Results tagged “timetravel” from 60 Second Science

So I'm a technological optimist. By and large, I think that, ultimately, technology will solve all my problems. That is, of course, if it doesn't destroy the world first. Because, let's face it, science is kind of scary.

At the top of my list of things that frighten me (followed shortly by a super-flu that turns people into zombies) is the sort-of-fact that the Large Hadron Collider could spew out strangelets and turn the Earth into a black hole, summon aggressive time travelers from the future, or plop us into a mediocre sci-fi movie.

Thank the good lord Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho have their heads screwed on right. They've filed suit in a federal court in Honolulu to stop CERN from powering up the LHC until it's produced safety and environmental reports.

[Google News]

Continue reading 'Hawaiians sue to stop Large Hadron Collider / save the world' >

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The entire particle physics community is counting down to May like it was their birthday, Christmas and the Second Coming of the Lord all wrapped up in a clutch of Superbowls. It's when the Large Hadron Collider comes online, but while most are hoping for data and praying for the bashful Higgs boson to finally show it's tiny little face, some Russian mathematicians are warning that we might get more than we bargained for. Specifically, time-travelers: futurenauts using our ultra-duper atomsmasher to punch a hole in causality and hop back from the future.

The idea dates back to Einstein's explanation that spacetime can be deformed by large energies or masses. Since the Large Hadron Collider is a twenty-six kilometer ring of superconducting magnets designed to do nothing but give a particle as large an energy as possible, that sounds like it could be an issue. Small deformations in spacetime (like Earth) give us the force of gravity, severe deformations give the cosmological trash compacting black holes, and an extreme case could cause a wormhole - a link between two points as spacetime folds over to touch itself (no sniggering).

Continue reading 'Time Travelers: Futurenauts Using Ultra-duper Atomsmasher' >

In the film "Jumper," Hayden Christensen plays a superhero who can transport himself by wishing it so. The "I Dream of Jeannie"-like technique sounds a lot easier than Doc Brown's method of rigging up a time traveling DeLorean.

But how close is the film's teleporting to reality?

The New York Times reports on a recent panel of MIT physicists who broke down the science of teleporting. MIT's Edward Farhi said physicists have managed to teleport the quantum information of a photon for about one and a half miles, “a little less exotic than what you see in the movie.”

Continue reading 'Time traveling movie "Jumper" not that far from reality...for protons' >

Today's Giftology recommendation will enable the recipient to travel...through TIME! OK, not really, but it'll remind you of a time when the plucky adventures of Marty McFly and the irascible Doc Brown made you believe it to be possible. Revisit that innocent, science-stupid time with this full-scale replica of the Flux Capacitor from Back to the Future. It features full lighting effects, adjustable power settings, hastily-pasted handmade labels, and 1.21 jigowatts of non-time-traveling power. All you'll need to do is find a refurbished DeLorean, and those are practically everywhere.

Continue reading '60 S.S. Giftology: Flux capacitor' >