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Interview With an 'X'

The 'X' is definitely one of the most important letters in the alphabet. Not only that, but it is the most valuable variable in all math equations and scientific chases for the unknown, and in the entire history of human riddles, and I mean not always related to math, it always marks the most interesting spot. Sometimes the one with the treasure. It was no coincidence that the old Romans used it for the most important number of them all. 10. The very base of our widely used numeric system. But we are not here to talk about mathematics or treasure hunting per se. It will be more about age. Of ten. My son Viktor is turning this magic number on this year's Earth Day (April 22nd), and I decided, in addition to our previous topic and post Interview With an Expert, to fire another set of questions for him to answer. This time it's more general and within various realms of life and... well, stuff...



So let's start with favorites. I guess they say a lot about personality. And they don't require a polygraph to confirm the truthfulness of the given answers. For some reason, I believe everybody, or most of us, will answer these honestly. Probably because of their benevolence (if this is even a word). Even we adults will not curve the truth with these ones. And yet, answers to these questions probably reveal a lot about a person. In the modern world, it is comparable to the browser history; if you want to learn about your friend's likes and dislikes, just have a glimpse or two of his or her bookmarks and history.

So, let's start the interview in that fashion. Here it goes:

 What are your favorite subjects in school?
Physical education, sports, music, and math—because they are so much fun, and I like numbers and solving puzzles.

 What sport do you like the most, and why?
Basketball: It is the best sport and great for body practice. It makes you stronger and faster.

 What are your favorite regular and comic books? And why?
The best book I've read so far was '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea' because it was so mysterious and adventurous. The greatest comic book is definitely 'Il Grande Blek'—he 'and all his friends are very interesting and super funny.

 What are your favorite board and video games? Why these?
Battleship and Connect 4—they are interesting and tense. The best video game is definitely Minecraft, because I can build things and make my own worlds.

What about your favorite movie and TV show? How so?
Avengers for the movies—great fight and smart play. The Flash for TV shows—because they are funny and mysterious. Also Discovery Channel's Mythbusters—they do amazing myth testing, especially what they find on YouTube.

 What's your favorite food?
Rolls, pie, and pastry. Also Milka chocolate and marshmallows.

 What about favorite color(s)?
Something between green and black.

Well, that was easy and nice to warm up the interviewer and interviewee. No big surprise there. To be honest, if I exclude color and food, it could be the same answers I would offer. Then again, back then, when I was around 10 years old, maybe even the food and colors would be the same. Perhaps only the movie would be different, but I have to say he nailed the book. Ok, let's move to more interesting questions and see what happens next. But not to the boring ones yet. Serious questions should be at the bottom of the pit for now... or never asked. So, let's continue with just a couple of those from the realm of movies and games. And fantasy.

What superpower would you like to possess? Don't say to be rich.
Jedi Force mastering and telekinesis.

 What do you think about the greatest mystery of the universe, women?
Well, I think that... wait, what?

 Sorry, it was a line from Back to the Future... But seriously, what do you think is the greatest mystery of the universe?
How did it all start in the first place?

 What part of the world would you like to visit some day?
America and Germany. I would like to visit their museums.

 You like museums? What kind?
Natural museums and museums about fighting machines of all kinds. Old and new.

 Would you rather live at the North Pole or in the desert?
Definitely the desert. (I like warm weather better).

 If you could be any animal, which one would you be and why?
Fox (they are fast and smart) or snake (because they are careful and cautious).

Okidoki, now we are getting warmer. With the exception of the snake, I would easily predict all the answers. However, even though the snake looks odd, when I think about it, there's wisdom in there. Ever since the book of Genesis, we have been taking snakes for granted and always in the realm of evil, and children's thinking is definitely not weighted with stereotypes and dogma. Museums look nice too. Ok, let's go into a more personal area now and see how the 'X' will describe himself by answering these generic questions (I found them online and changed them a little to better fit the age).

 What is one of your greatest talents? What do you do best?
I remember things for a long time.

 What makes you nervous, and what makes you happy?
I am nervous when I don't know what to say or how to answer questions and happy when I do things properly.

 What is your happiest memory so far? 
When I bought the Darth Vader Pig plushy from the Angry Birds franchise when I was 4... I couldn't believe it when I saw it on the shelf in the store when we were on vacation in Greece.

I have to admit, as it seemed, these questions gave Viktor a hard time. He did think a lot before answering, and I had to help him a little with offering answers in the form of A, B, C... It looks like with him and probably lots of children his age, happiness is not the same as with us adults. It's more about moments and great times they enjoy the most. I guess they live in present time more than we do. Ok, that indeed was something interesting, so what is next? Oh yes, if those questions up to now were describing a young boy indetail, the following ones will go even further. Like they say... To the bone... The time is now for hard questions.

 What age do you look forward to—and why?
22

 Really? Can you be more precise than that?
Because I was born on the 22nd...

Ok, I give up. What do you want to be when you grow up?
Game designer and software developer in general.

 What do you think you will be doing 10 years from now? 
Programming. And making more successful YouTube videos.

