Physics of the Impossible

“If at first an idea does not sound absurd, then there is no hope for it. —ALBERT EINSTEIN”

“If you haven’t found something strange during the day, it hasn’t been much of a day. –JOHN WHEELER”

“If time travel is possible, then where are the tourists from the future? –STEPHEN HAWKING”

“A plasma is the “fourth state of matter.” Solids, liquids, and gases make up the three familiar states of matter, but the most common form of matter in the universe is plasma, a gas of ionized atoms.”

“As Sir William Osler once said, “The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow.”

“The Pentagon has been looking into the possibility of developing “smart dust,” dust-sized particles that have tiny sensors inside that can be sprayed over a battlefield to give commanders real-time information. In the future it is conceivable that “smart dust” might be sent to the nearby stars.”

“One day , would it be possible to walk through walls ? To build starships than can travel faster than the speed of life? TO READ OTHER PEOPLE'S MIND ?To become INVISIBLE ? To move object with the power of our minds? To transport our bodies instantly through outer space??Since I was a child , I've always been fascinated by these questions.”

“Ironically, the serious study of the impossible has frequently opened up rich and entirely unexpected domains of science. For example, over the centuries the frustrating and futile search for a “perpetual motion machine” led physicists to conclude that such a machine was impossible, forcing them to postulate the conservation of energy and the three laws of thermodynamics. Thus the futile search to build perpetual motion machines helped to open up the entirely new field of thermodynamics, which in part laid the foundation of the steam engine, the machine age, and modern industrial society.”

“...the entire electromagnetic spectrum— from radar to TV, infrared light, visible light, ultraviolet light, X-rays, microwaves, and gamma rays— is nothing but Maxwell waves, which in turn are vibrating Faraday force fields.”

“Entire cities could sprout instantly in the desert, with skyscrapers made entirely of force fields.”

“The word “robot” comes from the 1920 Czech play R.U.R. by playwright Karel Capek (“robot” means “drudgery” in the Czech language and “labor” in Slovak).”

“If at first an idea does not sound absurd, then there is no hope for it.”

“Someday in the next thirty years, very quietly one day we will cease to be the brightest things on Earth. –JAMES MCALEAR”

“I canna’ change the laws of physics, Captain! –SCOTTY, CHIEF ENGINEER IN STAR TREK”

“Kerr found that a spinning black hole would not collapse into a pointlike star, as Schwarzschild assumed, but would collapse into a spinning ring. Anyone unfortunate enough to hit the ring would perish; but someone falling into the ring would not die, but would actually fall through. But instead of winding up on the other side of the ring, he or she would pass through the Einstein-Rosen Bridge and wind up in another universe. In other words, the spinning black hole is the rim of Alice's Looking Glass.If he or she were to move around the spinning ring a second time, he or she would enter yet another universe. In fact, repeated entry into the spinning ring would put a person in different parallel universes, much like hitting the "up" button on an elevator. In principle, there could be an infinite number of universes, each stacked on top of each other. "Pass through this magic ring and-presto!-you're in a completely different universe where radius and mass are negative!" Kerr wrote.There is an important catch, however. Black holes are examples of "nontransversable wormholes"; that is, passing through the event horizon is a one-way trip. Once you pass through the event horizon and the Kerr ring, you cannot go backward through the ring and out through the event horizon.”

“Newton had invented the calculus, which was expressed in the language of "differential equations," which describe how objects smoothly undergo infinitesimal changes in space and time. The motion of ocean waves, fluids, gases, and cannon balls could all be expressed in the language of differential equations. Maxwell set out with a clear goal, to express the revolutionary findings of Faraday and his force fields through precise differential equations.Maxwell began with Faraday's discovery that electric fields could turn into magnetic fields and vice versa. He took Faraday's depictions of force fields and rewrote them in the precise language of differential equations, producing one of the most important series of equations in modern science. They are a series of eight fierce-looking differential equations. Every physicist and engineer in the world has to sweat over them when mastering electromagnetism in graduate school.Next, Maxwell asked himself the fateful question: if magnetic fields can turn into electric fields and vice versa, what happens if they are constantly turning into each other in a never-ending pattern? Maxwell found that these electric-magnetic fields would create a wave, much like an ocean wave. To his astonishment, he calculated the speed of these waves and found it to be the speed of light! In 1864, upon discovering this fact, he wrote prophetically: "This velocity is so nearly that of light that it seems we have strong reason to conclude that light itself...is an electromagnetic disturbance.”

