If You Were Obsessed...

[SaxonViolence]

Never mind reasons to believe that it isn't possible...

 

If you woke up tomorrow morning with a Fanatical Mad Scientist's Compulsion to try to Build a Time Machine...

 

Where would you start?

 

Yeah, they're not going to let you schedule a few hours on the new Atom Smasher at CERN...

 

Or give you use of a Hydrogen Bomb—or whatever.

 

Limit yourself to things that you could reasonably build in a backyard, a dedicated garage or a small warehouse.

 

Of course:

 

"Since I don't think that it's possible—there IS no "good place" to start,"

 

Is a perfectly valid response, but hopefully more interesting responses are possible...

 

Backstory:

 

I was telling my mother about a short SF story I read.

 

A fellow has been obsessed with building a Time Machine since his early 20's.

 

He's too obsessed to take time out to get a Physics Degree.

 

He thinks he knows exactly how to go about it.

 

Late in life, he has a very partial and disappointing success.

 

He's at a loggerhead and hasn't the Theoretical Background to think of a different approach—and bemoans not going to school when he was young.

 

{No matter how he sets the machine, he inevitably ends up 50 years in the past—on the exact same street corner.

 

And after an hour, he inevitably comes back to his own basement.

 

Dude! That alone would be quite sufficient to get you a Nobel Prize, a PhD and a Tenured Teaching post on a Good University right there...}

 

And I remarked:

 

"If I really believed that I could make a backyard time machine, then everything else in my life would have to go on the back burner..."

 

Then I questioned just how an intelligent, science literate, obsessed but technically sane Dude with an uncontrollable compulsion to try to build a time machine might spend his workshop time...

 

 

 

Saxon Violence

Edited August 30, 2013 by SaxonViolence

[CraigD]

If you woke up tomorrow morning with a Fanatical Mad Scientist's Compulsion to try to Build a Time Machine...

 

Where would you start?

...

Limit yourself to things that you could reasonably build in a backyard, a dedicated garage or a small warehouse.

I’d begin by clearly defining what I mean by “time machine”, as a machine that can send information of any kind from an instant in its history (let’s, for convenience, call this “the future”) to an instance earlier in its history (“the past”). No sending DeLoreans nearing teenagers into the 1950s, but rather, a communication device that could receive messages that had not yet been sent, essentially what’s that Commodore PET-looking thing’s doing in the 1980 SF novel Thrice Upon a Time. So my mad scientist-ly plans for world domination would be of the winning the Lottery and/or cheating at stock market speculation, rather than guys with machine guns conquering ancient Rome, kind.

 

I’d pin my hopes on one iffy but not entirely scientifically incredible hypothesis that faster than light signaling is possible via quantum tunneling. I’d then build a machine to scale down and up the experimental apparatus Gunter Nimitz and Alfons Stahlhofen described in their 2006 paper “Macroscopic violation of special relativity”, (which is summarized in this wikipedia article section, and discussed around the same time in several threads, such as this one (which has lots of links)) and use it to implement the causality-violating scheme illustrated Sharp Blue: Relativity, FTL and causality

 

I’d go with this basic design (parts bolded):

1. A hard vacuum chamber filled with a cloud of high-refractive index material playing the role of the prisms in Nimitz’s setup ...
   
2. ... with an input laser and photoreceptor (sourced from COTS communication hardware) focused on a ...
   
3. … fixed mirror corresponding to Alice in the Sharp Blue diagram.
   
4. A second fixed mirror corresponds to Bob.
   
5. A couple of high power lasers sweep the cloud into hard vacuum in the paths followed by Dave and Carol,
   
6. ... which are ionized reflective metal atoms (perhaps silver) accelerated with a pair of bought cheap or free from university physics labs linear accelerators and fired down those paths.
   
7. A signal engineering miracle of signal-to-noise discrimination occurs (if I’m a mad scientist, I think it’s fair to grant that I’m a genius at this sort of thing)
   
8. With some fastest I can buy, beg, borrow, or steal network hardware, and not-too-complicated software, I’m able to get the latency of the system’s signal processing less that the time between events R and P, even if only by a tiny amount.
   
9. The system is then looped back into itself, multiplying that difference any a number of times constrained only by the bandwidth of the system to send a digital message from any instance in the device’s future to any instant in its past ...
   

... and I can start my day reading emails from myself from the future. :)

 

Profound weirdness can then ensue, ie: the sending and receiving of messages saying “whatever you do, tomorrow, 9/2/2013, do not send this message back to yourself today, 9/1/2013”.