Going Interstellar...

Artist’s depiction of a space probe, propelled by a solar sail. (Image credit: Andrzej Mirecki)

Topics: Exoplanets, Interstellar Travel, NASA, Space, Space Exploration, Spaceflight, Spacetime

Solar sails have been discussed for a long time as the most viable option for interstellar travel at current technological attainment. That will entail the nanoengineering of polymers that can be durable to things like micro-meteor strikes at 0.1 c (one-tenth the speed of light) as well as shielding for electronics so as not to fry instrumentation on the exceedingly long journey. I hope we're mature enough societally, socially and emotional intelligence-wise to complete the project. It would be a shame if our instrument transmitted information back to Mother Earth, and for a myriad of bad reasons, no one was here to receive the message.

NASA is in the earliest stages of planning an exoplanet expedition, set to mark the 100th anniversary of its first crewed Moon landing, Apollo 11. A small team based at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) hopes to send a spacecraft to a distant planet in search of life.

In 2016, a funding bill was passed that called upon NASA to investigate methods of interstellar travel that could reach at least 10 percent of the speed of light by 2069 [the 100th year anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission]. It also requested a mission to Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to our own.

A probe is set to be sent to the chosen exoplanet to determine whether or not life is present. A few years after its launch, NASA will send a large telescope into deep space, which will use gravitational lensing to offer a full view of the exoplanet.

At present, there’s some debate as to whether Alpha Centauri or another system will be selected, as there are several candidates being considered. Of course, there are some big questions to be answered before this mission becomes a reality.

NASA Is Planning the First-Ever Interstellar Mission, Brad Jones, Futurism

#P4TC:

TRAPPIST-1...

The Arrow of Time...

Schematic of the experimental setup. (A) Heat flows from the hot to the cold spin (at thermal contact) when both are initially uncorrelated. This corresponds to the standard thermodynamic arrow of time. For initially quantum correlated spins, heat is spontaneously transferred from the cold to the hot spin. The arrow of time is here reversed. (B) View of the magnetometer used in our NMR experiment. A superconducting magnet, producing a high intensity magnetic field (B0) in the longitudinal direction, is immersed in a thermally shielded vessel in liquid He, surrounded by liquid N in another vacuum separated chamber. The sample is placed at the center of the magnet within the radio frequency coil of the probe head inside a 5mm glass tube. (C) Experimental pulse sequence for the partial thermalization process. The blue (red) circle represents x (y) rotations by the indicated angle. The orange connections represents a free evolution under the scalar coupling, HJHC = (πh/2)JσzHσzC , between the 1H and 13C nuclear spins during the time indicated above the symbol. We have performed 22 samplings of the interaction time τ in the interval 0 to 2.32 ms. Credit: arXiv:1711.03323 [quant-ph]

Topics: Entropy, Spacetime, Thermodynamics

Abstract

The second law permits the prediction of the direction of natural processes, thus defining a thermodynamic arrow of time. However, standard thermodynamics presupposes the absence of initial correlations between interacting systems. We here experimentally demonstrate the reversal of the arrow of time for two initially quantum correlated spins-1/2, prepared in local thermal states at different temperatures, employing a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance setup. We observe a spontaneous heat flow from the cold to the hot system. This process is enabled by a trade off between correlations and entropy that we quantify with information-theoretical quantities.

The second law of thermodynamics says that entropy, or disorder, tends to increase over time, which is why everything in the world around us appears to unfold forward in time. But it also explains why hot tea grows cold rather than hot. In this new effort, the researchers found an exception to this rule that works in a way that doesn't violate the rules of physics as they have been defined.

The idea of entangled particles has been in the news a lot lately as researchers around the world attempt to use it for various purposes—but there is another lesser-known property of particles that is similar in nature, but slightly different. It is when particles become correlated, which means they become linked in ways that do not happen in the larger world. Like entanglement, correlated particles share information, though it is not as strong of a bond. In this new experiment, the researchers used this property to change the direction of the arrow of time.

