"Time Cloaking" sounds futuristic as all heck, but it turns out to be a rather simple trick. Thanks to the properties of spacetime and the unity of the electromagnetic spectrum, Time Cloaking turns out to be more optics than temporal translocation...see if you can grok this:
"Time cloaking is possible because of a kind of duality between space and time in electromagnetic theory. In particular, the diffraction of a beam of light in space is mathematically equivalent to the temporal propagation of light through a dispersive medium. In other words, diffraction and dispersion are symmetric in spacetime."
The actual size of the effect in question is somewhat less impressive than the headlines imply:
"The device has some limitations. The Cornell time cloak lasts only for 110 nanoseconds--that's not long. And Fridman and co say the best it can achieve will be 120 microseconds."
Shit, Paul Laffoley has a machine designed that can do better than that already. Are you up on the GEOCHRONMECHANE? Get hip.
Still: time cloaking is of deep interest to Team Ganesh. Tiny effects are all human engineers have ever needed to enact miracles on Earth. Soon these humble results will be better understood, and amplified into an actual means of local spacetime distortion. What can Time Cloaking do for you?
Meanwhile, in bunkers of Kent State, advances in magnetechnology prove even more interesting -- at least in terms of time travel potential. Behold the latest monster from the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory...
"High-powered research magnets are created by packing together dense, high-performance copper alloys and running an electrical current through them. All of the magnet's forces are focused on the center of the magnet coil — right where Toth and his team engineered the four ports. Building a magnet system with ports strong enough to withstand such strong magnetic fields and such a heavy power load was once considered impossible.
To accomplish the impossible, Toth's team cut large holes in the mid-plane of the magnet to provide user access to the bore but maintain a high magnetic field. All of this had to be done while supporting 500 tons of pressure pulling the two halves of the magnet together and, at the same time, allowing 160,000 amps of electrical current and 3,500 gallons of water per minute to flow through the mid-plane. (The water is needed to keep the magnet from overheating.)"
Serious experiments come with serious consequences, and tinkering with dimensionality itself is sure to create some completely fascinating problems. How would you deal with the literal disappearance of Lab 7B? Some of the strongest predictive programming in Fringe centers around the question of dealing with experiments that threaten the structural integrity of spacetime itself.
Science is fascinating stuff when it challenges our conceptions of reality, but what happens when it actually compromises reality in ways we cannot understand?
We look forward to finding out, of course. Algorhythms is not about Fear The Future dystopia, no matter how bleak our speculations may appear to be. Still, we wonder: is DHS allocating resources to keeping up with science's ongoing War on Reality? It all began, of course, on that infamous day in 2001...when a team at Harvard froze a beam of light in a laboratory setting. Since then, it's been an escalating series of brazen attacks, culminating in the human-jellyfish living laser project. (No, really.)
Considering the most recent round of fake terror threats involved bombs being actually implanted into human bodies, it's safe to say DHS is operating at least three years behind Hollywood, which is operating at least a decade behind science fiction at all times. Altogether, that's at least 13 Year Gap and it's a serious national security problem for the United States.
Consider The Crazies, a socio-economic horror film with a hilarious twist. The first 80% of the movie fakes the viewer out with a typical "zombie survival" action template, then abruptly makes it clear that the US Military, acting under protocols laid out by the Federal Government, is going to kill everybody and thus, far more dangerous than zombies who only go hunting one meal at a time. (Think about it.)
Once the true monster is revealed, it is far too late for the protagonists to fight back. They can only run, and in doing so, condemn another city full of innocent civilians to death. Roll credits. Containment is a nightmare that never ends, even nuclear weapons are not enough to enforce Control.
Consider "containment" as a concept itself -- this is an extension of the Myth of Entropy, a fictional end state known as a closed system. The damage that we do on this planet radiates out in waves just like any other spacetime phenomena does. Category errors make up most of the cultural discourse here in the Kali Yuga, as cognitive bias works with information technology to create an accelerating feedback loop of pure white noise. In other words, everything you think is horrible about the world in 2011 will be exponentially worse in less than one year.
The same is true for Beauty and Truth, though. It's all getting cranked up to 11 from here on out. Buckle up and eat good food.
1 comment:
The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory is located at Florida State University, not Kent State.
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