HELP! I need a time machine.

[Stevie]

Help, I need help, yes don't we all but I need your wise council.

 

I'm writing a sci fi story(yawnnnn), I know but it's good, honest(yawnnnnnnnity yaawwwnnnnnn).

 

Okay, I was doing fine with my theory on time travel that I invented(if suich a thing is possible) then some nasty fact based physicist came along and told me my beautiful theory was crap.... such is life.

 

I don't agree but I'm sure he's right... anyway, can any of you erudite physicians of the mind give me info to support my theory OR a better/possible theory that isn't yet debunked, with a cyclotron preferably?

 

MY THEORY IS :

a) gigantic super collider(diameter of the USA entering parts of Canada, Mexico and the ocean floor.

b) brilliant professor who collides particles together and creates "super gravitons".

c) the super gravitons stabilise localised worm holes due to a powerful local gravitational field.

d) the stabilised worm holes coalesce to form ONE BIG worm hole, stabilsed by a spinning energy field.

e) thus we have a time hole, ergo the name of my screenplay, "TIMEHOLE 30,000 BC"

 

AS I SAID HEEELLLLPPPPPPP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Kyrisch]

Well, we haven't even isolated the graviton yet, though our theory says it should exist. Also, the only thing it would be responsible for is communicating the force of gravity. "Stabilising a wormhole" is a far fetch from what the graviton actually does, but if you're like all the other sci-fi writers and you want to use a word that sounds cool, go ahead >.<.

 

In addition, wormholes themselves have never been observed, and while their existence is possible in theory, there may still be none around and what exact properties they have would vary from type to type, so again you'll be ascribing another random idea (time travel) to a barely related mechanism. Also, the whole joining together to make one giant wormhole is quite the random device. You're miles away from any concrete theory at this point.

 

"Spinning energy field" is jabberwocky. Energy fields emanate from electrically charged particles, particles with mass, and particles with colour charge. What kind of field is it? Why is it spinning? It's just word salad.

 

So, in conclusion, your sci-fi is just that -- highly speculative fiction. No offense, though, because that is what sci-fi tends to be, just don't get the idea that you're staying much true to any concrete theories. Hope you have fun with it .

[SkepticLance]

As said, in Scifi you can discuss that which is not quite right. It is theoretically impossible to travel through space faster than light, but if that facts stopped scifi writers, it would wipe out most of the entire genre!

 

One theoretical possibility for time travel is a spinning black hole. The event horizon then follows a toroid shape. In theory, if you dived through the centre of the torus - like going through the hole in a giant doughnut - you might end up in another time. More likely you would be torn apart - but this is scifi. Another possibility is that you would end in a different universe. Possible food for thought.

 

Will your giant cyclotron permit a spinning black hole? Woe unto the Earth!

 

Another possibility is to put your cyclotron in space - perhaps way out beyond Earth orbit. In vacuum and weightlessness, it would actually be easier to have such a giant device, and you could make it millions of kilometres long. A resulting black hole could then stay safely in solar orbit instead of destroying the Earth. Your protagonist would have to go through the torus in a space vessel - but why not?

[Mr Skeptic]

Well, what you have is a bunch of bull, but at least it is better than much of what I've seen. The super-graviton is a bit sketchy. You might be better off switching to just having lots of regular gravitons. Since gravitons are carriers for the force of gravity, you are not far off in assuming you could use them for gravity-related things. Wormholes are theoretical, but that is definitely fair game for scifi. I'm not sure about joining small wormholes. Why not start off with a large wormhole made by a beam of gravitons?

[Stevie]

Thanks to the various skeptics and kyrisch, most helpful but is there more to glean from the collective genius of you guys on how to make a functional theoretical time machine with 23rd century technology.

 

I can't believe you guys out there don't have a simple solution to my time travel difficulties. Come on, someone has a time machine idea with a cyclotron, I know it.

 

Also, if we found a super graviton, would my time machine work?(still beating my drum)

Edited March 10, 2009 by Stevie

[SkepticLance]

Stevie

Going back to my earlier post = a rotating black hole might be a time machine, though we still not know for sure. The current 'super-cyclotron' is the large hadron collider, and some people believe it will destroy the Earth by making a mini black hole.