Experiment shows that arrow of time is a relative concept, not an absolute one
Bob Yirka, Phys.org

Reversing the thermodynamic arrow of time using quantum correlations
Kaonan Micadei,^{1, ∗} John P. S. Peterson,^{2, ∗} Alexandre M. Souza,² Roberto S. Sarthour,² Ivan S. Oliveira,² Gabriel T. Landi,³ Tiago B. Batalhão,^{4, 5} Roberto M. Serra,^{1, 6, †} and Eric Lutz^{7, ‡}
Physics arXiv

Whisper to Shout...

MPI FOR GRAVITATIONAL PHYSICS/SIMULATING EXTREME SPACETIMES/AIRBORNE HYDRO MAPPING
Citation: Phys. Today 69, 8, 10 (2016); http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.3249

Topics: Astrophysics, Black Holes, General Relativity, Gravitational Waves, Spacetime

On 11 February 2016, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and its sister collaboration, Virgo, announced their earthshaking observation of Albert Einstein’s ripples in spacetime. LIGO had seen the death dance of a pair of massive black holes. As the behemoths circled each other faster and faster, the frequency and amplitude of the spacetime waves they produced grew into a crescendo as the black holes became one. Then the new doubly massive black hole began to ring softer and softer like a quieting bell. The escalating chirp and ringdown is also a metaphor for public information flow about the discovery. It could have unfolded differently.

When scientists make a discovery, they must choose how to disseminate it. A big decision they must make is whether to reveal the results before or after peer review. Reveal before peer review—sometimes even before the paper is written—and the community can use the results right away, but there is an increased risk that problems will be found in a very public way. Reveal after peer review, and the chance of such problems decreases, but there is more time for a competitor to announce first or for rumors to leak. At Physical Review Letters (PRL), where I am an editor, we allow authors to choose when they want to reveal their results. The LIGO collaborators chose to wait.

Just before LIGO’s experimental run began in September 2015, the team held a vote on which journal they would pick if they made a discovery. They picked PRL. Five days after the vote, LIGO’s detectors seemed to hear the universe sing out for the first time.

American Institute of Physics:
Commentary: How gravitational waves went from a whisper to a shout, Robert Garisto

Reality Since Einstein...

Neils Bohr and Albert Einstein

Topics: Einstein, Special Relativity, General Relativity, Nobel Prize, Spacetime, Steven Weinberg, World Science Festival

A discussion at the World Science Festival with Brian Green, Gabriela González, Samir Mathur, Andrew Strominger, Cumrun Vafa, and fellow Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg. In celebration of the 100th anniversary of Einstein's general theory of relativity, leaders from multiple fields of physics discuss its essential insights, its lingering questions, the latest work it has sparked, and the allied fields of research that have resulted. If not for the modern age of electronics with the Internet, television, smart phones and quantum mechanics, you can at least be thankful to him for your GPS not getting you lost.

Cartoon Physics...

Image Source: Amazon.com

Topics: Comic Books, Physics Humor, Physics and Pop Culture

Comic books are our modern mythology. We await with baited breath the donnybrook also known as Batman v Superman, though we don't yet know why the "Super Friends" start their inevitable bromance with a grudge match. Avengers: Age of Ultron answered who else was "worthy" enough - Vision - to lift Thor's hammer - forged in the heart of a dying star, which kind of suggests a Brown Dwarf or White Dwarf, meaning nothing in the universe worthy or not should be able to lift a teaspoon of Mjolnir (except apparently, a nail on the wall of Dr. Jane Foster's apartment in "Dark World" - seriously, look again). Technically, Vision came to life from it, so a one-armed curl shouldn't be past his AI abilities. Of course, there are others who lift "the smasher" - including the Hulk, who heretofore couldn't no matter how mad he got!

Currently in vogue on television are series like Agents of Shield (with the exception of enhanced humans and demigods, pretty terrestrial in its physics); Arrow (essentially, Batman with a bow); Gotham (that is so dark, it's a wonder Bruce Wayne or Jim Gordon WANT to stay there); and of course the breakout hit, the societal, self double entrendre: The Flash.

