Physicists Confirm a Pear-Shaped Nucleus, and It Could Ruin Time Travel Forever (sciencealert.com) 268
An anonymous reader writes from a report via ScienceAlert: Physicists have confirmed the existence of pear-shaped nuclei, which challenges the fundamental theories of physics that explain our Universe. "We've found these nuclei literally point towards a direction in space. This relates to a direction in time, providing there's a well-defined direction in time and we will always travel from past to present," Marcus Scheck from the University of the West of Scotland told Kenneth MacDonald at BBC News. Until recently, it was generally accepted that nuclei of atoms could only be one of three shapes: spherical, discus, or rugby ball. The first discovery of a pear-shaped nucleus was back in 2013, when physicists at CERN discovered isotope Radium-224. Now, that find has been confirmed by a second study, which shows that the nucleus of the isotope Barium-144 is also asymmetrical and pear-shaped. In regard to time travel, Scheck says that this uneven distribution of mass and charge caused Barium-144's nucleus to "point" in a certain direction in spacetime, and this bias could explain why time seems to only want to go from past to present, and not backwards, even if the laws of physics don't care which way it goes.
why time seems to only want to go from past... (Score:5, Funny)
Can you backup that statement? Oh wait... never mind.
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You mean, “take this backdown to the basement” surely.
That's the state of the universe then... (Score:5, Funny)
the whole thing has gone pear-shaped.
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the whole thing has gone pear-shaped.
I prefer the idea that time is suppository shaped.
Re:That's the state of the universe then... (Score:5, Funny)
the whole thing has gone pear-shaped.
I prefer the idea that time is suppository shaped.
So it's a good thing that time only runs in the forward direction then. (as Cat on Red dwarf found out).
Re:That's the state of the universe then... (Score:5, Funny)
red dwarf: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re:That's the state of the universe then... (Score:4, Interesting)
Pear shaped means time runs neither forwards nor backwards, it has a direction and that is that, it is arbitrary which direction that is, everything is just bound to that direction, well within our space, stranger things happen in infinitely small and infinitely large space and especially beyond where they become the same relative to our scale.
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Whenever I read physics stuff I feel like I'm the last segment of the Human Centipede of knowledge. Pear shaped, meaning a nucleus points in a direction meaning things aren't symmetrical.. How is that again? What does this have to do with time? They just say it does, and maybe they know why but it's meaningless to me.
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Where the smeg is Nodnol?
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Where the smeg is Nodnol?
In Dnalgne, on a planet called Htrae, of course
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>I prefer the idea that time is suppository shaped.
Actually... this is more like buttplug shaped.
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And, nuclei vibrate.. so the universe is a vibrating buttplug. ;)
I'm not sure that revelation would get you a Nobel Prize.
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And, nuclei vibrate.. so the universe is a vibrating buttplug. ;)
I'm not sure that revelation would get you a Nobel Prize.
It might if there was a practical application, what could one do with a vibrating universal buttplug?
Re:That's the state of the universe [pear-shaped] (Score:5, Funny)
My body certainly has. Maybe the atoms examined simply reached middle-age. Time* to put the universe on a diet of neutrino shakes; but they are so bland and often just pass right through ya.
* No pun intended
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Ba, neutrino shakes. Only three tastes, and you can't even be sure it hasn't changed on your drive home from the store.
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Wind-vane Theory (Score:2)
Instead of this being a CPT violation that requires all of physics to be "rewritten" there is another possibility that I hope they will look into.
Just like a finely balanced wind-vane (weather-vane) that can be moved around by the slightest breeze, might it not be the case that these particular isotopes (proton+neutron combinations) result in a unique very delicately balanced system that becomes "sensitive" to the movement and flow of other smaller matter/energy movements which can thus result in the appare
What is this I don't even (Score:5, Interesting)
Time only "goes from" the past to the future because we define those terms by the way that time "goes", and time "goes" the way it does, from less-entropic to more-entropic states, because the process of memory formation, like all processes, necessitates an increase in entropy. Time isn't actually "going" anywhere, there are just different possible states of the universe, and the ones we we remember (or are otherwise recorded for us to gather information from) are necessarily more entropic, and we call the states we already remember (or otherwise has record of) "past" and the opposite direction in the configuration space "future".
