Word: though
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2000
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...looking glass. The children in C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia entered theirs by way of a musty old wardrobe. Considering their usefulness as a plot device, it's hardly surprising that science fiction and fantasy literature are filled with alternate universes of one kind or another. What is surprising, though, is that mainstream physicists have stumbled onto their own alternate universes, hidden amid the complexities of science's most arcane equations...
...purely theoretical, though, since there's no conceivable way to make contact with even one of these alternate universes. So while each of us may spawn an uncountable number of parallel selves as the particles within us split and re-split, the chance of tapping into our other histories is precisely zero--and so, alas, is the chance of figuring out whether this interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct...
...still talking about one universe--though one vastly larger than the tiny patch, a mere 30 billion light-years across, that we can see. But then scientists, including the Russian emigre Andrei Linde, realized that this inflation was more flexible than anyone had thought. Energy fields of early-universe intensity could arise purely by chance in subatomic-size regions of even a normal cosmos...
...travel through the three dimensions of space pretty much at will--moving forward or back, left or right, up or down--without even thinking about it. When it comes to the fourth dimension, though, we appear to be stuck. Time flows on in one direction only, and we flow with it like corks bobbing helplessly in a river. So the idea of traveling through time, as opposed to with time, is immensely seductive. Who wouldn't want to know what technology will look like in the year 3000, or witness the assassination of Julius Caesar...
...theory of general relativity showed that space and time are curved, and that the curvature can be large in the neighborhood of very massive objects. If an object is dense enough, the curvature can become nearly infinite, perhaps opening a tunnel that connects distant regions of space-time as though they were next door. Physicists call this tunnel a wormhole, in an analogy to the shortcut a worm eats from one side of a curved apple to the other...