The series ended (spoiler alert) with a lot of cockeyed physics, like running at twice the speed of sound, colliding with a single proton in an accelerator and opening a wormhole so his nemesis - The Reverse Flash (a really pissed-off psychopath that comes back to create The Flash to KILL him - ahem: keep up), so he could go home. Home in this case, the 25th Century, bypassing Kirk and Picard's paltry epochs by two centuries where they apparently have time travel, but no cows for hamburgers, if Rev is to be "believed." The cliffhanger was Barry doing the heroes sacrifice of running into a black hole opening above Central City - that in real world physics would have killed most of the population with its radiation and ground the Earth into hamburger meat, Flash included. Ray Bradbury would be proud of the echo from his "A Sound of Thunder," an apocryphal foundation for time travel stories since its inception.

Of course, it's all hokey fun. Doing a serious and somewhat tongue-in-cheek search on the actual physics of superluminal (i.e. faster than light speed travel) resulted an interesting paper and related article [1, 3]; some humorous posts [2, 4], also tongue-in-cheek funny. Humor is always a good hook for STEM lectures and teenagers.

I enjoy the shows just like anyone else. For any story line to sell its audience, there is the usual suspension of belief in the verisimilitude of the fictional world and its "laws of cartoon physics." Alas, poor Yorick - our laws are binding. Even the Batman - my favorite, since he was for me the most believable - can't escape the laws we're subject to on a daily basis - like all of us mere mortals subject to Entropy, he wears out too. Life without magic is kind of a drag, but there's still much wonder in reality.

For any of these shows, I become that kid on 25th and Cleveland Avenue in Winston-Salem, NC that used to enjoy a nerdy Saturday with my best friend - trading and reading comic books, something sadly I don't think kids do much of anymore. I'm trying not to be the sour physics guy pointing out every impossibility in a movie or TV series - as I've gotten older, I'm better in large groups at keeping my mouth shut.

1. Physics arXiv: How superluminal motion can lead to backward time travel
Robert J. Nemiro and David M. Russelly
2. Geek: Quantum physics just solved one of the great paradoxes of time travel, Graham Templeton
3. Scientific American: Time Travel Simulation Resolves “Grandfather Paradox”, Lee Billings
4. PBS News Hour: Spider-Math and Bat-Physics: Science in a Superhero World, Rebecca Jacobson

Age of Einstein...

Image Source: Biography.com

Topics: Einstein, Special Relativity, Space Exploration, Spaceflight, Spacetime

It was Einstein that entered the term "warp" into our lexicon before the notion was popularized on the original Star Trek. That warp was gravity from the mass of objects like planets, suns; wormholes and black holes. It has lived on in the discovery of the intermediate vector boson ("W" and Z⁰particle), theorized by Dr's Sheldon Lee Glashow, Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg, meaning his was the "shoulder of [a] giant" these men stood on when they made their discovery. The foundation of the Higgs Boson were courses in special and general relativity as well as quantum mechanics, the root of all things micro and nano electronic. In a way, he's achieved immortality.

The link below is a PDF that goes through a primer of the physics at the high school level, which is appropriate. The more we understand about the physics that is all around us, the less we are frightened by, or put off by it. As we increase our intellectual acumen in STEM fields, is it too much to request such a self-study of those who wish to be our leaders, and possibly possess the nuclear codes?

This brief book is for the inquisitive reader who wishes to gain an understanding of the immortal work of Einstein, the greatest scientist since Newton. The concepts that form the basis of Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity are discussed at a level suitable for Seniors in High School. Special Relativity deals with measurements of space, time and motion in inertial frames of reference (see chapter 4). An introduction to Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, a theory of space, time, and motion in the presence of gravity, is given at a popular level. A more formal account of Special Relativity, that requires a higher level of understanding of Mathematics, is given in an Appendix.