 

I am suggesting a super-super-cyclotron in space, where a black hole will do no harm. The advanced science of the day makes a black hole, and sets it to spinning by throwing mass into it with a lot of velocity to make it spin. Once the spinning black hole is big enough, and spinning fast enough, to permit you to pass through the central hole, you have a possible time machine.

 

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090212102806AAun1md

[Stevie]

Kyrisch

 

I need this time machine to be the Earth surface. Wouldn't a black hole just gravitate towards the Earth and gobble it up.

 

Surely a huge amount of concentrated mass is required to produce a black hole?

 

Thanks, Stevie.

[Kyrisch]

Well, since we don't actually know how massive a black hole would have to be to operate the way in which you want it to (let alone if it can operate the way in which you want it to), I'm sure you could fudge something about it not being massive enough to 'swallow the earth', per se.

[Sayonara]

Your time machine is just a plot device which allows you to tell the characters' stories. There's no particular need for it to be explained in any great detail.

[swansont]

Since you asked: I know of no way of building a time machine. You are essentially asking to suspend laws of physics and the Entropy cops over in the Causality Division have a problem with that. There's nothing that guarantees that you can imagine whatever you want and not have it violate the laws of physics

 

One discussion on the arrow of time I recall involved the (non)ergodic nature of the universe. I didn't really follow the details, since it was given by a philosophy lecturer and he didn't use a projector — it was all verbal. But in short, ergodicity is the assumption that a system samples all possible states over time but converges on its time average. Or, put another way, when you see something, you are most likely observing average behavior. The objection is that the universe can't have had the time to sample all possible states, and so we may be seeing a fluctuation, and the implications that arise from that.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodic_hypothesis

http://viswiki.com/en/Entropy_(arrow_of_time)

 

In the long view, it's science fiction. You might have to make stuff up. One option is to create a fictional universe in which time travel is possible, and do it in a way that the reader won't care about a paradox that might arise.

[Sayonara]

Or do what Lost in Space did: get halfway through your plot, realise there is a paradox, and then rewrite the ending to make it all about the paradox (but not to the extent of renaming the film to "Lost in Space a bit but mostly in Time".)

[Sisyphus]

One option is to create a fictional universe in which time travel is possible, and do it in a way that the reader won't care about a paradox that might arise.

 

This is exactly right. Some science fiction takes place entirely in the realm of the scientifically possible (Arthur C. Clarke wrote some cool stories using nothing more than orbital mechanics as a plot device), but a lot of involves changing very specific rules about how the world (our world) works, and looking at the consequences of those changes from an otherwise scientific perspective. Like for example, somehow (insert magic device) faster than light travel becomes possible, but everything else is the same. You don’t have to say how it works (because in real life it doesn’t), but you should know what rules it follows, and those rules and their consequences should be consistent. This is pretty much the kind of thing you need to do if you want a story about time travel, since there isn’t really any plausible method that it could work in our universe, at least not as far as we know.

 

Of course, if the time travel is just a plot device to get some modern characters in prehistoric times, then might I suggest a simulation of some kind (that perhaps the characters don’t realize is a simulation)? That way you stay it in good science, and you don’t have to worry about paradoxes or anything. If the paradoxes are important to the story, never mind.

[Mr Skeptic]

Of course, if the time travel is just a plot device to get some modern characters in prehistoric times, then might I suggest a simulation of some kind (that perhaps the characters don’t realize is a simulation)? That way you stay it in good science, and you don’t have to worry about paradoxes or anything. If the paradoxes are important to the story, never mind.

 

Haha that would be hilarious. Then he can have a big story about saving the world from inevitable doom, and then right at the end the characters (and reader) find out it was all a simulation!

[Stevie]

Haha that would be hilarious. Then he can have a big story about saving the world from inevitable doom, and then right at the end the characters (and reader) find out it was all a simulation!

 

I agree that would be funny but I'm hoping for drama. It's a good idea actually.

