Thursday, January 13, 2011

Light Travel

Most Sci-Fi flics treat the idea of traveling the speed of light (or faster) as something rather ordinary, spaceships traveling in and out of light speed as easily as our cars darting through traffic.
However,when the concept of light speed travel is discussed in any classroom or academic setting with real physicists, it's completely dismissed as impossible and downright outlandish.

Physicists generally state the following as their reason :

Because E=mc sq, as a ship approaches light speed, it's mass would increase which would require more energy or fuel to accelerate the ship. As the mass increases to infinity , there will never be enough fuel to power the vehicle over the threshold of light speed. Add to that the minor detail of time slowing down as one approaches the speed of light, so that even if there was an infinite fuel supply, there will never be enough time to get the ship up to speed.

Not only do i think these physicists are wrong, but i think man is capable of traveling many times the speed of light. My reasons for this are neither mathematical or scientific. I base my conclusions on an experience i had in grade school. I was presented with a math problem in the 3rd grade. Although all the details of the problem are unclear to me today, i remember that after a few minutes of calculations my answer was ....... ' Ted's train arrived at the station 5 hours before it left.'.... The answer was absurd so i reworked it.........Same answer. I reworked it again and again...Same answer. I finally concluded to myself that the the math problem was unsolvable, that if Sue and Ted left home at 5:00pm on a train traveling 50 miles per hour, they would never arrive at their destination......... After the teacher introduced me to a brand new field of mathematics, i easily solved the problem.

When it comes to our physical world , i believe that conventional mathematics works fine up till a certain point. Once we begin to speed things up beyond 50,000 miles per hour, math gets a little peculiar. The faster we go after that, standard mathematical models fall apart at the seams. Eventually physicists when wrestling with light speed travel, become like me in the 3rd grade. They come up with absurd answers, rework the problem again and again, and finally conclude that light travel is impossible, essentially their version of .. ' Ted's train arrived at the station 5 hours before it left.'...The only difference is that there has not yet appeared a teacher to introduce these scientists to a new field of mathematics, one that is compatible to the world of light speed, mass and energy. The day mankind discovers this 'New Math', the conundrum of traveling light speed or many times it, will unravel quite easily.

Before 1940, it was thought that traveling beyond the speed of sound would be either impossible or catastrophic to the traveler, hence the name 'sound BARRIER'. ...However, technology improved till finally a Bell XS-1 was able to scale the sound barrier with Chuck Yeager at the helm, and the only catastrophic event was a large 'POP' sound once Chuck got on the other side of 750 miles per hour....

From impossible to accomplish to ...it can be done but with a brief popping sound .

I therefore conclude that traveling beyond the light BARRIER may be much easier than we think once we
1. improve our technology
2. discover a 'New math'
....and I wouldn't be surprised that once a spacecraft crosses that barrier there will be some equivalent of a popping sound ( although there's no sound in space).



Until then , I'm placing a Help Wanted ad--
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........................................... Help Wanted--Teacher who's great at math...............................................

Thursday, January 06, 2011

The Homeless Phenom

I was looking at TV yesterday and an amazing story unfolded. ........It was about a homeless man with a phenomenal set of speaking pipes. At first I refused to accept it, especially after looking at the man in question.


He looked to me like an overly tanned Don Imus,.......like a werewolf in mid transformation.


But then the man, Ted Williams, opened his pie hole and sounded like James Earl Jones with a side of Barack Obama ......a combo of Tony the Tiger and the 'LET'S GET READY TO RUMBLE' guy....Needless to say a voice of a god...small 'g'.

I turned to my wife and said," Boy I sure hope the poor homeless schmuck gets a job with that voice."...
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----------------------------------ONE DAY LATER-----------------------------------
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The very next day I find out that Ted Williams received job offers from numerous Fortune 500 companies, sports franchises, on and on and on......to the point that he was even offered a home to live in....That's correct.The man went from homeless to home less a mortgage. Ted Williams in one day passed me by on the successo meter.

Now if you're thinking that I'm slightly jealous, you couldn't be more wrong.......I'm insanely jealous.

When I told my wife that I hope he gets a job, I meant that I hope that he gets a job that pays less than my job....I wanted him to improve in his lot in life, but I didn't want that lot to be bigger than mine.
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Homeless people are like midgets. I want midgets to be tall...but not taller than me....Likewise I want homeless folks to be successful, but NOT MORE THAN ME.... By the way, could you imagine a midget that suddenly grows and dominates you ?......


I have a strange feeling that Ted Williams right now is making comments about me, hoping that I someday will get a decent job.



From now on this will be my standard reaction to any homeless person I see.