Word: speeding
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2000
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...sent an astronaut to the planet Mercury and she lived there for 30 years before returning, she would be about 22 seconds younger than if she had stayed on Earth. Clocks on Mercury tick more slowly than those on Earth because Mercury circles the sun at a faster speed (and also because Mercury is deeper in the sun's gravitational field; gravity affects clocks much as velocity does). Astronauts traveling away from Earth to a distance of 0.1 light years and returning at 1% the speed of light would arrive back 8.8 hours younger than if they hadn't gone...
...Thorne, a physicist at Caltech, and several colleagues suggested that you could use such a wormhole to travel into the past. Here's how you do it: move one mouth of the wormhole through space at nearly the speed of light while leaving the other one fixed. Then jump in through the moving end. Like a moving astronaut, this end ages less, so it connects back to an earlier time on the fixed end. When you pop out through the fixed end an instant later, you'll find that you've emerged in your own past...
...string and somehow manipulating it so it would contract rapidly under its own tension, like a rubber band. The extraordinary energy density of the string curves space-time sharply, and by flying a spaceship around the two sides of the loop as they pass each other at nearly the speed of light, you'd travel into the past...
...bets are off, however, if genetic engineers find a way to intervene. What slows the human body down is less the architecture of its skeleton than the chemistry of its muscles. The key to speed is making muscles contract faster, and the key to that is gassing them up with as much oxygen as possible. "About 80% of the energy used to run a mile," explains physiologist Peter Weyand of Harvard University, "comes directly from oxygen...
Runners are not the only athletes for whom souped-up genetics could mean souped-up performance. If baseball players could increase their bat speed, home runs that barely clear the fence could fly hundreds of feet farther. Boost leg strength in a football kicker, and a 60-yd. field goal could sail...