No really! It DOES work! Watch…I can PROVE it!
These are the kinds of news stories I love to read because nothing says “Waste of money” more than a good time travel story. Apparently the idea of time travel was recently debunked in Hong Kong as Dr. Shengwang Du and his team of scientists found that single photons can’t really travel faster than the speed of light like originally thought (or I know I did anyway). This, in turn, has set the world on fire because now it is unknown how Dr. Emmitt Brown got that DeLorean to travel back to the 60’s in “Back To The Future.” But I digress…
Dr. Du (as he’s called in the scientific community) issued this statement, “By showing that single photons cannot travel faster than the speed of light, our results bring a closure to the debate on the true speed of information carried by a single photon. Our findings will also likely have potential applications by giving scientists a better picture on the transmission of quantum information.”
He also said this, “The team found that, as the fastest part of a single photon, the precursor wave front always travels at the speed of light in vacuum,” researchers said. “The main wave packet of the single photon travels no faster than the speed of light in vacuum in any dispersive medium, and can be delayed up to 500 nanoseconds in a slow light medium. Even in a superluminal medium where the group velocity (of an optical pulse peak) is faster than the speed of light in vacuum, the main part of the single photon has no possibility to travel faster than its precursor.”
And this, “Our test confirms Einstein’s causality; that is, an effect cannot occur before its cause.”
And this, “I like to go poo poo when I get hot in this diaper.”
Okay…maybe I made up that last one.
Seriously? Do they have so much money laying around in Hong Kong that they can afford this kind of research? This makes me wonder what kind of time travel studies we’re doing here in the U.S. ’cause you just KNOW that we wanted to be the first to PROVE that time travel could really happen. I’m sure we have an entire squadron of astro-scientists who are hunkered down in an underground bunker somewhere, building robots and attempting to figure out how we can go back in time to create the Wii first.
Look…I’m thinking it’s about time we figured out what is important and what isn’t. Saving our eco-system, learning how to properly use solar energy and maintaining world peace? First. Going back in time or creating teleportation devices? Last.
Would it be cool to travel back in time, knowing what we know now and fix some things? Sure. I’m positive there are some really stupid decisions I’ve made (like a few in the last 30 seconds) that I would LOVE to go back and change. But it’s over & done and I’m moving on. And so should Dr. Du. I know the IDEA of time travel is fascinating to some and I guess it would be cool to hop in a flying car and jet back to my teenage years to see how far I’ve come, but do we really need all that pressure? There is SO MUCH to fix! As a race, humans have done so much to ruin this little planet of ours, ranging from destroying the environment to mass genocide. So I say let’s leave the past in the past and concentrate on our future because, quite frankly, we’ve screwed up the past enough. It’s time to focus all our efforts (and money) into some programs that DO make sense…like studying the eating habits of the humpback whale or the effects of cigarette smoke and how it causes cancer (’cause we can NEVER get enough of those studies). But time travel?
C’mon. Even I could have told you THAT wasn’t gonna happen.
Now excuse me but I gotta go e-bid on a nuclear sub on my IPhone. If you need me we can video chat later and I’ll Google ya on the flipside!
Alan out!
A Round World Through Square Glasses 