Monthly Archive for June, 2008

This past weekend there was a marathon of Cosmos on The Science Channel.  We’ll keep it simple for those with a short attention span.  Carl Sagan is the man.  That’s it, nothing more, be gone.  Seriously, look at that picture, he’s the man.

For the rest of you who enjoy these ramblings, I’ll continue.

Cosmos is a show from 1980 where Carl Sagan takes the most ridiculous topics related to astronomy, chemistry, physics, and others and manages to make it mildly engaging, entertaining, and educational.  I am willing to admit that I may be alone in this opinion.

I was especially engaged because two good friends of mine and I have had recent conversations about topics that were addressed by Carl.

First of these topics was the concept of time travel.  It is all centered around Einstein’s theory of relativity stating that as an object approaches the speed of light that time slows dramatically relative to those at rest.  Pretty sweet concept, but it’s not really time travel per say. It’s just kinda bending time and space a we bit.  If you ever get the itch to see what Earth is like in 30,000 years or so just travel near light speed for about 5 years.  Let me know how it goes, or leave a note on my grave or something.  You can’t travel backwards.

There is all kinds of cool stuff that happens as you approach the speed of light.  Your cone of vision would change dramatically.  To the point where you would actually see things in front of you that you already passed by.  It’s caused by the doppler affect on light.  We’ve all experienced it with a fire engine siren, well light waves do the same thing, pretty freaky.  In fact, if you were watching a person moving at the speed of light coming towards you they would “blue-shift“, going away and they would “red-shift“.  Some guys with a telescope actually figured this out.  It’s why pictures of far of galaxies have color.  Amazing.

“Teleportation” is another interesting concept.  I think we’ve all seen the The Fly, right?  Well, in astrophysics reality it’s a bit different.  The idea being that there are potentially these wormholes at the bottom of black holes that could lead across the galaxy, universe, or possibly other dimensions.  I’ll be honest, I was kind of napping during this one, so I don’t have much insight on the whole thing.  Still, pretty awesome, except for that whole near infinite gravity thing that would stretch you into oblivion.

Egads, I may be man-crushing.  Is that possible posthumously?