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Here Ron Mallett pouring liquid chemical on array of lasers for progress of time machine. I didn't understand it.

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Source

What exactly Ron Mallett doing for time machine here?

Qmechanic
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Polly Man
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  • +1 for persistence. This is a better question than some people might think. The OP read a news article that makes it sound like physicists are serious about time travel. Naturally he had questions about it. One question about it was closed before I could answer. – mmesser314 Apr 19 '20 at 04:55
  • Possible duplicates: https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/2166/2451 and links therein. – Qmechanic Apr 19 '20 at 05:06
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    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Mallett#Criticism – G. Smith Apr 19 '20 at 05:12
  • If you want to know what Ron Mallett is doing, ask Ron Mallett. My impression is that he uses his personal ideas about time travel (not generally accepted) to create publicity, not the least for his own books. – StephenG - Help Ukraine Apr 19 '20 at 11:11
  • To be fair, the linked article was written by people who did ask Ron mallet. From Wikipedia, his personal ideas seem to be that you can create a ring laser that produces a detectable change in time, something like jets flying clocks around the Earth in opposite directions. So far, he hasn't detected anything. Some people have doubts that it is possible. – mmesser314 Apr 19 '20 at 14:10

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He is posing for a picture. He is not running a time machine.

The source you linked is a non-technical news article that makes science sound a lot like science fiction. Nobody is working on a time machine that will let him visit his dead father. There are no time machines that are remotely practical. Some are questionable even theoretically.

One "time machine" takes advantage of distortions of time in extreme gravitational fields. Two very accurate clocks were put in fast military jets. One jet flew east around the world. The other flew west. As predicted by General relativity, one clock ran slightly slower. The other slightly faster. The difference was a few microseconds.

If you were to repeat the experiment in orbit around a rapidly spinning black hole, the effect is much bigger. One clock could arrive before it left.

This works better as science fiction than as a practical time machine. The nearest black hole is many light years away, well beyond any trip we will ever be able to make. If you ignore that, a trip of many light years would take many, many years. If you ignore that, you still have to survive the extreme heat, radiation, and gravity near a black hole. If you put a spinning black hole near enough Earth to be useful, it would likely tear apart the Sun.

Another time travel machine uses worm holes. Worm holes are theoretically possible according to General Relativity. But that does not mean any actually exist. No evidence for them has ever been found by astronomers.

If they did exist, some types would collapse very quickly from gravitational effects. Scientists have proposed ways of propping some open long enough to traverse them. Unfortunately, this requires exotic forms of matter that are probably impossible. For one thing they must have negative mass. Very loosely, you might say that if you give me anti-gravity, I will give you time travel.

However, suppose you have a wormhole and did prop it open. If you could accelerate one end, it would be possible for a trip through it to arrive in the past.

Getting back to Ron Mallet, his ideas seem to be that you can create a ring laser that produces a detectable change in time, something like jets flying clocks around the Earth in opposite directions. So far, he hasn't detected anything. Some people have doubts that it is possible. Some are willing to wait and see.

mmesser314
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