Tea at Trianon: A Mathematical Model For Time Travel?

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, September 10, 2018

A Mathematical Model For Time Travel?

From Science Alert:

"People think of time travel as something as fiction. And we tend to think it's not possible because we don't actually do it," said theoretical physicist and mathematician, Ben Tippett, from the University of British Columbia in Canada. "But, mathematically, it is possible."

Together with David Tsang, an astrophysicist at the University of Maryland, Tippett used Einstein's theory of general relativity to come up with a mathematical model of what they're calling a Traversable Acausal Retrograde Domain in Space-time (yep, the acronym is literally TARDIS). But before we get into the madness of legit time travel, let's put this into perspective real quick - the researchers aren't claiming to have a blueprint for a Doctor Who-style time machine that can be built tomorrow. They say the materials we'd need to build this thing are so exotic, we haven't even discovered them yet... but we'll get to that in a minute.

Firstly, let's talk about what Tippett and Tsang are actually proposing. The model is based on the idea that instead of looking at the Universe in three spatial dimensions, with the fourth dimension (time) separated, we should be imagining those four dimensions simultaneously. (Read more.)