JDR_1293.ZIP John David Rohner, Milwaukee, WI December 1993 COMMENTS The purpose of this document: to eliminate primitive beliefs, to offer solutions to unanswered questions, and to investigate or at least mention interesting discoveries and technologies. You will find this to be hard reading, disjoint, and disorganized. Remember that this is a compilation of many notes I have taken throughout my life. Also whatever new data I come across. Only through many revisions will this be complete and understandable. The scientific method for solving problems uses deduction. You observe data and then create theories to account for that data. Your theory is proven when you can correctly anticipate future data. The competing form of logic is that of induction. With induction you start with a theory and try to prove it. This method is out of favor because it usually introduces bias. Deductive methods attempt to form the universe into a pattern that can be easily predicted and understood. I feel that this prevents awareness of data. By working from the inductive method you can use more creativity and imagination to examine all possibilities. Then you can see what data is available, fill where you can, and investigate where you suspect. There are real problems in knowing the truth of what our senses and instruments tell us. The field of philosophy that deals with knowing and finding things that are true has found only one truth: that whenever you say "I think, therefore I am," then you can be sure that you, at least, exist. We attempt to order the universe in our own minds. Unfortunately there is much misunderstanding. Too many people are still "hoping" or "thinking" that the universe and its events are a certain way. I have written this continually on-going project in hopes that the whole human race can feel the same confidence I have concerning our future. All I ask is an open mind. Generally, two opposing theories are both right and wrong. In the end, the result/method/truth is usually a combination of both theories. The same is true of inductive logic. The more diverse the views, the more likely all the angles will be found. The Voyager spacecraft is one example of the limits of the scientific method. We sent it out to explore and investigate. Their goal was to fill some missing holes of data on our solar system and its origins. What we got were some answers and many more questions. If we had simply put down into a list everything we imagined we may see, we would have been less surprised. We could have, perhaps, better prepared the spacecraft for answers instead of a "go see what is there" approach. What we saw was the infamous, "Why did I not think of that?". I believe that to be truly successful with something like inductive logic you need to have many opinions viewed. Much like the ideas of a global village or distributed democracy. This will reduce the bias of the single person (into a bias of the group--still better than one view though). "None of that majority rules stuff."[1] Computers allow us to merge views from many sources than was previously possible. As an example, I feel that I have read so many science fiction storylines that I can form what I think the universe is really like. Another good example is the Lottery. We do not know what the final numbers will be, but finding the correct numbers are inevitable with so many people guessing. This is stretching it a bit since other factors such as the definitions of the number system also come into account. The more diverse the opinions and views, the higher the probability that answers are among them. These views can be formed together to create the final picture. My views, I hope, are not totally your views. Where we differ I would like to hear from you. This document is not meant to be scientific. The references are sources of ideas--not necessarily hard scientific investigation (eg. various journals). 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴� CONTENTS Line Topic 컴컴 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴� 131 NOTES 151 TERMS AND CONCEPTS 284 TRADITIONAL MYSTERIES 287 Mind Reading 298 Ghosts 324 Psychic Voyages 327 Witches and Warlocks 332 UFO'S 340 NEW MYSTERIES 343 Existence 362 Imagination 386 UNIVERSE 388 The Universe 644 COBE 686 Physics of the Universe 1548 Gravity 1755 Objects in Space 2302 Cosmology 2360 My Cosmology 2395 Time 2472 Anti-Gravity 2519 SPACE SHIPS 2524 Space Ships 2632 Engines 2654 Faster Than Light 2760 FTL possibility 2892 Navigation 2917 Force shields 2981 Teleportation 3094 Teleportation via dimensions and space tearing 3328 Life in space 3390 Communication 3410 Tractor Beams 3421 Motivation 3482 Colonizing 3504 Transportation 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴� NOTES The first two digits of each line contain the release number. This number starts at 01, which represents JDR-0889 which was my first release. Only those entries made over over the last year will retain their numbers. This breaks down as follows: 22 22 JDR_0293 23 23 JDR_0493 24 24 JDR_0693 25 25 JDR_0893 26 26 JDR_1093 27� 27� JDR_1093 Anything new since the last release is designated by a "�". 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴� TERMS AND A MOMENT OF TIME CONCEPTS State of the universe, or of some local area, that once/had/could exist. "The present moment is eternity and contains all the mystery of the universe."[2] CRYONICS The freezing of meat for later use. . .ah, well, the truth. The freezing of organic matter with the expectation of restoring or duplicating the tissue into living organic matter in the future. CYBERSPACE William Gibson's creation, in ~Neuromancer~, of an interactive communications protocol. Using full graphics, direct brain sensors, and symbols for computers. If you're into computers you should have read it. If you're young and into computers you're required to read it. DETERMINISTIC Determinism and Free Will are interrelated. If you have determinism then you do not have Free Will. Words such as "fate" and "destiny" are deterministic. It is the belief that the future was planned and will be unchangeable. Environmental Determinism, the idea that the environment you grew up in will affect your future actions, is a common use of the term. FREE WILL The freedom to think what you want, without any external influences. Not having someone implant your next thoughts into your brain. Self-determinism of thought. Do not confuse the term with freedom or liberty. If you kill somebody, Free Will requires that you take the punishment since you did it. Whereas if things were deterministic you could say it was your destiny to kill them. That the future was unalterable. Therefore you lacked choice, no way not to do it, and should not have to take the punishment. If one allows only moments of free thought in your life, you do not have Free Will. INFINITY Infinity is essentially a level above the Real number system (0, 1, 2, 3, ...). It is more of a theoretical tool than something of practical value. After all, if you have a zillion apples you are not going to say you have an infinite number of apples. Infinity marks the point of "unknown many," when you have so many that you do not know how many. If the number can be estimated, than that number is not infinite. Example, we have an infinite number of atoms in the Universe. You also could say there are an infinite number of atoms in the solar system, except that we know the size of solar system and the number of atoms in a given unit of area. So while we may break the mathematical system trying to calculate the number we would eventually get a number, whereas the Universe lacks a size limit. INFINITY^ Infinity raised to infinity raised to infinity, etc., etc., till infinity (forever). Infinity multiplied by any Real number will still equal infinity (for example, 10*Infinity=infinity, or 1,000,000,000*infinity=infinity,) since any number smaller than infinity is insignificant. Multiplying infinity by itself (infinity*infinity) yields values that are so large that they are only theoretical toys. Since all things in the universe together would only equal infinity, it can be said that Infinity^ represents nothing. INFINITESIMAL Does not represent anything. Even the smallest bit of matter is not infinitesimal, since it can be measured. The main use of the infinitesimal is to describe immeasurably small distances or times for theoretical purposes. Just as 5/1=5 and 1/5=.2, infinity/1=infinity, and 1/infinity=infinitesimal. The larger the number under the one, the smaller the resulting value. Example, if the distance between two points had an infinite number of points between them, then Zeno's argument would be true (that motion is impossible because it requires an object to pass through an infinite number of points in a finite amount of time).[3] INFINITESIMAL^ Infinitely^ small. LOCAL Structure of the local area at a current moment of time. The size of this local area can be anything from less than a single atom to whole clusters of galaxies--it depends on the total area considered. PROBABILITY OF THE UNIVERSE ITSELF As the Universe is infinite, the term "infinite" evokes a potential for duplication. Specifically, duplication of ourselves. Events are what the Universe is made of. At each moment of time there are an infinite^ number of potential states the Universe can change into. For example, if each atom in the universe could move in only one of four directions at each moment of time then; 1 atom could go in one of four directions (4 probable outcomes), 2 atoms - each capable of going in one of four directions - gives 4 probable outcomes for each, but together there would be 16 probable outcomes (4*4). An infinite number of atoms produces an unimaginable number with a limit of only two choices of directions for each atom. Toss in interactions and an infinite number of potential directions for each little bit of matter for the three-dimensional space it lives in (a sphere of potential movement directions) and even infinite^ may be small. This extremely high number of potential states cumulatively eliminates any serious duplication problems. The more complex the required duplication, the less its possibility. What I have not really decided yet is whether the probability is cumulative or not. The universe is so vast that it simply may not matter. SCIENCE FICTION Parapsychology is not a part of Science Fiction. The majority of science fiction today is a Character Role Playing Game (CRPG) adventure. It is a great source of creative thinking. STATE Structure of the Universe at a current moment of time. UNIVERSE I had considered using something like "Multiverse" to describe the Universe but decided against it. Just think of the Universe as made up of an infinite number of what we now consider to be in the universe (not "Big Bang bubbles"). The term universe can be most anything (for example, the ecology of forest could be thought of a "local universe"). Each dimension should be called a universe. Within each of us, our imagination is a universe. 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴� TRADITIONAL MYSTERIES Mind No. While we are developing technology to read the Reading electronic activity of brains through receivers attached to the skull, the current/voltage is extremely difficult to detect. The brain being 3-dimensional and very fast moving just exacerbates the challenge. Humans cannot read each others minds. There are no "links" between humans either to allow mind reading. In perhaps 30 years we will have the technology to put thoughts into pictures onto a screen - generated by computer using the same algorithms as we do to process the information. Ghosts No. By ghosts I mean ethereal former organic beings. We have no invisible souls, we are what we are. Incorporeal matter can hardly have very much intelligence (unless it has access to some form of database to provide the intelligence - but this may eliminate the very "being"/existence of the intelligence). A person is better off considering our spirit to be just that. The feeling of happiness, self confidence, etc. that you feel at times, in the long term this helps to reduce stress and by that give you a longer life. Bob Shaw wrote of life: "A personality is a structure of mental entities, existing in mental space, and it survives destruction of the brain though it required the brain's complex physical organization to develop."[4] I suspect this is what many people currently think. Note the flaw, no growth after death. Static life-after-death, that is not life, merely existence. Notice the differences between an advanced race at the energy level and ghosts. Both exist in the same medium; energy. Except the race evolved into it, the ghosts became it when we died. The race would use a real form of energy, the ghosts use undetectable energy. Ghosts and spirits are things those who cannot accept death believe. My efforts will always be constructive and real, not imaginary and false. Psychic Definitely yes. Dreams and drugs now. Databases and Voyages interfaces tomorrow. Just read William Gibson's works. Witches and People with some tricks up their sleeves. With an Warlocks antigravity belt and a few other tricks I could easily be a warlock even in these times. This cult is now concentrating on worshipping nature. UFO'S Sure, maybe one or two in all history. Since any more would have serious implications: maybe there are many alien races nearby watching us, or that they simply do not share their data. A race that can fly through space can surely stop our primitive detection equipment, so there really is no reason for us to have noticed them at all. NEW MYSTERIES Existence Many things that people typically think may happen, such as; instantaneous travel, ghosts, true visions of the future, a single being who can do anything. These are all possible, if one accepts that we may be a great beings' memory - that we had existed, but no longer exist. Thus our essence and the world around us is subject to the beings thinking, as is anyone who can access/manipulate the storage area. By having lived we had Free Will, but as a memory we think we have Free Will because the events did occur with Free Will. The key to determining the truth involves time, and the "ticks of time." This is not thinking of time in the traditional sense, but as the state method. Since by its very nature each tick of time lasts both an infinitesimal amount of time and that this amount is always varying. Maybe some type of atomic-based system which only works during these ticks - thus if a jump in time occurs we would notice it. On the other hand, a jump might be caused by something else, or we might be forced to "see" it falsely. Imagination It seems to me that there is some significance in the following, although I am not really sure what: The universe in its purely natural state is raw energy, from this we get clumps of matter into inanimate objects. This inorganic matter can create organic matter under the right conditions, the organic matter then becomes plants and animals. Sentient beings evolve from these animals. These sentient beings then develop an imagination. The deal is: we start with infinity, we shrink it down to get humans, but we have an infinity within ourselves because our imaginations can imagine anything. What is this link with the universe? The Universe cannot imagine or create things beyond what are "natural," but our brains can do both. We cannot bring those objects we think up into this universe--though they do exist in this Universe in an encoded form (memory). We then use our bodies to construct the object into the Universe. There seems some logic here, but I cannot pinpoint it. Perhaps its just me making more of nothing. [The Universe is a platform on which life forms. Life is a platform on which intelligence forms. It took a variety of tiny modifications and reactions to produce an infinite potential.] 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴� UNIVERSE The The Universe is infinite. A lot is automatically assumed Universe when you mention infinite. Since the very word implies anything is possible. It says, for example, that there may be two identical people in this Universe and therefore we have no Free Will (which would lead to a potentially known future - which is impossible). One must remember what a Universe creates: events. At every infinitesimal point of time an infinite number of choices are available. As the amount of time increases the probability of events matching exactly goes so far beyond infinity itself (infinity^) that the size of the Universe is small in comparison with the Universe of events. The Universe is made-up of universe's. The big bang theory is a joke as it casually does not count what the matter expands into as also being space, it also has a chicken and egg problem with its initial particle. Imagine the expanding universal bubble as white (space would be mainly white if light was not being blocked by dust particles), imagine this on a black canvas (space). Reduce it to just a spot of light. What I see is a spot of light (like a star) on a black canvas - a very tiny spot on a very large black area. No matter how much the universe expands, one can always imagine it as just an infinitesimal spot of light in an infinity of darkness. The picture looks a lot better when there are lots of spots of light. The theory of creation (a super-advanced being/race creating/developing our Universe) probably would require too much energy, and would only be useful for studying how life evolves. There just are not any good arguments for this theory. The universe is probably steady-state, with changes occurring on what we consider the universal level still being local. Within the solar system other planets may exist if conditions are right. If other planets do exist, then one may be in an orbit allowing for life to come into existence and thrive. Probably there is a black hole in each galaxy (logically - since old big stars can become black holes). Black holes are of course not holes, merely matter so dense that the light cannot escape the force of gravity, massive bodies, such as suns, can warp light rays with their gravity. As you approach the center, the atoms become more densely packed. I suspect that there are other forces there besides pressure/heat/etc. that somehow ignite the whole thing causing it to explode into a giant cloud of gas. This exploded star would then form into either huge/medium/small stars depending upon how much available gas there is--perhaps the gas is attracted by a dead neutron star, or something (like many of them) causing a "rebirth." The universe is at 3 degrees kelvin. Kelvin is when molecular action ceases? Does this imply that 0 degrees kelvin the universe would stop? Is the 3 degrees kelvin temperature or radiation and is there a difference? Perhaps the uniform microwave background temperature/radiation is the base-level of natural matter in the universe (much like the speed of light being the highest speed of any natural thing in the universe). Perhaps there is something special in the extra cold 3 degree area that could be useful. The theory that everything we see exists only for us, and that it does not exist when we do not see it, is garbage. Merely an extension of the question "how do we know we are not dreaming everything." Which is essentially an extension of the omniscient god. Point: someone or something is projecting the vision, I exist, if everything I do not see does not exist then that person/machine also does not exist, since I see the visions and I do not see the person/machine when I wish it, I conclude there is no person/machine and what I am seeing is not put into existence for me. This type of theory is merely an attempt to legitimatize a god. I am not espousing a steady state theory of the Universe. All I am saying is that it is a lot bigger than we think and that what we imagine as grandiose workings of the universe through big bangs/etc. is really just a local effect. A steady state universe may exist, as may many other types of universes (since changing only a few universal variables can have drastically different effects on the outcome). While the universe may be against life, it is a continuum of size from very small to very large. One could ask why it isn't mostly dust, or mostly galaxy-sized stars. Probably because, like fractals, no matter how you look at, no matter from which orientation, no matter from what size, it will always look the same. Little things forming into big things. Light. It shines from stars and reflects from planets. It permeates the universe. A ray of light could beam across the universe if it wasn't interrupted. Unfortunately they are interrupted. Thought history stars have been shinning and planets have been echoing light. Low level light must be doing all sorts of collisions in the universe. What are the effects? When light from planets x, y, z, ..., n constantly vie for the same piece of space surely the loser goes somewhere. Where? All energy flows within a continuum (the energy spectrum). All matter is just a different combination of atoms. Question: is matter energy at rest? If so, then all matter is energy, which makes sense since they are convertible. If matter and energy are the same. Then in the universe only force influences. This suggests a continuum of force. "Gravity"/magnetism and at a small level: electro weak/strong and nuclear. What I'm suggesting: "space" is forces, all in space is energy/matter and is influenced by space. Energy/matter do not influence each other, and do not influence space. No...that's wrong, matter does influence space at least on the