 

Dear everybody,

would a tachyon beam or tachyon generated TIMEHOLE event horizon be less beyond the boundaries of your thinking?

 

What would be possible on the Earth surface(at least possible in the sense that you would say , well I'm not sure... can't say really).

[swansont]

Tachyons are borderline Sci-fi already. They are hypothesized, and are solutions to some equations but require imaginary mass or energy, and I don't have an idea of what that physically means. But of you're willing to go down that path, there are probably some things you could do with a universe construct where energy was a complex (i.e., mathematically. complex vs real) phenomenon, and spacetime had a real and an imaginary energy that was normally orthogonal, and we never experience the imaginary part. But some interaction mixed the two (i.e. they are no longer perpendicular) so that some of the imaginary axis projected onto the real axis. Poof! Tachyons actually exist. Wackiness of your choosing ensues.

 

It's not something that physicists would digest easily, but then, they aren't your target audience. You just need the veneer of plausibility. How thick and strong that veneer is or needs to be isn't my call.

 

ArXiv might be a place to look for theoretical workups of tachyon physics and related subjects.

[Stevie]

tachyon physics and related subjects.

 

I'd already found this but found it a bit "made up", however it seems more along the lines of the plausible improbability I am searching for OR not, I don't know.

 

Construction and Operation of a Time Gate

 

Once a suitably stable environment has been located, the time gate may be constructed as follows: A tachyon accelerator is positioned so that it can emit a steady tachyon stream onto a super-dense gravitic lens, which will focus the tachyon field into a single plane within stable protonic matter. (Tachyons are three-dimensional particles that occupy the second, fourth, and sixth dimensions, out of phase with normal space-time; while first proposed theoretically in the mid-Twentieth Century, they were not actually discovered until a century later due to their unique dimensional phase properties.)

 

The gravitic lens is composed of a super-dense artificial material that is bombarded by a graviton stream from a graviton accelerator, which is placed at a ninety-degree angle from the tachyon accelerator, so that the tachyon and graviton streams intersect at the center of the gravitic lens. (Gravitons are three-dimensional particles that occupy the fifth, seventh, and ninth dimensions, sharing many properties with photons, but in a different dimensional phase; so, unlike photons, gravitons can pass through solid matter.) The gravitic lens must remain supercooled close to absolute zero, so that atomic motion is at a minimum, which is necessary to maintain a stable tachyon stream.

 

The gravitic lens is used to refract the tachyon stream along the sixth-dimensional axis; the degree of refraction determines through how many temporal cycles the time gate will extend into the past. Thus, going farther back in time requires a greater degree of refraction of the tachyon stream, which means a greater graviton density in the gravitic lens.

 

The intensity, or frequency, of the tachyon stream determines the diameter of the time gate. A time gate aperture that is several meters across would require millions of times more tachyon energy to keep open than would a time gate open at only the atomic level.

 

Once created, the time gate will appear as a distortion around the matter onto which it is projected, in roughly a two-dimensional circular plane. The gravitational and dimensional stresses may create an optical refractory effect, creating a swirling rainbow pattern around the perimeter of the gateway. The center of the aperture will appear to recede inward, an optical illusion created by the sixth-dimensional refraction of the tachyon stream.

 

After the time gate is created, and the diameter and degree of sixth-dimensional displacement are selected, the time traveller may enter the aperture through the side opposite the tachyon accelerator (i.e., the tachyon accelerator and gravitic lens would be located behind the time gate).

 

In the past timeline, the time traveller would emerge on the opposite side of the plane of the time gate, where the gravitic lens is located in his future.

 

Time travel, however, is not as simple as stepping through a doorway. The gateway aperture must be projected onto a plane of solid protonic matter, and it would be extremely unlikely to find a natural arrangement of stable protonic matter in a two-dimensional plane thin enough to step through. It is thus necessary for the time travellers to use cutting machinery to bore through the solid matter inside of which the time gateway has already been opened.

