Kip S. Thorne is one of the country’s best physicists, and one of the few who will openly discuss such far-out concepts as faster-than-light (FTL) spaceships, time travel, and our weird universe.
The best place to start reading about modern physics without the dry exercises of a text book is A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. Read more about that book in this article.
After that, you should graduate to Michio Kaku, a physicist at the City College of New York. His homepage is subtitled “Explorations in Science,” and his weekly radio show called “Science Fantastic” airs on Saturday nights from 5pm to 8pm EST. His MySpace page is called “Because Science Matters.” His books, like Hyperspace, are friendly, interesting discussions of very advanced physics. Read more about Michio Kaku here.
After reading the work of those two scientists, try chewing with your newly sharp physics teeth on the hefty tome Black Holes & Time Warps, Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy, by Kip S. Thorne.
Kip Thorne
Kip Thorne is the wild man of modern physics. He’s the guy who Carl Sagan turned to when Sagan was writing Contact (a novel and movie) because Sagan needed a faster-than-light spaceship.
Black Holes & Time Warps, first published in 1994, is still relevant today. One of the most fascinating chapters is the last one that concern’s Thorne’s own research into “closed timelike curves,” physicists’ jargon for time machines.
The fact that he only has one chapter dedicated to this impressive research is both modest and disappointing. Personally, I would have rather seen it compose a much larger percentage of the book. In Thorne’s defense, a thorough understanding of previous physics is necessary to understand his work, and he does make the preceding chapters interesting.
How to Build Your Own Time Machine
Once Thorne arrives at the final chapter, however, the book gets fascinating. Thorne and his student Mike Morris worked on these theories in the mid-1980s.
The basics of his time machine are this: you start with a wormhole. Wormholes are not merely the stuff of Star Trek: Deep Space 9. They were discovered mathematically in 1916 as a solution to Einstein’s field equation just a few months after he published it.
Then, you thread the wormhole with exotic material, which means that the material has a negative energy density as measured by a light beam that travels through it, which kind of means that it should have negative mass within a certain frame of reference (but of course must be positive when you add up all the frames of reference.)
Surely this does not exist! you say. Okay, it doesn’t exist often, but Stephen Hawking had already shown that vacuum fluctuations near a black hole’s horizon are made of exotic material in 1974, so exotic material can exist. Exotic material can also be called the weak energy condition, in physicistese.
Once you have a wormhole threaded with exotic material, you take one end of the wormhole and put it in a really fast spaceship that can travel very, very near the speed of light (very carefully, one would assume.) The other end of the wormhole stays on earth.
The spaceship runs out into the Universe and back, thus activating that whole theory about how time travels much more slowly on a spaceship near the speed of light than it does on Earth. When the spaceship gets back, ten years will have passed on Earth but only twelve hours on the spaceship.
Thus, if you climb into the wormhole that was on the spaceship and has now returned ten years later, you will emerge at the other end of the wormhole twelve hours after the spaceship took off.
The Problems with Time Machines
Thus, we come to one of the most important considerations of Thorne’s ideas: that you cannot travel farther backward in time than the time that the first wormhole time machine was made.
A few weeks ago, some physicists breathtakingly revealed the starkly obvious, that time travel is probably not feasible and may not be possible.
Why is this obvious? The best evidence is experimental, that is, because we have not been inundated with hordes of people from the future. At Ford’s Theater when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, twenty thousand people did not miraculously appear and prevent this, and another forty thousand did not wrestle them to the ground to prevent the prevention.
(But there would be laws against tampering, you say? Oh, yeah. Laws. That would work. And nobody ever speeds on the freeway, either.)
We also don’t have millions of extra people just milling around, watching, because they’re time tourists. We also don’t have time economic refugees running around, finding a menial job for starvation wages, which they can then deposit in a bank at 5% compound interest for a thousand years, which then becomes some real money, a la South Park.
We also don’t have a whole bunch of people wearing funny-looking clothes betting on all the winning horses in every race at Belmont or Churchill Downs, or a thousand people winning the lottery every week, which could be done with historical racing forms or lottery records.
(Personally, I’d go back to Jane Austen’s time and hang around the Upper and Lower Rooms of Bath and watch people.)
But, again, Thorne’s hypotheses about time machines state that you cannot go back farther than when the first time machine was invented.
So, the fact that there were no tourists or rescuers in Lincoln’s time, or that there are no funny-looking lottery winners now, only assures us that in the 1800s and at the present time, no one has yet threaded a wormhole with exotic material and created a time machine. That much is probably true.
Thus, this "experimental” data only dates to the present day. It states that no Thorne time machines have yet been made.
Stephen Hawking Hates Time Machines
Thorne discusses the objections to his theories of time machines lucidly and fairly in this book. Stephen Hawking postulates a theory that he calls the chronology protection conjecture, which basically says, “The laws of physics do not allow time machines.” This also keeps the world safe for historians.
The Value of Time Machines
Black Holes & Time Warps discusses the theoretical considerations around how “closed timelike curves,” physicists’ jargon for time machines are possible, if not feasible. If they’re possible, then perhaps we can use those theories to create other, more feasible, economically viable technologies, so they are worth studying. No one knew that obscure experiments into the mechanism of bacterial DNA replication would lead to Genentech and Amgen.
TK Kenyon does not discuss time machines in RABID, A Novel, coming in April, 2007, but does delve into renegade scientists creating green, glowing, neurovirulent viruses, murder, pedophile priests, faith, religion, and free will.
