Quantum Weirdness

Rarely do I get a chance and a real opportunity to revive an old article from the past and to update it to fit better in the present day. Actually, the quantum weirdness is still where it was four years ago—science is not something that changes overnight, especially with quantum mechanics, so I am not going to update the post with any new physics or breakthroughs. Instead, what's new and what pushed me to repost today is one extraordinary novel in the field. The book that kept me from sleeping last weekend was "Quantum Space" by Douglas Phillips, and in short, it is by far one of the best titles I read this year. It is one of those true sci-fi stories that follows the real science and, in this case, the weirdness of the quantum world I wrote about in this post, and I would add it is one of those articles I enjoyed writing the most in the history of the blog. But, before a couple of my glimpses at the book itself, followed by my warm recommendation, and especially if you want to read it yourself, please continue reading about physics itself. This one definitely requires some knowledge to understand it fully, so let's start with some weirdness of our own macrophysics first.

It's very well known that the world we live in is driven by two sets of rules, or physical laws. The one for big and the one for small. We don't need to be rocket scientists in order to observe our big world surrounding us and to notice all the laws we obey. For example, if we drop a book and a feather and let them both hit the floor separately, it is obvious that the book touches the floor first. However, if we put a feather ON the book and let them fall together, they will hit the carpet at the same time. Well, the book will still hit the carpet first, but if you try the experiment, you will know what I mean. This simple experiment was itching Galileo's mind centuries ago when he discovered one of the fundamental physics laws stating simply that the mass of the object has no influence on the speed of free falling. But we can ask ourselves next, why did the feather travel slower toward the floor if dropped alone? Because of the things we cannot see. The air is blocking it. To learn what is happening with the feather during the fall, we have to go beyond our eyes. We need science and experiments to discover why small molecules of the air would rather play with feathers than with heavy books.

Was the book/feather experiment weird to you? I am sure it was at least a little weird if you were seeing it for the first time. We simply accept things for granted. What we cannot see, like the air and its little ingredients in the above experiment, we tend to exclude from our perception. If this was a little strange and intriguing, let's go further to the world of the even smaller and compare it to the world of the big. For example, in a mind experiment, we have a 9mm gun and shoot toward the wall with two holes in it, both with a diameter of 9mm or a little bigger. If you are an Olympic champion in shooting, you will, of course, need only two bullets, one for each hole. In the world of little, if we use a gun that shoots electrons toward a wall with two adequate holes in it, you would probably think that we would need two electrons to hit both holes, right? Nope, we need only one. Believe it or not, one electron goes through both holes, and we don't even need to aim too perfectly. No, it doesn't split up in two and use each half to pass the holes. It goes through both holes at the same time. In fact, if we had three or more holes on the wall, one single electron would go through each one and, at the same time, use all possible paths toward the destination. Perhaps the best illustration of what happens in this experiment is presented by the "Stephen Hawking's Grand Design" documentary made by Discovery Channel.

And you thought the feather on the book was weird...

However, this is just another interpretation of the famous double-slit experiment, and even though the first theories about the duality of particles/waves originated way back with Thomas Young and his scientific paper about the properties of light in 1799, perhaps the best-known theory was proposed by Richard Feynman during the forties of the 20th century. The beginning of the last century will be remembered by the birth of quantum mechanics, part of the physics trying to describe all the laws responsible for what is happening in the inner world, or the world where the very fabric of our universe is located. Feynman confirmed Young's light theory that subatomic particles (as we call them today) and energy waves are more or less the same. Electrons are among them. In simple words, they are capable of traveling as particles (and acting as bullets in our giant world by traveling within the straight line from point A to point B) or avoiding obstacles by transforming into waves and vice versa. However, after all these years, due to the fact that we are way too big to monitor the quantum world directly, we still have no clue why and how subatomic particles choose to travel either as a wave or as a particle of the material world. For example, in a previous double-slit experiment, if we tried to add a source of photons and "light" the holes where electrons are "passing through", trying to find out what happens on the surface of the wall and how they "choose" to be either particles or waves, we only added disturbance in the system, and electrons simply stopped transforming into waves and started going through the holes like simple bullets, with many of them crashing into the wall in case of missing the holes. It's almost like they know that somebody is watching them and that they don't like to expose their secret of how they vanish into thin air, forming waves and materializing back after the wall. That skill would be something special in every magician's performance.