What the hell could pear-shaped nuclei possible have to do with any of that?
Re:What is this I don't even (Score:5, Insightful)
What the hell could pear-shaped nuclei possible have to do with any of that?
TFA adds nothing of value - it's just an unsubstantiated claim. The nuclei point "in a particular direction", whatever that means. If they all point in the same direction that would certainly be interesting, but it's not clear.
Hopefully will get some better science journalism on this one. Where's the Sixty Symbols video when we need it?
Re: What is this I don't even (Score:2, Interesting)
They seem to claim that lumpy nuclei violate CP Symmetry. If the universe can be asymmetric, then maybe (1) there is more matter than antimatter, and (2) other things like time may be assymetric.
Getting the Girl (Score:3)
Hey Richard Feynman --- yeah I hear you laughing, we've been snookered again. It doesn't sound like a downer at all. If we're capable of perceiving that some of these things aren't just 'are' ... they are 'are' yet they are also 'oriented' ... that means we have been given a Signpost to follow ... and we must follow it.
Never mind that time travel blather. All fixation on 'practical time travel' in physics is a rollover from science fiction, in which it exists solely for humans to go back in time to fix::no
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If the universe can be asymmetric
It is, otherwise stars and galaxies could not form.
there is more matter than antimatter
There is, at least as far as we've observed.
other things like time may be asymmetric
It is, as far as we've observed it only travels in one direction.
My understanding is that this is a possible explanation for these observations.
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If they all point in the same direction that would certainly be interesting, but it's not clear.
I thought that was the point of the discovery? It's just that the direction is not a "normal" direction like "towards the sun", but along their worldlines. They all point in the same "direction" in the sense that they all point towards (or away) from their future (or past) in spacetime.
Disclaimer: I may have no idea what I'm talking about.
Re: What is this I don't even (Score:2)
Re: What is this I don't even (Score:2)
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You've certainly added a lot to the conversation. Were you motivated by anything other than "virtue signalling" about Trump and the Brexit?
time's direction (Score:4, Interesting)
How do we know time doesn't go backward? Maybe it does. We'd never know it if it did. (think about it.)
Perhaps in fact time goes back and forward all the time. This would be a nifty way to have things like spooky action at a distance. You run time forward till a correlated event happens, then run it backward and imbue the necessary future state. Instant hidden variables that you can't detect.
it doesn't matter how much time this time reversal takes since, you will never notice it happening.
Time has a direction independent of entropy (Score:5, Informative)
How do we know time doesn't go backward? Maybe it does. We'd never know it if it did. (think about it.)
Surprising as it seems we would actually know if time reversed because of what seems to be one of the most forgotten results of particle physics: the laws of physics do not work the same if time is reversed due to something called "T-violation": literally time-reversal symmetry violation. This is NOT the same thing as a glass falling off a table will not reassemble itself and flying back onto the same because this is an effect of entropy.
The first evidence for T-violation came from the CP-LEAR kaon experiment at CERN in 1998 [Phys. Lett. B 444 43 (1998)] and was confirmed in B-decays by Babar [physicsworld.com] in 2012 (and as evidence that this result is always forgotten they forgot about the CP-LEAR measurement in this article!!). These experiments looked at how a particle oscillates back and forth between two possible states. What they found is that a particle in state A will oscillate into state B faster than one in state B will oscillate into state A. Hence the process prefers to go in one direction more than the other even though in this case the two states have identical entropy.
So if time were reversed you would be able to detect it by doing the same experiment and finding that now the particles would go from B to A faster than from A to B. Incidentally this symmetry is also closely related by special relativity to the symmetry between matter and anti-matter so reversing time would switch our universe into one which prefers anti-matter over matter and we could detect this flip again with particle physics experiments.
So amazing as it seems we could detect a flip in the direction of time and the article is just plain wrong when it says that the laws of physics don't care which way time goes: they do and we have evidence to show it!
Re:Time has a direction independent of entropy (Score:5, Interesting)
> so why people keep mixing several theories together, is beyond me
I can tell you that. It's because the only difference between the written down formula for Shannon Entropy and the written down formula for thermodynamic entropy is a single - sign. Which led people to believe that the one is merely an inversion of the other.
