2008; Year Zero?

2008: Does time travel start here?
February 2008
Michael Brooks
New ScientistMagazine issue 2642

AS YOU may have heard, this will be the year. The Large Hadron Collider - the most powerful atom-smasher ever built - will be switched on, and particle physics will hit pay-dirt. Yet if a pair of Russian mathematicians are right, any advances in this area could be overshadowed by a truly extraordinary event. According to Irina Aref'eva and Igor Volovich, the LHC might just turn out to be the world's first time machine.

It is a highly speculative claim, that's for sure. But if Aref'eva and Volovich are correct, the LHC's debut at CERN, the European particle physics centre near Geneva in Switzerland, could provide a landmark in history. That's because travelling into the past is only possible - if it is possible at all - as far back as the creation of the first time machine, and that means 2008 could become Year Zero.

Wow. I thought we were still hundreds, if not thousands of years away from achieving time travel.

Invader Zim wrote:2008: Does time travel start here?
February 2008
Michael Brooks
New ScientistMagazine issue 2642

AS YOU may have heard, this will be the year. The Large Hadron Collider - the most powerful atom-smasher ever built - will be switched on, and particle physics will hit pay-dirt. Yet if a pair of Russian mathematicians are right, any advances in this area could be overshadowed by a truly extraordinary event. According to Irina Aref'eva and Igor Volovich, the LHC might just turn out to be the world's first time machine.

It is a highly speculative claim, that's for sure. But if Aref'eva and Volovich are correct, the LHC's debut at CERN, the European particle physics centre near Geneva in Switzerland, could provide a landmark in history. That's because travelling into the past is only possible - if it is possible at all - as far back as the creation of the first time machine, and that means 2008 could become Year Zero.

The literature distributors from Canberra screw your order up sheety?

i thought some people had already succeeded in sending bits of information at faster than the speed of light some years back?

Quantum "information" appears to, or can be described as moving at superlight speed.

Zimi in morphing into Buckeroo shock.

The One wrote:i thought some people had already succeeded in sending bits of information at faster than the speed of light some years back?

Yeah, not quite the same as time travel IIRC. Think Bohr was supposed to have transferred particles from here to past Venus. How they know that, I just can't remember.

"and that means 2008 could become Year Zero."

meh, most people already restarted their calender upon the retirement of TGM

Batfink Begins wrote:

The One wrote:i thought some people had already succeeded in sending bits of information at faster than the speed of light some years back?

Yeah, not quite the same as time travel IIRC. Think Bohr was supposed to have transferred particles from here to past Venus. How they know that, I just can't remember.

I'm still baffled by how "they" determined the speed of light.

Mick Sawyer wrote:I'm still baffled by how "they" determined the speed of light.

With a stopwatch, dummy.

They started it when they turned the light on and stopped it when the light reached them. Sheesh, how easy was that?

Invader Zim wrote:2008: Does time travel start here?

Turns out, no.

Was all a bit Higgs Bogus, no?

Dello wrote:

Invader Zim wrote:2008: Does time travel start here?

Turns out, no.

It's started, they're just too far ahead for us to recognise.