atomic scale. Well, I need to think about this a little while. Basically picture the universe as two parts: the topography and the stuff on/in/around/within this topography. Nothing can come out of nothing, nothing can go back to nothing. --PERSIUS Only the fantastic has a chance of being real in the cosmos. --HAWKWIND Parallel universe = refection of the universe in each of our minds? If non-space was all vacuum then you would have Big Bangs all over the place--since space itself causes matter to be pulled apart in vacuum. Mass and volume displaces space, whereas only volume displaces water. COBE is finding uniform 2.7535 degrees kelvin radiation background. Has anybody every asked if nature simply can't go below this point. That in nature 0 degrees kelvin might be our 2.7535. And if this is true, what is the significance of the "unnatural" 0 - 2.7535 degree zone. What happens to space or matter at 2.7535 that is different from 0 degrees? I'd like to take a few minutes here and review "probability of the universe itself" again. Lets start off with an infinite number of stars. Of these stars, lets say half have planets (.5*infinity). And lets say 10% of the planets are earth-like (.1*.5*infinity). Then lets say 100% of them have sentient human life (.1*.5*infinity). Continuing: 1 in 6 billion is identical in looks, and further the same 1 in 6 billion is also identical genetically (.000000001*.1*.5*infinity). Another 1% probability (for we are dealing with probabilities here) that the age is the same (.01*.0000000001*.1*.5*infinity). So we've got a probability of .01*.000000001*.1*.5*infinity that another identical person exists as yourself does. The really low probabilities come now: at every instant since you were first formed there were a variety of different things that could have happened to each and every one of your atoms (or cells if it helps). So, we need to multiply time of existence times atoms in the body. Divide this number by 1 and then add it in. .00000...01*.01*.000000001*.1*.5*infinity. Raw math would break down into infinity/infinity or 1. But this isn't math, it's probabilities. The resulting numbers are incredibly (impossibly?) small. And remember, that number of atoms and their probabilities gets multiplied in at each moment of time. And that's the key, that so many events happen each moment of time, that it is unduplicatable. The mere fact that there are "universal constants" suggests a steady-state universe. COBE has found the microwave background radiation to now be smooth to one part in 100,000. Meaning that the early universe was extremely smooth. The higher this value gets, the better the chance of a steady-state universe. I think the temperature (3 degree kelvin microwave background) is the universe's "base state", and that tempatures can't naturally get lower than that. Thus nothing would ever "completely stop" in the universe. To be perfectly honest folks, I think the big bang theory and the theory that black holes are infintely dense and the theory that the universe started from a single infinitesimal point rank up their with psyhics, backward time travel, and gods--for the brain dead. The key to the big bang has always been the red shift. If we find another reason for the red shift of light from galaxies- -the big bang will be finally buried. So, let's start off with the opposite assumption: the galaxies aren't moving away from all other galaxies. Our galaxy and its neighbors, most astronomers think, are hurtling through space at more than a million miles per hour. What's more, our "local group" is not alone. In the 1980s astronomers discovered that hundreds of galaxies, over a region of space spanning tens of millions of light years, are streaming in the same direction as the local group and at roughly the same speed. Where to and why the rush? The answer, it seemed, was that the galaxies were being drawn by gravity toward the center of some enormous concentration of mass- -a Great Attractor--somewhere in the direction of the constellations Hydra and Centaurus. Three years ago Alan Dressler of the Carnegie Institution and Sandra Faber of the University of California at Santa Cruz reported that they had located the center of the attractor. By surveying galaxies even farther away in the Hydra- Centaurus direction, they had found the point at which the streaming motion stopped, and beyond which galaxies began to stream the other way, back toward us and back toward the center of the attractor. With the discovery of 'back-side infall,' the case for believing in the attractor seemed open and shut. Three astronomers at the Mount Stromlo Observatory in Australia want to open it again--and along with it, perhaps, the whole issue of whether the Milky Way itself is rocketing through space. Donald Mathewson, Vince Ford, and Markus Buchhorn have surveyed the same part of the universe Dressler and Faber did but have looked at five times as many galaxies. They have come to the opposite conclusion: 'There is no back- side infall into the Great Attractor,' they wrote in a recent paper, 'which suggests that the Great Attractor does not exist.' Unlike Dressler and Faber, they never found a point where the streaming stopped or reversed direction. As far as 200 million light-years or so, the galaxies still seemed to be streaming the same direction as the Milky Way and at about the same speed. Furthermore, Mathewson points out, a separate survey of galaxies on the opposite side of the sky from Centaurus has found that they too are headed in the same direction, again at roughtly the same speed. If one takes all these measurements at face value, then, there is not a stream but a river of moving galaxies, stretching hundreds of millions of light-years from one side of the sky through our own galaxy to the other side, and disappearing over the horizon toward a Great Attractor that, if Mathewson is right, still remains to be discovered. Only now, to keep all these extra galaxies in motion, it would have to be even more massive than the 10,000-trillion-sun figure Dressler and Faber had suggested. Mathewson finds that scenario hard to swallow. It is possible, he admits, that a Really Huge Attractor lurks beyond the measurement horizon. It is also possible that he has mininterpreted his own complex data and that the original Great Attractor lives; that is what Faber believes. But Mathewson suggests a heretical alternative. If these galaxies are moving in the same direction and with the same velocity, he argues, maybe it would be easier just to say that none of them, including our own Milky Way, are moving at all. Maybe the 'dipole' pattern in the background radiation, which has been taken as direct evidence for our galaxy's motion, is really a huge pattern imprinted on the the universe itself.[135] COBE It's a bit earlier for me to comment on the hoopla about the COBE discoveries, as I haven't seen the evidence yet. What I have seen is what, frankly, looks more like climate maps. My understanding was that COBE passed the "big bang is no" point last month (Feburary). My understanding was also that COBE's measurements involved finding deviations in the background radiation. And I had thought COBE was looking for "x deviations per y"--that is, not mapping the deviations-- just trying to find one, and it's rate. Even if I was wrong, and it turns out that this long delay was to calibrate or cool its instruments down low enough, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because the realm of science is based on the realm of logic. The big bang could not occur because of the classic chicken and egg problem. It's as simple as that. However, I link to think of the fault as being on the other end. If the universe expands, it's expanding into something. They must count this something as the universe as well. It does no good showing an expanding universe expanding into something and saying it need not exist because of some mathematical formula. What I find particular humorous is how these guys think they can discern the nature of the universe when we haven't even gotten past our own solar system. Einstein envisioned a universe they had never thought of. Only after he did, did they know what to look for. It's the same now--they rely only on what they expect to find. Too many are towing the big bang line, ignoring ideas about alternatives and how to explore those. Too many people believing only one idea slows development in the whole field, and is the reason paradigm's in the field fall so loudly when a new discovery takes place. A little imagination--examine all possibilities, not just those that fit a theory. Physics When an atom decays (beta decay) the atomic number of the of the nucleus (the number of protons it contains) increases by one. Universe Also the electron will fly off at different speeds sometimes fast, sometimes slow. The neutrino is responsible for the speed. A neutrino and an electron is emitted off a neutron when beta decay occurs, and the amount of energy each gets (the more energy the faster the speed of departure) is random. Neutrinos are particles that have no charge, and little or no mass. The nucleus of the atom recoils against the departing neutrino's motion. Neutrinos travel and rarely hit other particles (they easily pass through all matter). This neutrino is known as the electron neutrino. There are two other forms of neutrinos: the muon neutrino and the tau neutrino. Only the muon neutrino has been produced and detected in the laboratory. When a neutrino strikes an atom of chlorine it turns it into argon 37 (radioactive), when it strikes a gallium atom it turns it into a form of radioactive germanium. Inverse beta decay is when a neutrino strikes a proton yielding a neutron and an antimatter electron (a positron). The positron flies off and should strike an electron quickly and annihilate each other.[25] [Antimatter is] just matter with its electric charge reversed--an anti-proton, for example, is merely a proton with a negative charge--it's unknown in the natural universe. And when created in a laboratory it has a tendency to vanish in a blaze of elementary particles as soon as it comes in contact with matter [its positive form, not some other type of matter].[26] Conceivably an anti-matter universe could develop. When this universe hits a matter universe what happens? Maybe matter and antimatter destroy each other--perhaps leaving a tiny repelling force or merely a lot of energy that can become a repelling force (through volume area filled?), building up, until large enough that both galaxies move away (not necessarily directly opposite courses?). This could go on forever until the universe shrink to nothing? - so what would be a universal building/expansion part of this? Does a universe, by being anti-deterministic, allow things like tachyons to exist? Edwin P. Hubble found in 1929 that the more distant a galaxy the faster it recedes (from us). On space expanding causing all objects to fly apart from all other objects: Garbage. There would be all sorts of distortions on the quantum level, experiencing distortions of our own matter--which sensors would notice. The galaxies are probably moving, but by the laws of gravity. The galaxies are falling through curved space like all matter does. We should be looking for forces that distort space. If for some reason empty space expands while space with matter does not, this creates some intriguing ideas; including: crumpled space where empty space meets space dominated by matter, empty space pushing matter space, empty space containing all sorts of distortions providing quicker or slower matter travel (light apparently is not affected, but maybe matter is). Note, breaking the speed barrier by changing the form of matter itself. For example, changing electrons to tachyons. Q: does anything ever disappear from existence totally? Or do they just become increasingly infinitesimal (energy/speed/mass/etc.)? Space curves around everything (for example, planets, us) (space is curved by everything). While planets can move and tables stay still, only life can move where it wants. This ability also gives us minuscule control of space around us-- as we warp space wherever we are. Q: can this be enhanced? The minute warping of space is enough to cause a slight pull on objects--but is vastly pulled toward earth so it is unnoticeable. What is space? How is it curving around me? Or through me? Does space curve around an object, or does the body absorb the space that is right on target, reflecting it back out like a barrier to deflect things? Note, non gravity space attracting gravity may lead to a collapsed universe, until encountering another universe's gravity zone? Momentum, it's the force of a moving object that was imparted to that object externally. When you hit a baseball with a bat, for instance, the bat imparted energy onto the ball (the bat lost the energy) and the ball was able to take off. Without forces of resistance the ball would go forever at the same speed. The ball acts as though it was constantly being pushed by the bat at a constant rate of speed. Each second the object (the ball) thinks it's being pushed, although nothing is pushed, it's just moving forward due to its momentum. The ball doesn't have this energy that is momentum. The energy was released with a bang at the moment it was imparted to the ball. It gave the ball direction and speed for its full amount of energy. The ball just continues due to lack of sufficient resistance (until gravity and air resistance takes over). Momentum doesn't warp space. It rely's on the object (eg. planet) to do that job. It's the actual warping of space that slows down speed (the effect of momentum)--since you're literally pushing away space to move through. This warping alters the two factors of momentum: speed and direction. If gravity curves and warps space then it must be short range because if a planet had curved-space to flow in for it's orbit, momentum wouldn't keep it straight--if gravity came off the warping would be gone too--and momentum would take it straight as it is warping. That is, each object in space warps space around it. The warping isn't like ripples in a pool, but a smooth pattern more like a crater. Space nearest the object is curved toward the object most, as you move farther away from the object space becomes less curved (diminishing returns). A planet rotating the sun. Each has space curved toward itself, each is drawing the other closer. What keeps them apart? Momentum. The planet's momentum wants it move straight (tangent to the sun), the sun want's the planet to collide, you end up with an orbit. Q: shouldn't this mean that space in solar systems and especially close to the sun and first few planets is thinner than "normal" (empty) space because the area is so constantly used? Wouldn't this then mean that speeds of travel would be slower, take longer, in normal space? If they did, then objects would appear farther away, proportional to their distance, than they do now. On the other hand, most used space (eg. that occupied by things like: planets, tables, chairs, us) have highest rate of active use, but are "thicker" space. More compressed, more compact. Relation: compact space = active space. Relation: spacial density : spacial activity. Empty space = no activity. Full space = lots of atomic activity. As a light (ray, beam) atom goes through space: 1) space where that atom is at contracts, 2) then atom is forced onward into empty space, 3) repeat 1. At a point of max compression (for this atom) the atom's center is just past the point of maximum influence (or perhaps atom is warped/squashed) so that it is forced through the next infinitesimal point on and on--movement through space. Movement through momentum. Logically the process of warping space should either draw energy from the planet or draw energy from speed (momentum). This may reduce speed and suggest a denser space. Perhaps: imagine/picture visualize: a round atom in empty space, with a decreasing halo of light around it. The light represents the density of space near this atom, as space was drawn to and warped by the atom. Remember space itself had to move to allow this atom to be put there. Space isn't like water where you add objects and watch the level rise. It's like an enclosed box of sand, pump air into a balloon that is in the sand, and the sand immediately around the balloon compresses. This is an object at rest. Add in motion and the effect looks more like that of a comet. The increased compression of space in front of a moving adds more compression potential to the object. This makes the space farther in front of the object the direction of choice because while the influence of the object is the same in all directions the influence of the warped space is mostly toward the front (the direction of travel). Perhaps the initial extra frontal spatial warping is what is imparted to the ball when the bat hits it. This would give it both speed and direction simultaneously, by simply adding to it's normal warping of space a "cornea" which warps space in a specific direction with a "cornea size/effect" to cause the speed. Modern physicists are accustomed to seeing new particles materialize out of energy in particle accelerators. Near a black hole a similar process should happen; gas falling toward a black hole should heat up to such a high temperature that particles colliding with each other would create other particles. In fact, so great is the gravity around a black hole and so high the density of light that two light rays could behave the same way: photons could collide with each other just as gas particles do, each collision producing an electron and its antiparticle, the positron. Eventually the electron and positron would annihilate each other, releasing a burst of energy that could, in theory, be detected from Earth. An interesting consequence might follow from this exotic reaction: the creation of new matter could deflate the envelope of hot gas surrounding the black hole. If the intensity of light were to exceed a critical level, the photon collisions would run rampant and the creation of new electrons and positrons would ultimately drain all available energy reserves. The gas, having spent all its heat and pressure, would collapse. Once collapsed into a thin disk, the gas closest to the black hole could receive new gravitational energy from other, more remote gas being drawn in. This infusion of new energy could cause the disk to reinflate and start the process anew. The accompanying changes in radiation from the gas as it deflates and inflates would help astronomers locate the black hole and measure its mass. Predicted only in the past couple of years, this "matter-creation catastrophe" has not yet been observed. Astronomers are searching for evidence of such events mostly in the high end of the spectrum--X-rays and gamma rays--since only these rays have enough energy to create particles.[29] This may support a steady-state universe. As the black holes wouldn't be getting ever-larger. They reach a certain point, and then matter approaching gets converted into energy and sent back out into space, to re-coalesce into solar- systems/etc. This is radiation left over from the primordial fireball, which was ten billion degrees Kelvin at one second after the Big Bang. Today, after ten billion years of expansion and cooling, it's only 2.7�. Astronomers can't actually measure the age of the universe directly, but they can measure a quantity called the Hubble constant (denoted by H), which is the current expansion rate of the universe. In the Big Bang theory, the age of the universe is approximately the inverse of the Hubble constant (1/H), so H isn't really constant but is always getting smaller. Numbers happen to be dimensionless--this is, they lack units of measurement. (Plane 5 is dimensionless; 5 m.p.h. is not.) Why is our universe so isotropic and why is it so flay? (A flat universe is one that lies just at the borderline between "closed" and "open," the former indicating a universe that will eventually stop expanding and recollapse, the latter a universe that will expand forever.) The standard Big Bang model doesn't answer these questions other than to assume the universe started that way--isotropic and flat--which strikes many cosmologists as highly improbable.[30] [Note: isotropic=ordered, non-isotropic = chaotic] To drive chemical reactions you need some form of energy, usually heat, and in interstellar space there's not much heat: the temperature there is typically around -440 to - 425 degrees Fahrenheit, or 20 to 35 degrees above absolute zero. One possible source of energy, though, is cosmic rays. If a cosmic ray were to knock an electron off, say, a carbon atom (thereby converting it into a positively charged ion), the carbon would be much more prone to react with, say, a hydrogen molecule. Such ion- molecule reactions are thought to explain much of the chemistry in interstellar clouds.[31] [Note: as may ultraviolet light.] He was particularly interested in the conditions 10^-35 second after the Big Bang, when temperatures in the embryonic cosmos were dropping below 1,000 trillion trillion degrees. That was the moment when grand unification came to an end; when forces and particles, formerly indistinguishable, assumed their separate identities. New observations have shattered the old doctrine that the universe is homogeneous, with galaxies and clusters of galaxies scattered uniformly through space like a mist. Today's astronomers are discovering that galaxies are distributed in a curious pattern: they seem to sit on the surface of huge, nested bubbles. Inside the bubbles are enormous voids, as much as 250 million light-years across, where few if any galaxies are found."