discover!
Sunday, Dec. 12, 2004 - 10:56 a.m.
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The husband and I recently received our first issues of our new subscription to Discover - I LOVE this magazine! It�s full of all kinds of interesting stuff and articles that really send your brain into overdrive.
One particular article by Dr. Michio Kaku (Remember String Theory? Fascinating inofitself but that�s another slice.) in this issue (December 2004) had me thinking so hard that it caused physical pain in my brain, I had to pause halfway through to rest, AND I had to read several passages multiple times in order to fully digest what my eyes were seeing. The article? This one - it�s about the end of the universe and what future civilization (millions if not billions of years from now) might have to do in order to survive.
I always did well in school but I�d certainly not label myself �smart� and even if I did, I�d change my mind after reading stuff like this. I don�t have the brain capacity to come up with things like this on my own - hell, I have to work very hard just to maintain the brain capacity to understand what the super geniuses are trying to tell me. Here�s a quote from the article:
�Stephen Hawking has suggested that it might be possible to travel through a wormhole to another universe or another time. This may allow an advanced civilization to evade the death of the universe. Even if the wormhole is subatomic, on the scale of these particle collisions tracked in the CERN accelerator in Geneva, Switzerland, it might still be possible to inject enough information through the wormhole via nanotechnology to re-create the entire civilization on the other side.�
Are you getting that?? If a teeny tiny nanobot can�t fit through the teeny tiny wormhole, future generations may still be able to shove enough information through the hole to build a nanobot on the other side - HA! Science is awesome!
The end of the article says �Strange but true. Although seemingly fantastic, these scenarios are consistent with the known laws of physics and biology and would be within the capabilities of a Type III civilization. For a civilization caught in the last days of an expanding universe, these may be the only options for escape.� So while this all might seem preposterous it�s all perfectly feasible and well, wow.
Seriously, who isn�t mesmerized by things like The Large Hadron Collider? (It�s the worlds largest atom smasher and it�s scheduled to be turned on in 2007.) This beastly machine is MORE THAN FIVE MILES IN DIAMETER and �is capable of blasting protons together with the colossal energy of 14 trillion electron volts; it will be able to probe distance 1/10,000 the size of a proton, perhaps creating a zoo of exotic particles not seen since the Big Bang. One hope is that it will create exotic particles like miniature black holes and sparticles, or supersymmetric particles, which would indicate the presence of parallel universes in higher dimensions.� (That was more from the article btw.)
I could go on and on about this stuff but I won�t because my brain can only handle so much of this at one time... |