Comment Repost: April Fools? (Score 1) 1191
I thought this was a belated April Fools post for a moment. I remember following some link from Slashdot on the 1st that had articles talking about how to modify your car to use water instead of gasoline.
Articles like this are always fun because there's never any follow up that shows some progress on the subject. Like "Time Travel: Still yet to be achieved" and "Is it yesterday yet?" I also like the cute little pictures of spacemen going through some hole in time that often accompany the articles (http://www.abc.net.au/science/slab/wormholes/defa ult.htm#).
Here's an amusing (though thoroughly hostile) article that argues against the possibility of time travel:
http://home1.gte.net/res02khr/crackpots/notoriou s. htm
The dreamy Star-trekkie side of me would love to believe time travel is possible, but the down to Earth part of me believes that it's our perception of time that can change.
The commonly accepted "legal" form of time travel that people talk about is that of going into the future. I can accept that someone traveling at relativistic speeds will experience time slower than someone on the Earth, but that doesn't mean that he's travelling faster through time. It just means that all the factors that we use to measure change in time (including consciousness, his heartrate, the ticking of a clock, or the wavelength of a photon) are being distorted by speed he's travelling. There is still a unique *moment* in time for everything in the universe regardless of how fast you are travelling.
It's sweet that Mallett wants to travel back in time to save his father, but it smacks more of a Hollywood cliché than anything (Contact, anyone?). If he can show an experiment that is more than a trick of physics then maybe I'll start to take him seriously.
Articles like this are always fun because there's never any follow up that shows some progress on the subject. Like "Time Travel: Still yet to be achieved" and "Is it yesterday yet?" I also like the cute little pictures of spacemen going through some hole in time that often accompany the articles (http://www.abc.net.au/science/slab/wormholes/def
Here's an amusing (though thoroughly hostile) article that argues against the possibility of time travel:
http://home1.gte.net/res02khr/crackpots/notorio
The dreamy Star-trekkie side of me would love to believe time travel is possible, but the down to Earth part of me believes that it's our perception of time that can change.
The commonly accepted "legal" form of time travel that people talk about is that of going into the future. I can accept that someone traveling at relativistic speeds will experience time slower than someone on the Earth, but that doesn't mean that he's travelling faster through time. It just means that all the factors that we use to measure change in time (including consciousness, his heartrate, the ticking of a clock, or the wavelength of a photon) are being distorted by speed he's travelling. There is still a unique *moment* in time for everything in the universe regardless of how fast you are travelling.
It's sweet that Mallett wants to travel back in time to save his father, but it smacks more of a Hollywood cliché than anything (Contact, anyone?). If he can show an experiment that is more than a trick of physics then maybe I'll start to take him seriously.