Historians in the future will, no doubt, choose a phrase that best characterizes the 20th-century. Several possible phrases, such as “the Atomic Age”, “the Space Age” and “the Information Age”, come to mind. I believe that a strong case will be made for the phrase “the Age of Einstein”; no other person in the 20th-century advanced our understanding of the physical universe in such a dramatic way. He introduced many original concepts, each one of a profound nature. His discovery of the universal equivalence of energy and mass has had, and continues to have, far-reaching consequences not only in Science and Technology but also in fields as diverse as World Politics, Economics, and Philosophy.

Free Physics Book: The Age of Einstein
Frank W. K. Firk
Professor Emeritus of Physics
Yale University

Tomorrow: The Unraveling

After Contact...

Topics: Alien Life, Existentialism, NASA, SETI, Space, Space Exploration

This is the most recent article I've seen on the subject, stemming from the pronouncements of a NASA scientist that within 20 - 30 years, we'll confirm the existence of alien life:

"I think we're going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth within a decade, and I think we're going to have definitive evidence within 20 to 30 years," Nasa chief scientist Ellen Stofan said on Tuesday, during a panel discussion focusing on the space agency's search for habitable environments outside of Earth.

Now, the article only suggests within the solar system, things like oceans on frozen moons around Jupiter or Saturn; microbes on Mars. It wouldn't have to say anything, fly in a spaceship with death rays, or speak at all. The fact that it is beyond the clouds we've known to stipple ozone blue skies. That would be "extra-terrestrial"; that would be as shattering as an actual contact with advanced intelligence. It would expand the notion of where life is, what forms it would take: if it is ubiquitous in our own solar system, then it is probably in all likelihood everywhere there are favorable conditions for it.

Wikipedia: partial plot synopsis, "Contact" (1997 movie) by Carl Sagan:

The nations of the world fund the construction of the machine in Cape Canaveral at the Kennedy Space Center's Launch Complex 39. An international panel is assembled to choose a candidate to travel in the machine. Although Arroway is one of the top selections, Christian philosopher Palmer Joss, a panel member whom Arroway met in Puerto Rico and with whom she had a brief romantic encounter, brings attention to her lack of religious faith. As this differentiates her from most humans, the panel selects Drumlin as more representative. On the day the machine is tested, a religious fanatic destroys the machine in a suicide bombing, killing Drumlin and many others.

Truther: Noun- One who rejects the accepted explanation of the events of 9/11. Truthers generally believe the U.S. government committed the acts of terrorism against itself. Urban Dictionary

That definition morphed over time: from flat-Earthers (with their own web site); to birthers; from denial of the moon launch to vaccine truthers that endanger the human herd in America and climate change denial that will eventually endanger entire species, human or otherwise. What then is a microbe that metabolizes oxygen in similar fashion to that which we've observed? What is any reality that collectively we don't want to except, but the next inconvenient truth-cum-conspiracy-theory, blared over web sites and trolled on social media? It may not be as melodramatic as the Contact scene, but I've noticed zealots - religious and irreligious - that attack anything that doesn't conform to their preconceived notions of what's "right" with their thought processes and what's "wrong" with everyone outside of their particular group. Once you can "other" anyone as outsider, you can remove their humanity, justify their slaughter, either actual, or digital avatar: ET truther.

Knowledge is not just power: it is disruptive to power and regressive forces serving power determined to fight mightily in order to distort it, or destroy it.

Knowledge is power, and so is the darkness of ignorance.

Dark ages - once fully metastasized - have a way of lasting a long, long time.

"...Science is a reliable method for creating knowledge, and thus power...science constantly disrupts hierarchical power structures and vested interests in a long drive [by science] to give knowledge, and thus power, to the individual, and that process is also political." From "Fool Me Twice - Fighting the Assault on Science in America," Shawn Lawrence Otto

Seeing Enterprise...

Relativistic spacecraft must interact with the cosmic microwave background in a way that produces a unique light signature.

