Build Your Own Time Machine: The Real Science of Time Travel by Brian Clegg

Author:Brian Clegg [Clegg, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science
ISBN: 9780715645185
Google: d5RXNQEACAAJ
Amazon: 0715645188
Goodreads: 17471736
Publisher: Duckworth Overlook
Published: 2012-07-03T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

INTERSTELLAR ENGINEERING

If the “Principle of Relativity” in an extreme sense establishes itself, it seems as if even Time would become discontinuous and be supplied in atoms.

—Oliver Lodge (1851–1940), Presidential Address

to the British Association (1913)

Much 1950s science fiction reflected the inspiring pioneering spirit of the American West. Just as the gold rush drove people to cross vast distances and risk their lives to mine for rare commodities, so, it was imagined, mining in space would be the driving economy behind traveling out into the solar system. And to make the simplest form of time machine work, all we need to do is pick up on those science fiction dreams of carving up asteroids and planets on a rather larger scale.

In truth, a massive scale.

In his failed campaign to become the 2004 Democratic Party candidate for the White House, General Wesley Clark made an impassioned plea for a new goal for the space program. In a speech given in New Hampshire, drawing on the experience of President John F. Kennedy’s race for the Moon and how this goal had inspired a whole generation, General Clark suggested that the next great frontier was traveling faster than light.

Dismissing the idea of a manned mission to Mars and the other relatively sedate goals that NASA had at the time, General Clark said that we needed to build public support for exploration of a new frontier—and what could make for a more dramatic space challenge than the attempt to travel faster than light? The general had in mind making it possible to reach the stars, journeys of such length that faster-than-light travel would be almost mandatory. But though not mentioned by the general, such research would be intrinsically linked to the mechanisms of time travel.

There is no doubt that taking the engineering approach to faster-than-light flight or to time travel involves huge goals—in fact, it involves dreams, as General Clark suggested in his speech. The scale of effort required to produce an engineering-based solution totally dwarfs everything the human race has ever done in the field of construction. You have to be prepared to think big.

The first person to take on time using heavyweight technology (or at least who believed he had achieved a shift in time) did so by accident. This was the remarkable Nikola Tesla. Tesla was born in Smiljan in the Austrian Empire (now in Croatia) in 1856; he would become a U.S. citizen in 1891. He was a strange mix, managing to be both a scientist and a hugely successful inventor while at the same time, particularly in his later life, displaying strange behaviors and beliefs that seemed to verge on insanity, and that would have anyone else instantly labeled a crank.

It’s a measure of the seriousness with which the scientific community regards Tesla today that the International System of Units has one measure, the unit of magnetic flux, named after him. His early work was hugely important for the electrical industry. He invented the fluorescent light and, most significantly, he championed the use of alternating current (AC) to transmit electricity.

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