Why Time Travel Won't Be Like the Movies. Stephen King's Rules for Time Travel. Build Your Own Time Machine. Faster-Than-Light Discovery Raises Prospect of Time Travel. If a report of particles traveling faster than the speed of light turns out to be true, it will rock the foundations of modern physics — and perhaps even change the way scientists think about time travel. But don't fire up the DeLorean just yet. Physicists are skeptical that the tiny subatomic particles, called neutrinos, really are breaking the cosmic rule that nothing goes faster than light. And even if they are, neutrinos don't make the best vessel for sending signals to the past because they pass through ordinary matter almost unaffected, interacting only weakly with the wider world. [Countdown of Bizarre Subatomic Particles] So you may be able to send neutrinos back in time, but would anyone notice?
"If you're trying to get people's attention by bouncing neutrinos off their head, you could wait for quite awhile," Seth Lloyd, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told LiveScience. Physics shocker If it's true ... What does that mean for time travel? Stuck in time. Time travel in fiction: why authors return to it time and time again. From The Terminator to Austin Powers, Quantum Leap to Life on Mars, the paradoxes and quandaries of time travel exert an uncanny influence on modern writers. Even horror supremo Stephen King is to tackle the topic in his forthcoming novel 11.22.63, which involves a teacher travelling through a portal to 1958 in an attempt to save JFK. Authors have dreamed of time travel for centuries. A folk tale from eighth-century Japan tells of a fisherman, Urashima Taro, who journeys to a world under the sea where he lives for three years, only to find, on his return home, that three centuries have passed.
Washington Irving related the story of Rip Van Winkle, a man who goes to sleep for a night to find 20 years have passed in 1819; Scrooge was given glimpses into the past and the "yet to come" in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol in 1843; and Mark Twain sent a Connecticut Yankee to the court of King Arthur in his 1889 novel. Light speed: Flying into fantasy. 23 September 2011Last updated at 13:25 By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News A photo from Cern's past, or a wormhole? What if particles really can exceed the speed of light? It is a fascinating and provocative question. But first, it should be said that Thursday's news that physicists have seen subatomic particles called neutrinos exceed the Universe's speed limit is a picture of science still at work.
The researchers at Cern in Switzerland and Gran Sasso in Italy have tried really hard to find what they might be doing wrong - over three years and thousands of experiments - because they can hardly believe what they are seeing. The publication of their results is a call for help to pick holes in their methods, and save physics as we now know it. But he has gone further. "So let me put my money where my mouth is: if the Cern experiment proves to be correct and neutrinos have broken the speed of light, I will eat my boxer shorts on live TV. " Don't go buying one just yet. Large Hadron Collider could be world's first time machine, researchers' theory suggests. If the latest theory of Tom Weiler and Chui Man Ho is right, the Large Hadron Collider -- the world's largest atom smasher that started regular operation last year -- could be the first machine capable of causing matter to travel backwards in time. "Our theory is a long shot," admitted Weiler, who is a physics professor at Vanderbilt University, "but it doesn't violate any laws of physics or experimental constraints.
" One of the major goals of the collider is to find the elusive Higgs boson: the particle that physicists invoke to explain why particles like protons, neutrons and electrons have mass. If the collider succeeds in producing the Higgs boson, some scientists predict that it will create a second particle, called the Higgs singlet, at the same time. According to Weiler and Ho's theory, these singlets should have the ability to jump into an extra, fifth dimension where they can move either forward or backward in time and reappear in the future or past.
Unsticking the "brane"