Time travel possible, says boffin

AN ISRAELI SCIENTIST claims that it may be possible to build a time machine at some point in the future. He pooh-poohs such doubters as Steven Hawking who claim that if time travel were possible, people from the future would already have visited us.

In a paper in prestigious science publication Physical Review, Professor Amos Ori, of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, expounds a theory utilising a loop constructed in an empty, doughnut-shaped region of spacetime enveloped by a sphere of normal matter. The distortion of spacetime is simply created by a nearby black hole, enabling a traveller inside the doughnut to travel in time.

Ori claims that the simple reason we have yet to be visited by folk from the future is than it would be impossible to travel back in time to a point before the spacetime doughnut had been created. This removes at a stroke one of the great philosophical arguments about going back and killing your own grandfather before you were born and thus ceasing to exist so you couldn't go back and kill him in the first place.

But in the case of travelling to the future, everything in the universe is already capable of travelling into the future and we all do it without even noticing. When I leave my house to go to the pub, I travel ten minutes into the future. Were it to take me nine minutes, a paradox would be created whereby I met my future self coming into the pub a minute later and would be forced to buy myself a round. This is, of course, impossible.

But not all objects travel in time at the same speed. The Taliban travel considerably slower than most people and are now some 800 years behind the rest of the world. Other areas travel slightly faster - the Isle of Wight, for example is only 27 years behind the mainland of England, while New York is exactly five hours and fifty years behind. µ

L'Inq
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