Word: objects
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
introduce you to the object of your affection. After all, one is bound...
...hard to see why people would have serious reservations about letting John Hinckley wander freely through the Washington, D.C., suburbs. This is the man, after all, who shot four men, including President Ronald Reagan, outside a Hilton hotel in 1981, in a desperate cry for attention from the object of his obsession at the time, actress Jodie Foster. While no one has quite figured out how Hinckley established a causative connection between Reagan's death and Foster's affections, doctors report there have been significant breakthroughs during the would-be assassin's 18-year incarceration in the psychiatric ward...
...probability of a macroscopic object--like a human--doing this trick is infinitesimal. But thanks to Albert Einstein we know that time travel of a different sort does happen in the macroscopic world. As he showed back in 1905 with his special theory of relativity, time slows down for objects moving close to the speed of light, at least from the viewpoint of a stationary observer. You want to visit the earth 1,000 years from now? Just travel to a star 500 light-years away and return, going both ways at 99.995% the speed of light. When you return...
...that you might be stuck there. Is there any way of going backward in time? Once again, Einstein may have provided the answer. His 1915 theory of general relativity showed that space and time are curved, and that the curvature can be large in the neighborhood of very massive objects. If an object is dense enough, the curvature can become nearly infinite, perhaps opening a tunnel that connects distant regions of space-time as though they were next door. Physicists call this tunnel a wormhole, in an analogy to the shortcut a worm eats from one side of a curved...
This strange idea leads to even stranger consequences, including the fact that as an object goes faster, its mass increases (the reasons are dizzyingly complex, but it's been verified in particle accelerators). The faster you go, the harder it is to get yourself going faster still. As you near the speed of light, your weight heads for infinity, which makes it infinitely hard to go faster. So while we might reach 99% of light-speed, or even 99.99999%, the last little bit will forever lie just beyond our grasp...