Professor Gott transforms lecture halls into time machines

If you were walking around the football stadium last Tuesday evening, you may have run into an energetic man in a baby-blue sport coat gesturing excitedly toward the night sky. And, if you were to approach him, he would tell you that — for that night only — there was an object the size of an aircraft carrier between the earth and the moon.

For most of us this would be cause for alarm, but not for Professor J. Richard Gott of the Department of Astrophysical Sciences. Instead of panicking, he eagerly invited me into his office to discuss this phenomenon.

As he kicked up his legs and reclined in his squeaky desk chair, he fiddled with an earth-shaped earring, which he said was one-billionth of the size of the planet we inhabit. Using this prop, he described how vastly large our universe is and how unlikely it would be for Asteroid20065YU55 to collide with us, calming my fears. Soon our conversation digressed from what I thought was impending doom and moved more toward relativity and the universe as a whole.

Do you wish you could hold a similar conversation with such a noteworthy professor but feel that you do not have enough time? Perhaps a meeting with Professor Gott would be worth the time investment, considering the fact that he is the campus expert on time travel.

This interest started with his work involving Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which brought him to Princeton. One of the most influential moments of his experience here was advising Mark Alpert ’82 on his senior thesis, which concerned the theory of general relativity in two-dimensional flatlands.

“That undergraduate thesis led me to do the work that I did on cosmic strings,” Gott said. “This would have been of interest even without time travel, but it just so happened to involve time travel to the past.”

Gott described the phenomenon, alluding to curved space time, light beams and time loops in his explanation. But if all this sounds too complicated, never fear, for Gott is known to explain this phenomenon with something we are all familiar with: pizza.

“The geometry around a cosmic string looks like a cone, formed from a pizza with a slice missing,” Gott said.

In order to not spoil the surprise, he asked that the ‘Prince’ not publish the rest of his explanation but invited any student who is interested to stop by his office. Still, he did allow this bit of insider information to slip: Pepperoni is his favorite topping.

Unfortunately, even with Gott’s conceptual grasp of time travel, the time machine has its limits.

“You cannot use the time machine to go back to before the time machine was built, and those are vast engineering projects that involve hundreds of billions of solar masses,” Gott said.

This means that we will not be seeing any amateur attempts at homemade time machines anytime soon. Of course, a man can always dream up plans for where he would travel if the technology were available.

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“I would like to go 200,000 years into the future. The human race has been around for that long, so I would like to go ahead that long to see what happened to us. After all, we already know what happened in the past,” Gott said.

And Gott is certainly a man with a fascinating past. An avid traveler and photographer, Gott has visited over 45 countries and performed a true circumnavigation of the globe in 58 days. He was present at the Apollo 11 launch in 1969, which he compared to a state fair, and he has seen sights like the African Sahara and the Taj Mahal.

Gott has also published two books: “Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe: The Physical Possibilities of Travel Through Time” and “Sizing Up the Universe: The Cosmos in Perspective.” He wrote an article for Time in 2000 for a cover story about the future, and he is in the Guinness Book of World Records 2006 for finding the largest structure in the universe, the Sloan Great Wall of Galaxies.

Given his real-life exploits, it is not surprising that Professor Gott has actually served as inspiration for a character in Alpert’s 2008 novel, “Final Theory.” In the novel, he is reincarnated as Professor Kleinman, a character who knew Einstein.

“The plot is that Einstein had in fact found a final theory of everything but kept it secret because it led to superweapons that he did not approve of. In the novel, he told his students about it. Someone found out, and they came after these students,” Gott said.

Gott was quick to clarify that this is a work of fiction, and that he does not hold the answers to the fictitious theory of everything.

Although there are no plans in the making, Gott shared some possible titles for future books about himself, including “The Time Traveler,” “Going toward the Future” and “Why People Think I Have a Time Machine (Even Though I Don’t).”

If you’re interested in picking a time traveler’s brain, or perhaps writing his next sci-fi novel, finding Professor Gott around campus is not difficult. When he is not in his office or teaching he enjoys strolling around Nassau Hall, a building he likes because of its age.

“I’m interested in time, after all,” he said, “so the oldest thing on campus obviously catches my attention.”

Before parting ways, there was just one more thing I wanted to ask. What exactly is behind his signature blue “coat of the future”?

“I went to a cosmology conference in California once, and I happened to wear this coat. I thought I was fitting in with the California ambiance until [Harvard astrophysicist] Bob Kirshner said to me, ‘Rich, you must have gotten this coat in the future and then come back because, as of now, nobody has invented this color yet.’ ”