Yikes!

YouTube – Neil DeGrasse Tyson – Death By Black Hole

Thanks to Evan for the link (make sure to watch the Carl Sagan video from Cosmos below)…

Cosmonaut Sergi Avdeyev: By the time his stint in space was over, he had experienced 0.2 seconds less than the rest of the world did. This made him 0.2 seconds younger than he would have been if he had never gone into space. To put it in another way, he traveled 0.02 seconds into the future.

Remember, F=ma helps us realize the connection between mass, acceleration (change in velocity) and force.

So, technically this could be a possibility.

FOXNews.com – What’s Faster Than Light?: “While nothing with mass can move faster than the speed of light, scientists now think some weird, faster-than-light currents may be the powerhouse for fast-spinning stars.

The idea may sound heretical to one of most deeply held tenets in physics, which states that the speed of light is the ultimate speed limit. But the new proposal squeaks by on a loophole in that rule, which insists only that no mass or information exceeds the speed limit.”

I’m still skeptical.

We’ll discuss more in class tomorrow.

This is just getting odd…

LHC Shut Down Again — By Baguette-Dropping Bird: “This time, it is not falling cranes, cracked magnets, liquid helium leaks or even links to Al Qaeda, that have halted man’s efforts to understand the meaning of life, the universe and everything. It now appears that the collider is hindered from an initial firing by a baguette, dropped by a passing bird: ‘The bird dropped some bread on a section of outdoor machinery, eventually leading to significant over heating in parts of the accelerator. The LHC was not operational at the time of the incident, but the spike produced so much heat that had the beam been on, automatic failsafes would have shut down the machine.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Maybe our future selves really don’t want us to turn on the LHC!

Bagel or fate?

Ah, science!

Today at 12:34:56pm (it’s July 8, 2009), it will be 123456789!

Look down at your watch and smile