 How do you think Earth will look when you grow up?
I am not sure. Not so different than today. Maybe there will be lots of robots?

 What is God? 
There are many gods—the sea god, heaven god, and hell god (I like the sea god the most)—and I saw in Greece lots of sculptures and monuments. People say they lived long ago, and they created animals.

 Who created people?
Monkeys. Over time, they rose up, lost their fur and hair, and became humans.

Ok, thanks for all the answers. Do you have anything to ask me?
Not really... Maybe on your birthday.

 For the end, what advice would you give to your parents?
To play with me more often.

 So there you go. I know I could have been more thorough with this interview and created more serious questions for the last section, but I thought that this post should stay in the entertaining thread on the blog and represent just one short and funny conversation between a father and son and a small generation gap in between. For the very end and to get back to the post opening, Viktor's birthday and Earth Day (unofficial Earth's birthday) are celebrated on the same day every year, and for this special occasion, I want to give them both the same message:

 

Time Travel

It's a well-known fact that our universe is, as far as we know today, a four-dimensional space-time continuum with three spatial coordinates and time playing the role of the fourth one. We are perfectly capable of traveling backwards and forwards within the first three spatial coordinates, but is it possible to do the same on the fourth one? I am sure you would agree that it is not too exciting going up or down or left or right, but traveling through time could be something special. But is it possible? Let's explore all the theories, share some stories, and read about one connected hoax.


Well yes, like many of you, I also love reading sci-fi stories and watching great movies about time travel, but before I start upgrading my DeLorean with a brand new flux capacitor kit I can find online, let me tell you a story that inspired me to start reading articles and buying popular scientific books regarding the famous fourth dimension of our universe. It happened about 12 years ago when I was telecommuting with a Munich-based company developing software for interactive conferences for pharmaceutical companies. We did a great job, and I was asked to visit Munich for some software tuning and also for some socializing with my partners during the famous Oktoberfest festival. This is kind of a "conference" where instead of software driving the event, the only tool needed is, you guessed it, a great Bavarian beer. So, one night we went there and had a great time. I remember my visit didn't hit the main Oktoberfest night, but still the feeling was all the same. We were sitting in the big hall filled with lots of wooden tables, and I estimated up to 500 people in there. In one brief moment of insanity, I spotted a man enjoining his friends about 50, maybe 70 meters away from us. They were doing the same as us, drinking beer and having a good time, but what impressed me the most was his appearance, which hammered my head for a couple of moments or more. He looked amazingly like the gray aliens portrayed in the Fox Mulder X-Files that aired at the time. He had a large head compared to his body, large slightly curved black eyes, a small nose and mouth, and not much of ears on the top of his head. Probably because of the large amount of beer, I didn't remember clearly what happened after, but I was probably in the center of loud laughter when I pointed my finger and said, "Look, there's an alien drinking beer!" I am sure the amount of beer I drank was responsible for the whole thing, but still, ever since then, I can't stop thinking that gray aliens are nothing more than just our future descendants traveling through time, visiting the past and enjoying good shows, like in this case the best quality of Bavarian beer, especially brewed for Oktoberfest.

Let's face it, we surely don't know how humans will evolve within the next millennium or more, but I am confident that one particular outcome could be just like grays! It's not far from reason that our body would evolve down while our head will be 'heading' in the opposite direction in the future, directly caused by fewer physical activities and more brain evolution toward rationality. Anyway, if I am a future human in possession of a DeLorean with a working flux capacitor from "Back to the Future", after visiting a couple of main historical events, I would definitely visit some great entertainments of the past.


Ok, ok, I know how ridiculous this sounds, so I will stop now and try to get back to the main topic. Let's try to summarize what we scientifically know about time and how to bend it. Through Einstein's theories, we now definitely know that the universe is built from the fabric that is bendable. It was first proven by a famous experiment during a solar eclipse, which showed the curvature of light from a star as the light rays passed by the sun. Arthur Eddington led an expedition to West Africa back in 1919 in order to take pictures of a solar eclipse with definite proof of dislocated stars located next to the sun's disc, caused by a curved universe caused by the sun's large mass. In other words, we definitively know that spacetime is bendable, but the physics of how and why it bends is a completely different story. According to Einstein, in lack of better knowledge of the universe's fabric itself and lack of discovery that would prove the existence of gravitons, we can't say for sure even that gravity is a force at all! It could be just a property of the space-time fabric that bends easily by mass. In other words, the universe could be just a large system of perforated roads for traveling particles with mass and energy waves. Maybe to describe it better with a metaphor, if we are a large mass traveling throughout space and we don't have enough speed and encounter a curved space around a giant star, we are doomed and will be simply captured into circular motion around the large star. The question is, of course, is it possible to curve the space that much so we can travel the curved path back or forth in time? Thanks to Einstein, we now have a great understanding of the physics of the big. There are mathematical equations that describe and predict all known and still not observed objects in our universe. We are also aware of boundaries like the ultimate speed of light for any particle with a mass, and even the physics of the wormholes and warp drives are mathematically plausible. The only problem is that we are too small to comprehend the great amount of (negative) energy required to establish a wormhole or a drive capable of curving the space instead of propelling itself. In many theoretical studies of wormholes, it is still unknown whether or not it is possible to create a stable tunnel through the fabric.