Feather experiment on the Moon, by Apollo 15's commander David Scott

As you probably noticed, this post is part of the "Beth's Q&A" thread, and even though quantum mechanics is not directly mentioned in Beth's and my chats, it is simply not possible anymore to stay with the standard or particle model of mainstream physics and to look to the inner world only by researching its particle-type properties. Like with me and possibly with many scientists out here (and to be fair, I am not the scientist, just a modest observer), a set of laws responsible for the entire microscopic world seems to be "under construction" today more than ever. The idea for this post came to me a couple of months ago, when Beth asked me exactly this: "Somewhere, sometime, someone figured out the inside of the atom. Quarks, they call them. What we used to call the proton and nucleus of the atom. Why can't we still call them as before? Why did a new name come into play? Who discovered quarks, and how? Did they use the electron microscope? Did they use math? Tell me what you know of quarks. How did that come about? I am interested in the electron microscope and quarks or anything else hiding in an atom. The item that was never to be broken down, as it was taught to me".

Quarked! - How did the quarks get their names?**

Before we dive into more weirdness of the quantum world, let's check a little current terminology regarding atoms with all their parts, including quarks as the smallest items within. The word "átomos" originates from the Greek word ἄτομος, and it was made by Democritus, an ancient Greek philosopher who, around the year 450 BCE, formulated the first atomic theory, or the nature of matter we are made of. Translated from Greek, "atom" means something basic and uncuttable into smaller pieces. Almost two millennia passed since Democritus, and finally, in the year 1911, it was discovered that an atom, after all, is made of even smaller particles. Ever since then, we know that an atom is now made of a nucleus with a positive electric charge surrounded by a cloud of negatively charged electrons orbiting the nucleus. The smallest atom is the simplest isotope of hydrogen-1, with a nucleus of just one proton orbited by one electron. The heaviest atom made by nature found on Earth is Plutonium-244, the most stable isotope of Plutonium, with 94 protons and 150 neutrons in its nucleus and a cloud of 94 electrons in the orbit. For 50 years, protons, neutrons, and electrons were the tiniest particles known to the world. Then in the year 1968, the very year when I was born, experimental physicists at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center confirmed the existence of 6 different types of quarks. Much like electrons, they have various intrinsic properties, including electric charge, color charge, mass, and spin. Two of them with the lowest mass are the most stable, and they are simply called Up and Down. Scientists are not very intuitive when it comes to naming stuff—the other four quarks are called Strange, Charm, Bottom, and Top. I wonder how exactly one of them behaved in Accelerator's results in order to get the name 'Charm'. On the other end, I like this much more than naming scientific stuff with only Greek letters. Anyway, within the standard model of particle physics, quarks are building blocks in the universe, and many particles are made out of quarks. Quarks can't live in solitude, only in combination with other quarks, and they are tied up with a strong nuclear force, which is extremely hard to break. A proton is made of two up quarks and one down quark, while a neutron is a combination of two down quarks and one up quark. They orbit around each other and form an entity we call a particle. The bottom line now is that, as far as we know, quarks and electrons are fundamental particles, and we don't have any proof that they are made out of even smaller internal structures.

However, we have a pretty good idea what's inside. Strings. Now comes the part of real weirdness. Are you ready to dive into a rabbit hole? It will not lead you into Wonderland, but it is certainly one of the biggest scientific adventures.