Topics: CMB, Einstein, NASA, Relativity, SETI, Quantum Cosmology, Spaceflight, Spacetime

TECHNOLOGY REVIEW: Interstellar travel may be the stuff of science fiction but it’s straightforward to calculate that it should be possible given the ability to travel at a significant fraction of the speed of light. These kinds of speeds may even be achievable with near future technologies and the tax dollars to make them work.

There are significant challenges, of course. And today, Ulvi Yurtsever and Steven Wilkinson at the defense contractor Raytheon in El Segundo, California, outline another that seems to have been overlooked until now.

These guys point out that any object traveling at relativistic speeds will interact with photons in the cosmic microwave background. This interaction should create a drag that imposes specific limits on how fast spacecraft can travel, they say.

The movement of a relativistic spacecraft will have another effect. It should scatter the cosmic microwave background in a way that produces a unique signature. “As a baryonic spacecraft travels at relativistic speeds it will interact with the CMB through scattering to cause a frequency shift that could be detectable on Earth with current technology,” say Yurtsever and Wilkinson.

They go on to calculate the properties of this signature. They say the scattering should generate radiation in the terahertz to infrared regions of the spectrum and that this signal should move relative to the background. “The salient features of the signal are a rapid drop in temperature accompanied by a rapid rise in intensity, along with the motion of the source with respect to a reference frame fixed to distant quasars, which should be observable,” say Yurtsever and Wilkinson.

In other words, if relativistic spacecraft are zipping across interstellar space, this kind of signature should be visible using the current generation of astrophysical observatories.

That’s an interesting piece of work that takes the analysis of relativistic space travel to a new level. Other researchers have explored the possibility of observing relativistic spacecraft using the optical emissions that their engines must generate. But Yurtsever and Wilkinson go further.

Physics arXiv: Limits and Signatures of Relativistic Spaceflight
Ulvi Yurtsever, Steven Wilkinson

General Relativity...

Image Source: MIT Open Course Ware - General Relativity

Topics: Black Holes, Einstein, Special Relativity, GPS, Gravity, General Relativity, Spacetime, Wormholes

The 100th anniversary of the General Theory of Relativity also happens to have coincided with Einstein's birthday and the American Nerd-inspired Pi Day last Saturday (I say American, because it works when you use the dating sequence 3-14-15, and breaks down if you use military or European dating formats: e.g. 14 March 15; 14.3.15). Star Trek abused the word "warp" ad nauseum to get their astronauts from one side of the galaxy to the other in record time to solve galactic issues before the ending credits. Space is still vast, and getting to even our own solar system's planets in a human lifetime will take something more than conventional chemical rockets and Newtonian momentum, hence NASA's concentration on breakthrough propulsion technologies up to and inclusive of warp drive. Quoting one of the articles whose link I give below:

In 1905, Albert Einstein determined that the laws of physics are the same for all non-accelerating observers, and that the speed of light in a vacuum was independent of the motion of all observers. This was the theory of special relativity. It introduced a new framework for all of physics and proposed new concepts of space and time.

Einstein then spent ten years trying to include acceleration in the theory and published his theory of general relativity in 1915. In it, he determined that massive objects cause a distortion in space-time, which is felt as gravity. [1]

It is our current, best description in modern physics of gravity, and along with its effects, our Global Positioning Systems in our cars and smart phones; the evolution of stars into Brown Dwarfs; White Dwarfs, Black Holes and the theoretical possibility of Wormholes. It has outlived Einstein and proven its usefulness time and again.

1. Space.com: Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, Nola Taylor Redd
2. Einstein-Online: General Relativity
3. Princeton University Press: Relativity: The Special and the General Theory
100th Anniversary edition, Edited by Hanoch Gutfreund & Jürgen Renn
4. Physics Central: Einstein's Relativity and Everyday Life, Clifford M. Will (think GPS)

DSR and Gravity's Rainbow...