 

Since the trans-dimensional time gate effect encompasses a thickness of about ten atomic diameters in both timelines, a hole can be cut through the matter on one side of the time gate in the future timeline, and straight through the matter on the other side of the time gate in the past timeline, but the plane of continuous protonic matter onto which the time gate is projected will have contiguous matter supporting it in both timelines, albeit from opposite sides of the sixth-dimensional gateway (see illustration below).

 

Suffice to say, building a stable sixth-dimensional time gate requires years of geological surveying and excavation.

 

FORGETTING the geological excavation(dull), is this silly theory at least less ?$*^!;:?µ than my own my own?

[SkepticLance]

Stevie

My congratulations on your advanced grasp of techno-babble. Suitable for a Star Trek script writer. Your device sounds good, but the possible technology behind it is more full of flaws than a sieve with holes. However, that is quite unimportant in scifi. You are fully entitled to do what scifi writers of the past have done, and just say that your protagonist built a time machine, and ignore how it might work.

 

My earlier suggesiton of a rotating black hole came from a piece written by Stephen Hawking. Another possibility is a wormhole. However, that is pretty much impossible in reality. "Natural' wormholes are most likely too small to even permit a photon to pass through, even if they exist - thus conserving the speed of light barrier. There was a speculative article in Scientific American a few years back about possible wormholes (and other absurdities). Apparently, to make a wormhole big enough to permit a human to pass requires vast amounts of 'negative energy'. Since we do not know whether such a beast exists, or can exist, or any way to make it, even in small amounts, that seems a bit of unlikely.

 

I suggest you do not worry too much about how the time machine works, and just rely on it as a plot device.

[Mr Skeptic]

Well, if you want something vaguely resembling reality, I suggest the following:

1) A (slightly magical) particle accelerator is used to create gravitons.

2) The gravitons are (magically) manipulated (focused, condensed, pulsed, or whatever) to create a wormhole.

3) Wormhole allows travel through spacetime, allowing both time travel and interstellar travel. If interstellar travel is not desired, the graviton manipulation system does not work at that distance.

[Stevie]

Can't someone give me a view on the proposed time machine OR suggest a time machine that doesn't involve racing through space and black holes???????

 

Also, what about a tachyon beam to stabilise the worm hole phase coalescence(yes, I made that expression up...)

 

Come on guys!!!!

 

Are you not hairy chested physicists or are you just metaphysicists; bronzed from tanning on the thesis sunbed of faculty life?

[Mag]

Stevie, what you're asking for is just pure speculation. The only thing close to time machines that people can conceive that would not rely on magic are black holes, worm holes, and thing's of that nature.

 

It sounds like you're looking for a scientifically-based way of having someone step into a small machine.

 

and as SkepticLance said:

"I suggest you do not worry too much about how the time machine works, and just rely on it as a plot device."

 

If you go into too much detail, there are bound to be people who say "this isn't possible with his methods" - if you don't go into any detail however, you won't have that problem.

[Sayonara]

and as SkepticLance said:

"I suggest you do not worry too much about how the time machine works, and just rely on it as a plot device."

Yeah, it's almost as if he read my post #9 and drew inspiration from it.

[Mag]

Yeah, it's almost as if he read my post #9 and drew inspiration from it.

 

lol, my apologies, I just found the closest one from the bottom

[Stevie]

If you go into too much detail, there are bound to be people who say "this isn't possible with his methods" - if you don't go into any detail however, you won't have that problem.

 

Yes, you're right but I still would like a time machine idea that makes physicists go... Who knows? Anything's possible...

[samtheflash82]

why not have the brilliant scientist discover some type of higgins particle and subsequently reveal a TOE. that way time travel would work as long as it is possible according to his fictional TOE.

 

(TOE = theory of everything)

[Stevie]

I'm open to toes of any sort if it works. Can you elaborate?

 

I thought of a super heavy particle locally stabilising worm holes and a tachyon field generator to coalesce the wormholes into a phased Time Hole (time gate if you prefer), any theoretical premise would do that makes physicists go... "mmn, I wonder?"

 

But it needs to be on Earth happening in the event chamber of a GIANT super collider.