Tag: time travel

BIZARRE TACHYONS THAT MAY BE ABLE TO SEND DATA BACK IN TIME COULD BE RECONCILED WITH SPECIAL RELATIVITY

Tachyons, a mysterious variety of hypothetical particles capable of exceeding light speed, could play a more significant role in our understanding of the universe and its causal structure than scientists previously realized.

Not only have tachyons been revealed to be potentially compatible with Einstein’s special theory of relativity, but now, according to an international collaboration of physicists from the University of Warsaw and the University of Oxford, these curious particles could also help shed light on remaining questions regarding our understanding of the quantum world.

EXCEEDING THE UNIVERSAL SPEED LIMIT

Tachyons, which derive their name from the Greek word tachýs, meaning fast or quick, are theorized to exist under conditions where their minimum speed would be the speed of light. This effectively means that they should only be capable of traveling at velocities that exceed this universally recognized speed limit.

Ordinary particles, by comparison, move at subluminal or slower than light speeds. As Einstein’s theory of relativity dictates, the universal laws of physics prevent anything from being capable of accelerating to the speed of light from a slower speed. The same isn’t necessarily true for tachyons, though, since they are theorized to be born at speeds that already exceed light. Hence, the opposite would seem to be the case for these unusual particles, which hypothetically should be incapable of slowing down to light speed or slower speeds.

The idea of such superluminal particles has its origins in theoretical studies conducted back in the 1960s by physicist Gerald Feinberg. Although no experimental evidence has ever confirmed their existence, a theoretical framework for how these proposed particles might come to be has been developed over the decades, occasionally resulting in some rather strange paradoxes.

Among these is a curiosity that arises from their superluminal travel speeds, which indicates that tachyons may effectively be capable of sending information backward in time, giving rise to bizarre conditions under which cause and effect could theoretically become reversed.

However, new research is revealing that despite the implications of their existence, these bizarre hypothetical particles may be compatible with the special theory of relativity and could also help offer physicists significant new insights into quantum theory.

The new findings could potentially also upend long-held notions about the unlikelihood of superluminal particles, suggesting that tachyons might even play a crucial role in the formation of matter.

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The Respected Oxford Professors Who Say They Time Traveled

ON A HOT AUGUST AFTERNOON in France, 1901, Miss Elizabeth Morison and Miss Frances Lamont, on holiday from England, took a trip to visit the Palace of Versailles, a former royal residence some twelve miles west of Paris. “We went by train,” they would later recall, “and walked through the rooms and galleries of the Palace with interest.” But it was not to be the pleasant day out that the ladies had anticipated.

As they started to explore the gardens, an inexplicable feeling of depression descended upon them, a melancholic atmosphere they described as “a dreamy haziness” and “eerie and unpleasant.” They began to encounter people clothed in strange attire. They saw “two men dressed in long greyish-green coats with small three-cornered hats,” and later a man whose “face was most repulsive, —its expression odious. His complexion was very dark and rough.” Passing over a bridge, they found: “a lady was sitting. I supposed her to be sketching. She turned and looked full at us. Her dress was old-fashioned and rather unusual.” Eventually, they found their way out of the gardens, and returned to their accommodation in a daze.

The oddness of their experience stayed with them. Later, returning to the palace to retrace their steps, they found this impossible. Buildings had changed, lanes had disappeared, and the bridge was no longer present. In fact, the whole layout was unfamiliar. Through diligent research, Morison and Lamont came to believe that, on that fateful day, somehow they had experienced the grounds as they had been in the late eighteenth century, and that the lady they had come across had been the infamous Queen Marie Antoinette.

The story was so extraordinary that they decided to document a full account in book form. That account, titled An Adventure, was published in 1911. It became the literary sensation of its day, running to numerous editions. As incredible as the tale was, perhaps the most astonishing part was yet to be revealed, for Morison and Lamot did not exist. The real authors of An Adventure were Eleanor Jourdain and Charlotte Moberly, the Principal and Vice-Principal, respectively, of St Hugh’s College, University of Oxford—two highly esteemed academics hiding their names to protect their identities.

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Physicists Just Figured Out How Wormholes Could Enable Time Travel

Theoretical physicists have a lot in common with lawyers. Both spend a lot of time looking for loopholes and inconsistencies in the rules that might be exploited somehow.

Valeri P. Frolov and Andrei Zelnikov from the University of Alberta in Canada and Pavel Krtouš from Charles University in Prague probably couldn’t get you out of a traffic fine, but they may have uncovered enough wiggle room in the laws of physics to send you back in time to make sure you didn’t speed through that school zone in the first place.

Shortcuts through spacetime known as wormholes aren’t recognized features of the cosmos. But for the better part of a century, scientists have wondered if the weft and warp instructed by relativity prescribe ways for quantum ripples – or even entire particles – to break free of their locality.

At their most fantastic, such reconfigurations in the fabric of the Universe would allow human-sized masses to traverse light-years to cross galaxies in a heartbeat or perhaps move through time as quickly as one might move through their kitchen.

At the very least, exercises that probe the more exotic side of spacetime behavior could guide speculation over the mysterious meeting point of quantum physics and the general theory of relativity.

Wormholes are, in effect, little more than shapes. We’re used to dealing with single-dimensional lines, two-dimensional drawings, and three-dimensional objects in everyday life. Some we can intuitively fold, mold, and poke holes in.

Physics allows us to explore these changes in situations we can’t intuitively explore. On the smallest of levels, quantum effects give distances and time some wiggle room.

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Meet the man trying to send a warning about history’s worst tragedies back to 1935

For about a decade, Joe Davis has been trying to send a message into space. This message is not intended for potential intelligent alien listeners, though. He’s already sent two signals into the void for them. He hopes that this communiqué will reach humans. On Earth. Ideally around 1935.

The dispatch, which Davis calls Swansong, is at its simplest a one-hour Morse code transmission listing numerous pandemics, natural disasters, genocides, and other tragedies that humans failed to mitigate or prevent between 1935 and 2011. The idea is to send it towards Cygnus X-1, a black hole over 6,000 lightyears from Earth, in order to slingshot the signal off of its time-distorting edge, into the past, and back towards us. If the gambit works, the Swansong project could, as Davis put it in his notes for a 2017 presentation on the idea, “be used to break the wheel of time.”

It’s easy to brush Swansong off as an outlandish idea, especially when you know that Davis is not a trained scientist. He earned a BA in creative arts in 1973 from the now-defunct Mount Angel College in Oregon, then moved back to Mississippi, where he’d grown up, and started working blue collar jobs, usually with machines. (He reportedly used his art and machine skills to design his own prosthetic after losing a leg.) In recent decades, he’s struggled to make ends meet as an artist, taking dishwashing gigs to help cover basic expenses — and occasionally failing to do so, facing eviction, and sleeping on friends’ couches or in his truck for days or weeks on end.

But Davis’s lack of credentials and material success do not reflect his intellectual capabilities. As an undergrad in the early 70’s, he reportedly got permission from notorious innovation hub Bell Laboratories to use their laser rigs to carve acrylic, glass, and plastic, publishing his techniques in an academic journal. Then, while working as a laborer, he drew up designs for an electron gun that NASA agreed to launch on its space shuttle to conduct an experiment that could have theoretically produced artificial northern lights. (Despite the agreement, theproject, dubbed Ruby Falls, never got off the ground due to a NASA budget shortfall.) And in 1982, he talked his way into a meeting with the head of MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, outlined his Ruby Falls plan and several other ideas, and walked out a research fellow. He’s been affiliated with MIT ever since.

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