Monday, October 24, 2005
The Ways and Means of Time Travel

I want to talk about real time travel, okay? Stuff that can really happen, stuff that really does happen somewhere in the Universe.

First you should know about special relativity.

Here’s special relativity in a nutshell: When something moves, its length gets shorter, its mass increases, and the rate at which it moves forward in time slows down.

All of these effects are so small that they only get really noticeable when you move close to the speed of light. This is why it is impossible for anything with mass to travel as fast as light: if you did, you would have no length, infinite mass, and you wouldn’t go forward in time at all. And I’m afraid you can’t do that.

Anyway, time would still go forward at its usual rate for anything outside the moving object. So if you went out on a space trip to some distant star on a ship traveling at close to light speed, a few years might pass for you while on Earth decades, or even centuries, may have passed. In a way, you have traveled into the future.

Now here’s a kicker from General Relativity: Gravity can also affect time. Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose famously showed that time comes to a halt inside a black hole. The black hole’s gravity is so intense that it warps spacetime around it to a point, and time can’t move forward. You’re going to see some slowing of time as you get closer to it as well, so that passing very close to a massive object like a black hole or a cosmic string (see my previous blog post below) could also slow down your own personal time, so that more time would pass for the rest of the Universe than would pass for you. Just don’t get too close, or you’ll never get back out again.

In fact, if you fell inside a black hole, the last thing someone watching you fall in would simply see you approach the edge of it, suddenly become motionless, and then disappear. That’s because a certain distance away from a black hole, light can’t escape its gravitational pull. This distance is called the Schwarzschild radius, and this what physicist talk about when they refer to a black hole’s “size.” Since all the actual matter in a black hole is compressed down to a single point, it doesn’t have a conventional 3-D size. So physicists use the Schwarzchild radius, the distance beyond which light can’t escape the black hole, as a measure of its size. The Schwarzschild radius also gets bigger as the black hole gets bigger, so it is a measure of the black hole’s mass as well.

Now, it may also be possible that at the center of black holes, the gravity is sometimes so intense that it punches right through the fabric of spacetime and makes an Einstein-Rosen bridge, better known as a wormhole. This hole in space and time could potentially take you anywhere in the Universe, and at any time, past or future.

Another place you’ll find wormholes is all around you. According to modern quantum physics, empty space is full of them. They’re just very, very small, a tiny fraction of the diameter of a proton. At that size, the structure of space gets very porous, for lack of a better word. The tiny wormholes flicker in and out of existence, and in theory, it might be possible to isolate one and expand it, until it gets big enough for an object with mass to pass through. The catch is, making one big enough to pass a spaceship through might take more energy than exists in the Universe, so don’t start packing your bags for that next interstellar wormhole trip into the year 10,000 B.C. just yet.

Those are the ways and means of time travel.

Posted by Robert Williams 2005-10-24 21:27:00

Thursday, October 13, 2005
A True Story

Okay, this a bit off-topic, but this one was just too good not to share.

A certain man spent a lot of money on a case of 24 fine imported cigars. Because they were so expensive, he decided to take out an insurance policy on them under the most common form of coverage: fire insurance. (You see where this is going?) After a month had passed and before the man had paid so much as a single premium, the man filed a claim for his case of cigars, claiming it was destroyed in 24 separate fires. In essence, he took out a fire insurance claim for smoking them.

The insurance company of course denied the man's claim and the man sued them in response... and won! The judge explained that the insurance company's contract had not specified the manner in which the fire had to take place, and awarded the man $15,000.00 in damages.

But it didn't end there. The insurance company continued their litigation and eventuallygot the man arrested on criminal charges, of which he was convicted and sentenced to 24 concurrent 1-year prison sentences... for arson.

Posted by Robert Williams 2005-10-13 20:38:45

Tuesday, October 4, 2005
Tickling the Cosmic Strings

Cosmic strings figure big in my novel. You'll have to read it to find out why and how, but here is some background information some of you may find interesting. You don't have to know this to enjoy the book, but I still think it's pretty cool stuff.

Cosmic strings are objects that may have formed during the early stages ofthe Universe. Shortly after the Big Bang, the Universe was one big cloud of super-hot plasma. As the Universe cooled, bubbles formed inside this plasma cloud, big spherical regions that grew and cooled further as matter emptied out of them. Picture the air bubblesswelling upinside rising bread dough and I think you'll have a pretty good image.

Unlike bread dough however (unless you're a really bad baker, I suppose) when several of these bubbles met, the matter between them became compressed. Very compressed, until it was as dense as a black hole. But unlike black holes, where gravity compresses a massive star down to the size of a mathematical point, here all that matter collapsed down into a line, or in other words, a string.

