The Blue Box White Paper

Abstract

This white paper is an explanation of Ben and Dave's TARDIS time machine, written for laypeople who are interested in time travel, but have no technical knowledge of Einstein's Theory of General Relativity.The first part of this paper is an introduction to the pertinent ideas from Einstein's theory of curved spacetime, followed by a review of other popular time machine spacetimes. We begin with an introduction to curvature and lightcones. We then explain the Alcubierre Warp Drive, the Morris-Thorne wormhole, and the Tipler cylinder.We then describe the Traversable Achronal Retrograde Domain in Spacetime (TARDIS), and explain some of its general properties. Our TARDIS is a bubble of spacetime curvature which travels along a closed loop in space and time. A person travelling within the bubble will feel a constant acceleration. A person outside of the TARDIS will see two bubbles: one which is evolving forwards in time, and one which is evolving backwards in time. We then discuss the physical limitations which may prevent us from ever constructing a TARDIS. Finally, we discuss the method through which a TARDIS can be used to travel between arbitrary points in space and time, and the possible dangers involved with exiting a TARDIS from the wrong side.

Tractor Beams, Pressor Beams and Stressor Beams in General Relativity

“…Within the context of standard general relativity, there has now been over 33 years of serious theoretical work on the possibility of "traversable wormholes" [1][2][3][4][5], 29 years of recent work on "time machines" [6][7][8][9][10][11][12] and over 27 years of work on the theoretical possibility of "warp drives" [13][14][15][16][17][18]. These analyses, and their subsequent refinements, are based on "reverse engineering" the space-time metric to encapsulate some potentially interesting physics, and then using the Einstein equations to deduce what the stress-energy tensor must be to support these space-times [1,5,19,20].…”