Word: peculiarities
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Still, says Gott, "it is an ingenious concept, and it got me thinking about other ways you might achieve time travel." Gott's idea is simpler than Thorne's. No black holes, no wormholes -- just a spaceship traveling at near light speed, and a peculiar object called a cosmic string. Like wormholes, cosmic strings may or may not exist; they are at present just theoretical constructs...
...light speed and taking the shorter of the two paths. In principle it could reach the far side of a string at exactly the same moment as a light ray traveling the longer path. In essence the ship would be moving faster than light, and under the peculiar logic of special relativity, it would thus go backward in time. For complex reasons, the ship has to make a complete loop around the string, and thus a single string will not do; there must be two strings -- passing each other at nearly the speed of light -- for the trick to work...
Everyone has his or her own list -- each list no doubt is peculiar, idiosyncratic. The books you keep for the middle of the night serve a deeply personal purpose, one of companionship. Your connection with them is a mystery of affinities. Each mind has its night weather, its topographies. I like certain books about fly fishing, for example, especially Norman Maclean's brilliant A River Runs Through It, which, like fishing itself, sometimes makes sudden, taut connections to divinity...
...Kennedy lives under the rule of a peculiar metaphysic. He had to soldier on in the messy world after Camelot floated away into memory. Unlike his brothers, extinguished in their prime, Teddy would get older and coarser and lose some of the boyo's flashing charm. He would make mistakes. And -- something that did not happen in Camelot -- he would pay for them...
...light-years, only about one-thirtieth the diameter of the Milky Way. The mass could come from tightly packed stars, but then their light should be blazingly bright, contend the report's authors. The only other choices: a black hole of unprecedented proportions, or some even more peculiar form of matter...