Art Bell welcomes physicist Professor Ronald Mallett, whose grief over his father’s death at 33 fueled a theory: circulating laser light could twist spacetime, enabling backward time travel via black-hole-like vortices. Mallett’s $250K feasibility study with UConn’s Chandrai Chowdhury explores neutron spin messaging, dismissing unverified claims like Stephen Gibbs’ HDR device or Project Pegasus. Parallel universes (Deutsch/Everett) might absorb changes, but Hawking’s chronology protection hypothesis suggests nature could block past alterations—unproven yet. While future travel exists via relativity (e.g., 1971 atomic clock tests), practical past travel remains speculative, with risks like misreading parallel-timeline data or accidental lottery fixes. Mallett insists reproducibility and oversight are critical, framing time travel as humanity’s next frontier—if it ever arrives. [Automatically generated summary]
I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the world's time zone.
Each and every single one of them covered like a blanket by this program, Midnight in the Desert Worldwide.
Great to be here with you.
Two rules on our program.
That's all we have.
Two rules.
No bad language and only one call per show.
That said, let's look at a little news.
We're going to talk about time travel tonight with Professor Ronald Mallet.
It is my favorite topic, as you know.
I love time travel.
I really love time travel.
The whole concept of it, I would love to travel in time myself.
God, I would love that.
I've followed it.
I think I've read everything and seen every movie that one could see about time travel.
And it is intense.
Let me first give you something.
You can go and see at artbell.com because it's just breaking news from Peru.
A Peru teen has been rushed to the hospital screaming for the devil after becoming possessed.
A Peruvian teenager has claimed that she became possessed by the devil after playing with a Ouija board using a mobile phone app.
Patricia Cuispi from Chusica, that's in the Lima province of Peru, ended up possessed by the devil spirits after using a mobile phone version of the board game.
Now, I'm inviting you to artbell.com not just to read this with me, but to see the video of this young lady possessed.
Shocking footage filmed at the local hospital shows this young lady thrashing and convulsing while screaming for her mother and shouting out at the devil, let her go.
Friends of the teenagers say they have downloaded the app over the weekend for, you know, a bit of fun and had joked around about trying to communicate with the spirit world.
Upon returning home, her parents noticed that she seemed unwell and eventually called an ambulance when she began convulsing and foaming at the mouth.
Thinking that their daughter may have eaten something or taken a drug that would cause an allergic reaction, they of course contacted her friends who told them about the Ouija board.
In the video from the hospital that you can see at artbell.com, medical staff can be seen trying to restrain the young lady who is convulsing violently and struggling as she shouts 666, followed by, let me go, let me go.
In another segment, she can be heard shouting, please give me my phone.
And mom, these doctors don't know what they're doing.
Take me home.
Ouija boards.
I told you about Ouija boards, didn't I?
All right.
Looking at the news briefly, the mother of a gunman who killed nine people and then himself at an Oregon community college allowed her troubled son to have guns, acknowledged in online posts that he struggled with autism.
But she didn't know he was potentially violent.
Well, you don't always know that somebody is potentially violent.
Right?
The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan is saying that he's recommending that President Obama change his mind and keep more than 1,000 U.S. troops in the country beyond 2016.
Just now, days after a deadly U.S. airstrike mistakenly struck a hospital, Doctors Without Borders hospital, in fact, during fierce fighting in the north, the Doctors Without Borders people are calling it a war crime.
I think the Pentagon is choosing other wording.
And this from theanomalous.com that has got to be listening to the show.
Hello, guys.
Nick Redfern discusses Dr. Jacob's new book, Walking Among Us, The Alien Plan to Control Humanity.
A tale not of abductions, but about how abductees are allegedly being used to assist alien human hybrids whose role it is to infiltrate human society.
So, we read stories about abductees assisting the hybrids in the real world, driving them about, feeding them, teaching them how to dress and blendy and, you know, at baseball games, Kmart, and the Pete's parlor.
It's a scenario that Jacobs himself admits leads to a ridiculous conclusion.
But in part two of his overview of the book, Redfern points out the similarities between these hybrids and the men in black, which Redfern has studied extensively both, says Redfern, have a fascination for pens, are awkward around food, and often look sickly.
Redfern has a good point.
So obviously, other people are putting together the very interesting coincidences between Dr. Jacobs and what he's saying and Nick Redfern.
I sure did.
Ding, ding, ding, all the way, right?
One more thing.
The Russians are helping us to death in Syria.
What the Russians are actually hitting with their airstrikes are our CIA-trained anti-Assad rebels.
So the fireworks fall all over Syria.
And as I mentioned, they're helping us to death.
They were supposed to go in there and kill some ISIS characters for us, and they didn't do that.
Well, as I mentioned, it is my favorite topic of all time.
So coming up, Professor Ronald L. Mallet received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in physics from Penn State University.
He worked for United Technologies from 1973 to 5 and in 1975 joined the physics faculty at the University of Connecticut in Stores, where he is currently a research professor of physics.
Professor Mallet has published numerous papers on black holes and cosmology in professional journals.
His breakthrough research on time travel has been featured extensively in media around the world, and his published memoir, Time Traveler, has been translated into several languages.
Award-winning filmmaker Spike Lee has written a script for a feature film of the memoir.
So coming up in a moment, Professor Ronald Mallet and Time Travel from the High Desert, I'm Mark Bell, and this is Midnight in the Desert.
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We'll be right back.
Explanation Dali Lashman to the Air of the Grand.
Take a walk on the wild side of midnight from the Kingdom of Nigh.
So let us begin at the beginning, because so many who are listening now will not have heard you.
It's obviously important to ask you why you decided to get even involved with, I mean, here you are, a theoretical physicist beginning to actually toy with the mechanics of time travel.
Why did you decide to become involved in time travel research?
Yeah, and the thing is, is that prior to that, I had been a rather happy kid and pretty gregarious.
After that, it was like the world was destroyed for me.
I mean, for me, it was like the death of Superman.
And I went from being a happy kid to actually a very upset, depressed, and lonely kid.
And I was just in a fog.
I mean, I really didn't care whether I lived or died.
And this went on for about a year.
I buried myself in my books and science fiction books in particular.
And then I came across, when I was 11, I came across the book that changed my life.
It was actually a classics illustrated version of H.G. Wells' classic The Time Machine.
And something about just the cover of The Classics Illustrated spoke to me, and when I read the first page of it, it said, scientific people know very well that time is just a kind of space, and we can move forward and backward in time just as we can in space.
When I said that, I thought, oh, this is unbelievable.
This means that it might be possible to have a machine, a time machine that could go back into the past.
And my imagination immediately took flight.
I said, this means that if I had this kind of a machine, I could go back and see my father again and tell him what was going to happen and maybe change things.
And then that was the beginning of an obsession for me.
I mean, I even went to the point of my mother had kept the old radio and television parts that my father had had.
And I looked at the, there was a picture on this Classics Illustrated of their idea of what a time machine might look like.
And it had hoops and everything like that.
So I put old bicycle tires and everything together with this stuff.
And when I plugged it in, nothing happened, of course.
But the thing is, is that I really, I mean, I was disappointed, but I wasn't discouraged because I remembered that it said that scientific people know very well.
So I thought maybe that meant that I had to know something about science.
Although at that point, I didn't know exactly what I would need to know.
But that would come just a little bit later on because I was wondering.
And the thing is, is that in that case, he didn't have really control of it, I mean, except for the fact that it was communication through the ham radio set.
But the phenomenon that was causing it was sun distortion.
And the thing is, is that for me, one of the things is that, and I think that this is what differentiates a lot of science fiction movies and also science fiction books that made H.G. Wells' work so different was the fact that he posited a device, a machine.
You know, there actually is other early time travel books.
One of them is, in fact, part of was a Connecticut verse.
It was called Connecticut, Yankee, and King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain.