It seems that building large shortcuts in the universe is still out of our reach, probably because of the great energy needed and our lack of understanding of the space fabric itself. The solution is probably waiting to be discovered within a quantum level of existence. Compared to enormous space and large objects, ironically speaking, studying the science of small particles and energy waves is difficult because we are too big! Simply put, we are unable to monitor and understand small objects because our monitoring tools are too large in size. For example, if we are using an electron microscope, we would only be able to monitor objects much larger than the electrons we are beaming into; otherwise, we would be adding additional disturbance to objects we want to see. Studying the quantum world is only possible indirectly, like in giant accelerators where we are beaming two small particles and forcing them to collide and then learning from the snapshots taken from the clash. However, quantum mechanics is a scientific discipline we have been researching for a century or so, and while there are many things waiting to be understood, we have already learned a great deal about particle physics, electromagnetic waves, and the quantum microworld.


So, what do we quantumly know in regard to time travel? This is the story of searching for the ultimate theory that could be able to connect the microworld with the fabric of the universe itself and explain both the physics of micro- and macro-objects and their relations. We are still out of luck, but a couple of leading theories arrived in the previous century in the form of string theory and its variations. What is common for all of them is that they compete with old particle physics either to replace it or to be built on it similarly to what the theory of relativity did for Newton's gravity theory. String theory in the form of a membrane, or M-theory, suggests multiple dimensions and also the creation of multiple universes caused by collisions of membranes. The microworld in this theory would be capable of living and traveling through multiple dimensions and perhaps even universes. Now, how is this connected to time travel? It is important because of our efforts to find a solution to a so-called time travel paradox where traveling backwards in time would be potentially dangerous because of the butterfly effect, where a time traveler, by changing something even as small as killing a butterfly, would end up in a fatal disturbance of the future already happening events. So the additional question arises: if time travel backwards in time is possible by bending space, how has nature solved this paradox? Two solutions are proposed, wherein in one the universe is blocking inconsistent events by its nature, so it is simply impossible for you to go in the past and kidnap Hitler or kill somebody's ancestors in order to change history. If a future version of you visits a younger you, then it is simply impossible to prevent you later in the future from not making the visit in the first place, as this already happened, and it is nothing but a closed, inconsistent loop that is very hard to imagine. Too complicated? Maybe, but then check the other solution where time travel actually places you in a different timeline or parallel universe with copies of you and others. The quantum world recognizes a so-called quantum entanglement where two particles share the same properties even when located in two different locations in space, maybe in time, and perhaps even separated by two dimensions or branes. Does it look like 'fringe' science to you?

Either way, traveling back in time seems to be impossible, blocked, or extremely hard. If you ask Stephen Hawking, the only proof we need is a lack of tourists from the future visiting us. Of course, if you exclude my encounter with the Oktoberfest and gray alien from the beginning of this story.


Like you probably noticed, this post is more about traveling backwards in time, but it would be unfair not to mention the ease of traveling forward in time. We are doing it on a daily basis, and since you started reading this post, you have traveled forward in time for a couple of minutes by now. However, jumping forward into some future destination in time is a different story, but thanks to the theory of relativity, during fast flight of, say, 95% of the speed of light, traveling into the future is more than possible. So to speak. In theory, that is. Namely, it is a well-known thought experiment where a train is circling the Earth at near to light speed for a period of 100 years. Time in the train could be slowed down by a ratio of 1/5000, and their passengers would be older by only one week compared to their fellow Earthlings, who got older by one full century or so.

Like I said, easy. :-)

Time travel is not only popular in scientific circles or sci-fi stories. It is also popular among internet hoaxes. Back then, during 2000 and 2001, a guy named John Titor ruffled the internet audience of the time within bulletin boards and forums, claiming that he came from the year 2036 of his own universe into ours as a guinea pig of the government time travel experiment in his own future time. He was sent to retrieve some old computers they lost in their timeline. He even posted various images and schematics of his time machine based on contained micro singularities installed in the car capable of bending the laser beam toy and therefore the space-time itself. It was enjoyable how detailed it was, along with predictions of future nuclear wars, the CERN LHC experiment, the war in Iraq, etc. Don't miss this story in the below links. I am looking forward to the movie.

* Image credit
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1092026/

Refs:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/.../STEPHEN-HAWKING-How-build-time-machine.html
http://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/everyday-myths/parallel-universe.htm
http://www.npr.org/2011/01/24/132932268/a-physicist-explains-why-parallel
http://www.quantumjumping.com/articles/parallel-universe/parallel-universes-theory/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1269288/STEPHEN-HAWKING
http://library.thinkquest.org/27930/wormhole.htm
http://www.h2g2.com/approved_entry/A6345407
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor