From: LARRY KLAES (ljk4_at_msn.com)
Date: Sun Oct 05 2003 - 11:05:19 PDT
At least Clark has some concept of science.
Beam Us Up, General Clark
October 5, 2003
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Weird things certainly happen during election season, but
it's doubtful that even the most hardened seen-it-all
pundit would have dreamed that Einstein's theory of
relativity would turn up as an issue in an American
presidential campaign.
Yet last week a leading Democratic candidate, Gen. Wesley
Clark, expressed the hope that spaceships might one day be
engineered to go faster than the speed of light, a staple
of science fiction.
In a discussion of NASA's future at a recent gathering in
New Hampshire, General Clark ventured a look into the far,
far future. "I still believe in E=mc2," he said, according
to Wired.com, "but I can't believe that in all of human
history, we'll never, ever be able to go beyond the speed
of light."
Saying he had argued with some physicists and friends about
the idea, the general described it as "my only faith-based
initiative."
Soon afterward, The New York Post pictured the general in a
"Star Trek" uniform, pointing out that such a proposition
would violate the laws of physics.
If we could go faster than light, Einstein once said, we
could send a telegram into the past, and everyone knows
time travel is impossible.
Or do they?
In recent years, time travel has become a serious topic in
theoretical physics, debated at conferences and explicated
in popular books like "Black Holes and Timewarps," by the
Caltech theorist Kip S. Thorne, and "Time Travel in
Einstein's Universe," by the Princeton astrophysicist J.
Richard Gott. Last year, the topic came up at a
60th-birthday symposium in honor of Stephen Hawking, the
Cambridge cosmologist and author.
So don't be too quick to consign the general to a Star
Fleet command, a few physicists suggested last week.
Einstein's special theory of relativity, which he
propounded from a patent office in 1905, did establish the
speed of light - about 186,000 miles per second - as the
cosmic speed limit for matter and information.
But the general theory of relativity, which Einstein
published in 1916, holds out the possibility of a loophole.
That theory describes gravity as the bending of space-time
by matter and energy. Space-time, the theory maintains, can
be bent into wormholes and other shapes that could provide
shortcuts through space and time, allowing a traveler to
beat a light beam that took a route through regular space.
"This weirdness of space allows in principle for the
possibility of time travel," said Lawrence M. Krauss, an
astrophysicist at Case Western Reserve University, and the
author of "The Physics of Star Trek."
One of the first to realize that Einstein's universe had
room for such strangeness was the mathematician and
logician Kurt Gvdel, who wrote a paper about it in 1949.
Wormhole travel was featured prominently in the movie
<object.title class="Movie" idsrc="nyt_ttl"
value="155654;156934">"Contact,"</object.title> starring
Jodie Foster and based on the novel of the same name by the
astronomer Carl Sagan.
Nobody knows whether such things are actually possible in
the real world. One obstacle is the "grandmother paradox,"
which raises the theoretical possibility of going back in
time and killing your own grandmother. And the resources
required to build a wormhole, even if possible, would be
gargantuan, physicists say. "It's expensive," Dr. Gott
said, "but that is a question for politicians."
Describing faster-than-light travel as a faith-based
initiative was accurate, Dr. Krauss said. "At this point
the details are not known, so in some sense it is all a
matter of faith," he acknowledged. "But I wouldn't bet on
it."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/05/weekinreview/05OVER.html?ex=1066376201&ei=1&en=22694d9640b14333
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