[34] [note: what we really should be studying is why those few stars/galaxies left in the darkness are still there - perhaps an advanced race?] . . .the [big bang] model is based on general relativity, Einstein's tremendously successful theory of gravity. Relativity positively requires an expanding universe to have started off with a pointlike bang--provide certain assumptions are true. One crucial assumption is that gravity is the dominant force in shaping the cosmos. Another is that the universe today is smooth; that is, that the distribution of matter of the large scale is everywhere the same. That second assumption has always been problematic. At most levels the universe is clearly not smooth; it is clumpy. Matter is clumped in stars, stars in galaxies, galaxies in superclusters as much as 100 million light-years long. Even though such clumps have long been troublesome for the Big Bang theory--it cannot yet fully explain how they formed--they are not a fatal flaw. The theory requires only that the universe be smooth at the largest scale, over distances of billions rather than millions of light-years. Now, however, it appears that even that assumption may be wrong. In the past few years astronomers have discovered still larger clumps: huge aggregates of matter that span a billion light-years or more, stretching across a substantial fraction of the observable universe. If such clumps exist, Einstein's equations do not require the universe to have once been confined to the head of a pin. But there is an alternative to the Big Bang, one that isn't well known. It is an entirely different view of the nature and evolution of the universe. It is not based on general relativity because, unlike conventional astrophysics, it does not see gravity as the dominant force in the cosmos. Starting from the observed fact that the universe, stars and all, is 99 percent plasma-- ionized gas that can conduct electricity--the alternative cosmology holds that the universe is criss-crossed and sculpted by titanic electric currents and vast magnetic fields. In this electrically engineered plasma universe, the Big Bang never happened; instead the universe has existed for infinite time, without a beginning and with no end in sight. The plasma universe is a vision created not by cosmologists or astrophysicists but by plasma physicists. Its intellectual progenitor is Hannes Alfv굈, an 80-year-old Swedish Nobel laureate. Trained as an experimenter in electrical phenomena, Alfv굈 began in the 1930s to apply his work to astronomy--in particular, to the problem of why the universe is clumpy. In photographs of the Veil and Orion nebulas he noticed that glowing astronomical clumps often take the form of delicate, lacy filaments. He saw similar filaments in the sky over his Swedish home: in the aurora borealis, or northern lights. Most important of all, Alfv굈 saw the same luminous threads in laboratory plasmas. 'Whenever a piece of vacuum equipment started to misbehave,' he recalls, 'these filaments would be there.' Many investigators had analyzed the laboratory filaments before, and so Alfv굈 knew what they were: tiny electromagnetic vortices (Alfv굈 calls them ropes) that snake through a plasma, carrying electric currents. The vortices are produced by a phenomenon known as the pinch effect. A straight thread of electric current flowing through a plasma surrounds itself with a cylindrical magnetic field. This field attracts other currents flowing the same direction. Thus the tiny current threads tend to 'pinch' together, drawing the plasma with them. The converging threads are twined into a plasma rope, much as water converging toward a drain generates a swirling vortex. The plasma rope, or filament, then gets pinched further by its own magnetic field. [Alfv굈] proposed that gravity alone was not responsible for the clumpiness of the cosmos. Instead, vast magnetic vortices, operating through the pinch effect, drew plasma together in space--forming planets, stars, galaxies, and galaxy clusters--just as small vortices do in the lab. Indeed, according to Alfv굈, magnetic pinching, working with gravity, is much better at concentrating matter than gravity alone. Unlike gravity, the magnetic force on a plasma thread increases with the velocity of the plasma. That leads to a positive feedback: as threads get drawn into a vortex, the plasma moves faster, which increases the force on the threads and pinches them even tighter. In addition, a contracting mass tends to spin faster and faster, and the spin generates a centrifugal force that resists the contraction. Magnetic filaments can carry away this excess spin, or angular momentum. Thus they allow a much greater contraction. For a long time Alfv굈 didn't get far with these ideas: astronomers just didn't believe the tenuous plasma of space could carry giant electric currents. But things began to change in the late 1960's, as space probes explored the solar system. The probes showed that Alfv굈 was right: electric currents and magnetic filaments are present in space. They were first detected near Earth, where currents flow along the lines of the geomagnetic field. (The aurora is light given off by atmospheric atoms that have been struck by particles in these currents.) Later the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft detected currents and filaments around Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. The space probes "completely changed the preexisting theories about the magnetic fields and surroundings of all three planets," says Alex Desler, a Rice University space physicist who was the first person to recognize the currents near Earth. Currents and filaments are now known to exist throughout the solar system--a point that even vocal critics of plasma cosmology don't dispute. "No on today denies the importance of magnetic fields and currents in the solar systems and in its formation," says Peebles. "This is now completely accepted." For example, everyone agrees that Alfv굈's filaments explain why the sun is a slowly rotating sphere, rather than a rapidly rotating disk (as it would be if gravity alone had shaped it). Filaments connected to the young sun slowed it down by transferring spin to the planets and thereby allowed it to contract into a sphere. For Alfv굈 the acceptance of his ideas about the solar system is only the first step. "If we can extrapolate from the laboratory to the solar system, which is a hundred trillion times larger in extent," he asks, "then why shouldn't plasma still behave the same way for the entire observable universe--another hundred trillion times larger? Why should gravity alone dominate the largest scale?" Indeed, there is already good reason to believe that electromagnetic filaments are important at the next scale up from the solar system: the scale of a galaxy.[35] When Albert Einstein completed his general theory of relativity 65 years ago, he made an intriguing prediction: experimenters would discover that time passes more slowly on earth than in outer space, where gravity is weaker. The stronger a gravitational field, Einstein said, the slower a clock would run. This aspect of relativity has since been proved many times in the lab. Now researchers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts and NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama have tested Einstein's prediction by timing a clock in space. They did it by lofting a 90-pound atomic clock 6,200 miles above the earth aboard a Scout rocket. After lengthy analysis of the data radioed back to earth, they report in _Physical Review Letters_, they were able to measure the relativistic effect to within .007 per cent, almost 200 times as accurate as any previous measurement. Their conclusion: operating in a weaker gravitational field, the clock speeded up. Had it stayed in space, it would have gained one second every 73 years, just as Einstein's theory predicts.[36] Released during the fusion process are fast neutrons that can induce radioactivity in the walls of the plant by a process known as neutron activation. After a relatively short exposure to energetic neutrons, many materials weaken and fracture. But a Fusion Materials Test Facility is being Built at Hanford, Washington, to find materials that will stand up to neutron onslaught.[37] Conducts experiments that take only one ten-millionth of a second to run:. . .fires electron beams into high- energy plasmas and studies the radiation that emerges. Plasmas are gases in which the electrons have been liberated from the atoms; the type [of plasma used] are so hot that the freed electrons zing through the gas at nearly the speed of light. Plasmas make up about ninety- nine per cent of the matter in the universe. The work helps astrophysicists understand how plasmas function in nature, as in pulsars and quasars. For applied physics, we have to find ways of producing high-power electromagnetic waves in the high-frequency ranges of the spectrum [one use would be for better radars].[41] Tachyons' most obvious transgression is that they go faster than the speed of light. On the face of it, that would seem to disqualify them from existing. But even tachyon-hating physicists know there is a loophole in the theory of relativity. Einstein showed that no material object can reach the speed of light. Nothing in his equations says that the object can't go faster. But since no object can get to the speed of light in the first place, it certainly cannot exceed it. But what if an object were already moving faster than light from the moment of its creation? Then it would never have to cross the forbidden barrier at all. And that is just the idea behind tachyons. Of course, since tachyons have to follow the same rules as everything else, they could never reach the speed of light, either. It's just that for them light speed would be impossibly slow. The second problem with tachyons is that they have what physicists call imaginary mass. That means that when the number representing the mass of a tachyon is squared, the result is a negative number. That's an acceptable state of being in higher mathematics, but it isn't supposed to turn up in real life. Worst of all, tachyons can violate time order, so that two observers might disagree on which of two tachyonic events came first. That can lead to so- called causality problems. If, for example, one observer sees a tachyon fired from a hand-held tachyon gun at point A and disintegrate at a target at point B, another might see it leave in reverse, with the tachyon leaving point B and entering the gun at point A. How, ask physicists, could the observer explain such a nonsensical chain of events. No one has ever found any evidence of a tachyon's existence. In the late 1920s the British physicist Paul Dirac created the Dirac equation, which predicted with uncanny accuracy how electrons should behave. Unfortunately, it also pointed to the existence of particles with negative energy. Then, in 1932, Carl Anderson discovered the positron--identical to the electron in every way, except that it carries an opposite electric charge. Tachyons keep popping up in the mathematics that are at the heart of the theories that physicists do take very seriously. When that happens, theorists tend to roll up their sleeves and hack away at the equations until the last of the tachyons is banished, at whatever cost to the theory. On theory holds that all the elementary particles we know of in our three- dimensional universe become tachyons when they are examined from a four-dimensional point of view. He proposes that even the slowest of elementary particles whip through this extra spatial dimension at faster-than- light speeds. Unlike classical tachyon theory, Davidson's ideas don't require a tremendous leap of faith into forbidden territory; rather, the equations that describe these higher-dimensional tachyons fall out neatly from the much-loved theory of general relativity. Even better, Davidson has found that higher-dimensional tachyons provide a sway of deducing certain properties of the fourth dimension that physicists are normally forced to just assume. Einstein's theory of general relativity predicted an expanding universe, and he, horrified at the thought, reworked the equations until that prediction had been expunged--an exercise he later referred to as the greatest mistake of his life. Part of the causality problem is how could observers tell whether a tachyon gun was hooting or swallowing tachyons.[46] According to quantum theory, empty space is not empty at all; it is suffused with fluctuating fields of energy. And although physicists can't decide whether the total energy in the vacuum should be positive or negative, they agree on one thing: the energy out to be huge--80 figures to the left of the decimal point, in the units in which such things are measured. Since energy is equivalent to mass, the energetic vacuum should be exerting a gravitational force. If the cosmological constant is large and negative, it should be supplementing the gravitational attraction of ordinary matter; and the universe, instead of continuing to expand in the aftermath of the Big Bang, should be collapsing toward a Big Crunch. On the other hand, if the cosmological constant is large and positive, it should be generating a kind of antigravity, a repulsive force that would cause matter to fly apart so fast that it could never clump together to form galaxies, including our own. Clearly neither of these cases is true, and thus the cosmological constant, be it positive or negative, is not large. In fact, measurements of the expansion rate of distant galaxies suggest that it is exactly zero, and that quantum theory--the most successful theory in physics--is in this instance, at least, spectacularly wrong. What's more, even a relatively small constant would noticeably slow or speed the rate at which distant galaxies move away from us. Apparently physicists have missed something fundamental about the universe, some process that ensures that all the different components of the cosmological constant, positive and negative, add up precisely to zero. [Einstein] described gravity as a curvature of space-time induced by mass-energy. But when he tried to apply his theory to cosmology, he ran into the same problem that had bedeviled Isaac Newton: the gravitational attraction of matter should cause the universe to collapse. Although Einstein's equation also allowed. . .for the universe to be expanding. Hubble discovered that the universe really is expanding: galaxies at the farthest reaches of the universe are receding from our own at near-light speeds. [See stuff about spaceship and light elsewhere is this document.] Uncertainty principle. In its most familiar form, the principle states that the position and velocity of a particle cannot be measured simultaneously with unlimited precision; the more precisely you determine one, the more indeterminate the other becomes. Significant only at the subatomic scale. But the principle also applies to other pairs of variables--in particular, to energy and time. What it says in this case is that the precision with which you can measure the energy of any system, such as a piece of empty space, is limited by the duration of the measurements; the shorter the time, the greater the imprecision. And this indeterminacy can never be resolved simply by more accurate measuring instruments; it is inherent in the system itself. Over a short enough time the system can assume just about any energy--and it does. In a world ruled by quantum mechanics, the energy of the system in any fleeting instant can be seen only as a wavelike fluctuation. As a consequence, the vacuum of empty space is not empty; it is pervaded by fluctuating fields of energy that, when large enough, manifest themselves as particles--individual photons, for example, or particle pairs consisting of an ordinary electron or quark and its antimatter twin, which burst into existence and then annihilate. The vacuum is thick with these short-lived 'virtual' particles. It looks empty only because each particle's visit to existence, according to the uncertainty principle, is so infinitesimally brief as to be undetectable. But the effects of these virtual particles en masse may be detectable. Virtual particles ought to have one effect in particular: their energy ought to warp space. [Perhaps large tracts of empty space provide FTL travel?] Depends on how often virtual particles appear in a given volume of space, and it also depends on the types of particles. Virtual quarks and electrons have much the same effect their 'real' counterparts: they cause space to contract. But virtual photons, or any other force-transmitting particles, have the opposite effect: they cause space to expand. The [wormhole] concept emerged from mathematical tinkering with the equations of quantum cosmology, which represent modern physics' tortured attempt to apply the uncertainty of quantum mechanics to gravity and to the universe as a whole. [To me, this is another indication that gravity does not rule the universe.] Just as quantum mechanics says there is a certain probability that particles can appear from nowhere in a vacuum, quantum cosmology says there may be a certain probability that a small chuck of space and time will suddenly pop into existence. [No doubt inversely proportional to the odds that this part of the theory is wrong.][47] Quark, etc. testing may be not be concrete--as they aren't taking into account the "space" at that point. That is, we don't have an accurate view of what "space" really is-- especially when there's no matter in it. Q: Why is there more positive matter than negative matter (which is immediately annihilated with a positive brethren)? Is it just our number system, that our positive matter may really be negative matter, that we just cannot tell? Presumably somewhere there is much negative matter, where is it and what is protecting it? Another Zeno story: ...no matter how close a runner is to his destination, he must always run half the remaining distance first, then half the remaining half, and so on; because there are an infinite number of half distances, the runner never arrives at the finish line." "In 1989 physicist Wayne Itano and his colleagues at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder became the first to unambiguously observe the quantum Zeno effect. The group trapped 5,000 beryllium atoms in a magnetic field and exposed them to radio waves, which, from a quantum mechanical point of view, gradually transform the atoms until they are in an excited state. To determine how many atoms had actually made it to the new state at any particular time, Itano's team looked at them with a short pulse of laser light. The pulse had no effect on excited atoms, but those atoms still making the transition instantly absorbed and re-emitted a small amount of the light. Thus, by measuring the amount of light re- emitted, Itano's group could calculate how many atoms had made the transition. As it turned out, when the team waited a quarter second before turning on the laser, they found that nearly all the atoms had made it to the excited state. If, however, the researchers preceded that quarter-second pulse by a pulse sent in halfway through, after one-eighth second, they found that by the end of the quarter second only half the atoms had made the transition. If they sent in four pulses over the quarter-second interval, the final proportion of excited atoms dropped to a little more than one-third. With 64 pulses, scarcely a single atom made the transition.[99] Answering these Zeno questions just might solve Einstein's "not enough energy to go faster than light" problem. It appears that a contradiction exists: normally you could solve the problem by saying that math deals with infinitesimal distances but in the real world there is a limit--that of the smallest particle that makes up the universe. In actuality we are dealing with distance--and the universe isn't made of tiny particles--it's made up of empty space with tiny particles. This suggests that space itself is not continuous. The universe around us consists of three fundamental particles. They are the 'up' quark, the 'down' quark and electron. The known particles can be classified either as fermions or as guage bosons. Fermions are particles of spin 1/2, that is, they have an intrinsic angular momentum of 1/2h, where h is the Planck unit of action, 10^-27 ergsecond. Fermions may be thought of as the constituents of matter. Guage bosons are particles of spin 1, or angular momentum 1h. They can be visualized as the mediators of the forces between the fermions. In addition to their spins, these particles are characterized by their masses and by their various couplings with one another, such as electric charges. All known couplings, or interactions, can be classified into three types: electromagnetic, weak and strong. (A fourth interaction, gravity, is negligible at the level of elementary particles, so it need not be considered here.) Although the three interactions appear to be different, their mathematical formulation is quite similar. They are all described by theories in which fermions interact by exchanging gauge bosons. The electromagnetic interaction, as seen in the binding of electrons and nuclei to form atoms, is mediated by the exchange of photons--the electromagnetic gauge bosons. The weak interaction is mediated by the heavy W+, W-and Z bosons, whereas the strong interaction is mediated by the eight massless 'gluons.' The proton, for instance, is composed of three fermion quarks that are bound together by the exchange of gluons.