TIME TRAVEL

In the first half of Monday's show, Professor of theoretical physics Ronald Mallett gave an update on his quest to develop a time machine (he was originally inspired to do this after the early death of his father). The fact that time is affected by gravity became key to his work. "It turns out that you can actually use gravity to manipulate time in such a way that you can actually bend and twist time into a loop and this allows the possibility of traveling back into the past," he explained. "When you're trying to manipulate space and time, you have to do it in some way, and when you start the manipulation process you're actually beginning to capture the past in a way that you can revisit again," he continued.
Mallett's concept for a time machine centers around the idea that a circulating laser beam can cause a twisting of space and time, and thus loop the past and the future together. Yet, there are built-in limitations to such time travel-- the device if developed would only be able to visit the past that occurred after the machine's inception, and if the machine was turned off during a visit, the traveler wouldn't be able to return, he detailed. Mallett also discussed experiments being done with the Large Hadron Collider-- it acts as "sort of a time machine, as far as sending particles into the future," along the lines of Einstein's theory of relativity