The technical term is that the matter undergoes a phase change, where it passes from a symmetrical state (rather like liquid water, where it looks the same from all directions) to an asymmetrical state (like ice, which has a "discrete structure," that is,a structure where all the atoms fit together like a crystal, and the crystal looks different when you viewit at different angles.)The cosmic strings form at the domain boundaries where the two phases meet.

To give you an idea of how dense they are, consider this: a cosmic string is ten trillion times thinner than the radius of a hydrogen atom, but a section ten kilometers (or a little over six miles) long would weigh as much as the Earth itself.

As the Universe expands, the cosmic strings get stretched out with it, so one cosmic string can stretch across the entire visible Universe. They can also vibrate, and some of their oscillations can cause small loops of them to pinch off. These little isolated loops have a finite lifespan, and eventually decay into energy by gravitational radiation.

Now I should point out that cosmic strings are still only theorhetical; no one has actually observed one yet, although there has been some pretty tantalizing evidence.

As I said in my sffworld.com interview, I think the science belongs in the background of a novel, secondary to the story. I hope this makes the background a little more vibrant. Quite frankly, something this amazing is perfect to put into a book. I'm only surprised more people hadn't used it before me.

Posted by Robert Williams 2005-10-04 22:04:51

Monday, September 26, 2005
Animal Update

Just wanted to make a quick blog entry with an update on the abandoned puppy and kitten I found last Friday. The two are clean, fed, and have improved enormously, although the kitten still has a bit of a limp which we have not yet explained. Both of them seem to be happy and energetic however, having spentthe weekend exploring my father's garden. The kitten now has himself a new home with my stepmother's sister, and we have a couple of good leads on a home for the puppy.Good news!

I usually try to keep the subject matter of this blog confined to The Storms of Eternity, science fiction, and the book business in general, but this one time I wanted to share something important to me. More musings onthe above topicsto come.

Posted by Robert Williams 2005-09-26 01:47:11

Friday, September 23, 2005
Some People Disgust Me

I really need to write more about my book in this space, but right now I'm just too mad. I was out walking my dog this evening, and I saw some ladies outside with a puppy. I could also hear a cat crying somewhere but couldn't see it. The puppy ran up to my dog and started licking its face and sniffing in the usual way that dogs say hello, and that was when I noticed I could see the puppy's ribs and hipbones, and that it stank of dried urine. I asked the ladies what was up.

It turns out the ladies were with my apartment complex. Some tenants had recently abandoned their apartment, and rather than take their puppy and kitten with them, they had locked them up in the bathroom together and taken off without notifying anyone. TWO WEEKS passed before the apartment management finally went in to seize the apartment and they discovered the animals. The tenants must have at least left a little food with them since they were still alive, but the maintenance man said there was feces all over the floor. Both of the animals were starved. The kitten was in far worse shape. It's fur was matted with excrement, its bones were jutting through its skin,and it was crying constantly. The puppy had a bad-looking lump on its right front leg that was bleeding. I don't know if it was an abscess or an infected spot, or even if the leg had been broken and healed wrong.

The management had called Animal Control,an officer of whichwas already there by the time I dropped my dog off at my apartment and came back. The officer said they had to take the pets to the pound and hold them for seven days, because they were, as she called them, "abandoned property." I asked her if they could bring animal neglect and abuse charges against the owners. She said they could, but the apartment managers would not give her the owner's names because of privacy rights. I insisted she let me have the animals, since I knew what would happen at the pound.

"That's against the law," she said. "Because of the owner's property rights, and because the animals have to be held for seven days if the owners want to reclaim them. Also, there is disease to think about."

I insisted again that I could take care of them in the short term, and my father could get the animals veterinary care and help find a home for them.

"Technically, I can't let you," she said. "But I do have toturn away andtalk tomy sergeant over here for a moment..." And she looked the other way. I scooped up the puppy and the kitten and headed for home.

I fed them and gave them a bath. You should have seen how much food that puppy put away, although the kitten didn't eat much, which worried me. I had to change the bathwater several times with just the kitten because the water kept getting so dirty, but I finally got them both clean.

I couldn't believe how closely bonded the two were. The puppy, I think she was a boxer, maybe five months old, sat right by the tub and watched me bathe the kitten, and then kept licking the kitten's face as I dried it. And the kitten became agitated if I separated it from the puppy, but calmed down after I reunited them.

I called my father and he came down to pick them up. Unlike me, he has a house with a fenced backyard, and he knows contacts at several animal charities that find homes for animals without putting them to sleep. (There are, infact, several animal shelters inKansas City that have taken in animals from the Gulf Coast left homeless byHurricane Katrina) He also said he would take care of the vet bill.

Just the idea that the people who did this will get away with it scott-clean, and are free to get more animals for them to mistreat makes me sick. As I said above, some people just disgust me.

Posted by Robert Williams 2005-09-23 23:13:20