But there, once again, it was an accidental thing that caused it.
And for me, it was the notion of control.
And for me, I think that that had two different levels involved with it, because death is something that seems like it's out of your control.
And the fact that there might be some sort of a technical way of controlling nature, and in this particular case of controlling time, that spoke to me.
And I knew that that was going to have to be, I was going to try to find a way of actually finding a mechanism that might allow me to manipulate time.
No, I think all the intrigue has to do with the fact that we long to be able to go back to, and I mean, who of us has not had something that has happened in our lives, either personally or otherwise, that we would say as a regret, if I could have done this, how would this have turned out for me in my life?
If I could have prevented this?
And let me give you an example of something that when I had my breakthrough, I started getting letters and communiques from people literally all over the world.
And one of them that was one of the most moving to me, which I'll share with you, it came from Germany.
And this purse, I mean, I learned German when I was in college, but I forgot most of it.
So the thing is, is that when I got the package and the letter in it, there were graduate students in the department who were from Germany, and I asked one of them if they would translate it for me.
But in the meantime, there were four pictures that accompanied the letter.
And the thing is that the pictures told a story.
In the first picture, it showed a middle-aged couple with a very attractive young woman in the picture.
And then in the second picture, the young woman is in sort of acute modeling type of poses.
And then in the third picture, there's a mangled car.
And in the fourth picture, she's in the coffin.
And it brought tears to my eyes immediately.
I mean, I had never seen anything like that.
And the thing is, is that, so even before I got the letter, I knew what it was, what the story was going on here.
And then when I got the letter back from the student, sure enough, the letter was from the father of this young woman.
And he was asking me if he had heard about my work and if it was possible to send a message back to his daughter to warn her or to warn them to warn her about what was going to happen to try to save her life.
And I was heartbreaking, and I had to tell them that my research is just ongoing and that that wasn't possible.
But nevertheless, it shows the core of one of the things, I mean, in this very graphic way.
I mean, I've gotten emails from people who have had a loved one murdered, and they would like to go back and prevent that.
Or they themselves have been in prison, and they would like to go back and warn themselves about that.
So I think it has to do with this very, very primal thing of wanting to try to adjust our life.
And we do speculate that.
What if I had met this person rather than that person?
Just idle things like that.
Or on a more global level, people would have liked to see, actually see Lincoln give the Gettysburg Address.
I would love to hear and see Chopin actually performing.
So I think that this is, it's that, I think.
It's not, I mean, you might say that the longing is there first, and then we realize we're imprisoned rather than the other way around.
So I think that that's the thing.
And also even when it comes to the future, I mean, who of us hasn't wondered, you know, we think of all the marvels that we have now, wondering about the future when we might even have things like a cure for cancer, a cure for, you know, AIDS, a cure, you know, what's going to happen.
And to see also the possibility of changing things if we could know the future and sending information back to us.
Sometimes people have asked me, well, you know, what would you have a time machine for?
I mean, obviously, one of the things is my father, but I said, just in a more general sense, suppose we had an early warning device.
A time machine is an early warning device.
Imagine if we could send information back to us to warn ourselves of catastrophes and hurricanes and tsunamis and earthquakes, thousands of lives that we could save.
So I think that that's the intriguing thing about time traveling.
And by the way, if I had my dretherers, I've always said this, I would go back and observe the life of Christ.
I would observe the miracles that are said to have been done by Christ so I could really know, because as you pointed out, death is not under our control.
What comes after might well be determined about the truth of what happened then?
I mean, the thing is, is that time travel is a much more complex thing than we think about.
I mean, in other words, the thing that you're talking about actually has a parallel in what's called the so-called grandfather paradox, which is that we travel back in time and do something that could dramatically alter the future and alter our own lives.
Well, I don't know about rules, but the thing is, is that the reason why I said potentially is because travel to the past leads to possible paradoxes, and it may not be so simple as just simply bringing back information.
There might be all sorts of things that happen to the time stream that, in fact, even though you bring it back, you're not bringing it back into this dimension.
I mean, that's a whole different thing.
I mean, I don't know whether you want to get into that.
Let's say you did have the ability to travel in time and you went back and you had your dad go and see a heart specialist and the heart attack he was going to have would be prevented.
Then you would be changing something in this time stream, without a doubt.
Your dad would be living on.
It would be a very, very different situation indeed.
Professor, we're at a breakpoint, so relax.
We'll come back.
We've got so much territory to cover.
Professor Ronald Mallet, a professor of theoretical physicists, professor of theoretical physics, how about that, is my guest.
Well, yeah, I mean, the thing is, is that when I had decided way back when I was 11 that I wanted to build a time machine, even at that early age, I knew people were already concerned about me.
And so I already was a student enough to realize that I probably shouldn't share the fact that I wanted to build a time machine because that might not lead to consequences that I wanted to have.
And so I kept it to myself.
And I pretty much did that throughout my whole career because it was my secret project.
The thing is, is that what I realized is that, even in college, that I was going to have to do something that was going to relate to it, but not be obvious.
And that's where Einstein's work in the theory of black holes came in.
And if you look at all of my publications after I started as a faculty member at the University of Connecticut, they're on cosmology and black holes and topics like that.
None of them has to do with time travel.
However, Einstein's work, which we'll go into more detail later, but the thing is that it was key to understanding time.
So I could understand things like black holes and write papers about it.
And that would still allow me to study time.
So that's what I built my career on.
If I had come to the, during my interview at UConn, if I had said, well, I'm interested in building a time machine, we wouldn't be having this conversation here right now.
So that was something that I just didn't do.
And it wasn't until actually at the turn of the century that I had my breakthrough.
And by that time, I was a tenured full professor.
And I like to use a really terrible analogy, but being a tenured full professor is very roughly equivalent to being like a made man in the mafia.
And the thing is, is that by that time, when I made my breakthrough, I didn't have to fear anymore.
So I was able to come out of the time travel closet without fear.
But once again, since my work was rooted in Einstein's theories of relativity, that provided a sound foundation.
So when I published my papers, and I should mention that the papers for physicists, people don't realize sometimes how the publication process goes in the sciences, but when you submit a paper for publication, it doesn't just automatically get published.
It goes to an anonymous referee.
And they're anonymous for a reason, that because they can be critical without any comeback.
And the thing is, is that the referee judges whether or not it's scientifically sound, mathematically sound, and it can be accepted or rejected.
And the thing is, is that I've had, fortunately for me, many more papers accepted than rejected, but I have had both things.
And that keeps the science at a high level, as a matter of fact.
So I knew that when I was writing these papers, the later papers, that they were going to have to be scientifically and mathematically sound.
So the critics that I have within the community are not critical of the physics and mathematics of my work.
What they're critical about, and I actually agree with them on many of those points, is the technological feasibility of achieving what I want, which is a different statement from whether or not it's mathematically and sound as far as the physics.
Monnie, may I for one second divert your attention?
We'll come right back here.
But since you're a theoretical physicist and we haven't talked in all this time, we now have this spooky action at a distance, I believe Einstein called it, quantum entanglement, which is fascinating, impossible stuff.
And presumably throughout any distance you would care to name, these things flip and flop together once they've become entangled.
Now, there is kind of a new twist in the entanglement world, if you've done the reading, and I'm certain you have.
It's called a quantum twisting, in which they find that instead of a full flip or a flop, there can be a kind of a partial one with a twist.
And the twist in this is that they think that it might be the key to communication at faster than light, in fact, instantaneous communication.
So I wonder if you have any comment on all of that.
Or maybe you can help me understand quantum entanglement's abilities in the first place.
I mean, the thing is, is that it was actually known at the beginning of quantum mechanics.
I mean, it's just within the public imagination fairly recently, but it was actually known way back.
I mean, when one of the founders of quantum mechanics was a man named Erwin Schrodinger, who came up with a formulation of it back in 1926.
And he realized that was an aspect of it.
