Word: massed
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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Things don't look much more certain in the second type of alternate universe, which comes not from quantum mechanics but from the other great physics revolution of the 20th century, Einstein's general theory of relativity. According to Einstein, objects with extremely large mass or high density stretch the fabric of space-time. Find something whose density approaches infinity--a black hole, for example--and that stretch can become a tear...
Using this idea, Thorne and his colleagues proposed constructing a wormhole tunnel 600 million miles in circumference, with Casimir plates separated by only 400 proton diameters at the midpoint. Time travelers would have to somehow open doors in these plates to pass through the wormhole. The mass required for construction? Two hundred million times the mass of the sun. These are projects only a supercivilization could attempt--not something for 21st century engineers...
...back in time by one year, unfortunately, you'd need a loop containing about half the mass-energy of an entire galaxy. Worse yet, the contracting cosmic-string loop would probably trigger the formation of a rotating black hole, trapping any time-travel regions inside. You would almost certainly be torn apart by near infinite space curvature before you could travel anywhere...
...that codes for muscle growth, and they have injected the virus into mice. The animals quickly bulk up by as much as 20%, becoming not just bigger but stronger. The researchers have developed other techniques to block cellular signals that would otherwise cause muscles to atrophy, allowing the new mass to be retained even without exercise...
This strange idea leads to even stranger consequences, including the fact that as an object goes faster, its mass increases (the reasons are dizzyingly complex, but it's been verified in particle accelerators). The faster you go, the harder it is to get yourself going faster still. As you near the speed of light, your weight heads for infinity, which makes it infinitely hard to go faster. So while we might reach 99% of light-speed, or even 99.99999%, the last little bit will forever lie just beyond our grasp...