Should We Fear Aliens? Part III: Enlightenment.

‘Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.’ (H. Wells. The war of the worlds.)

Looks like I’m not Vox Clamantis In Deserto anymore. Well, there have been two of us supporting this contention: Stephen Hawking and me, although even his authority and expert opinion have apparently counted for little… until now.

It turns out that NASA luminaries finally came to senses and took notice of concerns I expressed in my articles ;) about the dangers of contact with aliens, although gung-ho techno geeks usually dismiss my ideas as a hindrance to progress. I'm glad my hard work has borne fruit at last and my articles managed to make NASA boffins see the light. (Note that they didn't even bother to credit me ;)) It’s not really rocket science to come to this conclusion and elaborate the report — all it takes is common sense and high school level literacy.

String Theory — The Music of The Spheres? M-theory (Superstring theory) and Brane cosmology.

String theory simplified and poeticised.

Wünschelrute
Schläft ein Lied in allen Dingen
Die da träumen fort und fort,
Und die Welt hebt an zu singen,
Triffst du nur das Zauberwort.
(Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff)

Magic wand
Sleeps a song inside all things
Dreaming in the spellbound world,
That will waken up to sing,
If you sound the magic word.

(Proverbs. Sentence poem by Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff)

Please don't copy without permission. Copyright © 2010  Brainstorming Ideas.)

String theory — science or philosophy?
This theory especially appeals to me because it’s based on a very musical idea — strings, and ‘music’, as Nietzsche put it, ‘is the true Idea of the World’ or in other words ‘world is materialised music’ (Schopenhauer).

This is what string theory is all about: the electrons, quarks and other particles are 1-dimensional oscillating "strings", possessing only the dimension of length. Their vibration determines the particles' flavour (quantum number of an elementary particle, which describes values of conserved quantities in the dynamics of the quantum system), charge, mass and spin. In addition, the superstring theory claims that a "supersymmetry" exists between bosons and fermions — force carriers and matter. But probably its most mind-boggling peculiarity is that such theory requires the existence of several extra unobservable dimensions — M-theory, for instance, puts forward eleven-dimensional space-time.

Hawking Radiation and Black Hole Evaporation.

Bekenstein-Hawking radiation questions.

'There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature...'  "The philosophy of Niels Bohr" by Aage Petersen.

How does Hawking Radiation work?



In 1974, Stephen Hawking set forth a theory that due to quantum effects black holes should emit a thermal radiation with a black body spectrum. Actually, he drew on two soviet scientists’ work who claimed that rotating black holes should create and emit particles according to the quantum mechanical uncertainty principle. That means that black holes can lose mass and, if they spew out more matter than they gain, they might shrink, evaporate and eventually vanish.

This analysis is allegedly the first serious shot at a possible theory of quantum gravity, but there’s a catch — the existence of Hawking radiation hasn’t been proved so far. NASA launched a satellite to search for the expected gamma-ray flashes from the evaporating primordial black holes, and CERN’s Large Hadron Collider is bent on creating micro black holes in order to observe their evaporation, or that’s the part they let us in on.

Is Time Travel Possible? Science or Science Fiction?

'Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT'S relativity.' — A. Einstein

For most people time travel is a common plot device in science fiction, although I’ve always considered travel to the past a sort of Deus Ex Machina. Conversely, the possibility of time travel to the future is arguably deducible from special and general relativities based on the phenomenon of gravitational and time dilation linked to the speed of the observer.