Re: John Titor Update: Exclusive Report!
Well, I will point out that I am not debating "for" or "against" Titor. That little so-called "black hole" does have the mass (through gravity) of a small mountain. Afterall, gravity is formidable with getting out into Space. We have to get out of the pull of the Earth first, and that takes a lot of energy. Other people have pointed out that it may not take any more energy to move through Time, although the way that one moves through Time is thought now perhaps of the same way that moving through Space is thought of. In fact, I do have a book right here "Time Travel in Einstein's Universe" that does start off with time travel sci-fi stories, then says that time travel has to be self-consistent, and in one part, ends up, saying that 'mini black holes' would be like going over a 'speed bump' and you end up in a parallel universe. It is written in the consistent type story of sci-fi time travel stories of today. The book is by a Princeton physicist -- J. Richard Gott.
Either he is trying to 'fuel' the discussion, and ends up sounding like Titor in a sense, a year later (afterall the book had to be written, and the book did come out in 2001, but in paperback in 2002, but Titor is not the only one writing this way, about time travel.
Here is from the book:
Time travel to the past would appear difficult at best, so don't call your travel agent just yet. (I may add or delete a word or change a word, just to keep the copyright safe.) Extreme conditions would be required to even attempt such a project. (Gees, as physicists we don't really know, but debating amonst ourselves and having these conversations leads to this conclusion)...............But physicists spend their energy exploring the possibilities of time travel in principle for a very good reason: as I've commmented earlier, we are interested in testing the boundaries of the laws of physics under extreme conditions (Oh, that is why time travel is thought about -- I thought it was thought about, because actually instead of thinking it may not be possible, they are actually thinking that looking at extreme physics may bring about some light on the subject -- gees!). As physicists often remark -- especially when they lack money for building a new particle accelerator -- in its early moments the universe itself was a particle accelerator. If we want to search out places where extreme conditions prevail, we can look to the interiors of black holes -- or to the beginning of the universe.................A similiar logic applies to time machines. If we wish to test whether the laws of physics allow time travel to the past, we might further explore extreme conditions. One place to look for naturally occurring time machines may be in the interiors of black holes.
Well, gees whiz, golly whiz bang, chitty chitty bang bang!
Now for the good part of the book, that came out a little later than Titor (by a few months):
Any photons falling into the black hole from our universe would become very blueshifted and energetic, however. You would encounter these photons, which could kill you, as you headed in to jump through the ring singularity. Theoretically, photons entering the black hole in the infinite far future could become infinitely blueshifted and create their own singularity, blocking your way to the time-travel region. Yet work by physicists Amos Ori of Caltech and Lior Burko of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology shows that passing through this singularity to the region of time travel just may be possible after all, because the singularity formed by the incoming photons would be weak. First, we expect all infinities in the curvature to be "smeared out" bu quantum effects, so that the curvature would just rise to a very high but finite value.(We refer to this as "near-infinite.") Second, the buildup of curvature occurs so quickly that the associated tidal foreces might not tear you apart; they simply wouldn't have time to move your heard and feet much while you passed through. This would be akin to going over a speed bump very fast in your car: you would get a big jolt, but you could survive. To know the exact details of the process, we need a theory of quantum gravity, which we have not yet discovered. As Kip Thorne says in Black Holes and Time Warps, an astronaut "will survive, almost unscathed, right up to the edge of the probabilistic quantum gravity singularity. Only at the singularity's edge, just as he comes face-to-face with the laws of quantum gravity, will the astronaut be killed -- and we can not even be absoulutely sure he gets killed then, since we do not really understand at all well the laws of quantum gravity and their consequences. .........................
It was generally thought that such a singularity could, in principle, spew out all kinds of elementary particles that could kill you, but the argument has a loophole: there is a singularity we already see when looking out into the past that doesn't kill us ---- the big bang singularity at the beginning of the universe. Looking at a singularity isn't necessarily fatal.
Intriguing.
Well, that is all interesting as that chapter in the book talks about all that stuff of sci-fi -- wormholes, singularities, and time travel theories.
This does not make Titor real, at least, not yet, not real, not yet, yet!
I knew it.