Interesting tidbits about Leap Year

Today is February 29th, which only comes about every four years because of Leap Year. And if you wanna know why exactly we have that, The Christian Science Monitor's website has a rather informative article about the Gregorian Calendar and how it came about.

(I learned some new stuff reading that. Like: because of a deal brokered by Saint Patrick, today is the one day during four whole years that the lady gets to propose to her man! And if the dude says "no" he's obliged to give her a new dress and some gloves.)

And over at io9.com there's the strange but true tale of how there was once a February 30th.

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Scientists punch hole in time to cloak stuff in

Wasn't this the kind of thing that the DHARMA Initiative was playing with on that mysterious Island? We all know how great that turned out, huh?

Some thinkin' dudes at Cornell University have torn a hole in time itself. The result is a "time cloak" that hides events from being observed by the rest of the universe.

From the article at Gizmodo...

The process relies on similar methods of distorting electromagnetic fields as invisibility cloaks, but it exploits a time-space duality in electromagnetic theory: diffraction and dispersion of light in space are mathematically equivalent. Scientists have used this theory to create a "time-lens [that] can, for example, magnify or compress in time".

The time cloak takes two of those lenses and arranges them so that one compresses a beam of light while the other decompresses it. That leaves the beam seemingly unchanged, but the diffraction and dispersion actually "cloak" small events in the beam's timeline. Right now, the cloak can only last for 120 nanoseconds, and the theoretical max for the current design measures just microseconds. But the prospect of being able to exist outside of time, even for just a few microseconds, should be enough to make even the most jaded tech nerd giggle at the possibilities.

120 nanoseconds isn't much but that such a thing can be done for any length of time is pretty interesting no matter how ya look at it. Maybe when it can be made to last much longer I can invest in one: 'twould be the perfect spot in which to hide from the IRS! :-P

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Physicists propose idea for "Time Teleportation"

For the past several weeks I've been telling my filmmaking partner "Weird" Ed about Primer: the indie sci-fi film from a few years ago and positivalutely the most genius movie about time travel that I've ever had the pleasure of watching.

Well, it turns out that filmmaker Shane Carruth might be on to something...

Two physicists at the University of Queensland in Australia have published their theory on the concept of "time teleportation". If you're too lazy to read the write-up on the Popular Science website, the gist of it is that Einstein's "spooky action" not only operates across distances of space but also across measures of time!

Whoa.

Okay well if nothing else, maybe this'll entice you as well to watch Primer, 'cuz that movie sure does a much better job at trying to make sense of this than I can at the moment.

'Course it also goes without saying that there are some scientists who prefer a more "brute-force" assault on the space-time continuum...

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Is the LHC's own future sabotaging itself?

See if you can wrap your noggin around this one: the Large Hadron Collider - that super-powered high-energy thingamabob at CERN in Switzerland that previously had been predicted would destroy the world - is now theorized to be the first observed occurrence of the "grandfather paradox" of time travel!

According to two physicists, the LHC's mission to produce the hypothesized and long-sought Higgs boson is damned to failure by its own future. The reason? Because the Higgs boson "might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather". And according to Holger Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, this "predestination" from the Higgs particle goes far beyond screwing up a laboratory experiment: the failure of the United States government to finish building the Superconducting Supercollider is cited as possible evidence that the Higgs boson is wrecking havoc across spacetime from the future.

Here's that link again, if you still dare to look further into the abyss.

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Everything in its own time

Okay, this lil' presentation... puts me away, every time I watch it.

Ecclesiastes 3.

Make sure you've got the latest version of Flash Player installed.

Very special thanks to the ever-resplendent Reida Drum for finding this, and to Brittany Gibson for passing it along!

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