Episode Details
Back to Episodes
October 17, 2001: Time Travel - J. Richard Gott
Published 1 year, 2 months ago
Description
Art Bell opens with updates on the anthrax attacks spreading across the country and growing tensions between India and Pakistan before welcoming Princeton astrophysics professor J. Richard Gott for an in-depth discussion on the physics of time travel. Professor Gott explains how Einstein's special relativity makes time travel to the future not only theoretically possible but already demonstrated, citing Russian cosmonaut Sergei Avdeev as humanity's greatest time traveler to date.
The conversation turns to time travel to the past, where Gott describes his own discovery involving cosmic strings moving at near-light speeds and Kip Thorne's wormhole solutions. He offers a compelling answer to why no time travelers have visited us: no one can use a time machine before it has been built. The pair debate the grandmother paradox, weighing the conservative self-consistent universe model against the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Art presses Gott on whether he would personally take a one-way trip a thousand years into the future. The professor says yes without hesitation, comparing the journey to Marco Polo's 24-year voyage. They also discuss humanity's long-term survival prospects and the importance of colonizing Mars as a species-level insurance policy.
The conversation turns to time travel to the past, where Gott describes his own discovery involving cosmic strings moving at near-light speeds and Kip Thorne's wormhole solutions. He offers a compelling answer to why no time travelers have visited us: no one can use a time machine before it has been built. The pair debate the grandmother paradox, weighing the conservative self-consistent universe model against the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Art presses Gott on whether he would personally take a one-way trip a thousand years into the future. The professor says yes without hesitation, comparing the journey to Marco Polo's 24-year voyage. They also discuss humanity's long-term survival prospects and the importance of colonizing Mars as a species-level insurance policy.