[106] Since they've just about merged all the four forces, perhaps they should revamp the energy spectrum to include forces (gravity, magnetic) as well as electricity. Atoms can also be trapped by laser light. Light can exert forces on atoms and other neutral particles because it carries momentum. If an atom is bombarded with a beam of light of a particular frequency, it will continuously absorb and reemit photons, the quanta of light. As the atom absorbs photons, it will receive a barrage of momentum kicks in the direction that the light beam propagates. The kicks add up to produce a 'scattering' force, which is proportional to the momentum of each photon and the number of photons that the atom scatters per second. Of course, for every photon the atom absorbs, it must emit one. but because the photons are released with no preferred direction, the changes in momentum caused by the emission average to zero. Absorption and emission have the net effect of pushing the atom in the direction that the light travels. The magnitude of this scattering force is quite low. If an atom absorbs a single photon, its change in velocity is tiny compared with the average velocity of atoms in a gas at room temperature. (The change is on the order of one centimeter per second, the crawling speeed of an ant, whereas an atom at room temperature moves at the speed of a supersonic jet.) Decades later workers realized that the photon-scattering rate could be increased to more than 10 million photons per second, corresponding to a force 100,000 times greater than the pull of gravity by the earth. The first dramatic demonstration of the scattering force on atoms was made by two separate groups led by Phillips and John L. Hall at the National Bureau of Standards. In 1985 they stopped a beam of atoms and reduced the temperature of the atoms from roughtly 300 kelvins (room temparture) to 0.1 kelvin. The researchers predicted that an atom could be cooled if it is irradiated from two sides by laser light at a frequency slightly lower than the frequency needed for maximum absorption. If the atom moves in a direction opposing one of the light beams, the light, from the atom's perspective, increase in frequency. The light that has been shifted up in frequency is then likely to be absorbed by the atom. The light that the atom absorbs exerts a scattering force that slows the atom down. How does the atom interact with the light traveling in the same directon? The atom is less likely to absorb the light because the light, again from the atom's perspective, has been shifted down in frequency. The net effect of both of the beams is that a scattering force is generated, opposing the motion of the atom. The beauty of this idea is that an atom moving in the opposite direction will also experience a scattering force dragging it toward zero velocity. By surrounding the atom with three sets of counterpropagating beams along three mutually perpendicular axes, the atom can be cooled in all three dimensions. In 1985 Ashkin, Leo Hollberg, John E. Bjorkholm, Alex Cable and I [Steven Chu] at AT&T Bell Labs were able to cool sodium atoms to 240 millionths of a kelvin. Because the light field acts as a viscous force, we dubbed the combination of laser beams used to create the drag force 'optical molasses.' Although not a trap, the atoms were confined in the viscous medium for periods as long as 0.5 seconds, until eventually they would leak out of the cooling beams. Currently atoms can be cooled to a temperature with an average velocity equal to three and a half photon recoils. For cesium atoms, it means a temperature lower than three microkelvins.[127] For a while now some researchers have suspected that fractal patterns are a sign of nature's frugality with energy. In the case of rivers, at least, MIT researchers have found evidence that this theory is true: a river's inclination to expend a minimum amount of energy--as evidenced by its willful failure to cut a straight channel to the sea--inevitably gives a river network fractal appearance. Rafael Bras, a geophysicist at MIT, and his colleagues started with a computer model that initially didn't look like a river at all--it was just an arbitrarily branching pattern of short lines. They super-imposed the pattern on an artificial watershed, in the form of a grid of small squares, or pixels. Each pixel was assigned a specific flow direction for the small branch of the pattern it contained. Pixels linked by flows in the same direction, representing a straight, fast-running river, were assigned a higher enery value than pixels connected by meanders. The researchers then let the model find its lowest-energy state by trial and error. At every time step the computer program randomly changed the flow direction in one pixel and then measured the total energy of the model. If the altered pattern's energy was less than the original's, the process was repeated. Otherwise the computer rejected the change. The program stopped when its random changes no longer reduced the pattern's energy. 'What we saw was that once the energy minimization was carried out, we ended up with networks that followed the geometric pattern of river basins,' says Bras. 'But most important, they ended up having fractal structure.' In particular, the computer flow patterns had a fractal dimension--a measure of curviness--similar to real rivers. Are other fractal patterns in nature the result of energy savings? 'To say energy minimization is applicable to all fractal patterns is a leap of faith at this moment,' says Bras. 'But the idea is certainly tantalizing.'[131] James Yorke likens his research to riding an elephant. 'You pull the reins and see what the elephant does,' he says. Yorke is a mathematician at the University of Maryland, and the 'elephants' he is trying to rein in are chaotic systems. 'People have talked about chaos for fiteen years,' says Yorke, 'but no one has talked about controlling chaos.' In a recent experiment, Yorke and some colleagues showed for the first time that it is possible to control and perhaps even exploit chaos. Chaotic systems--the weather is the classic example--are characterized by what mathematicians call 'extreme sensitivity to initial conditions.' This property, sometimes called the butterfly effect, means that small disturbances (such as the flapping of a butterfly's wings) can have disproportionately large consequences on a large system (such as the weather). Yorke and his colleagues at Maryland and at the Naval Surface Warfare Center took advantage of the butterfly effect in their experiment. They anchored the base of a thin strip of stiff magnetic tape and stood it upright in a changing magnetic field. As the magnetic field varied, the tape alternately buckled and stiffened chaotically, meaning that any one point on it was oscillating unpredictably. A photoelectric cell kept track of the oscillations of one point and fed its position to a computer, which in turn mapped out how each variation in the magnetic field affected the path of the tape. The researchers' goal was to get the tape to oscillate on a predetermined path between two particular positions a fraction of an inch apart. They did this by having the computer adjust the magnetic field ever so slightly, once every second, to gently nudge the tape into the desired cycle. Yorke compares the process to guiding a satellite into a stable orbit by firing small thrusters. A non-chatoic system, on the other hand, might be compared to a supertanker-- it's easier in principle to steer, but it takes more energy. Yorke's experiment suggests that chaos might be not only tamable but actually beneficial, because chaotic proesses might be controlled with minute, carefully timed prodding. 'In the long run we would like to be able to control industrial processes, such as in chemical plants,' says Yorke. 'When you pour a lot of chemicals into a vat, reactions go on at different rates in different parts of the vat'--a chaotic process that one might control and speed up by slight adjustments to the rate at which the chemicals are mixed. The catch is that you'd have to map out in advance, as Yorke's group did in their experiment, what effect each slight adjustment would have--and a vat of chemicals, or any other bit of real-world chaos, is considerably more complex than a ribbon of tape. Chaos, in other words, may take less energy to control than non-chaos; but it will also take more knowledge.[132][sounds like any standard fine-tuning process--start with generalities, then move in deeper as technology and knowledge become available--doesn't mean you can't make use of the chaotic system in the meantime] 23 For decades, physicists have known that when a 23 superconductor is cooled to temperatures very close to 23 absolute zero, it shields itself from magnetic fields. 23 It does so because the field induces electric currents at 23 the surface of the material that prevent the field from 23 entering the interior. At room temperature, magnetic 23 fields can permeate a superconductor, and the material 23 resists the flow of current. But somewhere between room 23 temperature and absolute zero, some materials, including 23 all high-temperature superconductors, neither completely 23 shield nor readily admit magnetic fields. As the field 23 pushes its way into the material, it spawns vortices of 23 electric current reminiscent of water swirling down a 23 drain. The vortices in a superconductor extend from one 23 surface of the material to the opposite side. The 23 magnetic field, or more specifically magnetic flux, can 23 enter the material through the vortices, but the 23 remaining regions are shielded. The number of vortices 23 is directly related to the strength of the magnetic 23 field.[145] 23 Chaos theory is looking increasing important. As well as 23 increasingly powerful. For chaos systems seem to be 23 optimized least-energy states. Which is one method of 23 measuring optimization. These chaotic structures also seem 23 manipulatable either with the right things at the right 23 position, or more promising merely a small percentage of 23 what's necessary anywhere in the structure seems to effect 23 the whole--usually changing the very nature of the results as 23 time goes on. Gravity Matter (atoms, molecules, you, me, the planet, etc.) is made up of little things I'll call "Quantum physics". Within quantum physics, there are quantum particles, quantum energies, quantum accountants, quantum mail-room clerks, and who knows who else. Quantum phsysics is made up of little quantum things, so little, we can ignore it here. Space, without matter, is nothing more than a big black area with quantum physcis flowing through it. Quantum physics, and space, are one and the same thing. Reality is Space with matter flowing through it. When you drop an object in water, the water moves away to give the object room--unless the object being dropped in is water iteself. In space, all matter is made up of quantum physics, just like all space is. So when you drop an object into space (such as a planet) it doesn't displace space. Gravity, however, is the visible evidence that matter is displacing space. Conclusion: matter does displace space. But wait! If we displace sand by dropping a rock on it, or displace water by dropping a rock in it, we're left with "extra" sand or water near the rock (the displaced sand or water). So, we should have "extra" space near matter. Moving objects should slow down near other objects, as they are passing through regions of "thicker" space. This is not happening. The higher you drop a rock, the faster and harder it hits when it reaches the planetary surface. No, instead of slowing objects down, matter causes them to speed up, to be attracted at a faster rate based on such things as mass types. Newton. Einstein came along, and pointed out that it wasn't matter that was responsible for these effects, but space itself. That matter was "warping" space near it. So that objects of matter moving near each other followed these warpings and moved close together. This warping is accomplished from the center of the object outward, most warping at the center, least warping at the sides, and the amount of warping is based on the objects mass. Thus the earth, if it's mass stayed the same when hollowed out, would still show the exact same gravity. Hold on here. Matter just warped space, and is primarily clumping that space at the center of the object? Quantum phsics has many laws, and I'm sure one of them is that you can only clump so much matter at any one point. But this note isn't about black holes made that way. As this theory goes, we've just "stretched" space near matter. The space around objects was "stretched" by the space making up an object. Much like a sponge in water--it absorbed whatever water it could. What I'm saying: the quantum physics of the matter "drew in" the qauntum physics of the space around the matter, because, for some reason, quantum physics needs more space when it has more matter. The next question: where did all this "additional" quantum physics space goto in the matter/object? Did it go to the middle, the sides, or distribute itself evenly? Just as the quantum phsyics of space and matter are fighting among each other for domminance, so is the quantum physics of the matter/object itself. Atoms, while being tiny, are far bigger than quantum physics. Throughout matter, each atom has absorbed (and stretched) the space/quantum physics around it. Similarly for molecules, ants, and continents. Indeed, it's this stretching of space by the atoms that probably causes the need for "more space" from outside the object/matter. Quantum physics, it seems, likes to maintain a balance. Well, all the above is to point out two things: 1. space is not "nothing", and 2. space stretches. Moving on. What is "stretched space"? Merely quantum physics stretched out a little bit. In some places in this stretching, there won't be any quantum physics at all. What happens when quantum physics/space is no longer there (after being stretched)? Not much, it is in a 3 dimensional environment after all. Just like water rushes in to fill a void left by you removing some of it, so does space. Even though the whole area has been stretched, when a "hole" appears, it'll draw in the stretched space first, causing a ripple effect outward, eventually leading to space/quantum physics outside the object/matter to be pulled in. However, where this "hole" appears, there is no law, there is no resistance, and because there is a "natural" need to fill this "hole" with matter, it will accept quantum physics (or it's larger form, matter) at a very high speed. So, if someone can find a way to stop quantum physics (perhaps with magnetism) then it's possible to build a capsule in which there is no space, no quantum physics. What will happen to anything that enters this capsule, or the capsule itself, is for future speculation. I suspect that these "holes" happen all the time among the atomic world, that it's a "natural" moving about of energies. Noting incredible, nothing unique, just the way things are. Indeed, this may explain the "Heisenburg uncertainty principle"--which has components of quantum physics appearing and disappearing. Black holes provide something of interest. It keeps taking on matter, without giving off a whole lot of space/quantum physics. It's certainly not compressing it tighter and tighter--there's only so far you can pack stuff together. Another unknown: whether stretching stops when the object equalizes with the space around it, or whether the space around it can stretch only so far. I suspect space can keep stretching. This would make the area between two black holes that are close very interesting. I suspect that the distribution of quantum physics/space/gravity within objects is greatest towards the sides. Because the same effects the object produces outwardly from the survace, also acts inwardly--stretching the center out to the sides. This is because there's so much more matter making up a "shell" of an object rather than it's central areas. In normal objects, this isn't a problem, as there's plenty of space for new quantum physics/space/matter to filter down to the center. But in black holes, this may not be the case. The centers of black holes may therefore be "holes" in space. I further suspect these holes provide "instantaneous" movement to another location in space. Because any matter entering this would be speeded up far beyond light, it's logical to assume it would then be able to "jump" to another location in the universe. It also helps that the only matter it's likely to see is highly compressed matter. This doesn't happen with "loose" objects because they can obtain equalization, whereas black holes everything comes in, little comes out. It's also comming in constantly, whereas with a planet, say, it would equalize since there is no matter continuly being added, and it's not highly compressed. If a black hole stops receiving matter, it too will eventually equalize. This "location" that the matter comes out would be some point in space--look for a spot in space that's spewing energy. Also, this may change, since it's location would be based on the amount of matter entering (and perhaps the size of the black hole itself?). So it might actually appear as a "tear" in space that's spewing energy. Another possibility: black holes are linked by these forces. The lose of energy could take the for of super-strings: the packed paths of inter-black hole connections. I mentioned once that black holes would probably be whats used for "mapping" in FTL. It may also be possible that linked black holes are the "nodes and network connections" of the universe's structure itself. I guess this theory also is saying that "gravity" only effects a small area. But that the effects of these small alterations, can effect a large area as the mass of the matter/object is increased. Logical, as more space is compacted into a smaller area with matter/objects. In sum: remember that matter is only clumped together space, and when this space moves, it requires the space it moves through to to pass through it, to do this, all moving matter must be able to interact with the space around it. Perhaps, even, that clumped up space that makes up matter is also contantly changing as it shifts space through its quantum physics--perhaps the "space" that made up us last year, is now a light year distant as we've moved through the universe. After all, in this universe, nothing is at rest--we know atoms are hopping around, but quantum physics may not be able to hop, only to change form, first attaching to the clump of matter that comes near, then pulling away from that clump of matter as it "passes" by. 23 I think those working with gravity and gravitational waves 23 should spend some time with multi-dimensional mathematicians. 23 It seems to me that the 3-D visualization process simply 23 fails with gravity--because gravity permeates the objects. 23 By going to higher dimensions (start with 4th and go up), 23 perhaps there exists a computerized realm where the gravity 23 and the object are the two separate objects that they are in 23 the real universe. In the real universe, they are separate, 23 but permeate each other fully, and effect each other. So the 23 goal would be to seperate the objects and gravity, to 23 experiment and examine effects and anything else. Just like 23 you can't visualize 3-D objects with 2D images, you can't 23 visualize 3-D "same space occupying" objects with 3-D images. 27� Neutron stars typically have very powerful magnetic 27� fields that [hide] gravitational [effects].[156] Objects in Perhaps black holes (or more appropriately, black stars) act Space like galactic signposts/nodes in a galactic map/net for traveling via some trans-light method. In which normal matter doesn't matter. Black holes/etc. "lock down" space at that point. Fits w/my mapping view of space. Then two rotating black holes must really produce some interesting effects. If they're revolving around each other--say one smaller and one larger, like planets. Could really stretch and deform space. In two billion years, the Milky Way galaxy will collide with the Andromeda galaxy, our nearest neighbor. Recent reports have it that the Milky Way galaxy is a bar- spiral galaxy (versus a full, more pure spiral, spiral galaxy). That is, it has a prominent axis. Keep watch for information on Supernova 1987A. It has become a very fast and interesting pulsar in the last two years.[27] The star released a ring-shaped puff of gas as much as 10,000 years before it exploded. The debris from the explosion itself will eventually overtake the gas ring.