And it's really not so strange as it sounds.
I mean, the thing is, is that in quantum mechanics, systems, if they are created together, they're a unit.
And as far as the mathematics of quantum mechanics is concerned, even when you separate them at a spatial distance, they're still entangled because they were a unit.
That's the important point.
It's just not arbitrary, but they had to have been a single unit to begin with.
So that's actually, and that's used in some small ways in a lot of electronic devices.
But the thing is, is that it's become much more well known because of the fact that it seems to imply, and one has to be careful, we haven't had communication with it yet.
Implication, but it is not the same thing.
And when it comes to relativity, relativity never said that things can't be faster than the speed of light.
What it said is that you can't send information faster than the speed of light, which is a different thing.
Because the universe itself actually can expand faster than the speed of light.
That's something that people aren't aware.
But once again, that hasn't been done in a controlled way.
It'll be fascinating if it is, but that's, you know, as I said, it's part of quantum mechanics.
Well, entanglement up until now and what we knew about it wouldn't allow communication.
But with this new quantum twisting they're talking about, they have hopes that that might allow communication, which would be really, really, really intriguing.
I don't know if any of this has and or bears on your work in any way, and perhaps not.
I just wanted to ask you about it, that's all, and get your comments.
My work is actually based on manipulating space and time in a different way.
In fact, the thing that you're talking about actually is not a part of Einstein's general theory of relativity, just part of what is the basis of my work.
I mean, you have to realize that the foundation of Einstein's general theory of relativity, it was to solve a problem that was in Newton's theory of gravity.
In Newton's theory of gravity, it had predicted, and this was over 300 years ago, that gravity could travel faster than the speed of light.
And Einstein developed a general theory of relativity in order to take care of that particular problem.
In other words, to make sure that gravity was consistent with the theory of relativity.
So this notion of instantaneous action at a distance was actually in physics many, many, many years ago.
It's just that quantum mechanics brings it up in a different form, but it actually has been part of the root of other aspects of physics for a very long time.
Well, I should say that we would like to build hardware.
I mean, as you pointed out, I'm a theoretical physicist.
It's really important to distinguish between theoretical and experimental.
Of all the various sciences, there is a precise division of labor in physics.
Chemists and biologists pretty much go back and forth, but in physics, it really is that precise division.
And Einstein, for example, was a theoretical physicist, and he came up with the notion of equals mc square.
What people don't realize is that when Einstein developed that equation, neither he nor anyone else knew they it implied that if you have a small bit of matter, you could create an enormous amount of energy.
The question was technologically, is this possible?
And even Einstein wasn't sure whether it would be technologically possible to do that, even though the equation says that this is a possibility.
It wasn't that you have to remember that when he wrote the letter, the famous letter to Roosevelt, he very much felt that the German scientists were on the verge of developing an atomic weapon.
And for him, he would have had no problem whatsoever with it having been dropped on the Nazis in Germany at the time.
He just wouldn't have.
That's important to keep in mind.
When he found out that their project wasn't working and that when the bomb was dropped on Japan, that's when he felt a bitterness about it.
It wasn't about the use of the bomb per se.
It was just the target of it.
And that is something that caused him a considerable amount of angst.
Well, not only do I believe it, but time travel to the future has already been done.
I mean, you have to realize that Einstein developed two theories.
One was the special theory of relativity, which he developed in 1905.
And that theory says that time for a moving clock slows down.
The faster you have a clock move, the more time slows down.
Now, when I'm talking about a clock, I'm not just talking about a mechanical mechanism.
Your heart is a clock.
And that would mean that if you were traveling fast enough, your heart rate would slow down.
Now, it's important to realize that this doesn't mean that you would feel it.
You would not notice it, no matter how fast you were traveling.
It's just like when you're in your car.
No matter how fast you're going, you don't feel like you're traveling at the high speed.
But someone who's watching you sees you zip by.
And it's the same thing here.
If you're traveling close to the speed of light, they would actually see your heart rate slow down so noticeably that you would not be aging as much as others.
And that would mean that if you were traveling fast enough, that you could arrive in the future, maybe only being a few hours older, whereas decades could be having been passed for everyone else.
Now, that actually is a precise prediction of Einstein's theory.
The technical name for it is time dilation.
Now, what is important to realize is that this has been verified, not only on the subatomic level, but even on the large-scale level.
Well, there has been a long time that people have been talking about other particles.
Well, actually, there's been this notion of there's two different types of theories.
One of them is called supersymmetric theories, in which they say that there are other groups of subatomic particles that are sort of counterparts of the particles that we already know.
And then there's super string theories, which say that they're trying to explore and say that all of our particles are actually vibrations of these strings in many, many dimensions.
One of the things that's important to realize is that when that sort of thing came out, it was part of the hype to get people interested in the Large Hadron Collider.
Because the thing is, is that people were wondering what is this thing for and how long it's taking 10 years to build this thing, and it's costing billions of dollars to do it.
And to try to keep those people's interest in it, they were talking about the finite possibility, probability, I should say, of black holes being created.
Now, you have to realize that this is another aspect of quantum mechanics, and the probability of that was so low that, and let me give you an example of a probability that it's similar to.
When the atomic scientists of the Manhattan Project were getting ready to set the bomb off, they actually did some calculations and there was a finite probability, you know, that our atmosphere has hydrogen in it, that the fission bomb would cause a fusion of the hydrogen in the atmosphere and turn our entire planet into one gigantic hydrogen bomb.
That was actually a serious calculation.
But the probability, when people talk about probabilities, that is a really, really tricky thing.
It's like the probability, and there is a probability, that the room that you're in right now, all of the molecules in the air will end up on the other side of that room, and you will find yourself in a vacuum.
And it is a finite probability, but it's so low that it's greater than the age of the universe.
So when people talk about probabilities, one has to be careful.
And that's in the case of these black holes that might have formed, the probability of them is just, you know, it's a there.
Is there a bigger chance that CERN will do something that could affect the whole world than a bigger chance of that than there is of the air leaving half my room?
Yeah, I mean, you know, really, I mean, the thing is, is that there's a probability that when you calculate, and it depends on what it is that you're Talking about the probability of.
Yeah, something strange could happen, but the probability of it is so low that they're not even thinking about it, really.
I mean, what they're hoping is that when they get the experiments seriously going again, that they might see evidence for these strings or these counterpart particles, these supersymmetric particles.
I mean, that's what they're really interested in, and they're hoping that they'll be able to get the money and continue to have the money.
It costs about a billion dollars a year to keep running that thing.
You know, I'm not saying my music is loud, but I just recently noticed that the water in the bathroom adjacent to me is sending out rings from the center in the sink that are perfectly timed to the bass of the music that I'm running in this room.
That tells you how I handle my music here.
Now, the other thing is I just about blew a break, and I get so wrapped up in this topic that, you know, it's another effect of time.
I mean, so totally wrapped up that everything else goes away.
I'm listening to the professor and didn't even think about a break coming up.
Fortunately, a little whisper in my ear corrected that.
Yet another effect of time.
What I was saying, professor, was scientists create.
They think about things.
They suppose things, which is what a theoretical physicist does, and then other people build things.
And then once built, even though there is a possibility of perhaps something going wrong, I don't know, the atmosphere igniting, whatever, they do end up pushing the button.
And while that generally works out well, there may come a day when it may not work out as well.
Well, yes, but that's what can happen when you get in your car.
Oh, sure.
I mean, the thing that you have to realize is that, you know, anytime we're dealing with the mechanics of nature, something can potentially go wrong.
I mean, we've seen that with spaceflight and NASA.
Oh, yes.
So the question is, is that what is the likelihood?
And, you know, when you get in your car, you think that it's pretty much going to go, but it's actually much more likely that something's going to go wrong with your car than something's going to go wrong in the Large Hadron Collider.
That's the real science of it, because the precautions that they take as far as safety precautions are concerned.