Unfortunately this is an extremely silly conclusion - because although the formulas look the same on paper, they aren't representing the same things. The symbols re the same - but they are not symbols for the same things.
The conflation of Shannon entropy with Thermodynamic Entropy is only marginally less silly than somebody arguing that carbon dioxide is 2 Oxygen atoms travelling at light speed because C is also the symbol for the speed of light.
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Re: Time has a direction independent of entropy (Score:2)
To be fair there is an actual correlation between the two since storing information (increasing Shannon entropy) does generally require making something physically more ordered (decreasing thermodynamic entropy) so its not quite as silly as it seems but the relationship is probably far weaker than generally assumed and may not exist at all outside of deliberate actions by technologically advanced and intelligent species like us.
You cpuld argue that building houses and cities decrease thermodynanic entropy a
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Model a gas in a simulation, and output all of the momenta of every molecule in that gas. That list of vectors will have a very high Shannon entropy. Now decrease the Shannon entropy of that chunk of information, say setting all the vectors to the same value, the average of them all.
Now make your model of the gas reflect those changes. Look: all your molecules are comoving now, the temperature of the gas has dropped dramatically (and its overall velocity increased as necessary to conserve energy), and the t
Not True (Score:3)
But if laws are not symmetric, then your brain will not work the same. You will un-learn and then un-do the experiments, so you will not be able to reach conclusions.
You are missing a few important details here. First, as far as we know, this time reversal asymmetry does not apply to the EM force which is how our brains work so they would not be affected. Second the effect is a tiny one only measurable with extremely precise experiments so you would not notice an effect without detailed experiments. Lastly though "unlearning", glasses leaping back onto tables etc will only happen if you rewind time, not just reverse the flow i.e. force everything to return to its preci
Reverse != Rewind (Score:3)
Rewinding time i
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'Perhaps' is great for philosophy. In the real world, you gotta provide some evidence. We have evidence of the directional flow of time. Matches never compose from flame. If you're going to suggest that sometimes they do, you're also suggesting that the entire universe backs up a step in exact simultaneity. I'll have to agree with Occam's Razor on that one.
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Flame doesn't produce matches because of entropy, reversal of time doesn't imply reversal of entropy. Then you construct an argument that you think (but not prove - which is the standard) is complicated and therefore think Occam's razor applies. But the razor is a rule of thumb and also doesn't prove anything.
Re:time's direction (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps in fact time goes back and forward all the time. This would be a nifty way to have things like spooky action at a distance. You run time forward till a correlated event happens, then run it backward and imbue the necessary future state. Instant hidden variables that you can't detect.
Yes. I have long thought that this is a plausible explanation for the two slit photon "problem". We observe the photon moving in "our" time direction, but can not observe the same photon as it travels against our time direction. The photon itself is satisfied in its path, the past and future points agree. Thanks for putting this in easily grokable form.
Appalling Explained...but really complicated (Score:5, Informative)
Time only "goes from" the past to the future because we define those terms by the way that time "goes", and time "goes" the way it does, from less-entropic to more-entropic states
Actually that is not true because of something called T-violation which has been observed in kaon and B-meson oscillations (see my other reply to a post below for details but this is NOT an effect of entropy!).
What the hell could pear-shaped nuclei possible have to do with any of that?
This is harder to explain and you are absolutely correct that the article utterly fails to do so! We have three special symmetries in particle physics called C, P and T where T is time-reversal and C and P together, CP, is the symmetry between matter and anti-matter. What relativity tells us is that all three together, CPT, should be a perfect symmetry of nature. This means that CP (the matter-antimatter symmetry) and T (time reversal) are linked because if the T symmetry is violated then the CP symmetry must be violated in exactly the opposite way so that CPT altogether is conserved.
Now the pear shaped nucleus is interesting because the nucleus is bound together by the strong force and every test so far suggests that the strong force obeys C, P and T separately (and so of course also CPT together). The weird violation of T and CP is only seen in the weak force (which causes nuclear beta decay). Now if a nucleus has a non-symmetric shape it suggests that the strong force also violates P, called parity. If P is conserved then if you flip the direction of the x, y and z axes there is no change. However with a pear-shaped nucleus there would be a change and so parity is said to be violated and this means that CP would also be broken.
