Can only go back to when you started operating the device. So, basically the Primer time machine, except the math says it has to be done at galactic black hole amounts of energy sort of scale.
Mallett’s vision for a time machine centers on what he calls “an intense and continuous rotating beam of light” to manipulate gravity. His device would use a ring of lasers to mimic the spacetime-distorting effects of a black hole.
I don’t know, they probably don’t want to come back here because it’s disgusting and depressing. Steven Hawking once held the worst party ever and announced that because no time traveller’s turned up they can’t exist, like they can go anywhere why would they go to a dingy room with an egotistical and unpleasant discredited physicist? Sure his personality traits weren’t widely known and his theories were popular but someone from the future is going to see things differently.
Try talking to old people about things like race and gender, now imagine having to fit into a world where those old people opinions you find hard to take are the progressive ideas because the olds are young… then go back another few steps, you’re talking to one of the most progressive and respected people of his time but his teenage slave girl is pregnant with his child that he’ll keep as a slave until he dies (jefferson)
‘Hey timetraveller we set up the best night ever to thank you for curing my plauge, were going to go drink the most vile and disgusting beer you’ve ever seen, eat actual dead animals and watch people torture a bear!’
Going beck in time is horrible, you’d have to be a degenerate pervert to want to come back here
Good for you commenting on the title alone! If you looked at the actual article you would know that one of the limitations is, that the furthest point you can reach going back in time is when the “time machine” was first activated.
@inkican Going back in time would require more energy than is available in the universe, for going faster than the speed of light, which is impossible. That's the basis in the theory (should be called 'law' by now) of relativity.
Backwards time travel would obviously interfere with causality in creating an alternative past, which would lead to a different present. So it's a good thing that it's physically impossible, despite what a desperate astrophysicist believes.
The idea is that you can go backwards in time by going faster than light. The speed of light is actually the speed of information itself - so if you could go faster than that, you’d be going backwards in time.
However, Einstein showed that nothing can accelerate to the speed of light. You’d need infinite energy to actually reach the speed of light, and infinite energy is assumed to not be possible.
I wonder if there is a meaningful difference between your example, and the technology with which the JWST uses to view light in the past. Rather, if the later is something we can use for time travel ;)
The JWST looks at light which has been travelling for a long time. The only special thing about it, compared to other telescopes (or even your eyes), is the range of frequencies it’s looking at - the longer light travels, the lower the frequency becomes (due to the expansion of the universe).
So it’s the same basic phenomenon - information has a max speed, so you’re always interacting with the past state of any object.
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