Dr. Stephen Hawking of Cambridge University alongside illustrations of a black hole and an event horizon with Hawking Radiation. He continues to engage his grey matter to uncover the secrets of the Universe while others attempt to confirm his existing theories. Credit: Photo: BBC, Illus.: T.Reyes

Topics: Big Bang, Black Holes, Einstein, DSR, Gravity, Spacetime, Special Relativity

We've come a long way in 13.8 billion years; but despite our impressively extensive understanding of the Universe, there are still a few strings left untied. For one, there is the oft-cited disconnect between general relativity, the physics of the very large, and quantum mechanics, the physics of the very small. Then there is problematic fate of a particle's intrinsic information after it falls into a black hole. Now, a new interpretation of fundamental physics attempts to solve both of these conundrums by making a daring claim: at certain scales, space and time simply do not exist.

Let's start with something that is not in question. Thanks to Einstein's theory of special relativity, we can all agree that the speed of light is constant for all observers. We can also agree that, if you're not a photon, approaching light speed comes with some pretty funky rules – namely, anyone watching you will see your length compress and your watch slow down.

But the slowing of time also occurs near gravitationally potent objects, which are described by general relativity. So if you happen to be sight-seeing in the center of the Milky Way and you make the regrettable decision to get too close to our supermassive black hole's event horizon (more sinisterly known as its point-of-no-return), anyone observing you will also see your watch slow down. In fact, he or she will witness your motion toward the event horizon slow dramatically over an infinite amount of time; that is, from your now-traumatized friend's perspective, you never actually cross the event horizon. You, however, will feel no difference in the progression of time as you fall past this invisible barrier, soon to be spaghettified by the black hole's immense gravity.

So, who is "correct"? Relativity dictates that each observer's point of view is equally valid; but in this situation, you can't both be right. Do you face your demise in the heart of a black hole, or don't you? (Note: This isn't strictly a paradox, but intuitively, it feels a little sticky.)

And there is an additional, bigger problem. A black hole's event horizon is thought to give rise to Hawking radiation, a kind of escaping energy that will eventually lead to both the evaporation of the black hole and the destruction of all of the matter and energy that was once held inside of it. This concept has black hole physicists scratching their heads. Because according to the laws of physics, all of the intrinsic information about a particle or system (namely, the quantum wavefunction) must be conserved. It cannot just disappear.

Why all of these bizarre paradoxes? Because black holes exist in the nebulous space where a singularity meets general relativity – fertile, yet untapped ground for the elusive theory of everything.

Enter two interesting, yet controversial concepts: doubly special relativity and gravity's rainbow.

Phys.org:
Space-time theory may reconcile black hole conundrum
Vanessa Janek, Universe Today

Warp Drives and Wormholes...

Topics: FTL, Space Exploration, Spacetime, Star Trek, Wormholes

Since the 1994 paper by Miguel Alcubierre (and the physics caveats to attaining it), there has been some interest in this area just because of the vastness of interstellar space and the limitations since the Mercury Space Program of Newtonian Space Travel.

Also, it is unlikely we will come in contact with 5-dimensional hyper-humans that want to see to their ancestors' survival by popping up a wormhole next to Saturn (note: not a spoiler to "Interstellar" by now).

The problem being addressed is species survival - dinosaurs were animals with small brains that had a really BAD day 65 million years ago. We homo sapiens (Latin: "wise man") are not. With our demand for energy and resources going unabated, and the fact that our neighboring planets are so far uninhabitable, we are reduced to several options:

1. Conservation and resource restrictions: This has proven untenable as our economy at this point in history has been based on scarcity and charging a premium for that scarcity.

2. Plus, we'd have to forgo our Victorian compunctions regarding birth control, and stop encouraging both large families and early teen motherhood by ignorance of the same.

3. Terra-forming other planets: Which, I guess is the attraction to Mars and the four presumed volunteers to a one-way mission to the Red Planet (good luck). Mars has no breathable oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere; it is roughly 1/3 g, so bones would lose calcium and muscles would atrophy; temperatures can dip below -87 degrees Celsius (or, -124.6 degrees Fahrenheit). Getting there would take 150-300 days unless the VASIMR plasma rocket is available by 2020.