But now you're talking about phenomena that, unexpected phenomena that can occur.
That's something else, again, because we're being bombarded by cosmic rays.
And these cosmic rays, some of them have energies that are absolutely incredible.
And they could be raining down things that we don't even see in particle accelerators yet.
So they could be causing strange phenomena that we don't even quite understand yet because of that.
So it's what we, what the these machines allow us to have so much more control of what it is that we're dealing with.
But what's happening out in nature is something else again.
And that's one of the things that makes science the exciting thing that it is.
Well, the thing is, is that in order to talk about the breakthrough, I have to back up and go into what is the foundation of the breakthrough.
Otherwise, the breakthrough itself won't make a lot of sense.
And once again, going back to, because you asked me earlier about the possibility of time travel itself, and I was mentioning the special theory of relativity, which says time slows down for a moving clock.
And I was mentioning the Large Hadron Collider and the fact that what we know is that this effect really does happen because subatomic particles, there are some of them that disintegrate after just a fraction of a second, millionth of a second.
And you might say that they have an internal clock that says, well, after so much time, boom, they're going to just simply disappear.
And what happens is that when we accelerate them in something like the Large Hydron Collider, we can make these particles go close to the speed of light.
And what we've been able to find is that we can make them live 20, 30, 40 times longer than they normally would.
In effect, what we've done is send these particles into the future.
And we've actually been able to do this on a human scale, but at a much smaller rate.
There was an experiment that was done in 1971 at the Naval Observatory, U.S. Naval Observatory, which they took two atomic clocks.
One was kept at rest at the Naval Observatory.
The other was put on an ordinary passenger jet and flown around the world.
When they brought it back, they found that the atomic clock on the passenger jet had actually slowed down and had lost time in exactly the way Einstein predicted in his special theory of relativity.
This means that this plane actually flew into the future, but by just fractions of a second, because even though it was traveling at the speed of sound, that's very, very slow compared to the speed of light.
And when we have planes and rockets, or when we have rockets rather, that can go close to the speed of light, and NASA does work on some of these rockets.
They have exotic names like ion engines.
Then we will eventually have the effect that when astronauts go out in space, if they're traveling close to the speed of light and come back, only a few years may have passed for those astronauts, but they could have arrived decades into the far future, that travel.
And in fact, there was a movie, one of the science fiction movies that it's one of my favorites.
I got it right.
It was the original planet of the apes with Charlton Heston.
They thought they had landed on another planet that was ruled by apes.
What had happened is that what they realized later is that they had been traveling so close to the speed of light that they had actually landed back on the Earth in the distant future.
But they didn't realize that because things, you know, they thought they were in this weird planet.
So that effect is travel to the future.
We actually have already been able to do that.
As I said, on a human scale, it's going to be a while until we can do it.
But we can do it.
It's time travel to the past that I was interested in, and you can't do that from the special theory of relativity.
So once again, the special theory of relativity says that time for a moving clock slows down, and that allows for time travel into the future, which we already have achieved, just not on a dramatic scale.
Now, time travel into the past.
How does that happen?
Well, Einstein's general theory of relativity does not have to do with speed.
What Einstein's general theory of relativity says is that time is affected by gravity.
And that's part of the key of my work, because what Einstein meant by that was that the stronger gravity is, the more time slows down.
That means a clock here at the surface of the earth, where gravity is stronger, is actually ticking slower than a clock at high altitude.
And that's important to realize that.
And we actually know that that effect is real.
As a matter of fact, our GPS system works because of Einstein's theory of gravity.
All right, if I'm following what you're saying, would that suggest that with enough gravity, you could slow down dramatically and potentially go into the past?
No, but the point is that what it says is that you can actually, and this, I don't have enough time to go into it, but what this is associated with is the fact that in Einstein's theory, gravity, the force that we call gravity, is actually not a force at all.
It's actually a bending of empty space.
The sun, for example, bends the empty space around it.
The analogy I like to use is if you think of space as being like a rubber sheet, like a small trampoline, and if you put a bowling ball on it, you can get the rubber sheet to bend.
If you take a marble, you can actually put the marble and it will go towards the bowling ball.
But if you make the rubber sheet transparent, it would appear to you as though somehow the bowling ball is pulling directly on the marble.
But it's not.
It's a rubber sheet.
And that's what Einstein said, that gravity is.
The sun is actually bending the empty space around it, and the Earth is just moving in that.
In fact, you can actually do that with the rubber sheet, with the marble.
If you take a marble and sort of give it a sideways motion, it will actually orbit around the bowling ball, like a skater on a roller derby ring.
And what the Earth, fortunately for us, when the solar system was formed, the Earth had this sort of a sideways motion, and so it's moving around and around the warped space.
Now, in Einstein's theory, space and time are connected to each other.
Whatever you do to space happens to time.
So this bending of space actually leads to a bending of time.
You might say, well, what does that mean?
The bending of time shows up to us as clocks ticking slower.
So gravity is a bending of space and time.
But if you can bend space, then you can actually maybe finally twist it.
In fact, if you have a rotating star, a rotating star will not just simply bend space, it will actually twist space.
And it turns out that if you have an object like a rotating black hole, not only will it bend space and twist space, but it will also twist time.
And it's that twisting of time that gives you the possibility of going back into the past.
Because if you think of time normally as a straight line going from the past, present, to the future, which we all are moving along that line, that invisible dragging of us into the future that we were talking about, that if you could twist time into a loop, then you could go from the past, present, to the future.
Pulsar would cause some twisting of space and time, but not matic enough.
A rotating black hole is a much, much more dense object, and it would actually cause a twisting of space and time.
Pulsar is actually a neutron star, which is a state that's a little bit before you get to a black hole state.
But we do know that they're rotating black holes out there in space.
We just haven't got, you know, we can't get to them.
But the thing is, is that if we could, since you have this twisting of time into a loop, and as I said, along this loop, you could go from the past, present, to the future, but you've made time into a loop, so you could go from the future back into the past.
So Einstein's general theory of relativity allows for the possibility of bending time and twisting time.
And it's this twisting of time that's part of the core of my work.
And so once again, what I realized in Einstein's theory, Newton's theory, the only thing that can create gravity is matter.
And that's it.
In Einstein's theory, not only can matter create gravity, but light can create gravity as well.
Even though light does not have mass or matter, light has energy, and the energy of light can actually create gravity.
And that was the core of my breakthrough, because I realized that, in Einstein's theory, since gravity can affect time, and light can create gravity, then light can affect time.
That was the core of my breakthrough.
And what I realized was that I could do something similar to what one has with a rotating black hole by using a device called a ring laser.
A ring laser is just simply a device that creates a circulating beam of light.
One way of thinking about it is that if you have a series of mirrors that form like a square, and you bounce light off of one mirror and it hits the other mirror and the other, and it creates a circulating beam of light.
That circulating beam of light can cause a twisting of space.
And the analogy that I like to give people to think about that is the fact that think of if you had a cup of coffee in front of you right now.
And think of the spoon as being like the circulating light beam.
So what happens when you take the spoon and stir the coffee?
The coffee starts swirling around, sort of creates a vortex in the coffee.
That, what will happen in empty space is the circulating light beam will actually cause empty space to get swirled around.
You'll actually be able to create sort of vortex in empty space.
Now, you might say, well, if it's empty space, how do I see it?
Well, let's come back to the coffee.
If I draw a coffee bean in there, then what will happen is that as I'm stirring the coffee, the coffee will drag the coffee bean around.
So I could see the effect of the spoon stirring the coffee by seeing the coffee dragging the coffee bean around.
The thing that plays the role of the coffee bean in the experiment that we're talking about would be a particle called the neutron, which is part of every atom.
If you put a neutron into the empty space and then turn on the circulating light beam, as a circulating light beam is twisting the space, the space will drag the neutron around, just like the coffee dragged the coffee beam around.
