The March 2010 cover story about time travel has major flaws in it, in particular, a method for time travel that by its design, wouldn't work. That is the finding of research and development engineer Marshall Barnes, who includes among his specialities, temporal mechanics (the study of time and time travel). The Discover article, How To Travel Through Time, was written by Cal Tech physicist Sean Carroll, PhD who is the author of the Dutton book, From Eternity to Here, which is where the Discover article is taken from. Marshall rebuts the article in a paper he has posted at ScientificBlogging.com. The paper is titled, "The New Rules for Time Travel" and Sean Carroll's Gate.
In his article, Carroll discusses how closed time-like curves, also known as CTCs, can result in time travel without paradoxes. He proposes a time gate that allows the creation of a CTC to illustrate his idea. Marshall disagrees with Carroll on almost every count - the nature of CTCs, paradoxes, and especially the time gate. It is the subject of how the gate functions where Marshall, who is known for his laser-like insightful skills of analysis, shows his superior grasp of the subject over Carroll's. Through his application of conceptualizing space-time geometries that are described by the gate, Marshall shows how it would be impossible for the gate to act in the manner that Carroll describes, thus rendering Carroll's use of it as a mechanism to produce CTCs totally useless, and by extension, Carroll's entire article.
Marshall, who has an agent shopping a book deal of his own on the subject of time travel, plans a follow-up to the paper in online video form, which will also be part of a new DVD project that he has in the works. An announcement will be made when the video will be released. Marshall has been known for finding terminal flaws in the work of Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne, Julian Barbour, Kurt Godel, and most recently, in the study by David Eagelman of Baylor College of Medicine, that claims to prove that duration dilation is a function of elongated memory. He also beat Duke University's claim of having a working invisibility cloak by more than ten years and his actually works in the optical realm. Duke, despite the use of the term "invisible", has admitted that it has yet to cloak something from anything beyond microwaves. The physics of his approach is displayed as part of a permanent exhibit in Columbus, Ohio.
