Saturday, September 6, 2008

Large Hadron Collider as a Time Machine?

Time travel is one of the most radical ideas of science. What's fascinating about it is that it may be allowed by relativity. Now then, as if worrrying about the Large Hadron Collider destroying the world with an earth-eating black hole or ball of strangelets were not enough. I. V. Volovich and I. Ya. Aref'eva are proposing the device can function as a time machine. In a paper posted last year, the pair proposed that the LHC would be capable of producing wormholes, which can function as time machines-at least in principle. The researchers state:

"Causality is one of fundamental physical principles. We suggest in this note that there is a
possibility to test causality in experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This
is related with a possibility of wormhole production in proton-proton collisions at the LHC.
The wormholes contain small spacetime regions with closed timelike curves (CTC) which
violate the standard causality condition."

Well this is unlikely, but certainly fascinating. This idea was also proposed in another very interesting paper which discusses how to detect the presence of such time machines here.

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