So even though you can't see the space itself being dragged around, what you'll be able to see all of a sudden is the neutron will start getting twisted around when you turn on the circulating light beam.
So that would tell you that space is actually being twisted.
And now we go to the next step because remember I said that space and time are connected in Einstein's theory.
So if you cause this twisting in space to become strong enough, then the straight line of time going from the past, present, to the future will actually get twisted into a loop so that you'll be able to travel from the past, present, to the future.
But once again, you've twisted time into a loop so you could go from the future back into the past.
And that's my idea of my work.
Now, of course, everything that I described to you has been in words.
I should mention that for physicists, that is not even remotely enough.
What you have to do whenever you have these things, when physicists say that they have a theoretical model, people sometimes think that that means something that they're talking about verbally.
It's not that at all.
What I had to do was to solve Einstein's gravitational field equations for a circulating beam of light.
And then what I found was I found mathematical results that showed that space and time could be twisted.
So that is what I actually had to submit as far as a paper was a mathematical model.
And I have to emphasize that because once again, I have people saying, oh, gee, you know, that's something that you could have thought of.
Well, after you, once it's out there, then, yeah, it seems clear.
But you have to actually develop a mathematical model to actually show this in order for it to mean something to physicists.
Well, the practical application would be showing that you could twist space.
That's a possibility.
That could be a new type of space propulsion, for example.
Imagine if you could use light to manipulate space, then you could manipulate objects in space.
And that might lead to a whole new type of space travel.
So that's one of the things that we've been thinking about.
But the main thing is to actually do the experiments itself.
And once again, this is where the public gets a lot of their ideas about these things from science fiction movies.
You know, One of my favorite movies is Back to the Future.
In real science, and once again, we were talking about the Large Hadron Collider.
The prediction of that, the Higgs particle, was over forty years ago, and it took ten years to build this Large Hadron Collider at a cost of ten billion dollars.
And all of that was just to smash particles together to see if they would give you this Higgs particle.
I mean, that sounds simple, you know, that you smash particles together, they get enough energy that it might create this Higgs particle.
What's done is the prediction is that this particle will actually disintegrate and give you other things.
And so you don't have to see the particle directly.
What you have to see is those other things.
And that's just the same thing as seeing it.
So that's just part of the normal process of it.
But in any case, this thing costs $10 billion.
And just for the funding that we're looking at for just a feasibility study, and the feasibility study wouldn't be the show time travel.
What it would be is the first show that you could use circulating light to twist space, which is a whole new effect in itself, which, as I said, could lead to a possibility of a new type of space propulsion.
But just the feasibility study for that, and by that it means computer modeling, looking at laser arrays.
And I should mention that I have an experimental partner.
He's a laser physicist.
He's not a specialist, but he's a laser physicist.
His name is Chandrai Chowdhury.
And he's a research professor at UConn.
And he became interested in my work and in experimentally verifying my work.
But just to do the feasibility study is going to cost a quarter of a million dollars.
And that may sound like a lot, but it's actually minor when it comes to scientific experiments.
And what we're looking at is trying to get the funding just to do that.
And what happens is that people are dismayed because they think that, well, this is going to lead immediately to a time machine.
I mean, so the thing is, is that, but that's the stage that we're in right now, is trying to get the funding for showing that the feasibility study, for showing that circulating light will cause a twisting of space.
If we see that, then this will allow us to go and do the experiment itself.
And that experiment will probably cost many millions of dollars more, but we won't know how much more until we do the feasibility study.
Then, if the experiments show that we can twist space by using light, then the input from that we would use to see what would be necessary to cause the twisting of time.
And that is going to be caused even more millions of dollars, and that's down the line.
So we're talking about something that's going to happen over a long period of time, and this is the way in which science progresses.
And that's okay.
I mean, the thing is, is that even with a plane, with flight, one of the things that I've always been surprised about is that most of the documentaries that I've seen about the Wright brothers, you know, they do a good job of talking about their background and everything is bicycle mechanics.
And then they talk about, you know, flying the plane at Kitty Hawk.
I've only seen one documentary that mentions in detail the fact that these two brothers actually did science and engineering things prior to that.
What they did was build a small wind tunnel to look at wing configurations.
That's very practical engineering.
That's what they did in order to get the correct flight characteristics that were necessary.
And what I'm doing is sort of like the wind tunnel stage.
What I'm trying to get the funding for is to showing the twisting of space is like doing that.
And then from that, that will allow us to see what it is that we need for the twisting of time.
So the theory is there.
And as I said, I actually have a partner, experimental partner, that's interested in it.
And I'm trying to get people who are experts in neutrons to become interested in that part of it.
Because that, as I said, has applications that are independent of time travel, just simply a new prediction about how circulating light can cause a twisting of space.
Well, number one, it doesn't serve any purpose, and it's actually, you know, we call ourselves the information age.
You know, sending a person back is like, you know, that sounds romantic, but sending information back is vastly more important than sending a person back.
I mean, sending a person back is that's, as I said, that's fun for us.
But being able to send information back, and we were talking about that earlier, is about warning or sending information back about cures and things like that.
I mean, this is actually much more important.
Eventually, it would be nice To send people back, but the amount of energy that would be required for that would require the total capability and collaboration.
I mean, you know, CERN is an international collaboration.
It would require something like a super CERN type of thing.
I mean, it would require the output or the financial cooperation of all the major world governments.
Once again, that answers the, well, that's because of the fact of the energies that we're talking about.
unidentified
If you're sending information, that's not much energy.
Okay, Professor, just for fun, let us imagine that you get the twisting you want, that you can pass information into the past and that you decide to pass, just as an example, information on how to cure a disease that we now know how to cure, thereby saving the lives of millions of people in the past.
Now, that one act could have paradox implications that are staggering to even think about.
Well, that's the reason why I said that time travel to the past is a much more complicated and subtle thing than time travel to the future.
There are no paradoxes with time travel to the future.
But when you're talking about time travel to the past, it brings up the specter of what we call the grandfather paradox, which has very, very many forms.
But the most basic of it is if you go back to prevent your grandparents from meeting each other, then they don't have your parents.
And if they don't have your parents, then your parents don't have you.
So how do you go back and change the past?
But all of these other things you're talking about have that aspect to it.
And you have to realize that, once again, quantum mechanics has led to a possible resolution of this notion of the paradox.
What we've been talking about mainly, except when we were talking about entanglement, has been relativity.
Let us assume for a moment that what this theoretical physicist that we have in the line says is going to come to pass.
In other words, you're correct, Professor Mallet.
And is it irrational to then sit here and think, well, okay, if what the man is saying is correct, and he did agree that sending information back might be the first and most logical practical application of something like that, that we, as you pointed out, live very much in an information age now, professor, so shouldn't we be on the lookout?
Because, I mean, if time travel becomes possible in reverse, and we're inundated with so much information now, that isn't it possible that on somebody's, oh, I don't know, iPhone, there could suddenly pop what would seem to be an indecipherable message, perhaps indecipherable if it comes from far enough in the future.
In other words, what I'm saying is, if this is going to be eventually made into a practical application, shouldn't we be looking for messages from the future?
And what I was mentioning was this physicist, Hugo Everett III, who was applying quantum mechanics to the universe as a whole.
And what he found was that essentially different decisions, possible outcomes, are all played out.
And I was giving a specific example that I actually Like to use, which is to say that suppose that today you were trying to make a decision between having a fish sandwich or a cheeseburger.
At the instant that you decided to, let's say, have the cheeseburger, there would be an Art Bell in a parallel universe that has chosen the fish sandwich.
They're both real and they're in separate universes, and they both don't know anything about the other.
And this notion doesn't have to do with just human beings.
In other words, if an electron has a possibility of going to path A or path B, at the moment that it has that, it can actually go to both.
It goes into path A in one universe and path B in the other universe.