So, if true, this result would be interesting because we have never seen this effect in the strong force despite it being possible to add a term to do this and it has always been a mystery as to why this term appeared to be exactly zero - it is called the "strong CP problem". Since CP is tied to CPT by relativity this means that we would expect time reversal to be broken as well by the strong force. However despite the BBC's best effort to advertize Dr. Who this result says absolutely nothing about whether time travel is possible just that time seems to have a preferred direction...which we have known since 1998 thanks to the CP-LEAR experiment.
As for the "pointing in the same direction in space" I want to see that written in a journal before I give it any credence. Given there are several errors and mistakes elsewhere in the article I the journalism behind this story is seems appalling and I think they completely misunderstood the explanation given...which as you can see above is not exactly trivial!
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What is surprising, is that these nuclei are relatively stable. It appears something strongly suppresses the most energetically favorable decay. Getting the answer to this is going to be tricky - we can't really model the nuclei intera
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Time only "goes from" the past to the future because we define those terms by the way that time "goes", and time "goes" the way it does, from less-entropic to more-entropic states, because the process of memory formation, like all processes, necessitates an increase in entropy. Time isn't actually "going" anywhere, there are just different possible states of the universe, and the ones we we remember (or are otherwise recorded for us to gather information from) are necessarily more entropic, and we call the states we already remember (or otherwise has record of) "past" and the opposite direction in the configuration space "future".
What the hell could pear-shaped nuclei possible have to do with any of that?
The only time that actually exists is Now; the constantly changing, eternal moment of Now. Now is the only time anything can happen. So everything that ever has happened or ever will happen, happen Now. Past and future are only illusions created by our perception.
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Right on!
Time is an attribute of how the human mind/brain perceives the universe. There is no way of untangling the psychology of perception from the study of physics at the quantum level. But there is probably no way of convincing most persons who have invested effort in reading and learning about quantum mechanics that this is so. I understand that the few persons who have invested a LOT of effort into learning physics have an understanding of this entanglement, though they probably describe it in differ
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Time is an attribute of how the human mind/brain perceives the universe. There is no way of untangling the psychology of perception from the study of physics at the quantum level.
That's true of all of it, every psychological model of the universe breaks down, everything is just varying mass, velocity and charge. in reality it's all jabberwocky to wrap our minds around to maintain sanity.
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The process of a brain (or any other mechanism) recording information about its environment decreases the entropy of the brain (or other mechanism), thus necessitating an even greater increase in entropy in the environment, so that the second law is obeyed for the total brain-environment system.
So for any system where some part of the system is recording information about the rest of the system, the total entropy of that system will have to go up, modulo any exchange of entropy with something outside the sy
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I never said that entropy causes memory, I said that the necessity of memory increasing universal entropy means that the states we we remember are always less-entropic ones, and so the universe seems to us to be more entropic in the past (i.e. in the states we can remember) and less entropic in the future (i.e. in our predictions of states that will follow from that trend).
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universe seems to us to be more entropic in the past [...] and less entropic in the future
whoops, I switched "less" and "more" there for some reason
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The process of a brain (or any other mechanism) recording information about its environment decreases the entropy of the brain (or other mechanism), thus necessitating an even greater increase in entropy in the environment, so that the second law is obeyed for the total brain-environment system.
So for any system where some part of the system is recording information about the rest of the system, the total entropy of that system will have to go up, modulo any exchange of entropy with something outside the sy
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Thanks, for some reason I have a bad habit of swapping less/more when discussing entropy. Some part of my mind wants to think of the more-entropic state as "lesser", I guess.
But entropy very much can be defined without memory. You can be given a random series of bits that mean nothing to you, and mathematically describe how entropic that piece of information is, in absolute terms with no reference to any other benchmark information.
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The problem with white holes is that the matter had to come from somewhere and if you smoke just the right amount of pot it makes sense that the matter would come from the black holes.
Perhaps the hole is only black on the outside if you smoke just the right amount of pot.
Galactic North... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Galactic North... (Score:5, Informative)
Nice thought but no, there is no center as you're thinking, space itself expanded with the big bang so the big bang happened literally everywhere. At least as far as we know.
