John Richard Gott III | |
|---|---|
 J. Richard Gott (1989) | |
| Born | February 8, 1947 |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Astrophysics, gravitational physics |
| Institutions | Princeton University |
| Notable students | Matthew Headrick [1] |
John Richard Gott III (born February 8, 1947) is a professor of astrophysical sciences at Princeton University. He is known for his work on time travel and the Doomsday argument.
Paul Davies's bestseller How to Build a Time Machine credits Gott with the proposal of using cosmic strings to create a time machine. Gott's machine depends upon the antigravitational tension of the (hypothetical) strings to deform space without attracting nearby objects. The traveler would follow a precise path around rapidly separating strings, and find that he or she had moved backwards in time. Gott's solution does require that the strings are infinitely long, though: a theorem by Stephen Hawking proves that according to general relativity, closed timelike curves cannot be created in a finite region of space unless there is exotic matter present which violates certain energy conditions, [2] while cosmic strings would not be expected to violate these conditions, so strings of finite length would not work. [3] [4]
Gott also proposed a "time mirror": a time travel device based on the principle of time delays. The device would be situated near a black hole some hundred or more light years from Earth. The device would act as a light collector and would power the light rays deformed and curved by the gravitational depression of the black hole. The collector would then reveal the past as detailed by the photons that had originated from Earth.
Since Gott believes that time travel is not cosmologically excluded, he has presented the possibility that the universe was created out of itself (at a later time). This controversial suggestion was published with Li-Xin Lin, and it was described by Gott as "it would be like having one branch of a tree circle around and grow up to be the trunk. In that way, the universe could be its own mother."
In his own book, Time Travel in Einstein's Universe: The Physical Possibilities of Travel Through Time, Gott argues that travel to the past is quite possible, although probably only after the construction of a working device (during its existence), and certainly not onto the time traveler's own past timeline (he argues that either the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics must be invoked to overcome the Grandfather paradox, or that all time travel remain self-consistent, i.e., one can visit the past but not change it, as in the Novikov self-consistency principle). Although he is keen to emphasize that time travel itself is a commonplace physical phenomenon, by this he means time travel into the future at varying rates through special relativity, he is not completely committed on the subject of time travel to the past. The book does say that nothing known excludes such travel, but he does not completely rule out the possibility that future research may prove it impossible.
Gott first thought of his "Copernicus method" of lifetime estimation in 1969 when stopping at the Berlin Wall and wondering how long it would stand. Gott postulated that the Copernican principle is applicable in cases where nothing is known; unless there was something special about his visit (which he did not think there was) this gave a 75% chance that he was seeing the wall after the first quarter of its life. Based on its age in 1969 (8 years), Gott left the wall with 50% confidence that it would not be there in 1993 (1969 + 8·(1.5/0.5)).
In fact, the wall was brought down in 1989, and 1993 was the year in which Gott applied his "Copernicus method" to the lifetime of the human race. His paper in Nature was the first to apply the Copernican principle to the survival of humanity; his original prediction gave 95% confidence that the human race would last for between 5100 and 7.8 million years. (Brandon Carter's alternative form of the Doomsday argument was delivered earlier that year, but Gott's derivation was independent.)
He made a major effort subsequently to defend his form of the Doomsday argument from a variety of philosophical attacks, and this debate (like the feasibility of closed time loops) is still ongoing. To popularize the Copernicus method, Gott gave The New Yorker magazine a 95% confidence interval for the closing time of forty-four Broadway and Off Broadway productions based only on their opening dates. [5]
He received the President's Award for Distinguished Teaching in acknowledgment of his work on the National Westinghouse/Intel Science Talent Search high school student science competition. He is an active promoter of the public awareness of science at the popular level, and Princeton students have voted him the school's outstanding professor several times.
Gott was born in Louisville, Kentucky. He is a Presbyterian who distinguishes physical from metaphysical questions by their teleology; he believes that his writings are entirely scientific (not trespassing into theology) because the motivation for the way things are (or might be) is never examined. [6]
The anthropic principle, also known as the observation selection effect, is the hypothesis that the range of possible observations that could be made about the universe is limited by the fact that observations are only possible in the type of universe that is capable of developing intelligent life. Proponents of the anthropic principle argue that it explains why the universe has the age and the fundamental physical constants necessary to accommodate intelligent life. If either had been significantly different, no one would have been around to make observations. Anthropic reasoning has been used to address the question as to why certain measured physical constants take the values that they do, rather than some other arbitrary values, and to explain a perception that the universe appears to be finely tuned for the existence of life.
In the philosophy of religion, a cosmological argument is an argument for the existence of God based upon observational and factual statements concerning the universe typically in the context of causation, change, contingency or finitude. In referring to reason and observation alone for its premises, and precluding revelation, this category of argument falls within the domain of natural theology. A cosmological argument can also sometimes be referred to as an argument from universal causation, an argument from first cause, the causal argument or the prime mover argument.
In physical cosmology, the Copernican principle states that humans are not privileged observers of the universe, that observations from the Earth are representative of observations from the average position in the universe. Named for Copernican heliocentrism, it is a working assumption that arises from a modified cosmological extension of Copernicus' argument of a moving Earth.
Time travel is the hypothetical activity of traveling into the past or future. Time travel is a concept in philosophy and fiction, particularly science fiction. In fiction, time travel is typically achieved through the use of a device known as a time machine. The idea of a time machine was popularized by H. G. Wells's 1895 novel The Time Machine.
A wormhole is a hypothetical structure which connects disparate points in spacetime. It may be visualized as a tunnel with two ends at separate points in spacetime. Wormholes are based on a special solution of the Einstein field equations. Specifically, they are a transcendental bijection of the spacetime continuum, an asymptotic projection of the Calabi–Yau manifold manifesting itself in anti-de Sitter space.
The Novikov self-consistency principle, also known as the Novikov self-consistency conjecture and Larry Niven's law of conservation of history, is a principle developed by Russian physicist Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov in the mid-1980s. Novikov intended it to solve the problem of paradoxes in time travel, which is theoretically permitted in certain solutions of general relativity that contain what are known as closed timelike curves. The principle asserts that if an event exists that would cause a paradox or any "change" to the past whatsoever, then the probability of that event is zero. It would thus be impossible to create time paradoxes.
Heliocentrism is a superseded astronomical model in which the Earth and planets revolve around the Sun at the centre of the universe. Historically, heliocentrism was opposed to geocentrism, which placed the Earth at the center. The notion that the Earth revolves around the Sun had been proposed as early as the 3rd century BC by Aristarchus of Samos, who had been influenced by a concept presented by Philolaus of Croton. In the 5th century BC the Greek philosophers Philolaus and Hicetas had the thought on different occasions that the Earth was spherical and revolving around a "mystical" central fire, and that this fire regulated the universe. In medieval Europe, however, Aristarchus' heliocentrism attracted little attention—possibly because of the loss of scientific works of the Hellenistic period.
The Tychonic system is a model of the universe published by Tycho Brahe in 1588, which combines what he saw as the mathematical benefits of the Copernican system with the philosophical and "physical" benefits of the Ptolemaic system. The model may have been inspired by Valentin Naboth and Paul Wittich, a Silesian mathematician and astronomer. A similar cosmological model was independently proposed in the Hindu astronomical treatise Tantrasamgraha by Nilakantha Somayaji of the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics.
In mathematical physics, a closed timelike curve (CTC) is a world line in a Lorentzian manifold, of a material particle in spacetime, that is "closed", returning to its starting point. This possibility was first discovered by Willem Jacob van Stockum in 1937 and later confirmed by Kurt Gödel in 1949, who discovered a solution to the equations of general relativity (GR) allowing CTCs known as the Gödel metric; and since then other GR solutions containing CTCs have been found, such as the Tipler cylinder and traversable wormholes. If CTCs exist, their existence would seem to imply at least the theoretical possibility of time travel backwards in time, raising the spectre of the grandfather paradox, although the Novikov self-consistency principle seems to show that such paradoxes could be avoided. Some physicists speculate that the CTCs which appear in certain GR solutions might be ruled out by a future theory of quantum gravity which would replace GR, an idea which Stephen Hawking labeled the chronology protection conjecture. Others note that if every closed timelike curve in a given spacetime passes through an event horizon, a property which can be called chronological censorship, then that spacetime with event horizons excised would still be causally well behaved and an observer might not be able to detect the causal violation.
Cosmic strings are hypothetical 1-dimensional topological defects which may have formed during a symmetry-breaking phase transition in the early universe when the topology of the vacuum manifold associated to this symmetry breaking was not simply connected. Their existence was first contemplated by the theoretical physicist Tom Kibble in the 1970s.
The mediocrity principle is the philosophical notion that "if an item is drawn at random from one of several sets or categories, it's more likely to come from the most numerous category than from any one of the less numerous categories". The principle has been taken to suggest that there is nothing very unusual about the evolution of the Solar System, Earth's history, the evolution of biological complexity, human evolution, or any one nation. It is a heuristic in the vein of the Copernican principle, and is sometimes used as a philosophical statement about the place of humanity. The idea is to assume mediocrity, rather than starting with the assumption that a phenomenon is special, privileged, exceptional, or even superior.
Nicolaus Copernicus was a Renaissance polymath, active as a mathematician, astronomer, and Catholic canon, who formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than Earth at its center. In all likelihood, Copernicus developed his model independently of Aristarchus of Samos, an ancient Greek astronomer who had formulated such a model some eighteen centuries earlier.
The doomsday argument (DA), or Carter catastrophe, is a probabilistic argument that claims to predict the future population of the human species based on an estimation of the number of humans born to date. The doomsday argument was originally proposed by the astrophysicist Brandon Carter in 1983, leading to the initial name of the Carter catastrophe. The argument was subsequently championed by the philosopher John A. Leslie and has since been independently conceived by J. Richard Gott and Holger Bech Nielsen. Similar principles of eschatology were proposed earlier by Heinz von Foerster, among others. A more general form was given earlier in the Lindy effect, which proposes that for certain phenomena, the future life expectancy is proportional to the current age and is based on a decreasing mortality rate over time.
The chronology protection conjecture is a hypothesis first proposed by Stephen Hawking that laws of physics beyond those of standard general relativity prevent time travel on all but microscopic scales—even when the latter theory states that it should be possible. The permissibility of time travel is represented mathematically by the existence of closed timelike curves in some solutions to the field equations of general relativity. The chronology protection conjecture should be distinguished from chronological censorship under which every closed timelike curve passes through an event horizon, which might prevent an observer from detecting the causal violation.
A Tipler cylinder, also called a Tipler time machine, is a hypothetical object theorized to be a potential mode of time travel—although results have shown that a Tipler cylinder could only allow time travel if its length were infinite or with the existence of negative energy.
A temporal paradox, time paradox, or time travel paradox, is a paradox, an apparent contradiction, or logical contradiction associated with the idea of time travel or other foreknowledge of the future. While the notion of time travel to the future complies with the current understanding of physics via relativistic time dilation, temporal paradoxes arise from circumstances involving hypothetical time travel to the past – and are often used to demonstrate its impossibility.
The self-indication assumption doomsday argument rebuttal is an objection to the doomsday argument by arguing that the chance of being born is not one, but is an increasing function of the number of people who will be born.
The self-referencing doomsday argument rebuttal is an attempt to refute the doomsday argument by applying the same reasoning to the lifetime of the doomsday argument itself.
Retrocausality, or backwards causation, is a concept of cause and effect in which an effect precedes its cause in time and so a later event affects an earlier one. In quantum physics, the distinction between cause and effect is not made at the most fundamental level and so time-symmetric systems can be viewed as causal or retrocausal. Philosophical considerations of time travel often address the same issues as retrocausality, as do treatments of the subject in fiction, but the two phenomena are distinct.
Copernican heliocentrism is the astronomical model developed by Nicolaus Copernicus and published in 1543. This model positioned the Sun at the center of the Universe, motionless, with Earth and the other planets orbiting around it in circular paths, modified by epicycles, and at uniform speeds. The Copernican model displaced the geocentric model of Ptolemy that had prevailed for centuries, which had placed Earth at the center of the Universe.
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