Word: gott
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Richard Gott's calculations, which appear in the prestigious journal Physical Review Letters, create an imaginary time machine that takes advantage of an Einsteinian concept: that both space and time are distorted in the presence of very large masses or when objects are moving at speeds approaching the velocity of light. Gott is not the first to take this tack; in 1988 a Caltech physicist, Kip Thorne, and two colleagues constructed their own theoretical time machine and wrote about it in the same journal...
Still, says Gott, "it is an ingenious concept, and it got me thinking about other ways you might achieve time travel." Gott's idea is simpler than Thorne's. No black holes, no wormholes -- just a spaceship traveling at near light speed, and a peculiar object called a cosmic string. Like wormholes, cosmic strings may or may not exist; they are at present just theoretical constructs...
...this difference in travel time that sets up Gott's time machine. Imagine a rocket ship moving at 99.9999% of light speed and taking the shorter of the two paths. In principle it could reach the far side of a string at exactly the same moment as a light ray traveling the longer path. In essence the ship would be moving faster than light, and under the peculiar logic of special relativity, it would thus go backward in time. For complex reasons, the ship has to make a complete loop around the string, and thus a single string will...
...effect can theoretically precede a cause? What if, to use a theme from science fiction, a person could go into the past and kill his or her grandmother at an early age? Such a concept appears to make no sense, yet it must have some meaning if Gott's and Thorne's ideas are correct, as they appear to be. Says Gott: "At some point physics will have to find some mechanism by which these things are forbidden, or else learn to live with them." With two examples in hand, the paradox can no longer be ignored...
...German description of well-being is to live wie Gott in Frankreich -- like God in France. Whatever the yardstick for the good life, at least some of it still seems to be outside Germany. In pursuit of that grail, some 800,000 West Germans have established second homes abroad -- in Tuscany, along the Grande Corniche overlooking the Riviera, in the verdant valleys of South Tirol. They have also become the world's most traveled tourists: last year some 28 million West Germans took holidays abroad...