As the common tropes of science fiction continue to break out into reality, from humanoid robots to self-driving cars, there’s one concept that has seemingly remained beyond our grasp: time travel.
But, jumping through time might not be impossible, after all, according to one astrophysicist.
By the rules of theoretical physics, certain conditions exist that would allow for the construction of elaborate wormholes, which could transport humans back to different eras.
While scientists have yet to discover the conditions needed to travel back in time, and construction a system large enough for humans certainly wouldn’t be easy, ‘there’s nothing forbidding it’ in the laws of theoretical physics, explains astrophysicist Ethan Siegel of Lewis & Clark College in the Forbes blog Starts With A Bang.
Backward time travel would rely on the elusive counterpart to the known positive energy / positive or zero mass particles found all throughout the universe – the negative mass/energy particles, which have long been theorized but never yet found.
‘If this negative mass/energy matter exists, then creating both a supermassive black hole and the negative mass/energy counterpart to it, while then connecting them, should allow for a traversable wormhole,’ Siegel writes.
He looked at the science and economics of a lunar colony.
Eighty-five percent of the rocks on the surface of the lunar highlands are anorthite, which contains aluminum as well as a massive supply of oxygen. Smelting aluminum in the quantities necessary to construct and maintain Artemis would produce so much excess oxygen—eight atoms for every two of aluminum—that they would be constantly venting it.
For every kilogram of payload, you need an additional 3.73 kilos of fuel. So a one-way ticket to the moon is calculated to eventually cost about $33,000.
The Great Pyramid of Giza has been shrouded in mystery for millennia, but now a long-held secret of its structure might be known thanks to particle physics.
A narrow void lying deep within the ancient Wonder of the World has been found by scientists using cosmic-ray based imaging.
The internal structure is located above the Grand Gallery — which links two of the Pyramid’s chambers — and traces a similar route for at least 30 metres (100ft).
A team of researchers with Università degli Studi di Padova and the Matera Laser Ranging Observatory in Italy has conducted experiments that add credence to John Wheeler’s quantum theory thought experiment. In their paper published on the open access site Science Advances, the group describes their experiment and what they believe it showed.
The nature of light has proven to be one of the more difficult problems facing physicists. Nearly a century ago, experiments showed that light behaved like both a particle and a wave, but subsequent experiments seemed to show that light behaved differently depending on how it was tested, and weirdly, seemed to know how the researchers were testing it, changing its behavior as a result.
Back in the late 1970s, physicist Johan Wheeler tossed around a thought experiment in which he asked what would happen if tests allowed researchers to change parameters after a photon was fired, but before it had reached a sensor for testing—would it somehow alter its behavior mid-course? He also considered the possibilities as light from a distant quasar made its way through space, being lensed by gravity. Was it possible that the light could somehow choose to behave as a wave or a particle depending on what scientists here on Earth did in trying to measure it? In this new effort, the team in Italy set out to demonstrate the ideas that Wheeler had proposed—but instead of measuring light from a quasar, they measured light bounced from a satellite back to Earth.
D-Wave system shows quantum computers can learn to detect particle signatures in mountains of data, but doesn’t outpace conventional methods — yet.
