While this picture may look like a bunch of stars, but it comes close to a time machine. The picture taken by the Hubble Space Telescope has reached back 13.2 billion years to reveal baby galaxies after the Big Bang.
This is the picture of space just 600 million to 800 million years after the Big Bang.
The existence of these newly found galaxies pushes back the time when galaxies.
They are the product of Hubble’s new infrared Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), installed in May.
The James Webb Space Telescope is planned for launch in 2014 and allow astronomers to study the detailed nature of early galaxies and go even further back in time.
For the full story, click here.
With regards to time travel one wouldn’t need to reach the speed of light to experience it. Merely reaching a fraction of the speed of light, say one quarter to one half, then a few years in space could equate to thousands and even tens of thousands back on earth. And such ships are not impossible to build. Due to a treaty ban on detonating nuclear devices in space it is currently not doable but the technology is there. The ship is essentially a large combustion chamber that would propel itself up to speeds approaching the speed of light by a series of nuclear explosions.
Its a mind blowing concept but a short trip, say a year out and a year back at half the speed of light would return the traveler to a planet where everyone he ever knew was dead and buried for thousands of years. This is of course the great conundrum with Star Trek. If they really were traveling at these speeds exceeding the speed of light, those they leave each time they depart some place would be dead within moments of their departure.
It makes my head hurt.
Just replyin to another commenter if you decide to bail thats your call man/woman. Don’t like it, skip over my comments.
Bdaman:
Are you also pulling your global warming crap into the cop/Taser stories and hijacking them too? Every interesting article here gets taken over with global warming troll shit. I wish JT would ban your fucking IP… I’m about to bail on this place.
Your education is not my concern other that the substandard nature of it makes me laugh my ass off, badtroll.
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/03/30/time.travel/
Improbable is not impossible.
If it does not violate general relativity, time travel is possible. And it does not violate all solutions.
In fact, the entire idea of traveling via wormhole is not just space travel by definition, it’s spacetime travel. Here’s Sagan talking about it (he also mentions the time travel equivalent of the Fermi paradox). You’ll note nowhere is the word impossible asserted as fact, instead his position is theoretically possible but we don’t know enough yet (as I said earlier – conflicting theories):
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/time/sagan.html
Another issue deals with the various methods of addressing paradox. Travel into THE past may be impossible but not travel into A past. See Everett and Novikov.
The bottom line is we won’t know if it’s possible until we build a machine and try it.
Thanks Byron yea some people just don’t get it. You seen my post on the USS Skate didn’t you? Hey did you ever watch that documentary that I posted call The Cloud Mystery?
And know T Pyxidis is a death star that is due to explode. It has done it before and I wanted O Wise One to enlighten me. Even though I give him a hard time he is a pretty smart sum bitch.
For all you science lovers commenting here, I highly recommend a book written by David Bodanis: “E=mc2: A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation.” Has anyone read it?
Stephen Pitt:
are you talking making a black hole that would suck up earth?
Think of your present position in space and time as being the point of two cones, aligned with each other, one going upward and one going downward. (The time axis is running up and down; the other two dimensions are the horizontal-vertical and forward-backward space axes. The up-down space axis has to be replaced with the time axis to fit it in 3D.)
Points in spacetime that are outside the cones are “spacelike related” to you. Points in spacetime inside the cones are “timelike related”. And points that are on the surface of the cones are “lightlike related”. (Do an image search and you’ll find pictures all over the web.) Spacelike-related points in spacetime are closed off to you in every way. You cannot affect events there and vice versa.
Timelike-related points can either affect you or vice versa. The upper cone contains all your possible futures; the lower cone has all of the past events that could have affected you now. These galaxies shined the light we see at points on the surface of the lower cone. (That’s why everyone talks about “seeing into the past”.) All of past human history is within the lower cone, and everything we can see right now is on its surface. Traveling into the past is impossible. (The past is observable, and the future “observes” you, e.g. if you bury a time capsule or shine a light at something.)
When you travel at a high velocity, points within the cones move toward sides of them, in accordance to Special Relativity with its (linear) Lorentz transformation. The cones themselves don’t move but “squares” of spacetime between them become “parallelograms”, because spacetime is rubbery.
When you experience a high g-force, however, so that you’re outside your inertial frame (so you don’t feel weightless), the cones themselves bend. The upper one slants in the direction of your travel and the lower one slants away. The whole insight of General Relativity was that being in a rocket or being near a massive body are effectively the same phenomenon. Right now the floor is accelerating upward in spacetime beneath your feet, even if it doesn’t do that in space. If you shine a flashlight across the room, it will bend very slightly downward, as if the room were an elevator car accelerating you upward on a space station. The effect is equivalent- that’s the whole shtick of GR. Everything stems from that. Clocks tick faster on the ground than they do on orbiting satellites or vomit-comet planes, people approaching black holes never reach the event horizon as far as we’re concerned, etc.
