Time Travel Scientist Dr. Ronald Mallett on CNN

[The Night Owl]

A physicist named Ronald Mallet is attempting to build a time machine which will allow information in the form of subatomic particles to be sent into the past...

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Po99JEgOiuY&feature=related

The ramifications of being able to send information from the future to the past are staggering, but before anyone gets too excited, a couple of wet blankets have argued that Mallett's approach to time travel won't work...

http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0410078

Hopefully, the wet blankets are wrong.

[Chris_]

How much to send info to my grandparents to buy IBM, XEROX, YAHOO, MICROSOFT and Google stock? I'm gonna own a country!

[The Night Owl]

How much to send info to my grandparents to buy IBM, XEROX, YAHOO, MICROSOFT and Google stock? I'm gonna own a country!

Unfortunately, Ronald Mallett's time machine will not be able to send information to any point in time before the machine became operational. Mallett's time machine is sort of like a one way intercom which allows us to receive information from the future.

A short video about Mallet's time machine...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRWwI61so5Q&feature=related

So, the really big question is... what happens when Mallett turns on his machine? Theoretically, information from the future could start streaming in at the moment the time machine is activated. So, what will people from the future say to us?

Another unknown regarding this time travel business (this is where it gets confusing) is that we don't if information sent into the past can affect the future it was sent from because being able to affect the future by affecting the past creates paradoxes. What Mallett believes is that changing the past by sending information to it from the future simply forks the past and the future into two separate and diverging universes. Very weird stuff.