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I'm not a scientist but this pear-shaped atom probably points back to the origin point of the Big Bang. It might be possible find the precise galactic center from where everything got spewed out into the cosmos?
No, they all point toward Brexit, and that's why we can't have nice things, such as time travel!
Re:Galactic North... (Score:4, Funny)
If they point toward Mecca, I will be fully freaked out.
And, dammit, I just bought a bunch of Xmas decorations last year.
Simplest explnation is always true (Score:5, Funny)
Points to direction of next quest.
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Somebody might be able to write an interesting sci-fi story about that. Sort of along the vein of Contact where the instructions for a ship are encoded into PI.
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Some of the nicest titties are pearshaped, but I've always been partial to teardrop shaped myself. So tits-up and pearshaped sounds like a pretty good state of affairs to me.
Someone please explain this (Score:2)
How can something physically point to an abstract like time?
Like, holy shit guys, this thing is pointing left..that's the past!!! Yeah man, they're all pointing left..whoa!!
I cannot imagine how the orientation of a physical thing can have any correlation, whatsoever to time. Someone please explain this.
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Basic relativity. Time and Space are two aspects of the same one thing - spacetime. Nothing has JUST a position and direction in space, it also has a direction in time. In Newtonian physics you have a point in space. In Einsteinian physics you have an event in space time. It's not just a position but also a moment.
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Right, but I know where the center of a balloon is. And if I'm a two-dimensional creature on the surface, I can make three marks, then move in a direction, and eventually notice that I see them from another direction, and then estimate the distance.
If the argument is that the universe is the three dimensional equivalent of the balloon (or N dimensional, or whatever), then we'd expect there to be a way to gauge this, by basically looking out and seeing if we can see a really distant anything from one side i
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...and this is why I don't like the balloon analogy -- people point to the way in which the analogy is completely unlike the analogous system, and then assume that there is a comparable property in reality.
Think of the universe as the dolly zoom in the movie Vertigo. No matter where Jimmy Stewart is, as he climbs up the tower, when he looks down you see the bottom of the tower stretching away from him. There is no real center point -- it's not like the center of expansion suddenly moves up the tower with hi
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> and then assume that there is a comparable property in reality
Well, if you are arguing that its an object with a volume curved around a fourth dimension, then it is a natural objection.
Look, right now, a line from the Earth through the Sun will roughly point at the constellation Gemini. That means that the mass of Gemini and the mass of the sun are, at all points today, on the same side of us. Six months from now, that won't be the case- Gemini will be on one side, and the Sun on the other. That mea
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"Probably". I don't think it means what you think it means.
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I don't see the approximation I read in an astronomy book and that I still use, so here it is:
Think of the universe as an hyper-sphere. Well, this is actually hard, so remove a dimension: we're left with a sphere in space, like a balloon, and that balloon is inflated (*).
At the time of big-bang, the balloon was a point, and it is expanding.
To be clear, as we removed a dimension, the universe is the balloon surface, not the volume.
Pear-shaped I guess would point to center / past, but I guess they mean pear-s
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Galaxies have centers, as does the known universe. Space expanding has no impact on this fact. Define the boundaries universe at any single point in time and you can define a center. (or at least the center of a bounding spheroid). That center may change as space boils and expands, but you can travel toward it and as you get closer, recalculate it.
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The boundaries of the known universe are what they are because of where the rest of universe is relative to us, i.e. we can observe things up to a certain distance in any direction. We will thus always observe ourselves to be the center of the known universe.
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Sure, but I never said otherwise. I was just disputing sexconcer's notion of finding the "center of the universe", and telling your motion relative to the CMB doesn't help you do anything like that.
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forget about expansion or relativity or anything like that
you suddenly pop into existence in the middle of a foggy field
your KNOWN universe is everything within a certain distance of you; beyond that, it's lost in the fog, and wherever the boundaries of the field may be, if there are any at all, they're lost in the distant fog.
the part of the field that you know of, that you have any experience of, appears to be centered on you, because the ability to know and experience it is a function of its distance fro
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"Infinity" is not a known value. If it were known, there would be a limit, and it would be finite. There are things known to be infinite, but that means we can't assign a value saying how many there are.
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To me, the most important aspect of aether was is a universal reference frame. Galactic North would certainly imply one.
