Victor Grippi – The Atomic Writer

Pulsars are the most energetic objects known in the universe. They can accelerate photons close to the speed of light. And if you know a little science, or have been reading The Atomic Writer, you know close to the speed of light means close to the speed of altering the fabric of space and time. Could pulsars, the remnants of once powerful stars, be gateways into other universes, other dimensions, or even portals of time travel?

The FERMI Gamma ray telescope recently launched by NASA, has in only 5 months discovered 16 new pulsars. A pulsar is the rapidly spinning and highly magnetized core left behind when a massive star explodes. Most of the 1,800 cataloged pulsars were found through their periodic radio emissions. Astronomers believe these pulses are caused by narrow, lighthouse-like radio beams emanating from the pulsar’s magnetic poles.

The Vela Pulsar spins 11 times a second. It is the brightest most consistent source of gamma rays in the sky.

This movie shows one cycle of pulsed gamma rays from the Vela pulsar as constructed from photons detected by Fermi’s Large Area Telescope. The movie includes data from August 4 to Sept. 15, 2008. The bluer color in the latter part of the pulse indicates the presence of gamma rays with energies exceeding a billion electron volts. For comparison, visible light has energies between two and three electron volts. Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration

A pulsar’s radio beams only represent a fraction of its power. The gamma rays they emit represent far more. Somehow the pulsar is able to accelerate particles to near the speed of light along magnetic field lines. These particles emit gamma rays as they arc along these magnetic lines.

Eventually pulsars will lose energy and slow down. The radio and gamma emissions will drop below detectable levels unless a new source of energy is found. Some pulsars live near younger energy spewing stars and the pulsar is able to siphon off this energy, in the form of highly charged particles, and this fuels the pulsar to keep it spinning faster and faster.

If we take this one step further and speculate a bit: what if a pulsar, fueled by a neighboring star, spins fast enough to accelerate particles at the speed of light. Not close to but at or above the speed of light. Could this be enough energy to open a wormhole? To tear open the fabric of space to allow travel into the 5th dimension, where theoretically time travel could occur.

Could the power of this pulsar be harnessed and used as a source of energy? Could an advanced intelligence place a spinning pulsar next to a star and then travel across the universe and place another pulsar in a similar arrangement? We would have two high speed wormhole portals? Enter into one, and arrive almost instantaneously in the other? Hmmm… makes you think doesn’t it.

Take a gander at the latest all sky map of the newly found FERMI pulsars.

Sorry for spilling out over the side, but the thumbnail image just didn’t look right. You, my dedicated readers, deserve the full sized image.

FERMI has already discovered many GRB’s or gamma ray bursts, up in the sky, but now has confirmed the existence of 16 new pulsars never before detected. How many more are out there waiting to be discovered? Up until FERMI, radio astronomer’s were only able to see a pulsar if one of its poles happened to cross Earth’s line of sight. FERMI detects the highly charged photons they emit but in some cases only detects a few per minute. Yes, only a few tiny photons per minute. But with such a sensitive instrument what discoveries may lie ahead?

Perhaps FERMI will detect light (photons) from another world, another dimension, or the light of days past. Perhaps it will peer into another large area telescope from an intelligent race of people who search the heavens for evidence of others like themselves. No one wants to be alone. We all struggle to maintain a sense of belonging to a greater cause, a larger humanity; even if it is only a faint spot of light flickering at the end of the tunnel we call life.

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking…what if.

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

Hello Readers,

Amazon is pairing Carl Sagan’s book, Contact, with The Ninth Cube for the month of December. Readers will have the opportunity to purchase both books at a cost savings and can do so with a single click!

Click here to receive a discount on both books.

I am very excited about the opportunity for readers who may not have heard about The Ninth Cube to be exposed to it through this partnership. It’s hard to get the word out in today’s crowded and heavily saturated book market, and Amazon is helping new authors, like myself, to gain exposure through this partnership.

For those who ask questions such as; is time travel possible, where did we come from, where are we going, how are we going to get there, what will be there when we get there? The answers to these and many more questions can be found in the writing of Carl Sagan and The Atomic Writer. And in the month of December, you can experience both these great writers at discount.

