Roxanne Barbour's Blog, page 11
June 20, 2017
Quotation – June 20, 2017
Life can’t ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer’s lover until death–fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant.
Edna Ferber, A Kind of Magic, 1963
June 16, 2017
Quotation – June 16, 2017
Familiarity breeds contempt. How accurate that is. The reason we hold truth is such respect is because we have so little opportunity to get familiar with it.
Mark Twain
June 14, 2017
Quotation – June 14, 2017
One of the advantages bowling has over golf is that you seldom lose a bowling ball.
Don Carter
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Apple blossoms
June 13, 2017
June 12, 2017
Time Travel – Is it possible?
via Futurism.com
IN BRIEF
Physicists have developed a new mathematical model that shows how time travel is theoretically possible. They used Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity as a springboard for their hypothetical device, which they call a Traversable Acausal Retrograde Domain in Space-time (TARDIS).
BENDING TIME
Even before Einstein theorized that time is relative and flexible, humanity had already been imagining the possibility of time travel. In fact, science fiction is filled with time travelers. Some use metahuman abilities to do so, but most rely on a device generally known as a time machine. Now, two physicists think that it’s time to bring the time machine into the real world — sort of.
![The Future According to H. G. Wells [INFOGRAPHIC]](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1497392296i/23018582._SX540_.jpg)
Click to View Full Infographic
“People think of time travel as something as fiction. And we tend to think it’s not possible because we don’t actually do it,” Ben Tippett, a theoretical physicist and mathematician from the University of British Columbia, said in a UBC news release. “But, mathematically, it is possible.”
Essentially, what Tippet and University of Maryland astrophysicist David Tsang developed is a mathematical formula that uses Einstein’s General Relativity theory to prove that time travel is possible, in theory. That is, time travel fitting a layperson’s understanding of the concept as moving “backwards and forwards through time and space, as interpreted by an external observer,” according to the abstract of their paper, which is published in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity.
Oh, and they’re calling it a TARDIS — yes, “Doctor Who” fans, hurray! — which stands for a Traversable Acausal Retrograde Domain in Space-time.
FEASIBLE BUT NOT POSSIBLE. YET.
“My model of a time machine uses the curved space-time to bend time into a circle for the passengers, not in a straight line,” Tippet explained. “That circle takes us back in time.” Simply put, their model assumes that time could curve around high-mass objects in the same way that physical space does in the universe.
For Tippet and Tsang, a TARDIS is a space-time geometry “bubble” that travels faster than the speed of light. “It is a box which travels ‘forwards’ and then ‘backwards’ in time along a circular path through spacetime,” they wrote in their paper.
Unfortunately, it’s still not possible to construct such a time machine. “While is it mathematically feasible, it is not yet possible to build a space-time machine because we need materials — which we call exotic matter — to bend space-time in these impossible ways, but they have yet to be discovered,” Tippet explained.
Image credit: B.K. Tippet and YangIndeed, their work isn’t the first to suggest that time traveling can be done. Various other experiments, including those that rely on photon stimulation, suggest that time travel is feasible. Another theory explores the potential particles of time.
However, some think that a time machine wouldn’t be feasible because time traveling itself isn’t possible. One points to the intimate connection between time and energy as the reason time traveling is improbable. Another suggests that time travel isn’t going to work because there’s no future to travel to yet.
Whatever the case may be, there’s one thing that these researchers all agree on. As Tippet put it, “Studying space-time is both fascinating and problematic.”
Quotation – June 12, 2017
To be a champ you have to believe in yourself when nobody else will.
Sugar Ray Robinson
June 11, 2017
Quotation – June 11, 2017
The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax.
Alfred Kazin
June 10, 2017
Quotation – June 10, 2017
Those who dare are often disappointed, sometimes crushed. But without challenge, life withers. Icarus dared to accept the challenge; so do we his, his offspring.
Ben Bova
