Many people believe the fallacy that anything imaginable is possible.  This has led to all sorts of ridiculous beliefs throughout the ages.

Time travel is one of those subjects that has always irked me.  Let’s be quite clear: time travel is possible, gentle reader, you’re doing it right now.  We are all moving forward at the precise speed of 1 second per second.

Time travel in the other direction makes no sense.  Although we can imagine the possibility, it makes no sense to anyone who has grasped the concepts of Newton’s Laws of Motion.  It just doesn’t.  I know a lot of physicists think it is possible, and I know I’m not a physicist seeking funding to study such silly phenomenon, so I’ll speak out on the silliness.

Time is not a timeline, although we can create a timeline, it does not necessarily follow that we are free to move to the left and right along the timeline.

Time is a result of movement, it is the result of moving from one place to another.  Going back to where you were is a second movement, it does not undo the first movement although you are in the same place you started.  Easy concept to grasp.  Trying to do this faster won’t change the fact.  Just look at the concept: if you go back in time when you go faster than light you would immediately be returned to the point just before you went faster than light.

You can slow time from your perspective, time dilation has been proven with synchronized atomic clocks put on separate jets, one flown east and one flown west around the world.  The clocks were no longer synced when the planes landed.  Does this imply anything about time moving backward after reaching light speed?  Nope.  It proves Einstein was correct.  Frames of reference are real, which explains the eccentricity of Mercury’s orbit.  The reader is encouraged to utilize their search engine of choice for more clarity on time dilation, this is outside the scope of this post.

The belief that “Einstein’s theories allow time travel because at faster than the speed of light time moves backward” is absurd.  That’s just simply not a conclusion of anything I’m aware of Einstein writing.  It’s just a straw grasped at by those with over active imaginations and under funded research grants.

And given that Einstein proved that we could never travel at light speed, the point is moot, we’ll never get there, we’ll never go faster.  This limit is due to the fact that objects gain mass with speed, at speeds close to the speed of light, it requires energies approaching infinity to move faster, therefore it requires infinite power to accelerate mass to the speed of light.

So, what’s light then?  We don’t know exactly.  What we do know is that it travels from the Sun to the Earth in 8 minutes and 23 seconds.  It takes time to get here, and we see it, so it’s not moving backward at all.

Also, we know that physicists will still utter silliness such as:

However, because of the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, Prof Lloyd’s method seems to avoid this [grandfather paradox]. Anything caused by the time travel must have had a finite probability of happening anyway, so paradoxical impossibilities are out.

Complete silliness reported by the Telegraph here.

I could be wrong, physicists are smart people after all.  However every single one of them that has successfully traveled backward in time has died in the vacuum of space, given that the Earth moves through space and would not be where it was at the time of travel.  The only way around this issue is to now suggest because space-time is the actual medium of the Universe that travel backward in time automagically imparts the momentum necessary to travel to the previous location…oops, we’ve just moved which Newton showed takes time.

Time to pass the bong Prof Lloyd, you’ve had enough man.

Maybe I’ll grow wings tonight and fly in to the office tomorrow, I’ve thought of it, so it might happen!

Following up on my post I Feel So Broke Up, I Wanna Go Home, congratulations to the banking brat David Rothschild, he and his crew, completed their journey on the Plastiki.

Now, what to do with the artificially manufactured CO2 used to promote the four month, composting toilet journey?

In the article above he’s described as an ‘environmentalist’ and an ‘explorer’.  Great, please explore the environmental benefits from chartering a boat to clean up the Pacific Gyre rather than building a plastic boat, which is of course the source of the problem, filling it with manufactured CO2 for buoyancy, and then sailing through the problem to ‘raise awareness’?

You misspent your money, ‘environmentalist’.

The thermosphere contracted recently.  Big deal, it does this.  The thermosphere is the last bit of atmosphere before space, as such the thermosphere is subjected to extreme conditions.

When the Sun is active, more energy is dumped into the thermosphere and it predictably expands.  When the Sun is inactive, the thermosphere predictably cools and contracts.  The Sun is currently comparitively inactive.

PV/T is a constant, basic chemistry/physics, the pressure of a gas in a system times the volume of the gas in a system divided by the temperature of the gas in a system is a constant.

Derrick Ho from CNN reports (ahem) that anthropogenic global warming as a result of CO2 causes a reduction in the Sun’s activity, apparently.

I’ve been reading about the thermosphere contraction for several days now, and only Derrick Ho from CNN attributes the effect so directly with CO2.  His retarded article uses the phrase “carbon dioxide” no less than 8 times.

Some gems from the article “as carbon dioxide levels build up on Earth”, umm: FAIL, and after going on about how CO2 has caused this issue, Derrick Ho from CNN writes:

Emmert said there were still other possibilities unaccounted for that could have contributed to this phenomenon.

Followed immediately by:

It could be that we’re underestimating the effects [of carbon dioxide] somehow.

