Large Hadron Collider allows you to create a time machine?

    In the coming weeks, the first time travelers who arrived from the future may appear on Earth.
    Physicists around the world are eagerly awaiting the launch of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at a cost of 4.65 billion pounds - the most powerful particle accelerator in history. As expected, this device will provide new information about particles and forces acting in space, as well as reproduce conditions close to those that took place shortly after the "big bang" that gave rise to the Universe.

    Professor Irina Arefieva and Doctor of Physics and Mathematics Igor Volovich from the Steklov Institute of Mathematics in Moscow believe that a large-scale experiment at CERN, the European center for particle physics located near Geneva in Switzerland, could lead to the first time machine in the world, the magazine reports. New Scientist.



    The launch of the collider, scheduled for early summer, can be a historic milestone, as time travel is possible - if at all possible - only in the past, counting from the moment the first time machine was created.

    Thus, 2008 could be the “zero year” of time travel, scientists say.

    The idea of ​​time travel was born when Albert Einstein's colleague Kurt Godel, using the theory of relativity, proved the fundamental possibility of moving into the past.

    After the advent of his hypothesis in 1949, eminent physicists often tried to refute such an idea, since time travel undermines the principle of causality and threatens the appearance of paradoxes: a time traveler can return to the past and kill his own grandfather, but then it turns out that he himself could not appear to the light.

    By the way, 60 years have passed, and there are no fundamental objections as to why time travelers cannot leave historians out of work.

    According to Russian scientists, when the LHC energy concentrates on a subatomic particle (a trillion times smaller than a mosquito), strange things can happen to the tissue of the Universe, which scientists call “space-time” - this tissue can change.

    Earth's gravity weakly bends space-time, and the LHC is able to distort time so much that it closes in a ring. Such a phenomenon of physics is called a “closed time-like curve” - it allows, at least theoretically, to return to the past.

    This scheme echoes the theory proposed back in 1988. Then Professor Kip Thorne and colleagues at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena demonstrated that space-time tunnels - wormholes - can open the door to time travel. This theory has become popular thanks to the novel by Carl Sagan "Contact", which was later filmed.

    Professor Arefieva and Dr. Volovich are of the opinion that the LHC is able to create wormholes and thus provide time travel. “We realized that closed time-like curves and wormholes can appear as a result of a collision of particles,” Professor Arefieva explains.

    Nevertheless, before the appearance of imitators of Doctor Who will have to overcome many more obstacles. One of them is the fact that only subatomic particles can pass through the mini-wormholes.

    As the researchers told the Daily Telegraph, the idea that a subatomic particle’s time travel to the LHC could open the door for human travelers is a “deep and interesting question.” “Both these problems and many others require further study,” the scientists emphasized.

    Probably the best we can hope for is that the LHC will show signs of wormholes, says Dr. Volovich. If part of the collision energy in the LHC disappears, this can be explained by the creation of particles that pierce time through the wormhole.

    One of the pitfalls in the concept of wormholes is an attempt to find an exotic force that can keep them open for time travel.

    Dark energy - the mysterious anti-gravity force that is believed to act in the universe - may, according to scientists, turn out to be exactly what will keep the wormhole open. At least, supporters of one of the interpretations of this phantom energy, as it is called, say so.

    If a collision of particles, coupled with phantom energy, will create a wormhole in Geneva this year, the civilizations of the future may learn about this from history textbooks, calculate this moment and use our advanced technologies to pay us a visit.

    “Observational data do not yet exclude the possibility that phantom energy exists,” says Robert Caldwell, a physicist at Dartmaus College in Hanover, New Hampshire. “As for the speculations of Arefyeva and Volovich, as if the LHC would allow the creation of a time machine, pah!”

    One of the leading scientists who believe that time travel is possible, Professor David Deutsch of the University of Oxford, says: “These are hypothetical fabrications, but it is essentially impossible to find fault with them. Nevertheless, I believe that this mechanism will not work for a number of reasons (that is, the path for messages from the future will not open), even if their guesses are correct. ”

    Dr. Brian Cox of the University of Manchester adds: “The energy of the billions of cosmic rays that have entered the Earth’s atmosphere over five billion years exceeds the energy that the LHC can create. By their logic, time travelers should already be here. If these wormholes appear, I promise to eat my hat, which was presented to me on my birthday even before I received it. ”

    A source:www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/02/06/scitime106.xml

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