So this notion of, it was originally called mini-world theory, and now it's more popularly called parallel universe theory.
But it's a very important and possible process that quantum mechanics opens up.
Now, when Everett was looking at this, he was just looking at this as a possibility that was consistent with quantum mechanics.
It turned out that many years later, it was a physicist in Oxford.
His name was David Deutsch.
And David Deutsch decided to apply this to, and mathematically, to see what would happen when it was applied to time travel.
And what he found was that what it predicted is that suppose you went back into time.
And the moment that you arrived in the past, it would be a split of the universe into separate universes.
There would be a universe that you would arrive in.
And that universe that you arrive in, that parallel universe, you could do something like preventing your grandparents from meeting each other, and they don't have your parents, and so on.
You would just find yourself in a strange universe that you were never born into.
However, remember, I said there was a split.
The other universe, you don't arrive in.
And that universe leads to the outcome that we know has happened.
So the upshot of this is the fact that you can travel back to the past, but the past that you travel back to is not the past that you came from.
So that means that if you went back into the past to send information or you went back there with information about the stock market, for example, yes, in that parallel universe, you could become a millionaire.
But in the original universe that you came from, they wouldn't even know.
They would just simply say, oh, hey, you know, Art disappeared one day and we've never seen him again.
And that's one of the things that physicists believe is a real possibility is this notion of parallel universe and that quantum mechanics has to be taken into account.
That's one aspect of it.
The other aspect that Stephen Hawking has considered is what he calls the chronology protection hypothesis.
And I emphasize that word hypothesis because it's not a proof.
It's not a theorem.
It's just his conjecture.
And what he feels is that when you try to travel back into the past, nature itself will conspire in ways to prevent you from changing the past.
In fact, this conjecture of his, he's actually said it makes the world safe for historians.
And that's actually another possibility.
But once again, that's just a conjecture.
So you have that out there.
So that's why I said it's not as simple as it sounds.
Now, and then getting back to this notion of information, getting that information, number one, you have to realize that when you're sending information back to the past, you have to send it back in a certain form in which you have a device that will translate that.
To give you a simple example, people have asked me, well, how would you send information back?
Well, one of the ways that I have, and this is based on solid physics, is the neutron spins like a little top, like the Earth.
It spins about an axis, okay?
But in the world of quantum mechanics, the neutron can only have two directions of spin.
In our world, you can have any orientation of the spin axis.
But the neutron can only spin up or it can spin down.
It only has those two possibilities.
Now, the thing is, is that suppose that I assign a 1 to the neutron spin up and I assign a 0 to the neutron spin down.
Suppose I send a stream of neutrons in which I have spin up, spin up, spin down, spin up.
That's a binary code number.
And the thing is, is that so by using the spins of neutrons, one can actually send information.
However, that means you have to have a device associated with your machine that can actually translate these things.
So the neutrons coming back won't be able to be picked up by an iPhone or anything else unless you have something that decodes the neutron spins and then performs.
So then if that's so, then if the scientist professor at CERN one day, while looking for Higgs or something smaller, find some of these rapidly vanishing particles actually spell out, hey, you better quit this now, they should pay close attention to that message?
It might explain things that we were wondering about.
Why would this happen?
In fact, that's what we think that parallel universes do.
I think that the theory, when it was originally developed, as I said, it wasn't developed for time travel.
It was developed to try to see what happens whenever you apply quantum mechanics to the universe.
And what it implies then is that things that we see right now that are strange could be the result of a parallel universe.
But the problem is that it's hard to control that as an experiment.
One of the things that one would, and that's why I said one has to be careful with the messages one does get.
So let's just suppose for the moment that we now have things set up that we can receive information from the future.
Here is the paradox and the problem.
Now, it's not a paradox, but it's a problem.
We get a message from the future.
How do we know that that message is from our universe or a parallel universe?
Because we don't necessarily know because the information that we could be getting, since it's from the future, it could be coming from a parallel universe.
That means that we may or may not, we might have a new level of uncertainty about whether or not to act on that information.
Because if we act on it and it's from our universe, that's fine.
But if we act on it and it's from a parallel universe, that might not be fine.
It might say that, and more dangerous, that we're going to be attacked by such and such a country.
And that may be so in their universe, but not in our universe.
And so we prepare to attack, counterattack that country in this universe because we think that they're going to attack us in this universe, but they're not.
Oh, I mean, in fact, that's one of the things that governments would have to deal with.
That's why this notion of control of this, every new technology has to have control.
And when we talk about technology, sometimes people don't even think about how that simple that is.
For example, let's suppose that you have a butter knife.
I mean, I have a butter knife and I use it to spread butter.
But that butter knife can also be used to stab someone.
The knife itself is technology.
And it's technology.
It's neutral.
It has to do with the intent of the person that has the technology that one has to worry about.
And that has to be controlled.
That's why we have laws and everything else.
And in this particular case, in fact, one of my favorite movies, and it should get much more pressed, and I recommend it to people, it's called Time Cops with Claude Van Dam.
And the thing is, is that it's a good representation of what will have to happen when time travel comes online because you actually have this international organization.
It was to protect the time stream, essentially.
And you had time enforcement officers and all of that sort of thing.
And that's going to be the sort of thing that has to happen.
The other aspect is that the technology is going to be so expensive and so it's going to be, let's think of nuclear power.
None of us have our own individual nuclear reactors and we never will.
I've always wanted to actually have what looks like an ICBM in my front yard.
It would, you know, sort of keep everything in order.
Every now and then I could have a little smoke venting from Abramson line.
All right, so it's certainly possible, is it not, that either ourselves in the future or extraterrestrials have long since invented some form of time travel or information transfer?
the thing is, is that, and this is actually an important aspect of time travel.
In the movies, you can go back to any time that you want.
But with a real-time machine, you actually have a limitation.
The limitation is that you can only go back to the point where the machine was turned on.
For example, if I turn the device on today and I leave it on for 10 years, I could travel back seven years, five years, all the way back up to the point the machine was turned on.
But I can't travel earlier than that because you have to realize that it's the machine that's creating the warping of space and time.
I mean, with respect to an extraterrestrial civilization, it's highly likely.
In fact, one of the things that we know now scientifically is that since the 90s, scientists have found what are called extrasolar planets.
These are planets that are orbiting other stars.
Now, as strange as it might seem, we didn't know that until the 90s.
I mean, it was conjectured, but we saw observationally that there were other solar systems out there.
Before, we weren't sure that other stars had their own set of solar systems.
And what this means is that, in fact, scientists like to use catchy phrases, and recently they've actually found a class.
So what happened is that when they were looking at these extrasolar planets, most of them seemed like they were too close to their sun.
So they were too hot.
Some of them seemed like they were too far away.
So they were too cold.
What they have found now is a class of planets, extrasolar planets that they call Goldilocks planets.
So as you might guess from the name, it means that these planets are just right.
And they're just that the possibility of that light, they could support life.
Now, we haven't been able to see that yet.
And the current research that's going on in astrophysics is to determine how one determines the type of atmospheres that are possible on these planets.
But the general feeling now is among the scientific community is that there are very, and this is just in the neighborhood of our galaxy that we have found, you know, hundreds of these various planets.
And so, you know, there are billions of galaxies.
So the notion, it's highly likely that the universe is teeming with life.
And now that's part of the serious scientific thinking.
And so that means that if we encounter, I mean, there's probably some of these civilizations that are much more primitive than us, but it's highly likely that there are civilizations out there that are more advanced than us.
And they could have developed time travel technology, let's say, 10,000 years ago.
If we encounter them or they encounter us, they could visit our distant past.
Or once we encounter them, we could use their time travel technology to visit our distant past.
It's Time Traveler, and its subtitle is The Scientist's Personal Mission to Make Time Travel a Reality.
And the book is both a memoir and a popular science book.