4. Conversion to non-fossil fuels based energy infrastructure: see #1.

Alpha Centauri is 4.367 light years away, that's if we had a craft that could attain 99.9999% of c, the speed of light. It sounds ideal until you take into account the affects of time dilation: that would be roughly 3,088 years for any twins our astronauts had back on Earth. The "right stuff" would be similar to those embarking on Mars One - not just the vastness of space, but of time itself as a gulf.

That's also if there's a habitable but largely uninhabited planet around its twin or triple star system. It would take our Newtonian conventional rockets 165,000 years to reach it (75,000 by Dr. White's comparison to Voyager), enough time and 6,600 generations in the first case for our descendants to forget WHY they were sent there in the first place. If they survive at all, humanity would be decidedly different than the breed that left the cradle of Sol and Earth Millennium ago. What is now us, would be a distant or forgotten memory.

Whether eventually warp or non-causality impacting relativistic speeds, humanity will have to decide it wants to travel to another world, and try not to replicate the mistakes we've made on this one on the next.

TARDIS...

Source: Fan Pop

For Time And Relative Dimensions In Space, of course! I was introduced to The Doctor in the 80's by fellow Air Force Lieutenant Beth Richards: she hooked me on it. (If you're reading this Beth, I'm still a big fan.) The eleventh Doctor appears tonight, I think it's the same actor as in the other BBC series I follow, The Musketeers. I need to visit England again. Haven't been since 2000.

Although, "freezing" the TARDIS chameleon circuit in the shape of a London phone box/booth in the age of I-phones is complete nostalgia...most kids probably wouldn't know it if it materialized in front of them, landing on their foot! It used to make sense, trust me.

Found this Dr. Who special on Daily Motion. Enjoy!

Doctor-Who-7x98-Special-The-Science-of-Doctor-Who by jose-hita-9
BBC America: Doctor Who
Twitter: #newtowho

Tomorrow: If You Meet The Buddha

Kardashev Scales...

Source: see "here" after Type IV and V below

I used a reference to the Kardashev Scale to answer the following question (proposed to me by a friend on Facebook):

"Do you think mankind will ever master time travel?"

Short answer: no, with caveats.

I did qualify my "no" also with the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, and gave a link on Entropy. I also pointed out that every moment of our existence, we are time travelers - the motion of course, traveling forward.

In the series "Hannibal," the infamous Dr. Lecter discusses his longing for Mischa, his sister (you'll have to read "Hannibal Rising" by Thomas Harris to get the back story). In a nod to "Rising," he spoke of dropping a teacup in one scene of the season finale (most of which as someone who read the book series I did NOT predict coming), and hoped to see it reassemble, presumably witnessing the flow of time going in reverse, thus he would see his beloved sister again. That is a longing for something Entropy doesn't allow - backwards time travel.

I also pointed out as a species, we're not even at Type I on the Kardashev Scale:

Type I: able to marshal energy resources for communications on a planet-wide scale, equivalent to the entire present power consumption of the human race, or about 10¹⁶ watts. Here, Carl Sagan begged to differ, due to power gradation, we're more like (on his measure) a 0.7 civilization, or 7 x 10¹⁵ watts. We have pockets of deployed resources, but definitely not "planet-wide," else there would be no economic distinctions: east/south side to west side; 1st and 3rd worlds. Perhaps we could edge up our score with renewable alternatives?

Type II: surpasses this by a factor of approximately ten billion, making available 10²⁶ watts, by exploiting the total energy output of its central star, using a Dyson sphere.

Type III: evolved enough to tap the energy resources of an entire galaxy, ~ 10³⁶ watts.

Type IV and V here (along with the source of the shway photo above)

Let's take Chris Pine - the current Captain James T. Kirk. He weighs 175 lbs or 80 kg.

The Trek transporter converts humans into pure energy, ignores Heisenberg Uncertainty (via a Heisenberg compensator, of course...o_9), and somehow miraculously reassembles them perfectly, managing not to create horribly misshapen"Kirk-copies."