[28] If an atom exists in empty space, and another exists in crowded space than each of these have a different effect. The lone atom's effects won't be felt. The atom that is part of a group will interact with other atoms until the group as a whole has an effect that all the atoms, if isolated, couldn't produce. More of a universal truth than anything else. Every astronomer know how stars form: from collapsing clouds of interstellar gas and dust. They've found what appears to be a ring of massive young stars, surrounded by gas rushing into the ring at a speed of roughly 45,000 miles per hour. The cloud, called W49a, lies 45,000 light-years away, on the far side of the galaxy. The ring of a dozen or so stars at the center of W49A was extraordinary: it was large (about six light-years across), massive (including the gas inside it, about 50,000 times as massive as the sun), and spinning madly (at about 30,000 miles per hour). The sheer size and brilliance of the ring enabled Welch and his colleagues to observe gas motions in W49A by means of the familiar Doppler effect. As a tracer the researchers used the molecule HCO+, which emits and absorbs radio waves at a frequency of precisely 89.1 gigahertz. In the bright radiation coming from the ring, the absorption by HCO+ gas in front of the ring was plain to see--but not at 89.1 gigahertz. Instead the absorption was Doppler- shifted to a slightly lower frequency, indicating that the gas is falling away from Earth and into the ring. Conversely, the radiation emitted by excited molecules behind the ring was shifted to a higher frequency, because the gas there is flowing toward the Earth and, again, into the ring. Since gas seems to be flowing into the central ring from all sides, Welch and his colleagues conclude, W49A must be collapsing under its own gravity. Actually, gravity may not be the only force at work in W49A; the cloud's magnetic field may also have played a crucial role. The collapse, say the researchers, is proceeding from the inside out and has been going on for only about half a million years--not nearly enough time for gravity to suck 50,000 suns' worth of material into the center of an unmagnetized cloud. But if the cloud were stiffened and supported by a magnetic field, a lot of gas could have collected at the center before the gravitational collapse even began. Furthermore, within the cloud, the "news" of the collapse would travel at the speed of sound, and it would be transmitted faster through a magnetically stiffened cloud (just as sound moves faster through water than through air, because water is stiffer). That would allow gas to be drawn into the center faster. Yet even with a magnetic field, says Dreher, the outside of W49A probably still doesn't know that the inside has caved in underneath it.[32] Three astronomers at the University of Arizona say they have found a couple of galaxies that are at least 17 billion light-years away--well beyond the farthest quasar. Because their light has been en route for 17 billion years, we are seeing them during the era when all galaxies were born, shortly after the Big Bang. The only things that existed before galaxies formed--and thus the only things that might be farther away--are dim and probably unobservable clouds of gas. The newly detected "primeval" galaxies may therefore mark the edge of the observable universe. The reason primeval galaxies have not been found is simple. As the universe expands, the most distant objects move away from Earth at nearly the speed of light--a motion that stretches out and therefore reddens their light, shifting most of it into the infrared range. The sophisticated infrared detector chips needed to observe such faint radiation were originally developed for the military, and have only recently become available to astronomers. "We had an array of 4,096 such detectors," said Elston, "which meant we could gather in one night what would have taken 4,096 nights as recently as 1985, when single-chip detectors were state of the art. Elston and his colleagues started using their array last spring, before anyone else. They found the two primeval-galaxy candidates almost immediately, in the same swath of southern sky. Unless they were incredibly lucky, that means the heavens must be peppered with similar objects--just on would expect, if they really are primeval galaxies. The size and apparent brightness of the objects are also in line with what theorists have predicted.[33] [The microwave beams, called masers, that are emitted start] with the birth of massive blue stars that are 100,000 times as bright as the sun and dozens of times as big. As the star fires up its thermonuclear furnace for the first time and its surface temperature reaches 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit, atomic particles are driven off the star into space, becoming an intense stellar "wind" that drives away the surrounding dust and gas left over from the star's birth. This placental cloud speeds outward at hundreds of miles a second, but not smoothly. some of the gaseous molecules in that violent flow begin to form clumps. It is those clumps, each of them bigger than the earth's orbit around the sun, that absorb the star's energy and re-radiate it as intense microwave beams. At any one time, a hundred of these giant masers can surround the newly born star, like fireworks heralding its birth. Because it takes up to a million years for the dust to blow completely away and reveal the stellar glow itself, a cosmic maser is often the first announcement of a newborn star." The masers themselves last for just a couple of years or at most tens of thousands of years, as they gas slows down respectively. Useful for determining distances to stars. Masers have also been found in the twilight (death) of red giants.[39] Within a volume about the size of the solar system, a typical quasar produces the energy of 1000 galaxies, or 10 trillion stars. Some are more than 10 billion light- years away . . . many of them have tiny bright cores from which long jets of matter stream in opposite directions-- a feature characteristic of radio galaxies (so called because they emit prodigious amounts of energy at frequencies that radio telescopes can detect). Radio galaxies are less energetic than quasars, but most of them are not nearly so distant . . . theory that quasars are actually galaxies in their violent infancy. Says [Jeffrey Puschell of U. of CA at San Diego] 'My own feeling is that the largest galaxies start up quietly, go through a quasar stage, and then die off.' Astronomers think that the quasar's radio jets could be produced by hot gas squeezed out of the top and bottom of a thick doughnut of material that is swirling around a supermassive black hole at the center of a young galaxy. As this material is swallowed into the black hole, the galaxy's energy output gradually declines from quasar levels to that of a more ordinary radio galaxy, or shuts off entirely. Still, the centers of many galaxies, including the Milky Way, are believed to retain bizarre traces of their quasar ancestry--black holes.[40] Shrouded by clouds of dust, the center of the Milky Way has long been a mystery. Now the veil is lifting. Using the world's largest radio astronomy facility, scientists have discovered a huge plume of ionized hot gas escaping from the heart of the galaxy. The fiery arc is unlike anything observed before in the Milky Way. It rises from the galactic plane and curls around for perhaps 600 light-years, or 3,500 trillion miles. Each of its filaments of gas is a few light-years wide. The whiplike shape of the filaments suggests that they may be formed by an incredibly intense magnetic field at the galactic core. The question now is: What giant dynamo lies hidden there?[43] Measuring the Doppler shifts of light from different parts of the galaxy determines the velocities of stars. "If a rotating galaxy is edge-on to our line of sight, for example, stars on one side will be coming toward us and their light will be shifted to shorter, bluer wavelengths; on the other side, stars going away will be red-shifted. Most galaxies are found in groups, large or small, called clusters. The clusters in turn seem to form associations with each other called superclusters. On the large scale, these form a distinct pattern. The galaxies, that is, the luminous objects in the universe, are ganged up, it seems, in clumps and chains, with dark deserts of night--voids--in between." Largest clump found by 1983 went on for 700 million light- years. The Milky Way galaxy seems to be about 15 billion years old.[44] Globular galaxy M-87 (spherical). Emissions extend over many frequencies--from radio to x-ray--and most of them derive from a compact source embedded in the core of the galaxy. One of the best candidates for a galaxy with a supermassive black hole in its nucleus (or if not a black hole, some other prodigious engine worth decoding). Moreover, its location at the center of a nearby rich cluster of galaxies makes it an excellent study for astronomers trying to fathom the dynamics of galaxy formation and interaction. Significant amount of M-87's radio emission comes from the jet. The jet's optical emission was strongly polarized. This polarization was thought to be caused by 'synchrotron radiation,' in which high-energy electrons spiral along magnetic field lines in the jet at relativistic velocities. As the electrons are accelerated, they emit radiation. The wavelengths at which this radiation occurs depends on the energies of the spiraling particles. The jet is emerging from the 'north' polar axis. In contrast to the amber glow of M- 87, the jet shines with the bluish-white light of synchrotron radiation: its total luminosity is that of 10 million suns. Lumpy filament approximately 20 arcseconds in apparent length. At an estimated distance 17 megaparsecs the apparent length of the jet corresponds to a projected length of about 2 kiloparsecs (6,500 light- years) from the outer tip to the nucleus of M-87. Astronomers estimate that the jet is only about 15,000 years old, and yet it has already reached a length of 2 kiloparsecs. It must be moving at near relativistic velocities, but because the dynamics of the jet are not yet fully understood, astronomers cannot be certain what that velocity is. Many of the estimates of the jet's velocity stem from models, which place the velocity somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 kilometers per second (although given the length and age of the jet, at a distance of 17 megaparsecs the velocity works out to about 129,000 kilometers per second--43 percent the velocity of light). However, even this may be too slow. Some astronomers point out that many radio galaxies exhibit 'lobes' of strong radio emission on both sides of visible object. They suggest that M-87's jet is visible to us because it is moving more or less in our direction at speeds close to that of light. Relativistic effects cause the emissions from the jet to be preferentially beamed toward us. If there is a jet on the opposite side, it would be invisible to us because it is beaming its emission away from us in the same manner. Almost without exception astronomers agree synchrotron radiation produces the jet's light and radio emissions. Unlike thermal radiation, in which electrons in interstellar gas are energized by hot incident radiation, the synchrotron process energizes electrons by accelerating them through a magnetic field. Because synchrotron emission is not dependent on the temperature of the gas medium but on the energy of the particles and the strength of the magnetic field, synchrotron radiation is said to be nonthermal. In M-87 the synchrotron process begins when electrons are captured in the powerful magnetic field created in the core of the galaxy. The magnetic field accelerates these electrons to relativistic velocities in a spiral path around the magnetic field lines parallel to the polar axis of M-87. As the electrons are accelerated, they emit electromagnetic energy. Because the electrons are moving in a direction perpendicular to the field lines, the radiation is polarized. Through [synchrotron radiation] answers our questions about the kind of radiation we are detecting, it presents us with another problem: How can electrons continue emitting energy as they travel the length of the jet? As energetic electrons emit radiation, they lose energy, and the more energetic they are, the quicker they lose that energy. Typical lifetimes of electrons producing radio energy are a few hundred years, while those generating optical radiation may last twenty or thirty years. Electrons so energetic they emit x-rays last only a few days. The lifetimes of these electrons are far too short for the electrons to survive the journey out from the nucleus to the end of the jet, even if they travel near the speed of light. What, then, is re-energizing the electrons? Suggestions range from shock waves generated when newer plasma collides with older, slower-moving plasma to turbulence forming between the plasma and the interstellar medium surrounding it. Astronomers are fairly certain, however, that the same regenerating process probably occurs throughout the jet because structures evident in radio maps made of M-87 coincide with those in optical and x-ray emissions. Photographs of the jet made with large optical telescopes reveal a lumpy protuberance that resembles a bowling pin. These are only areas that are brighter and fainter, observations suggest the jet emissions may be coming from the surface of the jet rather than from inside. The jet may be a flow of hot gas out from the nucleus, but the part that is lit up may be a thin layer on the boundary of the jet between the hot gas and the external interstellar medium. And one hypothesis is that the zone of interaction [that is, the boundary between the jet and external medium] is what's actually producing the particles that are lighting up the flow. Most jets in active galaxies, astronomers agree, lead to their sources, and the source at M-87's core is bright, too bright to be a typical nucleus. In any telescope the galaxy's starlike nucleus appears to burn right through the haze of the surrounding disk. In that locus of light resides the secret of M-87's incredible power. Astronomers want to know what that secret is. The brightest x-ray emitting region corresponds to a diameter of about 200 kiloparsecs, it gets fainter and fainter, and the edge has never been seen. It smoothly falls off. Spectra of the cluster's gas consists of excessive amounts of heavy metals like iron, neon, and oxygen (besides helium and hydrogen). And what about the center of the center of the galaxy cluster--M-87's mysterious core? Something is relentlessly drawing the gas into the very middle of M-87. It is believed that in the inner 10 kiloparsecs of M-87, the gas is cooling. If the center is cooling and it has less pressure and a lot of gas on top of it, that means gas is flowing inward. But it is flowing in very slowly, over billions of years. The estimated rate is between 1 and 100 solar masses a year. It's conceivable that a small amount of it might power and feed a black hole in the middle. But one shouldn't give the idea that all of the gas goes in the black hole [speculative] because there's no way to get so much mass into such a small area. As you look farther and farther in toward the core of M-87 along the jet, it's like looking at a thin cone. It ends up being opaque out to some distance along the jet at any given frequency. At higher frequencies you can see farther into the core.[45] DIBs--diffuse interstellar bands. Since the 1930s astronomers have noted the existence of unusual features in the light spectra from distant stars: up to 50 dark lines indicating that something is absorbing certain frequencies of light as it passes from the star to Earth. This something, however, does not correspond to the spectral lines of any known element or molecule. Whatever it is, there's a lot of it, all over the place. It's an all-pervading material in the space between the stars, and we've never been able to figure out what it is.[96] The ultraviolet spectrometer [still working on Voyagers 1 and 2] is sensitive to wavelengths between 500 and 1,200 angstroms, which are absorbed by the earth's atmosphere and are not being observed by any other currently operating instrument. Although these wavelengths also tend to be absorbed by interstellar gas, the spectrometer has detected radiation from very hot white dwarf stars, like 'light coming through the fog'... The implication is that there are holes in the tenuous clouds of hydrogen that lie between the stars. Perhaps the biggest surprise has been the discovery of strong ultraviolet emissions from globular clusters, indicating that these ancient objects somehow maintain a population of young, hot stars. A continuous stream of charged particles, the solar wind, creates a huge, bubblelike structure known as the heliosphere. The solar wind carries the sun's magnetic field with it, keeping the solar system relatively free of interstellar matter and hindering the entry of cosmic rays. At some point, the solar wind bumps into denser but slower moving currents of material in interstellar space, forming a boundary called the heliopause. The ~Voyagers~ have also detected an unanticipated fourth component of medium-energy particles. ...These probably are atoms from interstellar space energized by turbulent processes occurring near the heliopause. These atoms constitute the first direct samples of the interstellar medium.[100] Asimov's ~Isaac's Universe Volume One~ hints at creation via near collisions of black holes. I thought this was indeed interesting. What happens when two black holes come near each other? Could the cause the creation of a galaxy? Could they be the cause of new galaxy creation? Two supermassive bodies each trying to pull each other toward itself. I imagine all sorts of potentials exist here. I saw a show recently (April 1991) on PBS called ~The Astronomers~ that concluded with them guessing that a small black hole was orbiting a larger one at the center of some galaxy. Astronomers have long known that when a very large cloud of interstellar gas collapses it may spawn an entire generation of stars. As a result, massive stars are often not scattered randomly across a galaxy but almost always born in litters called associations. A single galaxy can contain hundreds of associations; any single association can contain hundreds of supergiants. Although the stars are all born together, they don't all die together. The most massive ones can go supernovas in as little as a few million years; the longest-lived can last perhaps 30 to 50 million. As each star detonates it sends shock waves outward, pushing the surrounding gas and dust into an ever-expanding shell of matter, Heiles and other radio astronomers reported that they had detected such enormous shells, with diameters of 1,000 light-years, in our own galaxy. They called them superbubbles. Heiles also mentioned a phenomenon related to superbubbles called galactic chimneys... In Ikeuchi's scenario a superbubble expands until it breaches the galactic disk, then bursts outward. Without the surrounding galactic material to restrain it, the bubble erupts violently, sending a fountain of 1.8-million- degree gas jetting hundreds of light-years away. No one has ever directly observed a galactic chimney: the gas flowing from its mouth would be so hot that most of its radiation would be in the form of X-rays, which are blocked by both interstellar gas and Earth's atmosphere. However, Heiles remarked that other astronomers had observed what appeared to be gaping holes in the disks of face-on spiral galaxies. They had also detected hints of vast streamers extending from edge-on spirals, perhaps the cooler material at the periphery of a chimney. The curious formations would be like tunnels into the heart of a galaxy; supernovas shining from deep within such a cavity would be visible only when the chimney was pointed toward Earth. ...Chimney theories are already adding to astronomers' suspicions that they are seeing only a small fraction of the supernovas that occur. McClure and Van den Bergh themselves believe that supernovas may be up to three times more common than previously thought. If this is true, our entire understanding about the intergalactic environment might have to be re-thought. Supernovas act as forges in which heavy elements are formed, and thus if more stars are detonating, more heavy elements are being manufactured.[120] "Hall's team searched for radiation from a dust ring that was predicted to vaporize a few million miles from the sun. Surprisingly they found nothing. Astronomers know that interplanetary dust is common in the solar system and reason that some of it should spiral toward the sun, reaching a scorching zone where it vaporizes. Hall thus expected to detect infared radiation emitted by the burning dust. The negative result was completely unanticipated." [Discover, Jan '92, 20-22 'The year 1991 in science', Bob Berman,][This makes me wonder: perhaps planets don't form till after the sun does. When the sun stablilizes, it's solar winds push dust away from it, this dust mixes up with the dust falling towards the sun- -forming planets eventually. If enough extra material was around, then it all clumps together into a second star--forming a binary solar system.] "The spectrograph analyzes the electromagnetic signature of different types of matter and that the disk surrounding Beta Pictoris apparently consists on two parts: an outer ring of small, solid particles extending billions of miles, and an inner ring of diffuse gas within a few hundred million miles of the star. Understanding the anatomy of the disk, however, was not the same as understanding its origin. 'It's possible that it was shed by Beta Pictoris,' says Albert boggess, ans astronomer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. 