Lately scientists have been able to punch a hole in space/time and in theory can make things invisible. I'm not sure about how being invisible would be a boon to mankind except in warfare...but this is starting to scare me a little. We are messing with the fabric of the universe and if we get good at it we may make changes that we may come to regret later. Who knows what evil lurks in the realms outside space/time? A new virus from another dimension might come thru and wipe us out. Don't laff. Other scientists are concerned as well. Some even tried to stop some cern experiments last year for fear of creating a black hole and devouring our earth. I'm starting to understand their concerns a little more now.
I think they used lenses to stretch and compact a light beam leaving a tiny gap in space/time where the beam used to be. You can then put anything in that gap and it wouldn't be noticed by anyone. I guess it wasn't exactly "punching" a hole, but still we are exposing ourselves to alien territory.
First, I'd like to see a link to the research you are describing. This theory is practically Sci-Fi, and I need to see some facts before I even consider this as a valid topic of debate.
Second, if in any way these supposed scientists have been able to "punch a hole in space/time" - the result would not simply be to make a human invisible -- that human would be invisible because they have disappeared from reality as we know it. They would NOT come back the same individual, they would not just disappear and reappear... Putting a human as we are now through that kind of cosmic stress would push the boundaries of adaptive evolution.... IF the person could even cope with the physical/mental stresses of the journey, what kind of creature would they come back as?
The whole thing seems like a bad episode of Voyager to me...
Edited by: TarzellZhan
at February 10, 2012, 05:10am
"I think they used lenses to stretch and compact a light beam leaving a tiny gap in space/time where the beam used to be"
what you describe here is an optical illusion... the process of bending light waves to distort or change a visible object... Definitely not space/time manipulation....
He's like fire and ice and rage. He's like the night and the
storm in the heart of the sun. He's ancient and
forever. He burns at the center of time
and can see the turn of the
universe. And... He's
wonderful.
Well, they didn't punch any holes in space, or time. Rather they figured out a way to "bend" the light. Kinda like... Say manipulated the way that the waves travel.
There was no such thing as a bad episode of voyager!
Well it's a little more complicated than just bending light. Here's something from National Geographic's "time cloak" article...
Making Time Stand Still
To conduct their time-stopping experiment, described this week in the journal Nature, Gaeta and colleagues aimed a laser beam at a probe and passed the beam through a device called a time lens.
While a conventional optical lens bends a beam of light in space, the time lens modifies the light's temporal—not spatial—distribution.
"It's a way of being able to really control the properties of a light beam in the time domain, and shape and distort and do funny things like this to light in the time domain," Gaeta said.
Study co-author Moti Fridman, also of Cornell University's School of Applied and Engineering Physics, devised a method in which he crossed the laser beam aimed at the probe with a strong "pulse" laser inside specialized fiber optic glass.
"This changed the frequency and wavelength of the beam so it moved at a different velocity, and this is why a [time] gap was created," he explained.
A second pulse laser on the other side of the time hole reversed the changes, restoring the beam to its original properties.
In the experiment, an event that happened inside the time hole wasn't detected by the probe.
(Related: "Time Will End in Five Billion Years, Physicists Predict.")
Zhimin Shi, of the University of Rochester's Institute of Optics, said others have discussed the theoretical possibility of such a setup.
"But this is the first experimental realization of how you can actually create a time gap and hide something both in space and in time,"
"This changed the frequency and wavelength of the beam so it moved at a different velocity, and this is why a [time] gap was created," he explained."
Again, altering the properties of the lightwave is just that - it has nothing to do with changing the properties of the time or space it occupies - If used to conceal and object, it would simply be an optical illusion. A very expensive and complicated one, but still, an illusion.
I can see that at least lyss is genuinely affected by the scientific severity of this discovery
It's more than just an illusion since there is now a "gap" in time where nothing is happening. Nothing is aging. It is almost like opening up a new dimension of existence.
"Einstein's theories of relativity suggest that gravity can cause time to slow down. Now scientists have demonstrated a way to stop time altogether—or at least, to give the appearance of time stopping by bending light to create a hole in time."
That is from the same article. It is totally cool to only include the parts that strengthen your argument. Good job, yo.
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Interesting. I really think that everyone is making a bigger deal out of it than it really is. Movies have made it seem like we would doom the universe with things like this. We will see what happens, I suppose.
Not the same thing I know, but we already can slow light down by passing it through a liquid. Imagine what scientists of the day thought of that when it was first discovered
It is mostly just tricking the mind to not see something using light to hide it. You can trick someones brain very easily as far as what they see and even what they hear based on what they see
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The one problem I have with comparing this to a regular illusion of just bending light is that you are basically "shredding" light and stiching it back together. And by doing this you are also affecting the time associated with it. You are basically shredding time as well
This seems interesting, but this subject is way over my head. For whatever it's worth, here's a link to preview Nature's article, "Demonstration of temporal cloaking."
perhaps I could shed some light on the subject (pun totally unintended), as I've been doing some very interesting research and working out some very VERY weird math regarding electromagnetism and photonics
first of all, light is neither strictly a particle nor a wave; rather it acts like both, or either depending upon the context. a circularly polarized beam of light, expressed as a wave, consists of a charge vector rotating about the axis of propagation of the beam. From this, it doesn't take much to see that a circularly polarized beam of light will have an associated magnetic field vector along the axis of propagation. Given an intense uniform magnetic field, the beam of light will be deflected such that it's magnetic component approaches the magnetic field. as this is happening, the light's deflection causes a frame-dragging effect on the surrounding spacetime, becomes elliptically polarized, and blue-shifts, increasing the beam's magnetic field component. This 2-d differential behavior causes the beam to resolve into a hyperbolic path.
if, however, we were to assume a powerful magnetic ring dipole instead of a uniform field, the light could get trapped in a region of sufficient magnetic flux, either making a lemniscate path or, in the extreme case, causing the beam of light to meet up with itself, making a stable ring of light. If we were to use the same principle to rotate this ring of light about some axis, it would create a spacial manifold which would appear, from the inside, to be totally normal Cartesian space but which from the outside appears to be a toroidal horizon.
of course, I haven't quite figured out how to dismantle the toroidal horizon, nor have I figured out how to stop it from blue-shifting and expanding indefinitely, destroying the entire universe.
....kinda makes me think about that whole project camelot looking glass stuff they did idk how many years ago. this stuff kinda seems a bit dangerous. too much math into why screaming makes a crystal or prism shatter, or why a stereo will make water vibrate to create a rainbow or how sound waves can literally heal the genetic structure of the body at the right intensities. ummm.....has anyone even tried comprehending the connection of sound turning into lightwaves and vice versa? this goes back to old alchemical studies regarding the human voice and intellect as it connects to other people and even their air around them. like an old japanese man catching paper on fire with just his bare hands. scientists are just getting lazy and using machines lol.
I wouldn't say that the use of machines is a sign of laziness... after all, it's rather difficult to accelerate an electron with one's hands
you may be interested in a field called Cymatics, which is the study of waves in all their manifestations, particularly in finite-size resonant cavities
you'd hafta go to japan for something like that. i think over there they'd call it "chi." it's a different field of science, but a lot of spiritualists and such are actually staying a step ahead of the scientists by telling them what they're gonna find once they break through with the technology, kinda like a sneak peak before they actually get there.
the bending of light creates a frame-dragging effect which emulates the behavior of gravity. it's not a hole in the sense that there is no spacetime there, but there is a boundary between two manifolds. one could, theoretically, go FTL relative to an outside observer, provided that the manifold you inhabit is rotating at a significant fraction of the speed of light