Personal note:
Carl Sagan exposed the science of the Cosmos to an entire generation of inquisitive minds including the atomic writer. He continues to this day to inspire and motivate us wherever he is in the Cosmos. The Ninth Cube is an extraordinary book on many levels. One aspect is a tribute to a man who opened my eyes to the endless possibilities of what lies just out of reach. My only hope is that somehow, somewhere, Carl is reading my book and smiling.

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking, what if…

Until next time…

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

Hello Readers,

Just a reminder that The Ninth Cube is being paired with Stephen Hawking’s A Briefer History of Time on Amazon during the month of November. You can buy both books at a discount.

Check it out!

Have you ever read Plato’s Allegory of the Cave?

Here is my version of the story:

Suppose a group of people are chained to a large rock inside a deep cave. The rock faces the end of the cave, and the people chained to this rock can only see the back wall of the cave. They have been chained there since childhood. Given these circumstances, reality for these people are the shadows and sounds they experience that are reflected off the cave wall.

Suppose one day a member of the chained group is set free and allowed to walk behind the large rock. Once on the other side this person realizes that the shadows come from a large fire burning in a fire pit, and from people that walk between the fire and the rock. The sounds are from these free people that walk in and out of the cave. Wouldn’t this person be unable to describe or identify the fire and the other people? To him, reality is the shadows and sounds from the cave wall. These new entities would seem alien, mystical, magical, or even demonic in origin.

Further suppose that this freed person is then taken outside the cave where he experiences the shining sun and trees and everything that exists outside the cave. Would he not be able to accept these things? Could he categorize and rationalize these new objects after spending his life tied to a rock inside the cave?

Now suppose this person is brought back to the cave and the rock where his friends have been tied to all their lives. Once there he tries to explain the origin of the shadows and the sounds and tries to convince them that the cave wall is not real but in fact an illusion. How do you think the other people will respond. Wouldn’t they think he was crazy, delusional, possessed; that his eyes have somehow been corrupted? Remember, all their lives the only reality they have known existed in the images and sounds reflected off the back of the cave. They would think he has been taken somewhere unknown and corrupted.

When he attempts to free another bound person, wouldn’t they try to kill him?

The moral of this story is that we are only able to comprehend and categorize that which falls within the boundaries of our limited viewpoint on the world. What we believe is real is limited by the degree to which we can perceive it.

The only way to expand our perception of reality is by experiencing new things, by reading stories of new possible realities that exist right on the other side of the rock of our lives. An entire universe of people, places, and things may exist right in front of our noses but we remain unable to perceive it because we refuse to accept the possibility that it exists at all.

Reading is one of the best ways to expand your mind and experience the countless possibilities in our world. To be more specific, books classified as speculative fiction take reality as we know it today, and expand upon it. This genre takes technology and makes one more step into the unknown. These books ask the big what if questions: what if we create an artificial black hole, what if it is actually a wormhole, what if we can time travel through it, what if it leads to another dimension.

Books like Stephen Hawking’s A Briefer History of Time, and Victor Grippi’s The Ninth Cube ask these questions and more. Hawking’s book is non-fiction and presents the current state of technology and physics theory, while The Ninth Cube takes these as premise and speculates on what the future may be when these theories become reality.

Fiction writers are like puppet masters who create shadows on the wall. All too often these do become reality.

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking, what if…

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

Hello Readers,

Amazon is pairing Stephen Hawking’s book, A Briefer History of Time, with The Ninth Cube for the month of November. Readers will have the opportunity to purchase both books at a cost savings and can do so with a single click.

Available with The Ninth Cube on Amazon

I am very excited about the opportunity for readers who may not have heard about The Ninth Cube and the Timeline Trilogy to be exposed to it through this partnership. It’s hard to get the word out in today’s crowded and heavily saturated book market, and Amazon is helping new authors, like myself, to gain exposure through this partnership.

For those who ask questions such as; is time travel possible, where did we come from, where are we going, how are we going to get there, what will be there when we get there? The answers to these and many more questions can be found in the writing of Stephen Hawking and The Atomic Writer. And in the month of November, you can experience both these writers at discount.

To quote Stephen Hawking, “The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.”

We find in The Ninth Cube the main character, Dr. Daniel Lamb, who studied under Dr. Hawking. In Daniel’s thoughts and actions the story unfolds and realizes the dreams of a great physicist. In many ways this is the story Stephen Hawking would write, if he wrote fiction.

Don’t believe me? Read the story and post a comment.

