Part 14 (1/2)
He wrote, ”It is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiments” Cole, p 225
11: FASTER THAN LIGHT
As physicist Matt Visser of Washi+ngton University says Cavelos, p 137
Sir Martin Rees, Royal Astronomer of Great Britain, even says Kaku, Parallel Worlds, p 307
”I thought there should be a way of using these concepts” Cavelos, p 151
”In back, they wouldn't see anything-just black-because the light of the stars” Cavelos, p 154
”We would need a series of generators of exotic ic ring and-presto!” Kaku, Parallel Worlds, p 121
He says, ”You need about minus one Jupiter mass to do the job” Cavelos, p 145
”But it will also turn out that the technology for , p 146
12: TIME TRAVEL
In the novel Janus Equation, writer G Spruill explored one Nahin, p 322
”As for the present, if it were always present and never moved” Pickover, p 10
”Because we physicists have realized that the nature of time” Nahin, p ix
As physicist Richard Gott has said, ”I don't think there's any question” Pickover, p 130
Gott says, ”A collapsing loop of string large enough” Kaku, Parallel Worlds, p 142
”If he amy” Nahin, p 248
13: PARALLEL UNIVERSES
Henderson writes, ”Like a Black Hole,” Kaku, Hyperspace, p 22
”At first glance, I like your idea enormously” Pais, p 330
Enrico Fermi, horrified at the proliferation of subatoazine, Noveainst this interpretation of his theory Cole, p 222
”So I hope you can accept nature as She is-absurd” Greene, p 111
Another viewpoint on the paradox is the ”many worlds” idea Yet another attractive feature of the ”many worlds” interpretation is that no further assuinal wave equation are required In this picture we never have to collapse wave functions or make observations The wave function simply divides all by itself, automatically, without any intervention or assumptions from the outside In this sense, the ”many worlds” theory is simpler conceptually than all the other theories, which require outside observers, measurements, collapses of waves, and so forth It is true that we are burdened with infinite numbers of universes, but the wave function keeps track of them, without any further assumptions from the outside
One way to understand why our physical universe seems so stable and secure is to invoke decoherence, that is, that we have decohered from all these other parallel universes But decoherence does not eliminate these other parallel universes Decoherence only explains why our universe, a an infinite set of universes, seems so stable Decoherence is based on the idea that universes can split into many universes, but that our universe, via interactions from the environment, becomes quite separated from these other universes
nobel laureate Frank Wilczek says, ”We are haunted” Kaku, Parallel Worlds, p 169
14: PERPETUAL MOTION MACHINES
”It was Santa Claus and Aladdin's lamp of the whole world,” Asimov, p 12
In theory, a perpetual motion machine of the second type So that the hu perhaps the most complex object ever created by mother nature in the solar syste of over 100 billion neurons, is unrivaled in co out to 24 trillion miles of the Earth, to the nearest star But how can this vast reduction in entropy be compatible with the Second Law, they ask? Evolution itself seems to violate the Second Law The answer to this is that the decrease in entropy created by the rise of higher organis the total entropy elsewhere The decrease in entropy created by evolution is more than balanced out by the increase in entropy in the surrounding environ the Earth The creation of the human brain via evolution does lower entropy, but this is , pollution, waste heat, global war, etc)
One of the proponents of this idea Tesla, however, was also a tragic figure, probably cheated out of the royalties of many of his patents and inventions that paved the way for the co of radio, TV, and the telecouaranteed that the naotten We have naauss, or roughly twenty thousand tiotten, except that his more eccentric claiend Tesla believed that he could communicate with life on Mars, solve Einstein's unfinished unified field theory, split the Earth in half like an apple, and develop a death ray that could destroy ten thousand airplanes from a distance of 250 miles (The FBI took his claim of a death ray so seriously that it seized much of his notes and laboratory equipment after his death, soe even today) Tesla was at the height of his faazine He regularly dazzled the public by unleashi+ng huge bolts of lightning, containingaudiences Tesla's undoing, however, was that he was notoriously sloppy with his finances and his legal affairs Pitted against the battery of lawyers representing the eiants of today, Tesla lost control over his ns of what is today called OCD (obsessive-co obsessed with the nu in destitution in the New Yorker Hotel, fearing being poisoned by his enemies, and was always one step ahead of his creditors He died in total poverty at the age of eighty-six in 1943
EPILOGUE: THE FUTURE OF THE IMPOSSIBLE
Astronomer John Barrow notes, ”Historians still debate” Barrow, Impossibility, p 47
Mathe Comte's claims Barrow, Io, you could ask anybody,” Pickover, p 192
”All the great questions about the nature of the Universe-fro to its end-turn out to be unanswerable” Barrow, Iravitational waves from [the] inflation area are relics of the universe” Rocky Kolb, New Scientist Magazine, November 18, 2006, p 44
”These efforts will reveal inti, p 136
”Do the laws of physics perhly advanced civilizations” Barrow, Impossibility, p 143
”In 2056, I think you'll be able to buy a T-shi+rt” Max Tegazine, Nove (and only) candidate for a theory The reason for this is that e take Einstein's theory of gravity and add quantu small are infinite Over the years physicists have devised a number of tricks to eliminate these infinite terravity But in string theory these corrections vanish exactly for several reasons First, string theory has a symmetry, called supersyent ter, which helps to control these infinities
The origin of these infinities actually goes back to classical theory Newton's inverse-square law says that the force between two particles is infinite if the distance of separation goes to zero This infinity, which is apparent even in Newton's theory, carries over to the quantuth of the string, or the Planck length, which allows us to control these divergences
”We would then be able to observe theazine, November 18, 2006, p 51
Astrophysicist John Barrow suic this way Barrow, Impossibility, p 219
BIBLIOGRAPHY