Utilizing the famous (Special Relativity) E = mc²:

80 kg x (3 x 10⁸ m/s)² = 7,200,000,000,000,000,000 N-m = 7.2 x 10¹⁸ Joules, or 7.2 x 10¹⁸ Joules per second (watts), clearly putting 23rd Century Warp Tech somewhere between a Type I and a II (I'm calling it "1.12"), at least to accomplish "scattering a man's atoms" about the universe (gotta love Bones McCoy's wordplay).

However, Wormholes are theorized to exist, as were once Black Holes (see Kip Thorne's "Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy"). I was astonished to find out that Einstein and other physicists of his day did-not-want Black Holes to exist (at that time, they were called Schwarzschild singularities). It was pointed out in Kip's book that the solutions in General Relativity predicting Black Holes were initially themselves astonishing.

Wormholes, if detected, are probably very tiny and would take some kind of "exotic matter" to stabilize it for anything like the Enterprise, Defiant or Voyager to traverse it safely. That would put us squarely in Type II and out of the fossil fuel choke hold, plenty of food, world peace; "tea: Earl Grey - hot." A Wormhole would be a bridge in time as well as space, (Heimdall! Open the Bifrost!), but I think your time travel would be limited to the manufacture date of your Star Gate, i.e., if you made it 7 June 2014, this is as far backwards that one could travel (no reverse-breaking teacups or grandfather paradoxes).

So in essence: like any good Trekkie, or the mourning Dr. Lecter: I'd love to see it, but I don't think I will in my lifetime. We'd have to get smarter as a species than we've currently demonstrated in science.

By George...

Scientific American: Why Hasn't the Whole Universe Collapsed into an Enormous Black Hole?

Metronome Denouement...

I wish those days could come back once more
Why did those days ev-er have to go
I wish those days could come back once more
Why did those days ev-er have to go
Cause I love them so


Stevie Wonder, "I Wish"

"Much Ado About"...

About time...

About time: Why does time's arrow fly only one way? - physics-math - 10 October 2011 - New Scientist

Star Trek TNG: "Time's Arrow, part II"

As the visit from my brother and sister-in-law end: we think of time. How it's flown. How children we used to diaper are in college. Planning to do cruises; family and "class of 50" reunions, this is more a philosophical take on time, not an avocation of time travel...

TAKE a few steps forward, turn around and walk back. No problem. Now let a few seconds pass, then turn around and head back a few seconds in time. No luck? …Of course not. As we know only too well, time, unlike space, has only one direction - it flows from past to future, and never the other way round.

That all sounds like the natural order of things, but if you look closely enough at nature, you will find that it isn't. A thorough search of the laws of physics turns up no such arrow of time. For example, you can use Newton's laws of motion to work out where a ball was thrown from in the past just as well as where it will land in the future. And when it comes to particles, the laws and forces that govern their behavior do not change if you swap the future for the past.

"The truly odd thing is that the laws of physics, which surely ought to be responsible for what we see in the world, can work just as well both forwards and backwards in time," says Dean Rickles, a philosopher of science at the University of Sydney in New South Wales, Australia. "There shouldn't be an arrow."

New Scientist: More "About Time"

2D Universe...

Image Credit (and text credit below): Atra Materia

"Recently, physicists Jonas Mureika from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California, and Dejan Stojkovic from SUNY at Buffalo in Buffalo, New York, have proposed an interesting way to investigate lower dimensions of the Universe. They’ve published their study in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters.

"According to them, our four-dimensional spacetime may not have been the same in the past: it may have existed in a lower dimensional state. In the beginning, spacetime would have only two dimensions, one dimension of space and one dimension of time. In other words, shortly after the Big Bang, the Universe was a straight line. With the expansion, this straight line “wrapped up” so that it appears as the four-dimensional spacetime we see today, after going through a three-dimensional state, with two dimensions of space."

[Focus] Physics Review Letters: Testing for Vanishing Dimensions