'But what I suspect is that the gas comes from the ring of solid particles.'" "If Boggess is right, the gas may be a sign that planets are indeed being born around Beta Pictoris. the gas, says Boggess, would result from the collisions of solid particles in the outer ring accreting into planets that are still too small to see [I don't think so--look at saturn]. During the collisions some of the particles would be vaporized and drawn toward the star. The planets in our own solar system are thought to have formed from countless numbers of such collisions. [again, I don't think so--probabilities of collisions in space are enourmously small--and really would require that a gravitational body be formed before they got started.] The gaseous inner ring appears to contain clumps of matter spiraling in toward the star. These clumps may be comets, diverted from their normal paths by close calls with protoplanets. This also fits with current ideas about the evolution of our own solar system. Gases released from comet impacts may have created Earth's atmosphere and oceans." [Beta Pictoris is a good bet to be a forming solar system with planets.][134] It's been said that around solar systems may be an Oort Cloud--a "cloud" (lots) of asteroids/etc. If this exists, it would provide very nice protection from light speed projectiles. Discover, may 1992, pg 15: Contains a picture of M87--they think it may have a black hole at the center, because of it's large concentration of stars at the center, and a jet of plasma shooting out of the center. This may be proof that black holes don't "infinitely compress" matter--but instead act as recycler's--sucking up old stars, converting it to a plasma, and lauching it to the rim of the galaxy, where it eventually reforms into new stars. It would be a beautiful system. Not only logical, but supports a steady state universe, and provides a reason for color shifts (looking at different angles of each galaxies one or more plasma streams). Over the past decade, with the help of satellite telescopes and new infrared detectors on Earth, astronomers have discovered an entirely new class of galaxies that emit primarily infrared light--but in prodigious quantities. Called ultra luminous galaxies, they are among the brightest objects in the universe. The common assumption has been that the same deus in machina invoked to explain quasars (another type of bright galaxy) would serve in the case of infrared ultraluminosity: to wit, a central, supermassive black hole, which heats gases to a bright glow as they spiral into it. But Philip Solomon, an astronomer at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, says nothing so strange is required. He and his colleagues Simon Radford and Dennis Downes have been studying an ultraluminous galaxy discovered just last year, about 10 billion light- years away in the direction of the Big Dipper, that emits 30,000 times as much light as the Milky Way. The researchers believe it is blazing with light from the unchecked birth of new stars. The evidence is the amount of molecular gas in the galaxy. This gas--mostly compounds of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen--is the raw material from which stars are made. In mature galaxies like our own, gas clouds account for only about 5 to 10 percent of the total mass; most of the rest is already locked in stars, and only a couple of new stars form each year. But in the Big Dipper galaxy as much as 90 percent of the mass is in huge gas clouds. This suggests that the galaxy is young and just beginning to form stars--at a rate of about a thousand a year. Mature galaxies have star birth control: when a new star flames into life, its radiation disperses the gases from which other stars could coalesce. But in ultraluminous galaxies, Solomon says, the gas clouds may be so dense that stellar radiation isn't strong enough to blow them away. Thus the star population explodes, and the stars heat the gas that cloadks them to a bright infrared glow. 'Star formation is very powerful,' says Solomon. 'What a lot of people forget is that a star of about fifty solar masses has a million times the luminosity of the sun. So you can certainly get a lot of power from young, massive stars.[133][note: if these theories collide, I suggest that the infrared may mark the "exchange period"--when so much old-galaxy has been converted to base-matter by the black hole (and resent to the edge of that galaxy-- between when a galaxy can be considered old and when it can be said to be young again.] 27� A typical stony asteroid is traveling at about Mach 45, 27� so the atmosphere doesn't have time to get out of the 27� way. It piles up in front. And there's a near vacuum in 27� back of the asteroid because the atmosphere doesn't have 27� time to rush back in. This creates a tremendous pressure 27� gradient across the object. When that pressure exceeds 27� the strength of the object, it will shatter.[157] Cosmology Dust in space. I think it's more important than we realize. For instance, As more suns explode/etc. we'd expect a dustier universe as time went on. Black holes act as a recycler turning large matter into space dust. But because of their gravity, it doesn't escape into space, but instead reforms into new solar systems. Indeed, there are plenty of "overly dusty" solar systems out there--probably representing a stage in solar system recycling--or maybe it's just because the "spout" end of a black hole is pointing our way. If galaxyies need to go through a "dusty" period, then perhaps the whole universe does to. A self-regenerating universe. If you really want to see the stars, and be awed at the same time--take a look at the maps of the stars they're making. Inspiring! Reminds me of a sponge. I was working on an interesting inductive question: Yes, FTL exists, but "why" should it exist. The answer is, of course, because there are such vast distances between places in the universe. But this still begged the question: "why should the universe create a method of FTL?" Then it hit me: I'd thought of the universe's creation in Big Bang terms--even though I've always believed it's a steady- state universe. And I realized that with the steady-state thinking of myself, that I had not asked the question: "How did the galaxies/etc. get to where they are now?" My answer: that black holes, when compressed to a certain point, not being able to explode, "release" a stream of very fundamental particles. This realease is so fast, or perhaps uses a warp, that it "jumps" to some point in the universe, thus creating the cloud (at it's destination point) which eventually coalesses into a galaxy. I think the universe provides us with another example of fractals. It looks just any other fractal (natural) object. So, just like fractal dirt and rocks which form fractal coastlines, so planets and galaxies form the fractal universe. The cosmological question shouldn't be where do we come from, it should be: what does the universe look like now. Fractals can be formed in a variety of ways. If it's true that all fractal images can be reduced to a single equation, then Stephen W. Hawking may be right, perhaps there is a single equation that defines the universe. It would certainly be on par with the concepts that mathematics are the key to sentience and to communication among the sentient races. My All things are possible. Maybe there was a big bang. Maybe cosmology black holes spew matter into alternate bubble uniververses-- ours being just one of many. Maybe a slight phase shift in matter allows multiple universes in the same space. But I do not believe any of these, they are too "extra ordinary" to really exist. The universe is a chaos-object. Therefore I believe the chaos rule set which has chaos-objects being created to follow the lowest energy usaage. Which means the universe has a lot more control of its energies than we give it credit for. I think Alfv굈's theory about galaxy works is correct. I also think there is a black hole in the center of every active galaxy. This black hole acts as the energy recycler for the galaxy. Breaking matter back into energy and spewing it to the edges of its galaxy where it again collagulates into atoms, molecules, and stars. 23 There are lots of theories about galaxy creation. But it may 23 actually not be what we think--that the older suns are toward 23 the center of the galaxy--and therefore that is where 23 civilizations would first develop. It takes stars exploding 23 to make the real elements (things beyond the gases). It is 23 possible that some sort of out-gasing is in effect. In which 23 the inner stars, through nova's, expel elements out to the 23 rim (us)--thus having the effect of developing life first on 23 the outter edges, and then inward as excess/extra/enough 23 material "rebounds" (or just is left behind while the larger 23 concentrations go out--although the amount would have to be 23 small, or this would indeed insure that the inner solar 23 systems would develop first). Time Time is merely a reference tool. A yardstick by which we measure other things. Einstein understood this also: In a famous letter after the death of his oldest friend, Michele Besso, Einstein wrote to Besso's sister: "Michele has left this strange world just before me, This is of no importance. For us convinced physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is an illusion, although a persistent one."[50] Time is measured in infinitesimal^ states. An infinitesimal^ state is when something changes somewhere in the Universe (say an electron on an atom somewhere in the Universe moved slightly). When the Universe has moved from one state to another time has changed. By definition, if nothing changes time has stopped -presumably for only an infinitesimal^ second. Therefore, one can say that time has stopped, but it carries no meaning as it is just the same as the present [time/state]. Also nothing can be done in this period as any change would lead to the next state [of time]. The present is the current state. The past was a previous state and no longer exists, there is no past-time (as it had existed but no longer exists). In sum, there is no past because the past no longer exists. The future is the next state the Universe is about to enter. Once the universe enters that state, it is in the present. Since the future is not yet in existence, it does not exist. In sum, there is no future because the future is not yet in existence. Therefore, there is no past or future, only NOW, the present [state]. The Universe can never repeat a cycle of states without leading to a known future and to no Free Will. To prevent cycles one must call upon the probability of the Universe itself. A cycle of states are possible on an extremely local level (like having your computer scan the keyboard until you type a character). Much higher/larger things (such as a single human) become harder and as the size/complexity increases the probability of determining the future reduces quickly. Lets say a highly evolved being/race stored a cycle of states of some Universe. If they could recreate the initial state, and prevent outside interference, they could run these events/states repeatedly. Anything within that universe has lost all existence of self - it is not free, since it cannot change anything about its future. If a being cannot change its own future it is not free (lacks Free Will), and is merely a slave or machine - an object in the universe, not a self. This is, of course, on the arguments against any omniscient God. Time is usually measured using some oscillating event--such as a pendulum did. It was confirmed that the farther from gravity you are, the faster time is. Probably because atoms and other atomic interactions happen faster with less gravity, or maybe the wave just propagates faster (speeds up in weaker gravity--the signal changes, but not the Universe). Don't confuse the speed of light with time travel. Just because FTL is doable, doesn't have any implications for time travel. You can travel only in one direction: forward. Simple state mechanics, to go backward would require either the storage or recreation of the entire universe at ever single possible state. Probability of the universe itself rules this out. Moving via FTL simply means you may notice the effect before the cause. Science has always believed that every effect has a cause--this doesn't eliminate that, it just says the cause may be unknowable (especially if you're the observer at whom an FTL missle is aimed). 26 Anti- Stars are born when vast clouds of gas and dust floating 26 Gravity in the depts of space collapse under their own gravity. 26 Astronomers see the evidence for this--dense clouds 26 studded with young, bright stars--all over the galaxy. 26 But they also see somthing more puzzling: interstellar 26 clouds that don't contract and breed new stars, even 26 though they are plainly massive enough to do so. Actually 26 [...] there shouldn't be any clouds in the galaxy today; 26 they should all have collapsed long ago. The clouds are 26 nearly as old as the galaxy itself. 'The galaxy is more 26 than 10 billion years old,' says Mouschovias. 'The time 26 it would take for a typical cloud to form and collapse, 26 in round numbers, is only tens of millions of years, 26 sometimes less. But the coulds exist. So there must be 26 some agent, some force, that prevents them from 26 collapsing and forming stars. Mouschovias thinks that 26 force is magnetism. A very weak magnetic field, just a 26 few millionths the strength of Earth's, pervades the 26 galaxy. It is generated by the orbital motion of 26 electrically charged gas around the galactic center. 26 Puny though it may be, says Mouschovias, the galaxy's 26 field is strong enough to delay the contraction of many 26 interstellar clouds. The idea is not new, but Mouschovias 26 and his colleague Robert Fiedler have now tested it in 26 detail by simulating on a superocmputer the interactions 26 of the galaxy's magnetic field with a could of gas 26 particles. They found that the magnetic field keeps 26 electrically charged particles in the cloud suspended in 26 space; the charged particles, or ions, tend to spiral 26 around the magnetic field lines and thus resist the 26 inward pull of gravity. The ions themselves function 26 something like a police cordon to slow the inward rush of 26 uncharged particles, which aren't affected by the 26 magnetic field. Instead of collapsing in a heap at the 26 center, the neutral particles collide with the net of 26 charged particles and ricochet off in random directions. 26 As a result, says Mouschovias, it takes a lot longer for 26 interstellar clouds to collapse--which is why they still 26 exist in the galaxy today. 26 Great! Simply enough to prove. Once done, we will confirm 26 that it is possible to resist gravity. No anti-gravity force 26 needed. Just smart use of the particles around us. The road 26 is now open to our own anti-gravity vehicles.[154] 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴� SPACE SHIPS Although I cover a wide spectrum here, a lot of the technologies mentioned also have non-space related uses. Examples: force shields for military, teleports for transportation. Space Ships NASA is working on ion engines. They work by striping the electrons off of a substance (like fuel) and then sending the positive and negative electrons down different paths. They meet alternately in the engine nozzle. The ship is pushed at a slow constant speed, that is always building upon the old speed. Versus chemical engines that burn until they run out of fuel and then continue at a constant speed. Ion engines are considered electricity based engines. It looks like a shovel turned upside down, and it has a name befitting a surfboard. Yet a waverider is in fact an experimental design for a space vehicle, and the waves it catches are acoustic, not aquatic. The conventional solution has been to take advantage of another planet's gravitational pull. Using a slingshot maneuver called a gravity assist, a spacecraft approaches a planet and is held by its gravity long enough to absorb some of the planet's orbital momentum. Then the craft is hurled off into space again. Unfortunately, such maneuvers provide only limited control over the angle of deflection. So mission planners trying to bounce a craft in the right direction are, to their chagrin rather like astrologers-- waiting for the proper alignment of the planets before acting. And their ricochet shots often require tortuous routes that add years to the travel time. Life would be much simpler if engineers could only control the degree of bend in a gravity assist. The waverider would come much closer to the planet than would a conventional craft, close enough to dip into the atmosphere. Like any craft traveling though the atmosphere faster than the speed of sound, it would create a shock wave, which is a buildup of pressure in the surrounding air. But unlike other hypersonic craft, waveriders keeps this wave attached to the bottom of the vehicle. Lewis and other enthusiasts have come up with waverider models that could fly upside down in orbit so the force of the wave would press down on the craft, holding it in the atmosphere in the same way that an airfoil holds a car against the road. the craft could stay in orbit until it pointed in the desired direction; then it could beat a hast exit via rocket thrusters. The concept may seem like pie-in-the- sky stuff, but James Randolph of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is willing to stake one of NASA's space probes on it. Randolph is the manager of the Solar Probe program, which aims to launch an observational outpost in 2010 that would be placed 1.3 million miles from the sun's surface. The trip would take six years using plain old gravity assists. But with aerogravity assists at Venus and Mars, Randolph says, a waverider could make the journey in nine months. The usefulness of the wave rider design could go even further. With similar help from Venus and Mars, Randolph says, a planetary probe could get to Pluto in 5 years instead of 15, or to Saturn in 2 years instead of 4. A Mars-bound waverider whipping around Venus could cut the travel time to the Red Planet from a year or more to 130 days. [4 months] That is, of course, if waveriders work as promised. Atmospheric friction will make the leading edges of the craft hotter than the surface of the sun, and materials that can withstand that heat for long periods haven't been made yet. In addition, far-flung missions will require speeds ranging from 25 to 80 times the speed of sound, and that's more than Lewis and other engineers can coax out of wind tunnels now used to test waverider models. What Lewis and Randolph would like to see is an actual waverider test flight at those speeds in Earth's atmosphere. McDonnell Douglas may be able to squeeze a model waverider onto a delta or Pegasus rocket launch within the next three years.[48] Laser boring system--like idea on how atoms travel through space. But laser bore makes ship act like atom. Uses space itself to pull you along, therefore no need to buildup energy to infinity. Perhaps a laser (bore) diffuses through space and causes something behind the atoms of space it just went through--causing an attraction. Thus clearing space for a ship (or with a tight laser beam, a atom). Two possibilities for non-standard gravity-based flight: 1) stop the effects of gravity/control the percentage of effect. Problem: won't allow you to rise? 2) turn the force acting on the ship against itself. This can be done via a device that first stores the force, and then rotates and releases the force (maybe needing to merely slow it down). So, you've just captured a picture of an alien spaceship. What to do next? Well, obviously the goal is to reverse engineer the ship. Step 1: build a mock-up of the ship--to as exact parameters as you can get. Step 2: gather whatever information you can about the capabilities of that ship. Step 3: tell your engineers: "here are the specs, squeeze this capability into that frame, and it can be done". Eventually, it will be. After all, the ship was designed to meet it's parameters by experts--providing a guide for all others. Of course, if aliens wanted to protect themselves, then deception would be best--and they'd probably use a solid sphere--can't tell much about it. (Except that whatever it uses can either be unleashed inside the ship and let out through an opening, or can be set to effect an area beyond where it's stationed (since it needs to effect the area outside the ship, but not the ship itself(?)). Making ships out of rock. Like asteroids/etc. Sure, I've seen it everywhere, but I never really thought of them as ships--bases, yes, but not ships.