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking, what if…

Until next time…

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

Many of you ask The Atomic Writer if time travel is possible. It used to be a subject of science fiction that was not taken seriously. People would look sideways at you in a conversation about the physics involved and the possibility of altering space and time. Many scientists feared being seen as “fringe” scientists who are discounted as lunatics or quacks; the scourge of the profession.

Speaking of Fringe; how about the new Fox series by the same name? The Atomic Writer would like to know your comments on this new science based, X-Files like, new tv show. Any comments?

Michio Kaku gave the below interview to Scientific American on just this subject. The interview references the book and later movie, Timeline, by my fellow author Michael Crichton.

Now, let’s go back to Kaku, who says that it’s possible now to speak publicly about time travel without putting a career at risk, a thing unbelievable ten years ago.

Originally, the burden of proof was on physicists to prove that time travel was possible. Now the burden of proof is on physicists to prove there must be a law forbidding time travel. He goes back to the past to tell us when scientists started to think about time travel in a rigorous way, from Einstein to logician Kurt Gödel or mathematician Roy Kerr.

Here are selected excerpts:

SA: The idea in Timeline is that you can “fax” particles into the past. What is the kernel of truth there?
MK: In the last ten years, there has been enormous progress in something called quantum teleportation. This is not science fiction anymore. Now, to be real, we’re not talking about sending Captain Kirk across space and time. But we are talking about sending individual photons across space. In a few decades, maybe we will teleport the first virus, if the virus consists of a few thousand molecules. But at the present time, that’s the limit of what we can do. And we can only teleport things in space, not time. But the concept of faxing matter is not totally out of the question. And that was also raised in my book. So, there is a little bit of truth there.

SA: How practical would it be to build one of these time machines?
MK: In fact the energies we are talking about are the energies of stars. It would take a civilization far more advanced than ours, unbelievably advanced, to begin to manipulate negative energy to create gateways to the past. But if you could obtain large quantities of negative energy — and that’s a big “if” — then you could create a time machine that apparently obeys Einstein’s equation, and perhaps the laws of quantum theory. You need string theory to ultimately control all the divergences [i.e., to make sure a hail of gravitons doesn't fry you when you open or close the time machine]. Some cynics say quantum effects may still make the machine blow up. But at this point the burden of proof has shifted: people who are skeptical of time travel have to prove it’s impossible. And so far they have failed.

Kaku also speaks in detail about the paradoxes implied by time travel. and he discusses string theory or the influence of science fiction on physics. Scientific American also asked him what was his favorite time travel movie.

MK: Oh, that’s a hard one. There is a problem being a physicist, and that is when you see these movies, you say, “Well, that’s not right.” And it really ruins it. But I like the Back to the Future series. Here was a movie where you actually saw the scientist building and doing things; he was an essential character in the entire series. Doc Brown was this crazy man, but at least they showed him. He was there. He was making the series work.

Source: JR Minkel, for Scientific American, November 24, 2003
****************************************************

So is time travel possible? Every day science advances into the future. Most of the time it is with baby steps, but sometimes we do make a quantum leap.

Having a scientist as a protagonist is a great idea, just ask Dr. Daniel Lamb…

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking, what if…

Until next time…

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

Let’s cover some of the basic science behind black holes and how they could be related to time travel.

Where do black holes come from?
Black holes, like us, are born from the stars. The elements that make up all living beings originate in stars that explode and spread these elements throughout the cosmos. Likewise, when a star burns up all of its hydrogen, it explodes in a supernova, and then begins to collapse onto itself. It will collapse so dense that it creates a singularity.

What are the details of this process?
Stars, like our Sun, emit light from a process known as fusion. Stars convert energy into light by fusing hydrogen into helium. When a star burns all of its hydrogen it turns into a red giant. At this stage the star now has a helium core with a hydrogen outer layer. This grows and expands the star.

Inside this massive helium core, gravity begins to pull all this matter into itself. The temperature of the core rises dramatically and begins fusion of the helium.

The pressure sends temperatures soaring above a billion degrees, and the rising gravitational force makes lighter elements fuse into heavier ones: first helium to oxygen, then oxygen to silicon, and, finally, silicon to iron. Throughout, the slowly expiring star grows denser and denser.

The red giant is now very dense and causes space time, the four dimensional fabric of space and time, to curve more and more. Fusion continues until all elements are gone except iron.

This is the critical point where fusion can no longer support that pull of gravity in the core, and within a millisecond, the star explodes into a supernova.

