ray can create a gravitational field with an attraction force similar to that one described by Einstein’ theory, being able to describe time curves that allow travels to the past. Well, it only needs to work to make time travel possible.

Mallet is not the only one in this field of research. The American astrophysicist Richard Gott is an enthusiastic researcher of black holes, time-space geometry and gravitational effects and has suggested that time travel key is to observe the nature effects and then reproduce them. According to Gott, you have to search for cosmic chains that theoretically change the space-time to allow the time travel of some voyagers. So the needed machine is one that can use the time routes to travel through. The problem is that those routes are always near to a black hole and the time travel has only one direction to be possible in common black holes and maybe in two directions in warm black holes.

As you see, these and other projects could make real the dreams of time travels and time voyagers. On the other hand, those possible travelers could be the first ones or there have been other ones yet?

Who have been those time travelers?
I’ll tell you in a next time.