George Pal's The Time Machine

What person hasn't dreamed at least once of returning briefly to a favorite era in the past or seeing a real glimpse of a fantastic future hundreds, even thousands of years from today?

Despite a spate of articles claiming that travel to the past is flatly impossible, physicists like Stephen Hawking and others say it's not.

And now an engineer named Vadim Alexandrovich Chernobrov claims to have accomplished what others say cannot be done—he's built a working time machine.

At least that is his claim. And he says he's tested it and it works. But there are some limitations with its capabilities.

Vadim Alexandrovich Chernobrov

Potential dangers

Chernobrov cautions about potential dangers. "Those who attempt to return to the past to keep certain historical events from occurring—for example, the collapse of the Soviet Union—would fail in the attempt and would run the risk of not being able to return to the future."

The engineer's amazing time machine is a metal sphere that looks much like some of the early Soviet and American satellite spacecraft. Outside it has a diameter of two meters and inside is housed a meter wide space that can house a time-traveling chrononaut.

The device achieves travel through time, according to its inventor, by utilizing strong magnetic fields that resonate about the capsule and affect the natural flow of time and causality by literally increasing or slowing the flow of time.

During experiments, Chernobrov has shown that very precise chronometers, synchronized before the field is energized, experience a significant divergence in time after one has been placed inside the time machine while the other is kept far from the energized field as a control.

The chronometers revealed time is definitely warped within the machine's magnetic fields.

Early schematic of time machine

First time machine made at Moscow Aircraft University

According to an article translated by Lena Ksandinova, "the first Russian time machine was constructed by the scientists of Moscow Aircraft University.

Chernobrov at Moscow Aircraft University

"To understand, how the machine impacts live creatures, Vadim Chernobrov, an experiment administrator, put cockroaches inside. The insects died. They modernized the machine and put mice inside. The effect on them was the same. Scientists realized what the cause of death was: on different parts of the body time ran with a different speed. They fixed the machine once again and put a puppy called 'Lunar Rover' inside. He was inside for 108 minutes. The puppy survived, but behaved like he was having rabies.

"Then experiments on people came. Nine scientists, among which was Chernobrov, took part in it. Instruments inside the machine recorded a 3 percent time shift, and changes in machine size. Experiment participants, however, felt nothing but moderate arrhythmia and colored circles in eyes."

The experiment with people was the most dangerous. Some scientists familiar with the experiment condemned it as reckless.

"We came to conclusion that time is 3–dimensional," explained Chernobrov. "So in fact we can move in time backwards and forwards."

Chernobrov with associate and small model

Details on larger model

As Ksandinova reported, a larger model of the time machine was built to carry humans. It was constructed in a remote forest in Russia's Volgograd Region. While the device had a low power capacity it still affected the flow of time by three per cent; that temporal permutation was measured with symmetrical crystal oscillators.

Artist representation of time experiment

At first, the researchers spent periods of five, ten and later, twenty minutes in the field of the time machine; the longest stay recorded lasted about half an hour. Chernobrov reported the volunteers felt as if they had shifted into a different world: "they felt life here and there at the same time as if some space was unfolding."

Is time being manipulated?

If time travel has, does or ever will exist then by its very nature time travel always exists. "What is troubling is that we have no way of knowing that they aren't already doing it. For those of us in the daily stream of world events, a shift in history might wipe out thousands of people and change entire governments. But for us, the change would go into our memory of events as they happened during our lives. That good friend we went bowling with last night might disappear before the next morning and we would not notice his loss. By the time we awake, the person never existed." [Link]

Notes from a pioneer

In his notes on the early time machine experiments, Chernobrov wrote:

In experiments on deceleration and acceleration of a physical Time in small closed volume conducted since 1988,  among other things the effect electromagnetic of fields on space-time continuum was checked.

The experimental system for such effect represented set of electromagnets, are connected among  themselves in serial and in parallel and installed on the globe-shaped surfaces. In various experiments from 3 up to 5 such surfaces,  Electromagnetic Working Surfaces (EWS) was used.  All EWS  layers of  various diameters were installed consistently in each other.

The maximum EWS size was about meter, the minimum EWS diameter (internal) was equal to  115 mm, that has appeared sufficient to place inside of EWS  the gauges of the control and  experimental  animals (various kinds insect and laboratory mouses), to  investigate the effects of converging spherical electromagnetic of waves.

Presumably you can reach Vadim Chernobrov through his website at chernobrov.narod.ru/

Chernobrov's complete time machine report, Experiments on the change of the direction and rate of time motion, can be found here.