I mean, it talks about black holes, wormholes, cosmic strings, lasers, quantum mechanics, and relativity, as well as the personal story, my motivation, which I just talked a little bit about.
But I also, in the book, I go into much more detail about the ups and downs.
Because after my father died, I mean, we plunged into poverty and it was very, very difficult.
And I talk about that and how I finally was able to get the money that I needed to go to college, which was not immediate.
I mean, when I got out of high school, we were just too poor for me to go to college, and I went to the Air Force and I used the GI Bill eventually.
This was during the Vietnam War period.
Sometimes I like to give people an example in my book, not just so that they learn something about the physics, but also learn about the possibility of achieving their own dreams.
I really try to do that when I'm giving speeches as a motivational thing, which is to say that you can achieve your dream if you do three different things.
Number one, you have to have a dream first, a goal.
And it should be something that really excites you, something that turns your life.
It shouldn't be something that other people think is exciting for you, but something that really you want to do, whatever it is.
And then you have to develop a strategy for achieving that.
In my case, as I said, it wasn't that I was going to go to college right away, but I developed a strategy of going into the service as an enlisted man and then getting the money from the GI bill.
And since following my father's footsteps, that allowed me to go to college.
And then the third thing is what I call the self-sweat equity.
That is to say, the investment of the effort in yourself to achieve that.
In other words, the hard work that's necessary to do that.
And if you do those three things, then there's really nothing that you can't achieve for yourself.
If we received a message from the future, whether it would be our future directly or another dimension's future or an extraterrestrial message, in what way would you imagine that that message would manifest?
I mean, you know, you're not going to get extraterrestrial information in that form.
It's going to have to be in a form that they can receive the communication.
So we really have to set up a way in which we would think that it's going to be received.
Here, terrestrially, we will be controlling that.
In other words, when this device goes online to try to receive information, we will have detectors that detect neutron spin orientations that would allow us to digitalize or to translate that into binary code.
And we know how to read binary code.
So we're anticipating that that's the way we're going to be sending the information because we have, in fact, will be doing that.
In other words, once we have this process, that's how we're going to set it up.
So we're going to have to, with extraterrestrials, it's going to be a lot harder because the only other way that we could get the information would be, you know, like from SETI.
And they might send us information in terms of a binary code or something else.
The problem is that we have to know, we have to be able to determine that we're getting information from them.
In fact, it's funny because originally pulsars were thought to be information.
The thing is, is that when people tell me that, you know, that a person says that they've traveled back from the future, I tell my students, number one, first, you know, be very polite to the person, number one.
Two, say, well, okay, show me the machine that you materialized into, because, once again, they cannot have materialized into nothing.
There has to be a receiver that they were in, because that was the thing that caused the time distortion in the first place.
In fact, I'm glad you bring that movie up because it's one of the few movies that actually talks about the limitation of going back into the past in a rational way.
It's a very little-known movie and very low-tech, but they do point out that you can't go back in time earlier than the device that caused it.
unidentified
Yeah, I thought the notion of the failed safe was pretty novel and unique.
Yeah, and it's actually based on the way in which physics operates.
So yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that.
unidentified
Great.
And my other question would be, if you're familiar at all with simulation theory, I know you mentioned this idea that either pulsars or quasars were originally seen as possibly information.
And I'm curious to know if you're familiar at all with, I guess, this theory that poses that we might be living in a simulation or that there's this alignment of quasars along the different filaments in the galaxy that could suggest different ways of the ordering of physics.
The thing is, is that, once again, it has to be how does one verify that?
You know, that's the limitation of what's, yeah, maybe it's a possibility, but how do you actually verify it?
So it's one of these things that it's an interesting conjecture, but it's hard to know how one actually can, in an operational way, verify it.
unidentified
Sure.
And my last question is maybe I just wasn't following earlier, but if you're able to talk about the realistic and I guess the large-scale implications of being able to send information back to the past, maybe I wasn't following, but it sounds like you were saying that information sent back might go to a different timeline, so it's essentially just deep charity to different universes.
Yeah, that's one possibility based on quantum mechanics is the fact that the information that we send back could end up in a parallel universe rather than ending up in our universe.
And on the converse side of that, that means that the information that we might be getting in our universe might or might not be coming from our universe.
It might be coming from a parallel universe.
So we have to have some sort of controls to know what's happening.
unidentified
Would it still be valuable to us?
Or could some of the information that we get back, say, from a different universe, could it carry different implications?
Say that basic rules of physics are different in a separate universe and we receive back information that has that as the foundation of its analysis.
One is if assuming that if you go back in time, but it ends up being not your timeline, what I don't understand is do we then would that time traveler be creating their own universe?
Would they actually be creating this universe?
Or are they just flipping into something that was already there?
The thing is that you have to remember that, once again, when you take into account the fact that they have to materialize into it, it has to be that they are coming into...
That's like the device that they left, or they can't just get to that universe.
So the question is, is that is it a universe that was already there, is what you're saying, and that they come into that universe?
If we're talking about the parallel universe and the notion and the way in which I was talking about it, you actually would be creating an alternate universe going forward.
My other quick question was, if, let's say we know that now that there could be Earth-like planets, even super-Earths, that could be even millions of years more ahead than us in terms of advanced life.
And if that's possible, this is really out there, but it's a fun idea.
If that's possible, and this super-advanced civilization created a time machine, and they turned on that time machine at the time, say, when Earth had dinosaurs roaming on it, would it be possible for those aliens to, say they had this time machine aboard a spaceship that just lasts a long time?
Could they visit Earth and visit Earth back when it was the time of the dinosaurs?
On the phone, you're on the air with Professor Mellett.
Hello.
unidentified
Good evening, Art.
Professor Ron, the given would have to be, let's assume that the physics in, I have two questions, but that the physics here on Earth, as we experience it, is the same anywhere in the universe.
So put that aside, that's a given.
Could this technology that you have discovered be used for two ways?
Could it be used to transport an object?
And if so, how big back through time into the future?
Okay, well, this may or may not be related to what we just stated.
The transporting device that has been leaked out in the last couple of years, I think in Sweden, where they said they did a transporter, Star Trek-type transporter thing, but only, I believe, with a molecule across a room.
So we know that's possible.
Would your technology be able, within the current time that we experience, be able to transport physical objects or even living things from point A to point B on Earth?
Well, number one, what you're talking about is teleportation from time travel.
And my work is not teleportation.
In a sense, you might say it's the opposite.
In teleportation, you're sending things from one point to another in space, okay, over arbitrarily short period of time.
In my case, you're sending things through time over a short period in space.
In other words, you want the object to appear in the location now that you have sent it from.
In other words, your laboratory is somewhere in the future, on the Earth in the future, but you want it to arrive in the past where your laboratory is in the past.
Hi, this actually deals with what you were just talking about.
The earlier guest asked about if a civilization, say, millions and millions of years ago, had this time machine.
And then could we use it to go back to our millions and millions of years ago?
The question that I had was, let's say this time machine was moved.
You just said that you'd want it in a static place like a laboratory.
But let's say someone built it on a ship, and then it started at point A, and then two million years later it was way on the other side of the galaxy somewhere.
If you walk into it or send information into it or whatever, in the future, where's it going to end up in the past?
Is it going to end up in that spot in the past or is it going to end up in the machine's original spot in the past?
The thing is, is that the way you have to think about it, and I'm going to talk about this in terms of my work that I'm doing, is that when I was talking about these loops in time, the loops really don't close back on each other so that it's like you're going around and around.
What's happening is that think of two different things happening.
Imagine that when these loops are being created in time, that it's like a slinky.
So the base of the slinky is here where the Earth is now.
As these loops are being created, they're like the helix of the slinky.
So as the Earth moves, imagine that you take the top part of the slinky.
You're holding the base of the slinky, you know, where the Earth is now.
And what you do is the top of this, remember, the laboratory is moving in space, as you pointed out.