FAIL#2

Derrick Ho from CNN, this logical fallacy of yours is evident to everyone who isn’t a simple minded media studies graduate.

Just as PV/T is a constant (that means PV/T at time 1 is equal to PV/T at time 2 Derrick Ho from CNN, they’re equivalent), it is also equivalent to spend several paragraphs saying CO2 is the problem and then saying “underestimating the effects of CO2 somehow” is the problem, joining the two with the suggestion that there are “other possibilities” is just retarded.

They’re the same thing Derrick Ho from CNN, you’re right, CO2 does everything, and CO2 killed Kennedy.

Derrick Ho from CNN, please tell me how man made CO2 affects the solar output?!?

An El’ Reg article titled Global Warming Brings Peace and Happiness has some interesting points as well as the following two direct hits:

The idea that tiny changes in climate (either way) cause catastrophic effects, against which we’re powerless, is really the last in a line of medieval superstitions.

and,

The fear of science and technological innovation runs so deep with some people, that self-flagellation is always preferred.

The article begins by detailing five periods in Chinese history where cooling temps brought famine which subsequently led to regime change each time. 

I say, “spot on!” to El’ Reg, and a heartfelt, “good luck!” with Vulture 1-X.  Looks like you’re off to a sound start.  I’ve been following PARIS since the original announcement.

There is a difference between intelligence and wisdom, between being smart and being wise.  This individual, while perhaps smart, is certainly foolish.

Although weather is not indicative of a long term trend (and therefore climate), it is interesting to note that Queensland is having a bit of a cool off, here.

This comes within weeks of reported record cool temps in L.A.

So, we have reported cool temps in two locations literally across the world from one another.

This weather thing seems to be as hard to predict as a thunderstorm or tornado in the midwestern U.S., much less to extrapolate into a long term trend.

bullshiat

Why do I subscribe to Discover Magazine again?  Oh wait, I don’t, they send it to me because I subscribed for so long and apparently are hoping I give them more money.  Nope, won’t happen.

Surfing the tubes today, I came across what I thought would be a humorous link on Digg.  The headline was something to the effect of “why is it so hot in the US since we’re farthest from the Sun now?” (It now being summer in the US.)

I followed the link expecting to find an educational link with graphics and discussion appropriate for the grade school level.  I wanted to see how we were teaching our kiddos basic stuff.  Sadly, the link took me to a Nat Geo page clearly written for adult consumption.

Ridiculous that in today’s day and age some adults still linger in the Dark Ages.  It’s ridiculous because it’s by choice.

This event caused me to recall the time I spent working in a cookie store while in the last year of my second attempt at educating myself appropriately.

I recalled that while at the cookie store I proved in the sink that Kepler’s third law and Einstein’s theory of relativity were compatible.  This is easily done by observing a sink filled with soapy bubbles drain.  On this particular day, I had washed whatever it was I was washing and placed whatever it was in the rinse sink, but before draining the wash sink, I began to swirl the soap bubbles in the direction I knew the drainage vortex would form.

The swirling soap bubbles to me represented the matter in the Sun’s accretion disk, soapy bubbles close to the center swirled much faster than soapy bubbles toward the sink’s perimeter, yet all the bubbles were held together through the soap’s cohesion.  The soap’s cohesion and my swirling representing the Sun’s gravity.  I visually saw Kepler’s third law in the sink.  (Kepler’s third law states that the orbital velocity of a planet is inversely related to the distance from the Sun.)

Next, I introduced Einstein’s theory of relativity to the sink, I opened the drain.  This introduced into the sink system the effect of gravity due to the central mass falling down a gravity well, supplanting my artificial introduction of gravity with my swirling arm that I had originally used to induce spin in the soap bubbles.

It was fun to imagine the drain as the gravity well caused by the Sun and to see Kepler’s third law play out before me as the nearest bubbles to the drain spun swiftly and the furthest bubbles were dragged around more slowly.

Of course I had long before accepted that both Kepler and Einstein were correct, and was simply amusing myself by noticing an analogy in the soapy sink.  I was just passing the time as a curious college student in a boring job.

The co-owner of the store however was were she would always be education-wise, being much older and having made all the knowledge choices she was likely to make in life.  I had lent this individual my copy of A Brief History of Time, which was never returned to me.  The excuse given was that she had “studied it so hard” that the book became unusable.  She wrote me a check for the cover price of the book, apparently not acknowledging the concept of taxation.  Oh, well.

I have no doubt that the co-owner of the cookie store destroyed my copy of A Brief History of Time because it contradicted her One Book, the One Book she bragged about carrying around while she was in college.

I was amused one day to discover through discussion that she had no celestial concept of what a day was, what a month was, and what a year was.  Absolutely no clue, no understanding whatsoever of the mechanics of the solar system.

I suppose the Nat Geo article is for those adults who seldom read more than one book, and I hope that my son’s generation would find such an article insulting, and that the Nat Geo authors of my son’s generation would find such an article unnecessary.