[126] Engines Engines that are extremely powerful but can't be used in atmosphere/solar system/etc. will need protective system for the engines' power. Ie. a shield around the engine to reduce it's power in atmosphere/etc. That way, need only on powerful "engine that can be always used instead of specific task-oriented engines. Logical to look for ships coated in reflective/silver/mirror surface if their main concern is laser weapons? Telling a race's technology by the ships they drive. Secret of long-term space life is the ability to synthesize food and materials. Both in usable forms, for parts; something like the new "growing" technique recently developed to make plastic parts from CAD files. This means an advanced race would send a small probe and use these abilities to form whatever larger things it's users may have wanted it to create. Such as: probes, miners, battleships, bases, and people (alien people). Maybe an alternative to teleportation? A necessary trick would be to avoid consuming life forms for construction material. Faster Than Faster than light is possible. How I do not know. Such a big Light universe makes the mere light speed seem extremely slow - it is not pretty, so I suspect there is a way. Possibly though, this does not occur naturally. Possibilities: cracks in the structure of space (the curving of space is what causes the appearance of gravity - we ourselves curve space, but it is so small few things attract to us (maybe just a little on their way to the ground). The key seems "what is space itself?" I suspect it is some form of radiation layers (like magnetism). Or perhaps it is considered multilayered like including gamma rays, magnetism, gravity, etc. "What was the material that the universe expanded into?" is not a question since the big bang theory has been eliminated. A possibility is that what appears to us as space and distance may be changed dramatically if can change our dimensionality. If you had a space ship of the type: ----------------------- | |/| |-] <-=| | engine | |\| ----------------------- ^detector ^emitter |----- X ------| If the ship wasn't moving, and you sent a beam of light from the emitter to the detector, the distance traveled by the beam would be X, and the speed would be 300,000 kilometers per second (the speed of light). If the ship was moving forward, the speed of the beam remains the same. The distance traveled by the beam has increased. It increased by the distance the whole ship moved in the time it took the beam to get from the emitter to the detector. The real space the beam covered was greater than X, but the actual space the traveled was the same, after all, it had only to go from the emitter to the detector. If the ship was going the speed of light it would move ahead X, the light beam went X distance in the ship. In reference to the ship's space the beam of light traveled 1.5X. If the ship was going in reverse at the speed of light, the beam would get to the half-way point (in ship space) when the detector arrived. This assumes the inside of the ship isn't affected by the speed of the ship. If the beam is affected you need to consider such things like light leaving the emitter at light speed won't go anywhere with a ship moving forward at light speed. Isn't the solar system, and Milky Way galaxy, moving spaceships in space? Is the speed of light as we know it, the same outside the solar system, or outside the galaxy? Imagine, if you will. You are the captain of an interstellar space ship. Your technology level has not advanced to the point where you can convert yourself and your ship to energy and still maintain coherence. The old trick of scooping hydrogen (or whatever) from large tracks of space in front of you never supplied the energy you need for FTL. The scientists have discovered that they can use the fabric of space for energy (not the fabric itself - but what the fabric is made of). This frees up energy and makes an envelop of truly empty space (possible?). Possibilities: either the ship whisks it's way through this null space because it is null and in front of it, or the ship uses the energy to move itself. Possibilities: The null space behind the ship closes up, or it is necessary to recreate the space (consider it borrowed and that the ship probably requires no energy to move). Logical growth relations: larger engines to produce more speed - logical under normal circumstances, perhaps bigger null envelope = more speed. Smaller ships yield more speed - logical since would provide logical transport growth with technology (ie. you would have trouble sending a large army unless you could shrink the ships, use single-man engines, etc.), this also allows for growth when energy conversion and coherence is discovered - it provides a reward since a single beam (of first direct energy conversion, then compressed energy conversion later) probably is the maximum speed with this type of technology. Then the technology moves onto using the fabric of space itself--which is wholly energy based. Options also point to potential 1d single point type transfer methods. Could an FTL ship drop out of FTL, release a bomb going 99% of light, then go back into FTL? It seems that there must be some natural barrier against this kind of destruction. Probably anything falling below the speed of light drops down to a "normal" speed extremely quickly. How I don't know, perhaps near light warps space really bad. But should this be true, then the reverse is also true--that at some point you get to and past the speed of light rather rapidly. Or maybe you just exit FTL near masses, and that after a short while it drops down to something more "natural". The powerful magnetic fields that confined the singularity opened a small but carefully calculated pathway.[123] [a method for FTL] From space, a single planet looks extremely small in the universe. Perhaps there aren't any protects from FTL stuff. A key to FTL may be gravity. Gravity is faster than light; after all--it affects light. FTL I suspect three items that make up the universe: energy, possibility force, and space. Energy produces force that alters space, and space produces forces that move (and in the process mold/contain) energy. Energy follows "space" (force) and bends space. Although "space" may just be force, leaving only two. Matter is probably energy at rest. Rest being contained by force. I've dubbed this the "B B Bomb" theory. Since to imagine it: picture a space ship, out a front launch bay it shoots little (1 foot round or so) nuclear bombs. It launches a bomb. As the bomb travels through space, it's momentum provides energy to move through space. It's mass causes space to move towards it. It travels from the launch bay at the speed it's designers wanted. It reaches a point in space. Nothings changed, the balance of forces to provide movement keep it going. Boom. It's ordered to explode. Suddenly space that was being brushed aside by momentum and pulled inward by mass no longer finds mass pulling it in--but forces shoving it away. And so, for a short time (as long as the energy lasts), space is pulling away from the exploding bomb. Space at the point of explosion is a little more stretched out than it normally would be. Boom. The ship's been launching these bombs every second. With each explosion space in that area is stretching out--the key is to cause continual explosions to stretch this space further and further out--timing such that the space doesn't have time to contract. Like a balloon as you blow it up, or a slab of metal as the blacksmiths hammer hits it. Thinner and Thinner the area of space becomes. What happens then? I've no idea. I suspect that in that little area you've created a zone of very thin space. Should you run a beam of light through it, it'll go faster than usual. I'm not saying you're "tearing" space and will get some magical door to an area 100 light years away. I'm saying a little are of space is now much more devoid of the forces of cohesion. I suspect that a ship using this process could move faster than light. Except you don't want to do it this way. It's not the bombs that move space. It's the timing. You're pushing space back before it has time to regroup. Therefore, any oscillator should work. My guess: something like a high speed proton beam projector that causes the beams to exit with maximum impact just at the tip of the front of the moving ships, as well as some farther away to make the "hole" big enough for the rest of ship. It's not a hole--but a bubble--that the ship moves through. See the section of medical uses of proton beams for their workings. What's tricky is that you don't want the effects effecting the space that makes up your ship, but unlike a bomb which has no source, a proton beam would, which just might make all the difference needed. One emitter at the point of the ship, and several smaller ones to help keep space from collapsing along important points. I further suspect that if you use this trick in a directional manner, space on the other side of the created bubble falls toward the source of the beam. That is, since the space in the bubble is so thin, and the force causing the effect is highly directional, that space opposite it (other side of bubble) is drawn towards it. I suspect this because then you could build a stationary transmitter. It's one thing to keep moving through bubbles, it's another to transmit. Just as radio transmitters can be unidirectional (outputing in all directions) or directional (producing a cone-like signal along the direction), so should these beams. The reason I suspect space along the line of the beam ahead of the bubble would comes toward the beam is because space outside the bubble will have more mass than usual (it's getting compacted) and this should have the effect of forming a "tunnel" (along the edges of the bubble in the direction of the beam) that tugs on the space at which they all meet. I mentioned I suspected a similar effect elsewhere in this document. This is important, because as space is drawn, it is pulled apart, as it is pulled apart more is drawn in. At some point you reach whatever you're aiming at--preferably a receiving antenna. Since you need only send a tight laser communication beam. Probably not that much energy is needed. The beauty of this method: it's technology based. The better you're technology, the better the systems you can build. You start by only being able to produce tight beam-based communication, then you advance to small hard material objects, then to bigger and bigger objects. To test this: since any oscillating device should produce spatial distortion effects. We need to look at oscillating devices. Strobe lights, fans, propellers, (although with the last two best effects may be if the prop's weren't attached and only the generator's bar was spinning), electricity perhaps. Actually another key may be high speed switching. Any way, effects should always be there, extremely tiny for "klutzy" implementations like fans, and much better as the power and cycles increases. Actually pulsating is a better word for the methods to use to get the desired effects. After all, this method has to have some effect on space. Space that doesn't give depending on energy provided would be a universe of constants (eg. nothing ever moving). Perhaps this stretching produces thin areas of space and the key is to always follow the path of least resistance. Potential problems: maybe at some point energy and cycles don't produce enough force to keep pushing apart that area of space (Einstein's energy approaches infinity problem/diminishing returns)--but then again, we've got Zeno's "no infinite distance between points" as a potential solution. Maybe this will answer some of the questions about pulsars as well. It's "natural", after all, everything in the universe is based on rotating--either spinning in place or rotating around something. Wouldn't it be wild if in order to travel really long distances or with really large forces you needed a setup producing power like a pulsar--thereby announcing to the universe what you're doing. I view space as a rubber ball, push on it and it compresses, release it and it bounces back. Navigation Travel through space probably requires a similar system to what we have now. That is, you program a system with what you know, and it does the work of getting you from one point to another. This needs a reference system, gravity/space warping provides the system. Logical, as it allows finer tuning via determining smaller and smaller disturbances. Question is, whether this fine tuning can be done as you go along or whether you need to do it first - like mapping. Can a ship jump from x to y without any information about y? Can it navigate a course through the universe without having prior knowledge of the area to pass though. We can, maybe, assume that sensors would be too slow - but perhaps all could be done using computer models of predictability. Whatever; the system: low race relies on massive clusters and black holes (massive gravitational disturbances). Only able to travel between galaxies with this method. Then over time, refine it down to massive stars, then all stars, then planets, then asteroids, etc. A system of progressive improvements. If land somewhere you didn't expect, you would need to have the computer generate all possible locations, etc. to figure out where you are - must be a better way. Force Magnetic shields, or barriers, probably can be made by using shields multiple electromagnets aligned along the same way as an electromagnetic-gun. (nsnsnsnsns etc.) Rapidly reversing the polarity should produce a strong magnetic repelling field along the magnet. More power = more field --> more shield. Perhaps done with some sort of rotating/spinning nsnsns system, or just computer controlled electromagnets. Q: can magnetic fields repel anything? Even non magnetic objects? Also examine other forces (electroweak, etc.) to see if can enhance it. You also could put such a system inside metal, providing protection for such things as shocks (from bumps, weapons, etc.) without loosing advantages of skin (for example, armor). Maybe levitating fields for air cars. It is based on speed changes, outward magnetic field is getting n/s layers changing faster than the previous n/s layer has a chance to expand too far out. Note that it seems this will need extremely fast RPM's. Force screen types: Magnetic-based = primitive Spacewarp (ship size) = middle Spacewarp (implanted or just hand held) = advanced Spacewarp (bio) = highly advanced All NASA armor designs are based on something known as a Whipple shield. At present the [satellite(s)] shield is a two-layer swathe of aluminum that completely covers a spacecraft. Between the outer and inner layers is a space ranging from four to 12 inches. When a piece of debris strikes the bumper, the impact causes the projectile to shatter. The shrapnel generally retains enough oomph to break through the outer layer, but when it enters the space beyond, it disperses, then bounces off the inner layer. Studies suggest that future Whipple shields may be improved by using as many as five thin layers rather than two thicker ones. Experiments show that if a projectile is made to blast through four separate layers, the repeated shocks often cause it not only to shatter but to liquefy.[88] From The Beserker Throne, Fred Saberhagen: Notes that for large "doors" in space, a forcefield is best. Idea of creating an escape plan. Even you think you'll never want to, try to, or be able to, it would still be useful in an emergency. The book says this from a prisoner's point of view--but that needn't always be the case. A magnetic field does not pass through a superconductor, but instead flows around it.[38] NASA is now really concerned about the threat of space debris--the agency estimates a shuttle has a 1-in-30 chance of hitting a piece. [Breakthroughs Discover, Jan '92, p. 11] We should start seeing "force shield" designs within the next two years, and tests within 5. Probably be something simple: electro-static repulsion, magnetic repulsion, targetting lasers, etc. But it's a start. Force shielddesign is a key component to moving around in the universe. A force shield can act as a tool as well. You can use to reach out into space to grab other stuff (like ships).[130] I also suspect that they are used in "holo rooms" to produce "feel" and resistance. Tele- I consider this possible using the concept of transportation portation beams. Transportation beams are teleportation--except teleportation carries with it the connotation of instantaneous transportation. To teleport you need to encode the object, transmit the object, and decode the object. Exactly what we do with data communications today. Encoding: a x-ray laser should be able analyze each atom (?) and tell what it is. Problem: moving things (like blood) [all things are moving at the atomic level]. If done fast enough, the encoding process need not be concerned with moving things. So expect to be transmitting only unmoving objects long before can transmit moving objects. Use a laser mixed with x-ray to encode three-dimensional space occupied by object. Use laser beams to define locations of particles (like with holography now). Transmitting: easy, just send the encoding along an energy beam. Decoding: based on the transmitted data, reconstruct the object (using e=mc^2). Problem: life, life at encoding stage could still exist. Problem: energy, massive amounts to create an object. Solution: create object and destroy the atom as created, so transmit encoding and energy from conversion simultaneously, rebuilding the object particle by particle. Now, should energy be abundant, you can use a recorder and start creating duplicates of the people you send. Is this philosophically possible? Note: ~Battlefield Earth~ used teleportation devices to drop bombs suddenly into other peoples laps. Since this does not seem to happen very much I suspect there is a natural solution: 1) For long distances, knowledge is so complex race becomes so intelligent that such a thing would be beneath them and they would never do it. 2) Such distance that only normal radiation (such as light beams) can be used. Making long distance "High there!" bombs impractical. This would suggest a non-energy method to travel faster than light. 3) A receiving station is needed. Star Trek transporters: They go from ship to ship: this provides a greater range by making use of each other's teleport system. Each uses either an encoder or a decoder. Going from ship to surface: This method uses both an encoder and a decoder. We have the beginnings of this techology now. For ship to ship: communications technology. But for ship to surface: In 1986 Ashkin, Bjorkholm, J. B. Dziedzic and I [Steven Chu] showed that particles that range in size between 0.02 and 10 microns can be trapped in a single focused laser beam. In 1970 Ashkin trapped micron-size latex spheres suspended in water in between two focused, counterpropagting beams of light. But only much later was it realized that if a single beam is focused tightly enough, the dipole force would suffice to overcome the scattering force that pushes the particle in the direction that the laser beam is traveling. The great advantage of using a single beam is that it can be used as an optical tweezers to manipulate small particles. The optical tweezers can easily be integrated with a conventional microscope by introducing the laser light into the body of the scope and focusing it with the view objective. A sample placed on an ordinary microscope slide can be viewed and manipulated at the same time by moving the focused laser beam.[127] There's more, but what this really is is a way to move atoms around, using a single directed device. The microscope, which with a little imagination is the star ship Enterpise, works like so: microscope (normal everyday microscope, with space for laser beams). -------- | | | /旼컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴trapping beam of laser light | �/旼컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴훘lluminating beam of laser light | � � | | � � | | � � | | � � | | � � | | � � | |--�-�-| � � ========slide The two lasers trap, and are then able to move particles on the slide. The slide and the laser are completely independent of each other. Currently the technique only works on things that are in water (water keeps things cool). But this is also very similar to a scanning-tunneling microscope. The keys to notice is that it's possible to manipulate atoms and molecules without requiring a decoder or encoder at the opposite end. Sure, there's at least 30 years of technical things to work out, but we now know it is possible. Tele- Note: a hologram is three-dimensional in two-dimensional in portation three-dimensional (our world), can a hologram be broken into via smaller and smaller pieces until it is infinitesimal and dimensions therefore 1 dimension (and retains its three-dimensional thus and space having three-dimensional in one-dimensional in three- tearing dimensional)? Can one-dimensional exist in three-dimensional? Since you cannot move in one-dimensional space (it is a point only.) Once you enter the point you must come out the same way, right. Wrong. By entering at an angle you can figure out where you will come out. Note that 1 dimension must be interconnected to all space--thus allowing transport via dimensions. Also note that if can create a way to convert matter into energy you can beam the energy smaller and smaller thus reaching infinitesimal (picture an oscillating string that gets longer and longer cycles until it is a straight line). Also note, the space/frame of reference created by imagination, could this be used? What dimension is imagination--in what space do we create. What is infinite dimensions? If we imagine a n-dimension space, is it created? (Since everything we imagine comes into existence.) Yes, perhaps black holes and their very core are one- dimensional points--this would allow the matter/energy to be transported. The immense gravity strings the energy out so it can go through the one-dimensional "door." Instead of bringing space toward you--compress space in front of you (and do it along a very thin line--lest you disrupt space too much). Then you stop, move a bit, and let space (along that line) snap back to where it was. Better on energy than pulling space toward you, and letting it snap to get to your destination. What is the one-dimension? Seems an ideal method of travel. I know it cannot be represented in three or two-dimensional space (sphere, circle) but as we approach infinitesimal sizes do we cross a barrier to the one-d? Perhaps a black hole at its core can breach this barrier and send through some energy? To get from one place to another w/o speed limitations one must "tear" three-dimensional space. This cannot be done (and move you), therefore, "space" is actually the form of a different dimension. I assume infinite dimensions. Is it possible infinite dimensions is the same as zero dimensions? Maybe math 0=infinity, since on either side is nothing (think oscillations/cycles/circles)? Infinite dimensions: therefore, from any point you can instantly (or near enough) get to any other point (it can be done at a constant rate not matter the three-dimensional structured distances). What about movement of the points? Is a case of squeeze the moved ones into the new location, or some form of space-swapping? Maybe one has to convert to infinite dimension from three- dimensional (fractal like). Einstein: space (in three- dimensional) bends around everything. Therefore: you must "tear" into space to take advantages. Space is like a fabric. Center of black hole = point singularity = 1 point of space? What happens when you create a solid box? Is the inner space cut off from the outer space, or does three- dimensional not matter to space? We live in three-dimensional space. If we could convert our spatial molecules to four-dimensional, we would be living in four-dimensional space (with its advantages of shrunken distances?) Take this out onto near infinity - being able to move to any other point in the universe. There probably is a smaller dimensionality that will do the job. Can this be used to make the case of an infinite universe? What are the implications? An object can only consider to be in a n-dimension within a frame of reference (for example, a line on a two-dimensional surface). A point in three-dimensional space will always be a sphere. So points do not exist in three-dimensional. A line in three-dimensional space will appear as a point from its ends- -from this perspective it is no longer a line. So lines cannot exist in three-dimensional space but they can exist on a two-dimensional photo (frame of reference) that is in three-dimensional space. Since anything we imagine will come into existence (in our imagination) it should then be possible to imagine the necessary frames of reference, perhaps as higher numbered dimensions are created something will happen? The field around the ship would be like an object in a transporter room, converted to transmissible energy. It would slide away from the pattern of the ordinary universe, and only dimensionless hyperspace would be left. The ship would go with it.