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...detection would be a powerful boost to alternate-universe theories. "Confirming inflation," says Princeton physicist Paul Steinhardt, "would give us a lot more confidence about some of its implications." And that includes ideas that have lived until now only in the parallel universe of fantasy...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Will We Discover Another Universe? | 4/10/2000 | See Source »

...Thorne, a physicist at Caltech, and several colleagues suggested that you could use such a wormhole to travel into the past. Here's how you do it: move one mouth of the wormhole through space at nearly the speed of light while leaving the other one fixed. Then jump in through the moving end. Like a moving astronaut, this end ages less, so it connects back to an earlier time on the fixed end. When you pop out through the fixed end an instant later, you'll find that you've emerged in your own past...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Will We Travel Back (Or Forward) In Time? | 4/10/2000 | See Source »

...snap shut a fraction of a second after they're created. The only way to keep them open, as far as we know, is with matter that has negative density. In layman's terms, that's stuff that weighs less than nothing. This may sound impossible, but the Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir theorized in 1948 that holding two plates of electrically conducting material very close together in a vacuum actually does create a region of negative density that exerts an inward pressure on the plates. The force predicted by Casimir has been verified in the laboratory...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Will We Travel Back (Or Forward) In Time? | 4/10/2000 | See Source »

Some argue conservatively that time travelers don't change the past; they were always part of it. On the other hand, paradoxical though this sounds, a version of the many-worlds theory of quantum mechanics (see "Will We Discover Another Universe?" in this issue) devised by Oxford physicist David Deutsch might allow such history-changing visits. In this picture, there are many interlacing world histories, so that if you went back in time and killed your grandmother when she was a young girl, this would simply cause space-time to branch off into a new parallel universe that doesn...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Will We Travel Back (Or Forward) In Time? | 4/10/2000 | See Source »

Perhaps the most intriguing unknown, however, concerns the cosmic role played by intelligent life itself. As the physicist Freeman Dyson notes, "It is impossible to calculate in detail the long-range future of the universe without including the effects of life and intelligence." Much of the earth has been transformed, for better and worse, by the presence here of an intelligent species capable of manipulating its environment for its own benefit...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: How Will The Universe End? (With A Bang or A Whimper?) | 4/10/2000 | See Source »

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