Finally, a time machine. But oddly, the claim is that you can only travel back in time to the day the first time machine goes into operation, so you can only go back to earlier today, so far:
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.
I guess that would be a good failsafe in case you broke your time machine, if you only went back to when they started working, you could get another one, otherwise you’d have to wait howevermany years til it was invented.
Still, this means the time machine won’t be very interesting for 100 years or so, and that entire time people would have been going back and forth so much on short trips, there will be no novelty.
I’m going to hold out until they invent one that will go back to the time of the dinosaurs, at least. I’ll take a chance on it getting stepped on by a stegosaurus.