“In this book, therefore, I divide the things that are “impossible” into three categories. The first are what I call Class I impossibilities. These are technologies that are impossible today but that do not violate the known laws of physics. So they might be possible in this century, or perhaps the next, in modified form. They include teleportation, antimatter engines, certain forms of telepathy, psychokinesis, and invisibility. The second category is what I term Class II impossibilities. These are technologies that sit at the very edge of our understanding of the physical world. If they are possible at all, they might be realized on a scale of millennia to millions of years in the future. They include time machines, the possibility of hyperspace travel, and travel through wormholes. The final category is what I call Class III impossibilities. These are technologies that violate the known laws of physics. Surprisingly, there are very few such impossible technologies. If they do turn out to be possible, they would represent a fundamental shift in our understanding of physics.”

“The physicist Niels Bohr was fond of saying, “Prediction is very hard to do. Especially about the future”

“Even if the electrons are separated by many light-years, you instantly know the spin of the second electron as soon as you measure the spin of the first electron. In fact, you know this faster than the speed of light! Because these two electrons are “entangled,”

“It is a fool’s prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak. –SHAKESPEARE”

“I. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. II. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. III. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. —ARTHUR C. CLARKE’S THREE LAWS”

“Theories have four stages of acceptance: i. this is worthless nonsense; ii. this is interesting, but perverse; iii. this is true, but quite unimportant; iv. I always said so. —J. B. S. HALDANE, 1963”

“In the novel Janus Equation, writer G. Spruill explored one of the harrowing problems with time travel. In this tale a brilliant mathematician whose goal is to discover the secret of time travel meets a strange, beautiful woman, and they become lovers, although he knows nothing about her past. He becomes intrigued about finding out her true identity. Eventually he discovers that she once had plastic surgery to change her features. And that she had a sex change operation. Finally, he discovers that “she” is actually a time traveler from the future, and that “she” is actually himself, but from the future. This means that he made love to himself. And one is left wondering, what would have happened if they had had a child? And if this child went back into the past, to grow up to become the mathematician at the beginning of the story, then is it possible to be your own mother and father and son and daughter?”

“It is impossible to travel faster than the speed of light, and certainly not desirable, as one’s hat keeps blowing off. —WOODY ALLEN”

“Given that humanity must one day flee the solar system to the nearby stars to survive, or perish, the question is: how will we get there? The nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, is over 4 light-years away. Conventional chemical propulsion rockets, the workhorses of the current space program, barely reach 40,000 miles per hour. At that speed it would take 70,000 years just to visit the nearest star.”

“The popularity of perpetual motion machines is widespread. On an episode of The Simpsons, entitled “The PTA Disbands,” Lisa builds her own perpetual motion machine during a teachers’ strike. This prompts Homer to declare sternly, “Lisa, get in here…in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!”

“If time travel is possible, then where are the tourists from the future”

“To me it is truly remarkable that on a single sheet of paper one can write down the laws that govern all known physical phenomena, covering forty-three orders of magnitude, from the farthest reaches of the cosmos over 10 billion light-years away to the microworld of quarks and neutrinos. On that sheet of paper would be just two equations, Einstein’s theory of gravity and the Standard Model. To me this reveals the ultimate simplicity and harmony of nature at the fundamental level. The universe could have been perverse, random, or capricious. And yet it appears to us to be whole, coherent, and beautiful.”