So do they all point in the same direction? (Score:2)
'Cause that would be weird. Cool, but weird.
The inevitable simulation reference... (Score:4, Funny)
It's like the sysops are say, well, they're going to discover they're living in a simulation. Change the parameters so nuclei are pear shaped, and that ought to distract them for a little while.
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And by "for a little while" you mean for about one hour, or 3.14159265359 million years in the simulation, right?
Time Travel is easy.... (Score:2)
There goes my retirement (Score:3, Funny)
My DeLorean stocks just took a bigger hit than Brexit.
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get it to 88 MPH on I-88 at Mile 88
The picture in TFA (Score:2)
A bit off topic but the picture in TFA representing said nucleus seems to be moving even though it is not, like some kind of optical illusion. Did anyone else noticed this?
pear, banana... (Score:2)
"And that, my lord, is how we know the Earth to be banana-shaped."
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No back to the past (Score:2, Funny)
Prior Art (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey already ruined time travel forever.
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I love when Science invalidates Sci-Fi (Score:3)
Several Sci-Fi genre relied on gravity not being bound by the speed of light. LIGO has killed that.
It will be interesting to see where the hard sci-fi authors go now.
Oddly enough Edgar Rice Burroughs is still sorta safe, since his Mars is in an alternate reality (other obvious failings aside).
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Light and Gravity is EMF. Penetrate the EMF and you can go as fast as you want. Same as penetrating air for the 'speed of sound'.
Humans have to think in the correct paradigm. Patterns have a habit of being repeatable.
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"It will be interesting to see where the hard sci-fi authors go now."
Huh? There are differing opinions on what constitutes "hard sci-fi", but I thought that "No time travel" and "No FTL" were generally agreed upon principles for defining the genre.
Volgon Scientists. (Score:3)
even if the laws of physics don't care which way it goes.
Lacking access to a good intergalactic physics lawyer the Human race continues to make it up as they go along.
Imagine navigating the U.S. Justice system by trial and error the way science has been doing it.
The Volgons at least had a printed manual, in triplicate, read as poetry by some Volgons in self defense.
fat-bottomed nuclei ... (Score:2, Funny)
... you make the rockin' world go round.
The second law of thermodynamics ... (Score:2)
If someone can circumvent the first or second law of thermodynamics, they can call themselves a deity for all intents and purposes.
There is no time dimension (Score:2)
http://phys.org/news/2011-04-s... [phys.org]
I think until the majority of scientists do not accept this we won't have a unified theory.
Even Lee Smolin acknowledges that we have some problem with time (in The Trouble with Physics), but he thinks the problem is that we treat time as a static/frozen thing while he thinks it is a dynamic thing like space itself (eg. the shape of space continuously changes due to matter).
I'm not a physicits, but... (Score:2)
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I don't believe it. The study doesn't call out this statement (what, do they all point to the best stone crabs?), and the line, if quoted correctly, might mean something entirely different (such as the shape being consistently pear-like, or that it maintains a shape relative to something entirely unremarkable). Finding that a bunch of Radium atoms point to to a specific star would be pretty amazing, and look for a kooky youtube about it soon! ...but I doubt it really says anything of the sort. If you spe
Ugh... (Score:2)
Yet another article that takes massive liberties with pure speculation and has almost nothing to do with science other than the word scientist.
Or Not ! (Score:2)
But wait...there's more... (Score:2)
Shape Dynamics (Score:2)
This all sounds consistent Shape Dynamics [wikipedia.org]. IANAP, but according to Lee Smolin's book Time Reborn [wikipedia.org], this can lead to a preferred frame of reference, including an actual centre of the universe. It also make time into its own thing, disentangling it from space. Which could ruin time travel forever.
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This is science journalism, so that means absurdly hyperbolic articles written by idiots that fancy themselves "science journalists". Generally, they're fucking retards who know nothing about science, but are bound by one rule, sex everything up. Science "journalism" is one of the lowest forms of journalism there is. TMZ has better journalism than science "journalism". I ignore science "journalism", because it's usually worse than wrong.
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Backward time travel is impossible because it is inevitable that eventually it is used to prevent the discovery of backward time travel.
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That all sounds very E. E. "Doc" Smith. :-)