Ask Ethan: What science experiments will open the door to the future? (Synopsis)

"Imagination makes us aware of limitless possibilities. How many of us haven't pondered the concept of infinity or imagined the possibility of time travel? In one of her poems, Emily Bronte likens imagination to a constant companion, but I prefer to think of it as a built-in entertainment system." -Alexandra Adornetto

The dream of futuristic technologies and what they might enable us to do -- travel back in time, create artificial gravity, traverse the stars, create unlimited energy -- are some of the best goals science can aspire to. While a great many of the technologies we’ve envisioned might well prove to be physically impossible, these four could immediately become reality if just one experiment, potentially within the next decade, reveals a surprise it should be able to detect.

All rockets ever envisioned require some type of fuel, but if a dark matter engine were created, new fuel is always to be found simply by traveling through the galaxy. Image credit: NASA / MSFC.

If dark matter is detected and proves to be its own antiparticle, then all we need to do is figure out how to harness it and unlimited fuel along an interstellar journey is ours for the taking. Antimatter might fall upwards in a gravitational field, having a negative mass, which would create artificial gravity and even, potentially, warp drive. And if the Universe rotates with just the right value, traveling back in time might become a part of science, not just science fiction.

The idea of traveling back in time is presently relegated to the realm of science fiction. However, if there are closed time-like curves allowed in our Universe, it's not only possible, it's inevitable. Image credit: Genty / Pixabay.

There are experiments ongoing today and ones presently under design that might unlock these mysteries and more. Find out all about them on this week’s Ask Ethan!

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Ethan... are you high?
"— travel back in time, create artificial gravity, traverse the stars, create unlimited energy — are some of the best goals science can aspire to."

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The real problem is, these aren't 'some of the best' science objectives at all, it's a laundry list of silly Star Trek plot devices invented to help rapidly pace a 45 minute television program from being boring to young adults within a very limited financial budget.
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None of the things on your list of 'science' problems, or 'goals' is even remotely in need of being achieved.
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Time travel violates causality, this is the biggest no-no in all science. Causality should be near sacrosanct to you as a *cough* scientist. Being that time travel is more often than not used as a plot device to create problems, not solve them, I'm also surprised you even suggested it. Fry really doesn't need to ...bump into... his grandmother before his father was born. The Hump Back whales are not out to kill us ...yet...for a least a few centuries, so relax.
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We already have acheived simulated gravity, It's called centrifugal force, it's not pretty, is awkward to use, and doesn't allow for space ships to be built like aesthetically pleasing horizontal office buildings (with large picture windows) that can make ninety degree angle turns in a vacuum and take off instantly into cool rainbow streaks, but it works better than non-existent physics dependent upon theoretical dark unicorn farts for propulsion.
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Creating unlimited energy? No, I really don't think so. When you aren't high, you don't think so (usually). Einstein also doesn't think so either, just pop into your time machine and go ask him yourself...or just read any of his papers. So you think energy can be created, do you? So much for you and the rest of physics...remember the whole E=mc^2 business? You keep bringing it up whenever it's convenient....oh, oops, I see, this would be one of those 'inconvenient' times...my bad. The equation has to balance you well know... You are a *cough* *cough* *cough* scientist....aren't you?
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Traverse the stars...Ok. This is not a problem at all. This is just the ordinary escapist wish-fulfillment of someone who has nothing better to do with their life...
There are far more practical solutions to achieving this 'goal' that are actually possible: Use your imagination, pick up a science fiction novel, watch a movie, or check out "The Expanse" on Syfy to get your inner nerd on with, it will save the rest of humanity from bankrupting itself trying to entertain your useless ass getting bored in a spinning tin can in outer space...
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...also, you should very seriously consider getting yourself a girlfriend/boyfriend...these do wonders for making life on this little world more beautiful and interesting than putzing around in the void having imaginary adventures with fake people on holodecks that simulate being back on earth. Just stay on Earth to have real adventures with real people, and get rid of the incredibly complicated and expensive middleman.
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Ethan, Please don't drink or do drugs before you blog, it shows.

