Physicists ponder real-life TARDIS

Now here's something worth grabbing some fish fingers and custard for—and then some.

 

Physicists Dr. Ben Tippett and Dr. Dave Tsang have taken the time to ponder the feasibility of the British science fiction character Doctor Who’s means of traveling through space and time, the TARDIS.

 

 

Dr. Tippett and Dr. Tsang have written a paper entitled Traversable Achronal Retrograde Domains in Spacetime – a creative spin on the TARDIS acronym – that proposes a bubble following the path of a “closed loop in space and time.”

 

The framework behind the hypothetical “spacetime bubble” is based on Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, and makes use of concepts such as Miguel Alcubierre’s Warp Drive and Michael Morris' and Kip Thorne’s thought experiments with wormholes (an idea that was proposed by Einstein and colleague Nathan Rosen in the 1930s).

 

According to the physicists, the bubble would be able to travel to any point in time or space if a number of spacetime loops, or Closed Timelike Curves (CTC), could somehow be joined together. CTCs depict the dimension of time as a loop, curving around and back into itself. A bubble traveling on a CTC could only move in a circular path; the splicing of multiple CTCs, however, would allow said bubble to travel along the paths of other circles, subsequently reaching different points in spacetime.

 

However, don’t count on any time-jumping adventures with the Doctor anytime soon, as the paper also explains why such a device would not be possible in real life. Building the proposed TARDIS requires using a type of matter that doesn’t even exist in the conventional sense – unphysical or exotic matter, which repels gravity and can travel faster than the speed of light. Furthermore, an actual wormhole has yet to be discovered, and so the concept remains grounded in theory and the realm of science fiction.

 

The physicists have also written a more layman-friendly version of the paper, called The Blue Box White Paper. It simplifies the concepts and theories stated in the original, making them easier to understand for a wider audience. Both papers are hosted on arXiv.org, an online open-access repository of scientific papers that is funded and operated by Cornell University.

 

Dr. Tippett and Dr. Tsang are both part of the team of physicists behind the Titanium Physics Podcast, a series of recorded discussions that seek to explain complicated physics concepts through the use of simple examples and comparisons. Dr. Tippett is no stranger to combining real-world physics with fictional characters, having written papers in the past that analyze Superman's powers and Spider-Man's speed.

 

Doctor Who aired its first episode in 1963, and is recognized by the Guiness Book of World Records  as the longest-running science fiction television program in the world. In celebration of its 50th anniversary, the current season will conclude with a special 3D episode on November 23, to be broadcast simultaneously across 75 countries.

 

 

Now who says physics can’t be fun and exciting? Definitely not the Doctor. — TJD, GMA News