The thing is, is that the top of the slinky is going to adjust itself and be with the laboratory wherever it is in the universe, so that at some later time, the top of the slinky is way over here.
And what you have to do is, in other words, to get back to the past, you are actually going to have to spiral back along the loops of the slinky.
And you can go back to any point, and you'll be where the Earth was at that point, all the way back up to when you turned the device on.
unidentified
Right.
But what if you were to actually physically move the device to another place?
So if it started out in, let's say, planet X and later on it ended up on Earth, if you got into it and went all the way back to its beginning, you would end up on planet X, in theory, correct?
In the future, Michelle, if you wouldn't mind, Planet Y. Anything Planet X is in just X, Y, Z, N. The latest date for extinction, by the way, is October 7th.
So without going over it again, the answer is no problem.
unidentified
Right, right.
Okay, and the second question, a lot of these books that we read, like the future worlds and these dystopias, it really seems like the authors are really experiencing this.
Is it possible that some of these people writing these books are the people that are having those slips between alternate realities?
Well, no, but the thing is, is that what you have to remember is that the human imagination is incredible.
I mean, H.G. Wells, when he was writing this book, The Time Machine, he wrote it 10 years before relativity came on.
And what he said in it almost sounds like, how did he get this information?
He actually calls time the fourth dimension.
That was the first time it was stated like that.
And it was something that's always caused me to ponder how did he come up with this information.
So the thing is that I think that it just has to do with the human imagination rather than the fact that they're getting some sort of outside information.
One of my favorite quotes by Einstein is that imagination is more important than knowledge.
Knowledge is limited, but imagination encircles the world.
And what he meant by that was not that knowledge isn't important, but what he meant is that the driving force for us to acquire knowledge is our imagination.
So I just think that these people are extremely imaginative, and they could lead to the real possibilities.
After all, H.G. Wells was the inspiration for me to try to understand scientifically how time travel was possible.
unidentified
All right.
And the final question is, there's a popular British sci-fi show that you may have heard of.
And in that show, the main character talks about.
I'm a huge fan.
The doctor talks about these fixed points in time where you can go through time, but there are certain things that you cannot change or influence.
And I'm wondering, is that probably going to be true when we get time travel?
See, that's one of those things that we don't know until we do it.
Because, as I mentioned, this notion of parallel universes is actually just one possible conjecture.
I mentioned that Stephen Hawking had another.
And there's also the possibility, which I didn't mention, of the fact that what we think of as being part of our life, if time travel had been invented earlier, is something that we don't even realize is different.
What you were talking about as far as fixed things, that would play into Hawking's chronology protection hypothesis, that there would be things that you can't alter.
But once again, we don't know.
And then there's that scary other possibility, which is the fact that when we do go back in time, we really do alter our real universe and change it, and that the only person who realizes that is the person who altered it.
unidentified
Yes.
Everyone else outside of the time stream doesn't realize that.
Well, one that goes back in time, for example, can send information from today one day ago to one day ago to get the lottery winnings or, I don't know, what financial gains, I mean, for today.
With the right amount of money and a great enough technology, a lot of money, perhaps.
But the thing is, is that, as I said, according to what we understand from quantum mechanics, you might be able to alter information in another parallel world, but maybe not this.
That's just one possibility.
As I said, there's the other option of Stephen Hawking's chronology protection hypothesis, which simply says that when you try to send the information back, you won't be able to do it.
But once again, we don't know what's going to really happen when that happens.
And once again, the technology, when it does go online, is not going to be accessible to individuals any more than nuclear reactors are accessible to individuals.
Professor, I've got a couple of geometry questions for you.
This is a really interesting theory.
Are you, with the light that you're using to create the changes in the fabric, are you moving the light like in a cylinder like you were just so that the light beam stays parallel and it moves around?
Or is it moving in a cone like you use the analogy of stirring ice?
Or are you actually using like a coherent source and rotating it along the axis of the light beam?
As far as twisting space is concerned, it's not that much.
But when it comes to twisting time, it could be gigantic.
That's why we have to try to understand first how much we need.
And we do actually know how much we need to twist space.
But what we're hoping to learn from that is novel ways of overcoming how much we would need to twist time.
It's very much the analogy that I was mentioning earlier with equals MC square.
That sounds like a simple equation, but the question is, is, how do you get that energy out of that mass?
And it wasn't even clear at all until the 30s that it was even possible, even though theoretically it was so.
It wasn't until we discovered the notion of chain reaction that we actually were able to see how we could get the energy out of the nucleus, okay, to create that enormous amount of energy that we have, which results in the atomic bomb, but also a nuclear reactor.
So what we're hoping is that with these feasibility studies and when we do the experiments with the twisting of space, that this will allow us to understand how we can overcome the energy barrier to cause the twisting of time.
But once again, we haven't gotten to that stage yet.
Well, the thing is, is that you're partially right, but you have to remember that the system has time in it.
It's not something that's creating time.
It has time in it.
So you're actually having a time dilation effect that's happening for the electron that's moving around the proton.
And then when you're moving the system, it's the time dilation effect that's happening, is happening to the system.
It's not that the system is creating the time dilation.
So that's, as I said, you have to remember that the time is independent of the system.
And what you're doing by accelerating it is you're actually causing the time of the system to become altered, not the time of the system, that the system is creating the time dilation.
I mean, that may be true, but what we're talking about is actually you can distort space with the equation actually has, if you look at the equation, it has independent factors.
It's not just simply the energy density, but it's actually this is a ring laser type of thing.
You're saying that it only has one, and that's not true.
The equation has the energy density divided by the size of the ring laser.
So you have two independent parameters.
If you have, what you have to do is maximize the energy density and minimize the size of the ring laser.
unidentified
But that's just energy density.
That's energy per volume.
So that's just Energy per volume.
If you think of Eddington's measurement of Einstein's theory, where the starlight was passing near the sun, and Einstein believed theory, that you would send that light.
It's not just simply the energy density of the ring laser.
The energy density is a separate factor from the size of the ring laser.
The size of the ring laser is a separate parameter.
And that, what you're doing is you're actually increasing the energy and decreasing the ring laser size.
That is not the same thing as changing the energy density.
So what you're measuring in both cases, the thing that you're measuring is the precession of the neutron and the precession of the neutron for reasonable energies, for instance, 1,000 joules, you can actually show that you get a precession rate that is probably measurable.
So that's not quite true.
What we're trying to do is to show that you can cause a precession of the neutron due to the circulating ring laser.
And that is actually something that is within present technology.
Now, as far as twisting time, that requires not only different equations, but that requires much more energy.
But as far as twisting space is concerned, that is definitely within the present technology and within laser powers.
As a matter of fact, I have a colleague who's a laser specialist and is an expert in diode lasers.
And the NSF proposal we have actually shows that you can cause this twisting.
Hi, this is Chandler Colling from Bloomington, Normal, Illinois.
And my question to the guest is about a month or two ago, Art, you had that you'd interviewed a guy who had claimed to have traveled back in time as part of Project Pegasus by DARPA.
So I would wonder, have you, in that case, or have you ever run across any other specific cases that have given you pause and made you wonder whether we've had visitors from the future?
You know, physics and science in general has two critical things, reproducibility and verifiability.
You have to be able to verify this.
And when I say verify it, I mean by independent laboratories anywhere in the world.
And you have to be able to reproduce it anytime, you know, again and again and again under the same conditions.
One of the things that I'm very, very proud of is my book has been translated in a number of different languages.
Those languages are ones that I can't read.
For example, it's been translated to Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.
The thing that looks exactly the same in all of those languages is the basic equation that I have for the precession of the neutron due to the gravitational field of circulating light.
The equation looks exactly the same.
What that says is the universe reality.
Someone in any of these countries can verify my work independently of me.
And the thing is, is that whenever, for scientists, if you can't show in a verified way that what you have done can be done and reproduced, then it's, let's just simply say the community is skeptical.