Feb 19 2008
Time Machine Possible in New Particle Accelerator
In recent years, time traveling has been not only a scenario in science fictions and Hollywood blockbusters, but also a scientific possibility due to the rapid developments of quantum theory. Tidbits on the possibility of achieving time traveling has sprouted up in news in the past couple of weeks.
The soon to be available Large Hadron Collider (LHC, pictured above) of CERN utilizes several superconducting magnets (kept at just 1.9 K) to guide charged particles to a desired projectile. Scheduled to be in operation by May of this year, it is the largest and highest energy particle accelerator in the world.[1] Using the LHC, a special run is scheduled for April 2008 in attempt to recreate the Big Bang.
By colliding charged particles at high velocity, researchers hope to reproduce the first billionth second after the Big Bang. By successfully doing so, this exercise would further validate the theory–some claim as the origin of life–since the Nobel win of Professor George Smoot in 2007.
However, the public hype of the launch of LHC isn’t all for the recreation of the mysterious Big Bang. Much of its attention is the possibility of creating a time machine as a side product of this exercise. As mathematicians Irina Aref’eva and Igor Volovich of Moscow’s Steklov Mathematical Institute pointed out, Einstein’s theory of general relativity suggests that particle collisions at such high energy level would distort the space-time fabric surrounding it. This distortion can create a wormhole, or “time tunnel,” allowing time traveling.[2] A related interview with Irina Aref’eva is available on YouTube.
Such claim sounds little more than a scene out of some scifi movie; and many in the scientific community agrees. Most remains skeptical of the production and application of the man-made wormhole. Surely, arguments like the lack of “time travelers” from the future still echo every time machine idea is brought up. Since what will happen inside the particle accelerator is still largely unknown, its secondary consequences also remain unpredictable.
Noel
The LHC will undoubtedly have lots of attention as scientists search for the Higgs boson (the “god particle”) using proton-proton collisions. For my part, I want to see the results when they start colliding large nuclei. Smash these together at LHC and there will be so many particles produced that, initially, they’ll barely move without bumping into each other. Or, who knows? Maybe the particles (probably quarks) will just sail by each other without interacting. We know that at RHIC, they apparently interact very strongly. They jostle around so much that they equilibrate locally, and you can use thermodynamics to understand them in bulk. In fact, when they expand, it looks very much like a compressed little droplet of liquid flowing outward, so hydrodynamics is used to understand the stuff. At the predecessors to LHC, this liquid expansion (it’s called elliptic flow) grew stronger and stronger as they cranked up the collision energy. At the top RHIC energy, the expansion was so strong that it looked like a liquid droplet with almost zero viscosity. Probably before that, it was sort of liquid-like but it wasn’t a completely thermal system. But now people think that the elliptic flow can’t get any bigger, because you can’t get any more liquidy than a zero viscosity liquid!
So, at LHC I’ll be looking to see if the RHIC people got it right. Is this really hot nuclear matter a zero-viscosity liquid, in which case the elliptic flow won’t grow? Or did they get it wrong, and it just keeps getting bigger as the collision energy dial is turned up? (I know, I know… there’s no dial. They probably have a LabView vi instead.)
On a different note, this blog seems a little Berkeley-centric at the moment, but here at U. of Maryland, me and my east-coast posse are all about Professor Mather and *his* Nobel Prize!