" And if the Universe rotates with just the right value, traveling back in time might become a part of science, not just science fiction."

Would that be like it somehow begins rotating in reverse so all clocks would run backwards and eventually all dinosaurs would rise from their fossil beds and come back to life?
Just imagine! ... "not just science fiction."

Your blog reads more like sci-fi all the time. Must be the Trekkie mentality and the ardent desire to "make it so!"

By Michael Mooney (not verified) on 26 Aug 2017 #permalink

Ethan,
I just read your Forbes blog over again several times.
"Antimatter could have negative mass, which means it might be the key to warp drive."
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Utter rubbish and you know it. Magically conveyed forces derived from literally nothing but a gaping data hole?
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Having a particle with an opposite electrical charge does not grant negative mass, there is no such thing as negative mass. There is no 'might' or 'could' about it, you can have none, or some, but there is no negative mass, Just as there is no negative amount of time from turning clock hands counter clockwise. I find it almost surreal you are actually trying to make Superman's time travel stunt look like science.
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Seriously, even for you this is ditzy off the deep end. Are you alright? What happened?

Transmutation Confirmed? New MFMP Video: “NOVA Basic – First Look at 2 Minute Processed Charcoal”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzQdDcHnjbI

Here’s a new video published by the Martin Fleischmann Memorial Project in which they look at ash produced from processing carbon from charcoal after two minutes in George Egely’s NOVA reactor, using a Scanning Electron Microscope.

In the video, they show results in which aluminium, magnesium, iron, silicon, sulphur, potassium, calcium, titanium, sodium, copper are identified.

From the video description:

First look at 2 mins of charcoal processed in Basic NOVA reactor seems to confirm the claims of Dr. George Egely that it is producing George Ohsawa reaction products. Tests with controlled pure carbon needed to be certain.

Sergio Gutiérrez is a String theorist with a good idea. He wants to build new particles with Bose Condensates to test for extra dimensions as required by string theory doctrine. There a 11 dimensions in string theory. A Bose condensate produces a particle that is N times more massive than the individual particles that make up the condensate. But this idea is also a great way to produce grand unification of the fundamental forces by pumping energy into those extra dimensions. Rather than pumping huge amounts of energy into a single particle, a Bose condinsate can store that energy across many particles but still act like a single particle.

In this case, the coupling constants of the strong and electroweak interactions meet at the grand unification energy, also known as the GUT scale:

In my opinion by using a Bose condensate, Sergio Gutiérrez is on the correct road to Grand unification but he must utilize the polariton rather than atoms to form the Bose condensate. The non-equilibrium room temperature Bose-Einstein condensates is the tool that he must use in order to get to where he wants to go.

see for background on non-equilibrium room temperature Bose-Einstein condensates
https://arxiv.org/abs/1509.05264

Does the BEC argument imply that we would "see" the extra-dimensions of string theory in our daily life? Answer: YES. We can see the results of accessing these extra dimensions from the changes they produce in the fundamental forces.

In the grand unification theory (GUT) proposed by Howard Georgi and Sheldon Glashow in 1974, the road to grand unification took the wrong road by assuming that the fundamental forces of nature could come together when a single particle could be pumped with the huge amounts of energy required to expose the unification of the fundamental forces.

But the correct road to grand unification of forces is found in condensed matter physics, quasiparticles, and through Bose condensation of many of these particles. The condensate acts like a single particle but the energy that the condensate assumes and can store is the sum of all the energy of all the members of the condensate.

Unlike the conditions that exist in ultra-cold atomic BECs, the Bose condensation produced by polaritons has the proper temperature, particle mass, energy, and aggregation numbers to access and expose the extra dimensions that are not usually accessible to ordinary reality. What we see in that polariton condensate is how the universe functioned during the first few seconds at the beginning of the universe before the universe cooled where every particle in that infant universe had huge energies.

This condition can be seen today in selected polariton base BEC experiments that show the increased activity of the weak force in stabilizing radioactive isotopes.