The aftermath of the supernova depends on how large the original star was. For stars that are between 1.4 to 2 times the mass of our sun, it will become a neutron star. A neutron star is made up of super dense and heavy neutrons all packed together by the extreme gravity of the core. For solar masses of 3 or more, the star collapses into a black hole. A black hole is condensed so much that gravity prevents even light from escaping it. The fabric of space time has been reduced to a point, known as a singularity.

It is at this point where our math breaks down. Scientists have long searched for a unifying theory where we can explain how matter acts at the singularity. Solving this problem is critical if we are to ever know if time travel is possible. Knowing the conditions at the singularity will also explain the conditions present at the big bang, or before. Having the ability to shape the fabric of space time implies the possibility of manipulating the time factor in the equation.

If time travel proves to not be possible, it is important that we understand why it is not possible. This will lead to further explanation of our physical world and may lead to new technologies and industries that can create jobs, prosperity, and a healthy strong economy. In these troubled economic times, we need to keep moving forward and resist the urge to fall back technically in an attempt to comfort ourselves.

Some blame our current state on the failed promise of technology and the over dependence we face as a society. Computer system that we rely on have proven to not be reliable in all cases. This leads to a backlash of sediment against technology and cries of the nostalgic simpler days. This is the wrong direction to go. The Atomic Writer advocates the responsible, ethical pursuit of knowledge so that we can move forward in a safe humane manner, while continually progressing into the future. There is no turning back – only moving forward.

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking, what if…

Until next time…

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

News Flash: Thanks to you, my readers, The Ninth Cube is now the 5th best selling kindle technothriller on Amazon! This is based on the current sales ranking on 8.18.08.

Let’s examine some of the scientific theories involved in the examination of time travel. Remember, a theory is based on current observations and usually includes a mathematical model that describes the claims of the theory.

A new theory has emerged that claims to answer many questions that string theory falls short in. It is called MDT, or Moving Dimensions Theory.

According to Dr. Ranger McCoy, “Moving Dimensions Theory is in complete agreement with all
experimental tests and phenomena associated with special and general relativity. MDT is in complete agreement with all physical phenomena as predicted by quantum mechanics and demonstrated in extensive experiments. The genius and novelty of MDT is that it presents a common physical model which shows that phenomena from both relativity and quantum mechanics derive from the same fundamental physical reality.”

Let’s breakdown what we know so far:

RELATIVITY:

1) length contraction
2) time dilation
3) the equivalence of mass and energy
4) the constant velocity of light
5) the independence of the speed of light from the velocity of the source

QUANTUMN MECHANICS
1) action at a distance (quantum entanglement)
2) wave-particle duality
3) interference phenomena
4) EPR paradox

THERMODYNAMICS
1) Time’s arrow
2) Entropy

STRING THEORY’S MANY DIMENSIONS / KALUZA/KLEIN THEORY
1) a fourth expanding dimension can be interpreted as many dimensions, each time it expands

THE UNITY OF THE DUALITIES
1) wave/particle duality
2) time/space duality
3) energy/mass duality
4) E/B duality

GENERAL RELATIVITY
1) Gravitational redshift
2) Gravity waves
3) Gravitation attraction

THE SPACE-TIME BACKGROUND
1) quantum foam
2) the smearing of space and time at small distances
3) Hawking’s imaginary time

PARADOXES
1) MDT explains away Gödel’s Block Universe
2) MDT unfreezes time
3) Resolves Zeno’s Paradox

The Atomic Writer’s summary:
What I want you to get from this is that there are theories that do not rule out time travel. Travel in the forward direction is generally agreed without debate. However, travel back in time poses several problems that include a well known set of paradoxes. String theory, or MDT theory are attempts at rationalizing observations based on the advancing state of technology. As we peer deeper and deeper into the unknown, we sometimes have to throw out theories based on newly found data. New theories and mathematical models emerge to replace the old ones.

Einstein’s theory of relativity has stood the test of time for over a hundred years. Special relativity described the observable universe in a model called the space time continuum, replacing Newtonian theories that presented time as a linear entity stretching to infinity in both directions. Later, Einstein refined special relativity to include gravity, and this is called general relativity. Gravity is now described as warping or bending space/time and matter simply falls towards the mass that is creating the warp. A common analogy is placing a bowling ball on a mattress, the surface of the mattress depresses where the bowling ball sits. If you then take a baseball and roll it by the bowling ball, without touching it, you will see the baseball change course as if pulled towards the bowling ball. This is the core root of general relativity.