Once you’re so close to a black hole that they no longer contain the line vertical in time to your position, you’re inside the event horizon- nothing you do will affect anything that’s not closer to the hole than you are now. People outside will see your clocks ticking slower and slower as you approach the event horizon- in their inertial frame, you never actually reach it. (Of course, as far as you’re concerned, you hit the singularity pretty fast.)
Traveling into the past is utterly impossible, even near a black hole. (The “past” cone approaches, but doesn’t hit the horizontal, even there.) But, you can go anywhere in the universe within your lifetime! All you have to do is accelerate, so your “future” cone approaches the horizontal. (It will never quite reach it, but you can get as close as you want.)
If you can ride on a spaceship that continuously accelerates fast enough for years and years, you can reach any galaxy in the universe, even the ones in this picture (of course they’ll look different by then). Say you can tolerate an acceleration of a billion-g or so. No problem- you can get there before your age hits 65. However, you’ll probably want a more comfortable spaceship that accelerates at 1g so your bones aren’t crushed. In that case, bring lots of canned food, and a lot of people of both genders with you, because the trip will involve thousands of human generations.
Meanwhile, people back on earth will complain about the funding, because they’ll die before they ever see pictures of you planting flags in the dirt anyway.
Bdaman:
your Bdaman video was a hoot.
as far as T. Pyxidis dont you mean the candy Pixidust? Tastsy Pixidust.
Also it is cold as an Eskimos igloo here in Virginia. And the other day on radio I heard a guy say that a million years ago the earth was a snowball and guess what – Global Warming. I thought you might find that amusing.
Byron, if you weighed a trillion tons because you were traveling near the speed of light and were anywhere near or inside a massive object to interact with, you’d be crushed by overwhelming gravitational force, just like dust and gas collapse into stars. At a trillion tons, you still will not have reached “C” the speed of light. This has always been the problem with Relativity, and why mind travel and other unorthodox theories seem so attractive.
We all are awaiting the next step in higher thinking. For the time being, and until that happens, we’re stuck where Einstein was and Newton’s world.
By the way, the colliders prove Einstein’s Achilles and worry concerned thinkers.
Byron,
You may want to look at which part is the goal and which is a way to reach that goal. That will hint at which one was viewed as more important. Like I said though, it’s not a key point, just interesting.
Enlighten us oh wise one on T Pyxidis.
Stephen Pitt:
the acceleration is the problem. If you could accelerate in short spurts or very slowly you could reach light speed without an increase or significant increase in mass. If you stopped suddenly it would be molecular disruption.
Think 0-60 in 10 seconds vs 0-60 in 1 second.
Buddha, if we could just make “m” in f=ma insignificant, there would be no limit on speed and how fast we could travel, but as the speed of light is neared, mass approaches infinity according to the math. That would pose a significant problem, it seems.
Buddha:
The meaning of the word Welfare in the Constitution is different from its current usage. The constitutional meaning of welfare is: 1. happiness, or prosperity.
Is the space program a good deal, it gave us some good things and increased our knowledge but it cost a bunch of money that was not spent on other things. Did we need to, probably so because we did need to develop ballistic missles to match Russian capabilities. Now that would be a proper function of government – protection of citizens.
I believe the transister the space program depended on was developed by a private company.
Byron,
Don’t mistake the concept of patents and the concept of providing for the general welfare and promoting science. And if you must know, patent law is one of the biggest boondoggles in law today. It’s a system that pretty much everyone involved in says is broken and being abused by what are (strangely enough) called patent trolls. Look into it. You might want to start with the Linux/SCO battle.
Gyges:
” “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;”
thanks for making my point. They understood the necesity of allowing people the ownership of their creativity. I.E. this is a Lockean concept of owning your labor.
They should have made it for life. Although 17 years is a pretty long time.
Byron,
I’ve always found this line in Section 8 to be interesting, “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;”
At the very least it shows that some of the Founders had some intent that the government should be involved in encouraging scientific progress. While it’s by no means an argument winner, it is worth noting.
I’ll also point out that the body of human knowledge has grown so large as to make scientific research an entirely different beast than it was at the time the Constitution was written.
You mean promoting the general welfare? Like aiding in the discovery of new sciences and applications thereof to the benefit of all? Yeah, that’s part of the proper and original function of government – not protecting the individual’s check book to the detriment of all society. And if taxation is taking by force, well, you are going to have an issue with both the US and various state constitutions, Byron. Taxation without representation is a problem. Not taxation in general.
And if you think private companies don’t benefit from space exploration you should consider that NASA designs. Sub-contractors build. The more money you put in, the more high end, good paying, high tech jobs you’ll create. And no one has to die. Well, there are accidents, but not thousands of people dying for a profit motive.