time

Chris Knight's avatar

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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Chris Knight's avatar

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”

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Chris Knight's avatar
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

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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 ...

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