Einstein also discovered that time is based on how it is observed. To a person traveling at or close to the speed of light, time appears to move forward normally. To a stationary observer, however, time passes much much slower when compared to the person travelling at the speed of light. So if the traveler travelled for one year at the speed of light, the stationary observer would experience many years. Make sense?

Until next time…

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

Is time travel possible?

Many technologies were once considered impossible. Look at computers, the internet, airplanes, and the atomic bomb. Many scientists believed an atomic weapon was impossible because splitting a single atom would not produce enough energy. In 1914, HG Wells wrote a novel called The World Set Free, and in it Wells predicted the atomic bomb and described the concept of a chain reaction. Leo Szilard, a scientist, read the novel and set into motion a number of key experiments with Einstein and this led to the Manhattan project and ultimately the atomic bomb.

The moral of the story: the study of the impossible led to the realization of the real. Mainstream science should examine all avenues including works of fiction.

I am currently reading Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku. In it he describes three classes of impossibilities.

Class 1 impossibilities are impossible with today’s technology but they do not violate any known laws of physics. They could become possible within a century or two. These include items such as: force fields, invisibility, teleportation, antimatter engines, and psychokinesis.

Class 2 impossibilities are also impossible today and sit at the frontier of our understanding of physics, but could become real in millennia or more. These include: time machines, hyperspace travel, and travel through wormholes (Dr. Daniel Lamb may help out on this one).

Class 3 impossibilities are technologies that violate the known laws of physics. There are very few items in this class and if they ever become possible it is because of a fundamental shift in our understanding of the laws of science.

Another antidote from Dr. Kaku’s book describes how Stephen Hawking tried to prove that time travel was forbidden. Hawking called it the “chronology protection conjecture”. For many years he tried to mathematically prove that time travel was impossible, but failed. Physicists believe a law preventing time travel is beyond our current mathematics and therefore it has to be taken seriously. If there is no law preventing it then it may be possible.

According to T.H. White who wrote in The Once and Future King, “Anything that is not forbidden, is mandatory!”

Until next time…

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

Is time travel possible? As science considers this possibility, we may find an unlimited source of energy. In the quest for knowledge, and the solution to hawking radiation and traversing wormholes, we may find a source of clean natural energy to help solve our current energy crisis and dependence on foreign oil.

It’s called zero point energy and it involves harnessing quantum fluctuations in a vacuum. In the vacuum of space virtual particle pairs pop into existence, very briefly, and usually annihilate each other since they are oppositly charged. By interfering with the annihilation we can convert this potential energy into positive power.

There’s no coal to burn, wood to burn, oil to pump out of the ground, or nuclear chain reactions. And it’s a lot more effective than wind or solar power.

Could this help solve the energy dilemma this country faces? Even if time travel is proved to not be feasible, as previously mentioned here on the atomic writer, benefits from the attempts at time travel may provide new technologies and systems useful in a myriad of applications.

Industries will organically emerge and replace the failing sectors of our economy that are in dire straits at this time. We must fund projects that open and expand our horizons, and move away from the dying ones of the past.

Until next time…

-Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

Hello,

On this 4th of July, I look forward to a not too distant future when we humans will celebrate a different independence. Like the explorers who came before us, space is the next frontier and new technologies will be needed to traverse it. Columbus used the technology of the tall sailing ship to cross the Atlantic and discover a new continent.

If we are to ever spread out through the expansive cosmos, and hedge our chances of survival, we must develop new technologies like time travel. Time travel may be possible with wormholes but one obstacle that we must overcome is the predicted Hawking Radiation present at the event horizon. A common theme in this blog, my frequent readers know the importance of overcoming Hawking Radiation and how this will allow macroscopic objects to traverse the wormhole.

NASA recently launched the GLAST satellite, gamma large area space telescope, and they are currently calibrating it with the first received data. This may give us more insight into gamma ray bursts and evaporating black holes and prove that Hawking Radiation exists. We may begin to classify and catalog existing black holes that someday may prove to be one opening of a wormhole. A wormhole that may lead us to new worlds…

Stay tuned for more updates from NASA’s GLAST project. I hope you all had a safe and fun 4th of July.

-Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer