Build your own time machine
p2pnet view Cool:- Want to build your own time machine?
All you need is a wormhole, the Large Hadron Collider, or a rocket that goes really, really fast.
So says physicist, cosmologist and “dreamer” Stephen Hawking in a Daily Mail special (from whence came the pic on the right).
“Although I cannot move and I have to speak through a computer, in my mind I am free”, he writes, “Free to explore the universe and ask the big questions, such as: is time travel possible? Can we open a portal to the past or find a shortcut to the future? Can we ultimately use the laws of nature to become masters of time itself?”
Can we?
“The fastest manned vehicle in history was Apollo 10″, says Hawking. “It reached 25,000mph. But to travel in time we’ll have to go more than 2,000 times faster.”
To do that, he says, “The ship would have to be big enough to carry a huge amount of fuel, enough to accelerate it to nearly the speed of light. Getting to just beneath the cosmic speed limit would require six whole years at full power.
“The initial acceleration would be gentle because the ship would be so big and heavy. But gradually it would pick up speed and soon would be covering massive distances. In one week it would have reached the outer planets. After two years it would reach half-light speed and be far outside our solar system. Two years later it would be travelling at 90 per cent of the speed of light. Around 30 trillion miles away from Earth, and four years after launch, the ship would begin to travel in time. For every hour of time on the ship, two would pass on Earth. A similar situation to the spaceship that orbited the massive black hole.”
Then, after another two years of full thrust, “the ship would reach its top speed, 99 per cent of the speed of light” Hawking states.
And at that speed, “a single day on board is a whole year of Earth time. Our ship would be truly flying into the future”.
But time travel isn’t the only wonder Hawking envisages in his Daily Mail article.
“The slowing of time has another benefit”, he says, adding:
“It means we could, in theory, travel extraordinary distances within one lifetime. A trip to the edge of the galaxy would take just 80 years. But the real wonder of our journey is that it reveals just how strange the universe is. It’s a universe where time runs at different rates in different places. Where tiny wormholes exist all around us. And where, ultimately, we might use our understanding of physics to become true voyagers through the fourth dimension.”
See you tomorrow?
Today?
..
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
Daily Mail – STEPHEN HAWKING: How to build a time machine, May 3, 2010
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After another two years of full thrust the ship would reach its top speed, 99 per cent of the speed of light. At this speed, a single day on board is a whole year of Earth time. Our ship would be truly flying into the future.
The slowing of time has another benefit. It means we could, in theory, travel extraordinary distances within one lifetime. A trip to the edge of the galaxy would take just 80 years. But the real wonder of our journey is that it reveals just how strange the universe is. It’s a universe where time runs at different rates in different places. Where tiny wormholes exist all around us. And where, ultimately, we might use our understanding of physics to become true voyagers through the fourth dimension.
