It's a "Mys"tery

Just like many a sundry Oriental Language, Korean, or Hang-gul, sometimes "mis"ses something in the translation of simple texts.

I mean, I have seen "mis"-translations of simple directions but the above has to be an award winner, found above the stairs to the upper floor of the local fast-food chain here (Jung-ma "Lotteria").

I think it was meant to say "Be careful when carrying your meal upstairs".

Wonderful!

Apologies to my Good Korean Friend "Miss" Tori, or shall we say "Enigma"?

Physics Room Gold Medal Award Winner!

...and in another of my infrequent forays into the physics rooms, I have come across a rather interesting individual called Jeffrey Stapleton.

Not only does this geyser (Hey Diamond and Marianne (you work it out!)) proclaim himself a genius, but he also catagorically refuses to admit he is wrong in anything!

He is at www.jeffreystapleton.com and when confronted with my "hole-in-sphere" problem, claimed to have solved it with the answer 94! Check his site out, he is unique!

The problem is this: "A cylindrical hole 6 inches long of maximal radius is drilled straight through the center of a solid sphere. What is the volume remaining in the sphere?"

The answer I will leave to all you real geniuses.

It can be solved three different ways. Algebra (arduous), Calculus (beautiful), or Logic (ingenious).

Sad thing is, the Stapleton (spin -0, look at his site to see my comment) gave the right answer (but didn't know it was correct), and continued to try and explain why his "better" answer was 94. Strange, since the problem has a unique answer, and not 94 (logic gates, sorry Bill, look out!).

All in the physics chatroom!

These guys are so FUN to be with (Sirius (Yes, I still think Mr Black is Alive) Cybernetics Corporation).

Oh well, come the revolution....... all particles of spin -0 will be up against the wall....!

Yippee!

Is Time Travel possible? ~ an Honest Answer

Time travel has always fascinated people from all walks of life, writers, businessmen, scientists, philosphers, all have wondered. Well, here I am, about to put the record straight:

Is time travel possible?

Yes.

I may go on to tease and say, "Yes, Sir, but not in the way the movies or the books have led you to believe".

The "normal" way to time travel is to maybe build a "time travel machine" using which you can hop from decade to decade as if "time" were some sort of "tape measure" and we could position ourselves at any point along it. Wrong. Fascinating, especially when Robert Zemeckis did it, but wrong.

Time travel is a reality, but to figure out how, the Hollywood version of it has to be forgotten.

Completely.

Allow me to explain forthwith. Special Relativity has equations that tell that the faster a particle travels, the more time slows down for it. This is a real effect and has been demonstrated. In fact, I deal with it a lot since the calculations needed to deflect our nuclear particles would be useless without Einstein's equations, because we accelerate our particles to very near to the speed of light.

Particles that should decay into others often do not decay until after a million times the expected lifetime. From a certain point of view, this means they have time-travelled into their own future.........

...a more concrete example is needed here.

In my last post, about space travel, I said that if we had a spacecraft that could travel near to the speed of light, it would still take 4.2 years to get to the nearest star.

Suppose its speed was 99.9999% the speed of light. It would take nearly 4.2 years to get there, and the same to return. Travel time, 8.4 years.

Yet if you plug in this information into the Einstein equations, nearly 51 years have passed on earth, which means when the astronauts return, they will now be living (51-8.4 = 42.6) years into their future. They have time-travelled!

If you plug in even more exotic values, like 99.99999999% the speed of light, the astronauts will return to a completely new Earth that is now 40,000 years older than when they left.

These two examples show us the power of travelling at near light speed, and are given merely to illustrate what happens nearly every day in particle accelerators around the world. That is, that our particles do indeed exhibit time-travel properties, but as I said, not in the sense as portayed in the movies.

As for travelling backward in time, the physics tell us it forbidden, although some recent developments in the equations of General Relativity seem to suggest that this may be possible in principle, too.

And you don't even need a flux capacitor, much less a DeLorean.