This process has been patented by the US Navy and is available for licensed development.

https://www.google.com/patents/US8419919

Original Assignee: Jwk International Corporation, The United States Of America As Represented By The Secretary Of The Navy.

This patent means that the process of stabilizing radioactive isotopes described therein absolutely works as certified by the US patent office.

A very pure and direct polariton based nanoplasmonic experiment using light pumped nanoparticles that enables us to see the change in how the weak force works as it ascends the energy level scale to unification is referenced here.

Accelerated alpha-decay of 232U isotope achieved by exposure of its aqueous solution with gold nanoparticles to laser radiation
A.V. Simakin, G.A. Shafeev

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&frm=1&source=web&cd=1&ca…

And in a summation bringing in LENR involved in this subject for you as follows:

A polariton is a special quasiparticle. It is an electron that has most of its mass and charge removed. It can only exist when it is generated by a nanoparticle or a pit or bump in the surface of a metal.

As a special case, metallic hydrogen is a nanowire that produces the LENR reaction without plasma forming. This includes other hydrogen based metalized compounds like water.

But when plasma is used to produce the LENR reaction, because the polariton needs is a nanoparticle to exist, it is passively critical. When that nanoparticle vaporizes, the polariton dies. So a dirty plasma that is passively maintained at the vaporization point of a given metal will produce many self-sustaining forms of energy including heat, light. XUV. X-rays, gamma, pressure from fast particle generated shock waves, electrons and various other types of subatomic particles.

To sum up, the Bose condensate modifies the weak force so that the energy of excitation that comes from nuclear reactions that usually generate neutrons and other radiation is stored in the condensate and not released to the far field.

But if the Bose condensate is not well formed or very weak, then neutrons and other radiation is produced by the LENR reaction.

@CFT:
I will not go into details for each of your claims.
Basically, we don't really know many big ideas in science-fiction are really theoretically/practically possible or not. And that means our knowledge of physics is incomplete. And that means we should try to answer those questions by doing more theoretical research, as well as more experiments and observations.

I think you basically claim physicists should not even try and give up!

Also just wondering, do you have a problem with all physicists or just Ethan? :-)

@Frank #6,
My last few posts were very upset and angry, I made the mistake of drinking after receiving a phone call about the death of someone very dear to me.
No, I don't think physicists should stop looking for answers.

Bose condinsation is extremely important in LENR. It is where all the miracles of LENR come from. The polariton is a boson. It is made from an electron and photons of heat combined together through quantum mechanics. Polaritons are electrons that has lost their charge and most of their mass. Electrons are fermions and they cannot form condensates.

Why would a polariton condinsate as a black hole look like a tachyon?

http://phys.org/news/2015-09-law-implies-thermodynamic-black-holes.html

Because the area of future and past holographic screens increases in different directions, the direction of time is different for the two types of screens. In past screens, time moves forward. Expanding universes, such as ours, involve past holographic screens, and so we naturally perceive thermodynamic time as running forward. In contrast, time runs backward in future holographic screens. In a sense, this interpretation has the odd result that thermodynamic time runs backward inside black holes and collapsing universes. The polariton condinsate is a analogue black hole where energy enters but leaves in unexpected ways.

In a polariton condinsate as a analog black hole would look like a tachyon which is a particle that is traveling backward in time.

In the 1967 paper that coined the term, Feinberg proposed that tachyonic particles could be quanta of a quantum field with negative squared mass. However, it was soon realized that excitations of such imaginary mass fields do not in fact propagate faster than light, and instead represent an instability known as tachyon condensation. Nevertheless, negative squared mass fields are commonly referred to as "tachyons", and in fact have come to play an important role in modern physics.

The Polariton condinsate as an analog black hole would be a tachyon containing negative mass and moving backward in time.

According to string theory, The polariton condinsate as a tachyon releases energy in three ways: heat as hawking radiation, light whose frequency is proportional to the density of the polaritons that form the condinsate and mesons...lots and lots of mesons.

CFT, i am very sorry to hear about your friend/family member. I also understand how hard it is to not "type while angry". Best wishes to you and yours.

rich