Travel Through Time

Super-Science, NOT Fantasy!

Science Fact: Scientists say building a time machine may be extremely difficult. But time travel is not against the laws of physics!

For thousands of years, scientists and philosophers have talked of time as a river that flows steadily onward year after year. But what if there were a way to swim against the flow, or to run down the bank ahead of the river? Might we be able to journey back and forth in time just as we travel through space? The idea is not as far-fetched as it sounds, and the implications for the future are intriguing.

The brightest stellar explosion ever recorded may be a long-sought new type of supernova, according to observations by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ground-based optical telescopes. This discovery indicates that violent explosions of extremely massive stars were relatively common in the early universe, and that a similar explosion may be ready to go off in our own galaxy.
“This was a truly monstrous explosion, a hundred times more energetic than a typical supernova,” said Nathan Smith of the University of California at Berkeley, who led a team of astronomers from California and the University of Texas in Austin. “That means the star that exploded might have been as massive as a star can get, about 150 times that of our sun. We’ve never seen that before.”

After four years of intensive collaboration, 18 top mathematicians and computer scientists from the United States and Europe have successfully mapped E8, one of the largest and most complicated structures in mathematics, scientists said late Sunday.

Jeffrey Adams, project leader and mathematics professor at the University of Maryland said E8 was discovered over a century ago, in 1887, and until now, no one thought the structure could ever be understood.

“This groundbreaking achievement is significant both as an advance in basic knowledge, as well as a major advance in the use of large scale computing to solve complicated mathematical problems,” Adams said.

Sandia’s huge Z machine, which generates termperatures hottter than the sun, has turned water to ice in nanoseconds. However, don’t expect anything commercial just yet: the ice is hotter than the boiling point of water. “The three phases of water as we know them — cold ice, room temperature liquid, and hot vapor — are actually only a small part of water’s repertory of states,” says Sandia researcher Daniel Dolan. “Compressing water customarily heats it. But under extreme compression, it is easier for dense water to enter its solid phase [ice] than maintain the more energetic liquid phase [water].”

The sun is a cosmic spinmeister.

Using the highly sensitive radar telescope at the Cornell University-managed Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and Goldstone antenna in California, Cornell astronomers have confirmed a theory that sunlight and the asteroid’s shape determine how an asteroid’s rotation evolves. Their research is reported today in Science Express, the online edition of the journal Science.

The Yarkovsky-O’Keefe-Radzievskii-Paddack Effect, named after a nineteenth century Russian civil engineer Ivan Yarkovsky, a late American planetary scientist John A. O’Keefe, a late Russian astronomer V.V. Radzievskii and NASA aerospace engineer Stephen J. Paddack, affectionately known as YORP, says that solar radiation will increase or decrease the rate of an asteroid’s spin. This effect could help explain the formation of binary asteroids: The created centrifugal forces are so strong, that rubble-pile asteroids could break and form into two parts.