Wait. Warp drives may be possible?!

Wait, warp drives may be possible?!

The New York Times yesterday:

Harold G. White [ a physicist and advanced propulsion engineer at NASA] has been working on instrumentation with the goal of using it to slightly warp the trajectory of a photon, changing the distance it travels in a certain area, and then observing the change with a device called an interferometer....

[He and a] team is trying to determine whether faster-than-light travel — warp drive — might someday be possible.

Warp drive. Like on 'Star Trek.'

Whether a table top experiment might succeed, and the rather modest belief by White and others that its success may now be "less implausible," an actual warp drive bolted to a space ship is, for the time being, decidedly impossible.

But the laws governing these limits can nonetheless be probed. For example, the speed limit in special relativity applies to light's movement in the vacuum of space. Vacuum energy may be lowered further, however, to permit light to travel faster than its current limit of roughly 186,000 miles per second, a phenomenon known as the Casimir effect.

Other projects have demonstrated that the complementary states of two entangled but separate photons are maintained even at distances measured in miles. Though no information or matter is exchanged to maintain that reciprocal relationship, whatever happens does so at a speed many times the limit imposed by physical law. Similar experiments are planned between the ISS and Earth bound stations. Cryptology may never be the same.

Cosmologists also believe the repulsive and little understood force of dark energy is pushing galaxies away from us at speeds faster than light.

You too can probe the speed of light with the home experiment in the video here. You just need microwave and a chocolate bar. What the experiment may lack in precision, it more than makes up for in taste.

What Faster than the Speed of Light? suggests is that it may - and the stress is decidedly on may - be possible to travel faster than the speed of light, which could bring nearby stars hosting other worlds within reach of humanity. Whether there is a Zefram Cochrane out there to make that a reality remains to be seen.

Stay curious!

Wayne

Wikipedia: warp drive

Peter Sims' IF Conversation: Creativity a series of "little bets"

A lifetime removed from an earlier education that focused on finding the right answers and high achievement, "Little Bets" author Peter Sims believes that "life is much more rich when you're doing creative work."

Appearing last year at the IdeaFestival, Sims talks in this IdeaFestival Conversation about his nickname in high school (and why it may be less relevant than it once was), compares this period in U.S. history to another, and explains why he's so optimistic about the future.

The beauty of uncounted and culture-wide "little bets" is that they eventually result in new professions, companies and whole new industries.

To innovate, explore.

Festival passes for IdeaFestival 2013 are on sale now, but don't wait too long to make that purchase. We are expecting to sell out again this year!

Stay curious.

Wayne

Hacking Space - Five Questions for Ariel Waldman

Do particle collisions make a sound?

Slated to speak at IdeaFestival 2013 on the "Hacker's Guide to the Galaxy," Ariel Waldman took a few moments to talk recently with us for our Five Questions series. 

Thanks to a burgeoning citizen science movement that, for example, recruits human eyes to pour over data from our robotic emissaries, galaxies are identified, pulsars discovered and astronomical images are processed for clarity and beauty by amateurs the world over.

As Ariel suggests, these vantages can can, and do, connect ideas that had previously been unrelated, particularly when those sets of eyes come together. IdeaFestival fans will certainly recognize the delight in THAT process.

As for the answer to the first question, why, yes, particle collisions do make a sound!

Festival passes are now on sale - but don't wait too long to make that purchase. We're expecting a sell out again this year. 

Stay curious!

Wayne

"Extremists are afraid of books and pens"

Speaking at the United Nations, Malala Yousafzai, shot in the head by the Pakistani Taliban for speaking out about her right to an education, reminded world leaders that 57 million children are denied schooling. About her own story, she says that the bullet meant to silence her only killed her "weakness, fear and hopelessness."

Be inspired.

At IdeaFestival 2013 Tererai Trent will speak on her global quest to ensure that the right to an education for every child is protected.

Make plans now to be there!

Wayne

Can we still solve big problems? Five Questions with Jason Pontin

In the second of several new interviews in a revitalized "Five Questions" series, the editor in chief and publisher of Technology Review, Jason Pontin, connects with the IdeaFestival.

Watch the edited video to the right. Time stamps following each question (below) indicate where that question begins in the video.

Jason will appear at IdeaFestival 2013, where he will moderate a panel on Big Questions, Big Ideas and Intractable Problems that will include a name symbolic with blogging, Dave Winer, who created the RSS syndication standard. Digital syndication, combined with the then new medium of blogging, gave distinctive voices a chance for the first time to build audiences, just as their print counterparts did.

You don't want to miss Jason's panel! Festival Passes are now on sale, but don't wait too long to get yours. Sales are far ahead of last year's pace and we're expecting to sell out.

Wayne

1) Your most recent editor's note in Technology Review points out a couple of stories about the human role in "an automated world," and included the intriguing comment that "technological advances are not the same as progress." Do you believe the current divergence between wage growth and productivity in the United States is exacerbated by technology? If so, what technologies are responsible? And where do you see humans fitting in an "automated" future?

2) You're the editor of Technology Review. Since the IdeaFestival is all about the importance of innovation, how as a practical matter has Technology Review responded to changes in its industry? (2:22)

3) Today's media-saturated culture has of late drawn its share of critics, which include such people as Evgeny Morozov, Jaron Lanier and Nicholas Carr. If the medium is the message, how, in your opinion, are we being changed by the communications tools we use? What changes do you see on the horizon? (4:55)

4) Let's play Jeopardy! What question is an IdeaFestival audience member likely to ask following your panel? (8:00)

5) Isadora Duncan is quoted as saying, “If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it.” How do you "stay curious?" (9:30)