[51] As light approaches an object with gravity; it speeds up in proportion to the amount of gravity influenced on the light. In proper terms; the mass of the planet warped space such that light could cross distances at higher speeds. This implies that if we were to define a set distance (x) and say this is uninfluenced (no energy/no mass affectations). We then create a universal grid made using this coordinate system. We would see the nodes compress toward gravitic sources. If we set x to be the minimum distance possible (don't know what, but we know there is one--see note on Zeno's theory). Since x is finite (not infinitesimal), would we still see compression around masses? I think yes, after all, there is an infinity of space between any two points, but limits probably exist due to maximum mass of the source. This would suggest that masses are energy stores--as energy is awaiting as the compressed x lengths are waiting to expand. It probably takes an equal amount of energy to hold the structure together, although it also could be that when surrounded by a similar shell of compressed space no additional energy is required to maintain the store within (which seems likely). The spark that drives the system is a single, powerful laser pulse. The flash of light originates in a projector at the front of the room as a pair of different laser frequencies combined into a single beam. At first, the beam is a weak one, about as big as a pinpoint and barely strong enough to scorch a piece of paper. Mirrors then bounce the beam through an array of amplifiers that boost it to 10,000 times its original power. At this stage the laser packs a considerable energy wallop, but it is dispersed energy, spread across a beam with the circumference of a volleyball. The laser gets down to scientific business only after it is bounced through a maze of six mirrors and focused back down to one-fiftieth of an inch. Now, intense and dangerous, the beam is fired through two centimeters of hydrogen gas confined in a sealed chamber. Plowing through the gas, the laser pulse rips the hydrogen's electrons right off its atoms, creating what is known as a plasma-gaseous nuclei with no orbiting electrons. Because the two laser frequencies alternately magnify and cancel each other, they create a repeating wavelike pattern of very high and very low light intensity. These areas, which can be thought of as a passing series of peaks and valleys, segregate the oppositely charged particles: As the high-intensity peak passes through the gas, it pushes away some of the lightweight, negatively charged electrons. Left behind in the low-intensity valleys is a higher concentration of heavier, positively charged nuclei. As the peak passes, the electrons start rushing back toward the positively charged nuclei. Because they are moving so fast, they actually overshoot the nuclei, but they are soon met by the next high-intensity peak and given another shove. With each successive peak the electrons are, in effect, set vibrating back and forth like a plucked guitar string. Thus the laser begins to create band after band of electrons and nuclei, alternating down the entire length of the pulse. As the thousands of peaks and valleys in a single las vibration, and the greater the charge of the band--the effect is that of a steadily increasing wave of charge, moving through the plasma along with the laser. At nearly the same instant the beam enters the gas, an injection gun fires a cluster of high-speed electrons into the wake of charged bands that follows. The electrons are aimed to land directly behind a band of protons and directly in front of a band of electrons. Attracted by the protons and repelled by the other electrons, they ride along on the wave, following the laser at near-light speed, picking up energy. [[picture: p. 80]] A dielectric is simply an insulating material like glass or plastic or ceramic. What makes dielectrics useful to particle physicists is that in the presence of a rapidly moving charged particle, the material will radiate electromagnetic energy. [Jim] Simpson and his colleagues use dielectric materials in the shape of a long, thin tube. When they fire a short pulse of electrons--known as the drive beam--down the tube at near-light speed, the particles cause the atoms in the tube walls to become polarized and radiate electromagnetic energy. The energy converges in the center of the tube as an electric field, which follows along after the drive beam, matching its velocity. The physicists then inject a smaller bunch of electrons-- called the witness beam--into the moving field; these particles ride along with the field, also following the drive beam and also attaining near-light speed. As they go they pick up energy from the drive beam and from the dielectric material and convert it into mass.[52] A hurricane can shove a piece of paper into a tree edge on. Perhaps a similar event happens when mass (how much?) moves at or faster than the speed of light. Multi-state existence. Existing in reality, virtual reality, and as energy can be done by constantly teleporting you. That is, you exist in reality for a second. Then the scanners read you into memory and convert you to energy. Then you get read from memory and converted to matter again. Thus you spend time in reality, in virtual reality (memory), and as energy. You could then use algorithms on your "memory self." Use transmission methods on your energy self (the energy from your matter transmitted with the information about who you are and how it should all be put back together - your memory self). The only real question is that of growth. The process must allow for intellectual development. What if made a ship of electricity. I don't know how, but this is an alternative to conversion to electrons and then transmitting as a signal. I suppose what I'm thinking about is a material that acts like electricity, or another form of energy. Perhaps superconducting materials could be useful? Although if we could find a way in electricity itself forms a wall this too could be used. Perhaps with magnetic fields? Removing a 3d chunk of space. Effects? <-logical growth- >single pt (1d)? Maybe need engines only large enough to remove/process 3d area, then ships zips through area and space (eventually?) reseals that area. 23 Fact: The universe is lazy. All energy, and therefore 23 matter, follows the path of least resistance--unless that 23 path is blocked or there is an external influence for it to 23 follow another path. Using gravity techniques to warp space 23 for FTL may be the expensive method. It seems to me that to 23 warp space we need only create a circle of "null energy 23 space"--the size of the ship--that attracts all energy within 23 its bounds. Then either make the ship not attractable or 23 turn it off and send the ship through. How it's done pretty 23 much depends on whether engines are needed or not. It should 23 be easily test-able. Unlike the alternative of using a ring 23 of, say, neutron star matter to do the job. However, since 23 there "must" (logically) exist a method by which a self 23 contained ship should do it, certainly other ideas should be 23 considered. Remember, compared to the size of the universe, 23 a sun is very tiny. Compared to the sun, any ship we build 23 is very tiny. Compared to the universe, any whip we build is 23 smaller (in comparison) than a single atom in our body. Life in So, you want to be a space traveller. Well, there are some space problems: mainly lack-of-gravity related. Lack of gravity has decaying effects on the body's structure. This includes muscles and bones. Star Trek has nice "gravity controlled" ships. This may be the way to go, provided we can figure it out--without needing to spin the ship. There's a sight you haven't seen; the Enterprise rotating in space. Although, I must admit, the script writers have been making the ship more manuverable, such as in the scenes when it's trying to back away from something. Another alternative may be to simply replace bones with non- organic substance (like a plastic or metal). Similarly something for muscles would be needed. This is an interesting thought. Since that means we could have "better" humans in space than on land--could lead to a type of domination or segregation between the space humans and the earth-bound humans (actually this possibility is quite great even if we don't change physically). This also opens a path to us becoming a "exoskeleton race" (like insects, turtles)-- since it's just another step to making bones that protect the soft tissue and allow you to go out into space with it. A final method is to accept space as the dominating method-- and let ourselves turn into a kind of jelly. The interesting thing about all the possibilities above is that any race may choose any of them. Thus, the "galactic UN" may contain many races who won't allow their "original" appearence to change, various with exoskeletons, and various forms of jelly. Also: once a race starts doing electronic/mechanical/non-bio modifications, it's inevitable that they'll become "microchip based" for their conscious--after all, the computer in a ship (if it were a human) would just call the ship it's robotic body--no different than having a tiny one that requires a ship--just become the ship yourself. Hmm: an interesting thought: we've always assumed the stories of UFO's with spinning saucers used spinning as part of their propulsion system, it may be that they use it for gravity only. Up till now, I've never believed the UFO stories (see earlier writing in this document). I just didn't think they were that stupid. But the more I release the rich diversity of the alien races, the more I see that it's entirely possible. Indeed, it may be a fact of all primitive life: gods from space. This would aid races in thinking outwardly and not be extremely surprised and shocked (suicidely shocked even) when they find out the truth. 27� If humanity somehow ends up in an unchanging society, then 27� this has an advantage: you could do travels to other solar 27� systems using sleep and not worry about the amount of time it 27� takes--since the world (money/etc.) will be just like when 27� you left. Communi- If, in the unlikely event, it turns out to be true that when cation those extremely tiny particles (need to look up the name) when split, that altering one affects the other immediately and across any distance, besides shaking up the universe, this would give us sub-space radio. Since the source and destination need only contain 1/2 each of the particle. Communication between many ships could be done by "tuning" the particle parts. Wouldn't that be wild though, we create a reciever that tunes all the races conversations in. In a flash we'd know we weren't alone. The vast majority would be encoded/compressed, but some won't, or will just use CRC like checking. Actually, it raises a lot of problems. Since this idea is basically the same as the radio spectrum or energy spectrum, and we know how crowded that's getting. Tractor Instead of relying on some sort of particle based grabbing Beams beam, an alternative would be some sort of focused gravity beam. In which, along the length of the beam, gravity starts out most powerful at the point of origin and decreases the farther away along the beam you go. An alternative, interesting, use of this idea is to provide the necessary gravity focus on points to "break space", to send radio waves outside the realm of normal space. Essentially, a sub space communication system. Motivation One of the things I believe is that there is at least one "collection" of sentient races who work together in our galaxy. And that they either haven't found us, or find us too primative to contact. But, you know, there may be another reason: they don't care. It's just possible that races develop to such a level that they can effectively ignore any new races among them. Like Galactus in Marvel Comics, or other races that are neither helpful nor deadly toward developing races. Just about everything anyone could think of may be out there. That's why I like to use statistics. It shows anything is possible. Trouble arises when taking the universe as a whole (which I don't think is possible). Then it becomes: there is one god, there isn't one god, etc. etc. Nobody says: one god controls xxx billion stars, another and another xxy billion stars, etc. Because that's not dealing with the whole, and therefore falls into the realm of probabilities (making it as equal as anything else anyone comes up with). Indeed, maybe thinking of the universe as a single subject should be a religion in itself. Can't find any answers on less than the whole picture--so try for the whole thing. It's a joke to try to figure out the whole universe. Not even comparable to primitive land dwellers trying to figure out the oceans or the planet--before developing the boat, the submarine, etc. What we really need right now is some thing to "get" out of space exploration. Without a good reason, the politicans could easily stop the space program. This would be death. Since we'd build a nice utopia like world and slowly die off. "Slow but steady progress (if you call it that) is what has been going on with the human race, but it can only continue until a point - you cannot progress forever without eventually something happening" --Mark Noel The beneifits of space exploration are only understood by a very few (physisists and astronomers.) I think it's the imagination and adventure that keeps "everyday" people's interest. But, the space program isn't controlled by the astronomers/etc. It's controlled by politicians, who are controlled by us. If we suddenly decide we'd rather have a tax break than a space program, and then some guy decides to make it a referendum (like limiting insurance costs in CA). Then we'd be stuck. We need something that can only be found in space. My guess is that manufacturing will discover something that must be produced in a low-gravity environment. Maybe the 80xx86 packed with 2 gig's of mem and cray-like abilities would be so small that it would need to be produced in space.--some sort of "everyday" device. Or more likely in the short term- -some sort of superhard metal/creramics/superconductor. Colonizing We probably don't need a reason to colonize space/other planets/etc. when the technology becomes available. But there will a pressure to do so when we develop long life. Since with long life will inevitably bring people who simply "stay in place" at the top for very long times. These people will include people you like and don't like. Their own decisions won't be the primary determinant--but those around them who what to keep "a good thing going". This will lead to a lot of dissatisfaction, and the answer for both sides will be "emigrate to space". It is, after all, the common practice for those "out of power" who challenge it. 23 One of the ways of making moon-base life enjoyable is to have 23 the houses built into the side of mountains. Something we 23 can't do here because of erosion would be very practical on 23 the moon since it's little different than putting a large 23 metal patio over a cave mouth. But we just use wooden walls 23 to make the rock (cement) become livable. Set it for a nice 23 view of the earth, or stars, and interconnecting tunnels into 23 the mountain to other places, and it becomes livable. 22 Trans- It's the 21st century, and you want to fly from Spokane 22 portation to Toulouse. Don't bother with a jumbo jet. Just book a 22 trip in a Lightcraft capsule that's flung into the 22 stratosphere with pulsing beams of focused microwave or 22 laser energy. Travel halfway around the globe would take 22 45 minutes." "This is the vision of Leik Myrabo, an 22 associate professor of aerospace engineering at 22 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Over the past eight 22 years, the U.S. Air Force, NASA, and the Strategic 22 Defense Initiative Office have awarded him more than 22 $600,000 to develop the idea. Until now, the biggest 22 obstacle has been finding energy sources powerful enough. 22 But with the development of high-powered microwave energy 22 beams--which can produce up to 1 gigawatt, Myrabo says-- 22 the idea looks more credible. In the lower atmosphere, a 22 microwave beam could explode volumes of air beneath the 22 craft, forcing it upward in small blasts thousands of 22 times a second. Gound-based microwave beams would also 22 slow the craft's descent. Passengers would be sealed 22 inside, protected from the energy. This year, Myrabo 22 will work at the Space Studies Institute in Princeton, 22 N.J., to develop his idea.[144] [I think the cost for the 22 energy will be unpractical for a cargo transport system 22 like this--at least at our present stage in energy 22 technology. However, it is a unique idea that probably 22 has some really good use--perhaps as a defensive shield.] 23 One major wildcard for the next 20 years is fusion reactors. 23 They have great potential--and we are being promised working 23 models before 2010--but at what energy will they be able to 23 produce, and can we port them into space for a modular ship 23 engine (reusable/interchangeable for ships) are part of the 23 wildcards. Don't be deceived by neither nuclear reactor's 23 nor relation's with the sun's energy; fusion reactors, as 23 they're being designed and tested, look a lot more like 23 washing machines (but bigger)--in which instead of water you 23 have plasma (super heated deuterium and tritium). 25 Here's a solution for the present and future for a problem SF 25 authors envisioned. The problem is that space stations can 25 become traps. Example: an overseer on a space station turns 25 it into a little fief, and uses that old farming scam of 25 never being able to pay off your property (by changing the 25 prices for air, space, materials, etc.)(like in _Sten_). And 25 another example is when a station becomes so insular that the 25 people think of it as home (many examples--even DS9) and 25 people hustle to survive and you have a very poor class. 25 The solution: require that all space passenger vehicles offer 25 a free "vagrant class" on their ships. Thus, no matter how 25 poor you are, you can move on to someplace else. 25 The elegance in the solution is that it would be useful today 25 as well. By providing free transportation to those who can't 25 afford it--you provide them with a chance to get to potential 25 opportunites (ie, areas where they may need a particular 25 skill or labor, etc.). 25 However, it must be a simple law: "all mass transport 25 vehicles must reserve 5% of their space for a free vagrant 25 class". Even 1% is fine. Anything more complex, and you 25 throw the government into it--and then the whole thing could 25 fall apart (since the idea is to free poor people from bad 25 government). Rules such as: "if person is suspected of 25 wanting trip to do criminal activity", "if person is 25 suspected of merely going to panhandle", "person must have 25 relatives at other end or charity organization guarentee'ing 25 to take them." 25 Rules like that will kill the system. Since one cannot 25 assume that phone/video-phone links will be made available 25 for free. By limiting such access, they stop the person from 25 being able to find relatives/organizatons. Similarly, 25 "suspect" is subjective and could be used by any bad system. 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴�