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time

Stopping Time for Dummies

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Time - pixabay

The relentless march of time can be a source of anxiety. Who hasn’t sometimes wished for the ability to freeze themselves in a happy moment or even prevent a loved one from slipping away. Every once in a while, a science-fiction book, movie or TV show will feature characters who can do what we all wish: Stop time. But is such a thing possible? Answering that question requires a deep dive into the farthest corners of physics, philosophy and human perception. First, we have to define time. “To a physicist, it’s not that mysterious,” Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at … Read more

How Much Time Does the Human Race Have Left?

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Time - Pixabay

My advice to young scientists who seek a sense of purpose in their research is to engage in a topic that matters to society, such as moderating climate change, streamlining the development of vaccines, satisfying our energy or food needs, establishing a sustainable base in space or finding technological relics of alien civilizations. Broadly speaking, society funds science, and scientists should reciprocate by attending to the public’s interests. The most vital societal challenge is to extend the longevity of humanity. At a recent lecture to Harvard alumni I was asked how long I expect our technological civilization to survive. My … Read more

It’s Not Your Imagination – The World Really Is Spinning Faster

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Earth - pixabay

Even time did not escape 2020 unscathed. The 28 fastest days on record (since 1960) all occurred in 2020, with Earth completing its revolutions around its axis milliseconds quicker than average. That’s not particularly alarming — the planet’s rotation varies slightly all the time, driven by variations in atmospheric pressure, winds, ocean currents and the movement of the core. But it is inconvenient for international timekeepers, who use ultra-accurate atomic clocks to meter out the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) by which everyone sets their clocks. When astronomical time, set by the time it takes the Earth to make one full … Read more

Scientists Reverse Time (In a Really Small Way)

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alarm clock - pixabay

Time goes in one direction: forward. Little boys become old men but not vice versa; teacups shatter but never spontaneously reassemble. This cruel and immutable property of the universe, called the “arrow of time,” is fundamentally a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, which dictates that systems will always tend to become more disordered over time. But recently, researchers from the U.S. and Russia have bent that arrow just a bit — at least for subatomic particles. In the new study, published Tuesday (Mar. 12) in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers manipulated the arrow of time using a very … Read more

Did Time Run in Reverse Before the Big Bang?

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Like a mountain looming over a calm lake, it seems the universe may once have had a perfect mirror image. That’s the conclusion a team of Canadian scientists reached after extrapolating the laws of the universe both before and after the Big Bang. Physicists have a pretty good idea of the structure of the universe just a couple of seconds after the Big Bang, moving forward to today. In many ways, fundamental physics then worked as it does today. But experts have argued for decades about what happened in that first moment — when the tiny, infinitely dense speck of … Read more

SPACE: Could Black Holes Reverse Time?

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black hole - pixabay

As a massive star collapses into a black hole, it sends out a brilliant SOS signal in the form of ultrabright gamma-ray bursts. Now, scientists have found something very peculiar about those mysterious signals: They seem to reverse time. Well, sort of. A new study, published Aug. 13 in The Astrophysical Journal, has found that these gamma-ray bursts are time-reversed, meaning the brilliant light wave is spit out one way and then sent out again in the opposite order. The researchers said they have no idea what’s causing these time-reversed gamma-ray signals, but they added that the physics around black … Read more

SCIENCE: Killing the Arrow of Time

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Time - Pixabay

A new technique for quantum computing could bust open our whole model of how time moves in the universe. Here’s what’s long seemed to be true: Time works in one direction. The other direction? Not so much. That’s true in life. (Tuesday rolls into Wednesday, 2018 into 2019, youth into old age.) And it’s true in a classical computer. What does that mean? It’s much easier for a bit of software running on your laptop to predict how a complex system will move and develop in the future than it is to recreate its past. A property of the universe … Read more

SCIENCE: Using a Rare Element to Redefine Time

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Time - Pixabay

A lot can happen in a second; you could meet a stranger, snap your fingers, fall in love, fall asleep, sneeze. But what is a second, really — and is it as precise as we think it is? Right now, the most-precise clocks used to tell global time have an error of about 1 second every 300 million years — so a clock that started ticking in the time of the dinosaurs wouldn’t be off by even a second today. But scientists think we can do better. So, they are looking to lutetium, a neglected rare-earth element that has been … Read more

SPACE: Three Planet Hunters Make Time List

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Planet Hunters

Three extraordinary planet-hunters have been recognized by TIME Magazine as this year’s top 100 most influential people: Natalie Batalha from NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley; Michael Gillon from the University of Liège in Belgium; and Guillem Anglada-Escudé from the Queen Mary University in London. “It is truly exciting to see these planet-hunters among the other movers and the shakers of the world,” said Paul Hertz, Astrophysics division director at Headquarters in Washington. “These scientists have transformed the world’s understanding of our place in the universe, and NASA congratulates them for their well-deserved recognition.” Natalie Batalha is the … Read more