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© 1996-2007 National Geographic Society
By Stefan Lovgren

As any self-respecting science fiction fan knows, wormholes—theoretical shortcuts through space and time—make for excellent time travel portals. One such movie to transport people into the past is A Sound of Thunder, based on the classic 1952 Ray Bradbury novella. In it, a group of hunters build a time machine, which looks like a wormhole of sorts, to travel back to the dinosaur era. There, things go awry when one hunter kills a butterfly, which completely changes the course of history. The movie was widely panned by critics and seems to have quickly slipped out of theaters. But the questions it raises—the mystery of time and the possibilities of traveling through it—remain among the thorniest in physics, keeping a growing number of scientists occupied.

It's not like scientists are looking for a way to actually travel through time. But some believe that theorizing about how it could be done—maybe by using a wormhole in space—will help them understand and perhaps even revise the laws of physics. "Traversable wormholes are extremely useful as gedanken experiments"—the term describes experiments that can be reasoned theoretically but are impractical to carry out—"to probe the limitations of general relativity," said Francisco Lobo, an astrophysicist at the University of Lisbon in Portugal.

Quantum Leap : Albert Einstein's relativity theory set the speed of light as the universal speed limit and showed that distance and time are not absolute but instead are affected by one's motion. A clock in motion will always appear to run slowly compared with one at rest, because time is relative to the speed at which a body is moving. That fact would, in theory, allow for time travel—at least if you have a very fast spaceship. Consider this: If an astronaut travels into space for six months at a substantial fraction of light speed and takes another six months to return to Earth, he would land in the future. While a year will have elapsed on the astronaut's clock, tens of thousands of years may have gone by on Earth, depending on how close to light speed the astronaut traveled...

Copyright © 2005 by Leon Kilkenny

The Pentagon has more than 10,000 deadly nukes in its arsenal. Each hydrogen bomb is 50 times more powerful than the atomic bomb that fell on Hiroshima, Japan in 1945. One such bomb strategically placed could devastate a country the size of England. Hitler had the H-bomb in 1945 and the Pentagon took Hitler's H-bomb to the U.S. and tested it in Alaska on April 1, 1946.Theoretically, the Pentagon 9 megaton W-53 thermonuclear warhead shown on the left, could easily be encased in a small 'lookalike' saturation diving chamber similar to that on the right, to protect it from the massive 10,000 pounds per square inch pressures at the bottom of the Sumatran Trench. The whole armored package would weigh less than five tons, allowing it to be slipped over the stern of any oil rig supply vessel, of which there are more than 300 in Asia alone. Who would even notice?

Deadly hydrogen bomb is a nuke within a nuke: The hydrogen or thermonuclear bomb is just a nuke within a nuke. In other words, it uses fission and billions of degrees in a conventional atomic bomb (primary) to trigger a chain reaction (fusion) in another bomb (secondary) in order to create a nuclear explosion. A third or tertiary stage can be added yielding up to 20 million tons of TNT!! Dr. Edward Teller said that the limit on these monsters was 100 million tons of TNT!! The first H-bombs produced in Nazi Germany were huge devices and needed special refrigeration devices (cryogenics) to keep the liquid deuterium below 400 degrees Fahrenheit. A submarine was the ideal delivery method at that time but the sub would be blown up in the explosion too. First test of an atomic bomb took place at Port Chicago on July 17, 1944! The world's first atomic explosion took place at Port Chicago just north of San Francisco on July 17, 1944. This was a test of the gun-assembly uranium bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan on July 6, 1945. The atomic test was carried out using the smokescreen of conventional explosives...

By Clifford Pickover

What is time? Is time travel possible? For centuries, these questions have intrigued mystics, philosophers, and scientists. Much of ancient Greek philosophy was concerned with understanding the concept of eternity, and the subject of time is central to all the world's religions and cultures. Can the flow of time be stopped? Certainly some mystics thought so. Angelus Silesius, a sixth-century philosopher and poet, thought the flow of time could be suspended by mental powers: Time is of your own making; its clock ticks in your head. The moment you stop thought, time too stops dead. The line between science and mysticism sometimes grows thin. Today physicists would agree that time is one of the strangest properties of our universe. In fact, there is a story circulating among scientists of an immigrant to America who has lost his watch. He walks up to a man on a New York street and asks, "Please, Sir, what is time?" The scientist replies, "I'm sorry, you'll have to ask a philosopher. I'm just a physicist."

Most cultures have a grammar with past and future tenses, and also demarcations like seconds and minutes, and yesterday and tomorrow. Yet we cannot say exactly what time is. Although the study of time became scientific during the time of Galileo and Newton, a comprehensive explanation was given only in this century by Einstein, who declared, in effect, time is simply what a clock reads. The clock can be the rotation of a planet, sand falling in an hourglass, a heartbeat, or vibrations of a cesium atom. A typical grandfather clock follows the simple Newtonian law that states that the velocity of a body not subject to external forces remains constant. This means that clock hands travel equal distances in equal times. While this kind of clock is useful for everyday life, modern science finds that time can be warped in various ways, like clay in the hands of a cosmic sculptor. Science-fiction authors have had various uses for time machines, including dinosaur hunting, tourism, visits to one's ancestors, and animal collecting...

© 2000, Colorado Springs Independent
by Malcolm Howard

Metaphysical leanings, scientific breakthroughs and conspiracy theories surround the life of Nikola Tesla, who did some of his most important and astonishing work in Colorado Springs. Somewhere on North Foote Avenue, just up the hill from its intersection with Pikes Peak Avenue, a small house stands on ground where 101 years ago, Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla built his famed, and now long-gone, Colorado Springs laboratory. It was a small, barn-like structure built on a once-grassy knoll, which then served as pasture land. From the center of the structure, an 80-foot tower loomed over the flat grasslands. Signs on the door reportedly read: "Keep Out, Great Danger" and "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here," according to biographies of the man.

Where "here" is isn't exactly clear, and I'll avoid naming the address that is believed to be the location to spare the present-day homeowners a repeat of what happened the last time word leaked about the locus of the former lab: Strangly clad visitors meditated on the sidewalk. A man in a VW bus parked at the site for several days and tried to invoke Tesla's spirit. Pilgrims of physics -- and metaphysics -- had come to pay homage to the man who said he made his most important discoveries on the small rolling hill just adjacent to the Colorado Springs Deaf and Blind School.

While it would be easy to poke fun at those who migrated to North Foote hoping to absorb any lingering vibes or energy left by Tesla's experiments, it's undeniable that something unique and powerful happened at the site. Tesla himself felt that his work in Colorado Springs would change the planet. "It was on the 3rd of July -- the date I shall never forget -- when I obtained the first decisive experimental evidence of a truth of overwhelming importance for the advancement of humanity," Tesla wrote in his journal. In short, as lightning got farther away, the pulses being picked up by Tesla's equipment didn't fade. Tesla felt he had discovered evidence that the Earth itself contained "stationary waves" that could serve as a good conduit for electromagnetic energy, opening the possibility of worldwide, instantaneous communication and global transmission of power through the Earth's crust...