I noticed that CERN uses the LHC to collide particles after accelerating nearly to the speed of light. But the LHC could be used to build a time machine. In my opinion, it has to be much smaller.
Accelerators
were much smaller in the 1930's. They could accelerate electrons to about 99.75% the speed of light and it could sit on a lab work bench powered by a wall socket. But that's where the education comes in (the PhD in physics) to understand the special relativity problem here. Today, at CERN, it takes a power plant that can power a small city so they can attain 99.99999% the speed of light. In 80 years we went from a table top accelerator to a 27 km long accelerator to ecke out an extra 750 km/sec.
It's a bit more involved than that because they are accelerating, among other items, individual lead atoms. The most common stable isotope of lead is Pb-207 which is about 380,880 times more massive than an electron. But you can see the problem, I hope. I don't think that you can hook up a table top accelerator to Hoover Dam, pull the lever and have any hope that the gadget will survive the jolt. And this is also where the PhD in engineering comes in. The accelerator has to be big to give the particles suffieient "run up" room and to provide some place to put the "radiator". The LHC gets a tad warm when its running.
Developing a valid theory of time travel will take many, many physicists working around the world. It's an ongoing project today, but not really a front burner item. But a valid theory is not a working gadget.
Put some perspective on the endeavor. In the 1930's Germany led the world in nuclear physics theory and research. In 1938 Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner and Fritz Strassmann discovered that the uranium atom could be split by neutron bombardment. Soon thereafter Hermann Göring put Werner Heisenberg in charge of all nuclear physics research into sustaining a fission chain reaction of uranium. Seven years later following first the invasion of Italy and thereafter after the invasion of France Allied military personnel and scientists started gathering intel on the ground to determine how close Heisenberg was to developing a German atomic bomb. The answer absolutely shocked them. Heisenberg had made virtually no progress in 7 years. The reason? You can't invent the atomic bomb in your garage or basement, and you can't do it on a shoestring budget. The theory was there - everyone knew the theory...Germany, Italy, Japan, the Allies. The German government didn't fund the project or give it sufficient numbers of scientists.
Going from theory to fact took, in the US, several dedicated research facilities (Met Lab was one), 40,000 people and a huge tract of land at Los Alamos, New Mexico, two fully functional nuclear reactors and two fully functional seperation-processing plants. Plus a budget that, today, would be about 2 trillion dollars.
That's the problem. Werner Heisenberg was as brilliant in 1938 as Albert Einstein was in 1905. And he failed, utterly failed, to take classroom theory to an engineering reality.
And the Manhattan Project is child's play as compared with inventing a time machine.