Stephen Hawking, Grand Design***

Actually, it's not easy to describe what strings are in scientifically popular terms, but I will try anyway. In the standard model, besides six quarks and an electron, there are more fundamental particles. There are two more particles with negative charges similar to electrons called 'muons' and 'tauons.' Compared to electrons, they are much heavier in size (if we can speak about size when it comes to fundamental particles). Finally, there are three types of neutrinos, or particles that are neutral in electric charge. So far, we have encountered 12 fundamental particles. But there are more. As far as we know today, there are four fundamental forces as well (gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak and strong nuclear forces), and each force is produced by fundamental particles that act as carriers of the force. The photon is, for example, a carrier for electromagnetism; the strong force is carried by eight particles known as 'gluons'; the weak force uses three particles, the W+, the W-, and the Z; and finally, gravity is supposed to be taken care of by the fundamental particle called 'graviton'. Standard model predicted existence of all these fundamental particles, including Higgs boson we talked about last year in post Beth's Q&A - The God Particle. Each one except for the graviton. All efforts to include gravity in the theory so far have failed due to difficulties in describing it on a great scale within quantum mechanics. Step by step, over the years, new theories arrived, tending to fill in the blank or to replace the standard model entirely. There are several string theories that are 'under development', with the best candidate called 'M-theory', formulated in the last decade of the last century. In short, strings are single-dimensional objects we find within fundamental particles, or, to be precise, particles are nothing more than just different manifestations of the string. Strings can move and oscillate in different ways. If it oscillates a certain way, then its name is electron. If it oscillates some other way, we call it a photon, or a quark, or a neutrino, or... a graviton. In a nutshell, if string theory is correct, the entire universe is made of strings! However, the mathematical model of a string theory, such as M-theory, is far more complex than we can possibly imagine. Even though string theory can be seen as an extension to the standard model, its background is far more different than with the universe described by the particle model. Compared to the space-time continuum we live in as a four-dimensional universe described by the standard model, in M-theory there are 7 dimensions more. Those dimensions are tiny and undetectable by big objects like us living in large three-spatial dimensions, but within the quantum world there are objects capable of spreading their existence and occupying up to 9 dimensions. Furthermore, the theory predicts that additional tiny dimensions can be curved in a large number of ways, and even a slightly different position or curvature of at least one dimension would lead to dramatic changes of the whole system or entire universe. For example, if somehow we forced one dimension to curve a little bit more, the effect could, for instance, be different oscillations of strings, which would result in slightly different properties of fundamental particles, and electrons could start behaving differently and start having different electric charges. This example is highly speculative, but the point is that with different shapes of dimensional systems, the set of physical laws in the system would be completely different.

To put it simply, if laws of the universe can be changed by, for example, God, and if string theory in the form of M-theory is correct, he would do that by some almighty computer capable of curving dimensions. A combination of changes in the curvature of miniature 7 dimensions could be able to change, for example, the value of pi, and instead of being 3.14159265359..., it could be a different number. It is unknown what that would mean further, but in the universe where pi is, for example, 5, the circle would be something entirely different, and the pupils in schools learning about it would probably look very different than in our universe. However, there is still no direct experimental evidence that string theory itself is the correct description of nature and the true theory of everything most scientists dream of.

Completing superstring theory

But if laws of the universe after creation are unchangeable (not even by the gods) and if M-theory is true, is it possible that some natural phenomenon exists out there capable of giving birth to different universes by randomly producing the shape of their inner cosmos? Yep, there is one. Appropriately called "The Big Bang". The moment of creation of everything we are familiar with, including time. In the first couple of moments, when the process was very young, we can safely say that it all worked completely under the quantum mechanics and laws of the microcosmos, and it is not far from common sense to expect that, like in a double-slit experiment, all particles during the first moments of their existence used all possible paths in their travel toward the final destination. Within M-theory, this might mean that all possible versions of universes emerged as the result, and the one we exist in is just one of many. Furthermore, theory also predicts that within one universe all positive energy (planets, stars, life, matter, and antimatter in general) is balanced by the negative energy stored in the gravitational attraction that exists between all the positive-energy particles. If this is correct, then the total energy within one universe might be zero and therefore possible to be created out of nothing only by quantum fluctuations of the primordial singularity. Quantum fluctuations are a very well-known phenomenon that is experimentally confirmed in the form of virtual particles that arise from vacuum (particle-antiparticle pairs) and cancel each other almost immediately (unless this happens on the event horizon of a black hole, where one of the particles was immediately captured by the black hole, leaving the other alive in the form of Hawking radiation).

I am sure that 'M-theory' will stay just a theory for many more years to come, as proving the existence of strings, multi-dimensions, multi-universes, supersymmetry, etc. must be very hard with our current technology, but theories improve over time as well as technology, and perhaps we will have our answer relatively soon. However, the quantum world with all its weirdness is very much real, and many predictions, no matter how strange, are already proven. For example, quantum entanglement on top of it. This is the ability of two particles (or more) that usually originate from the same source to have the same properties like momentum, spin, polarization, etc., so that even after they are separated in space, when an action is performed on one particle, the other particle responds immediately. This was experimentally confirmed with two photons separated by 143 kilometers across two Canary Islands and soon should be used in an experiment between the ISS and Earth in the form of a first wireless Quantum Communications Network and for the first time perform the connection between two points separated by more than 400 km.

D-Wave quantum computer

Finally, let's just mention one potential application of quantum superposition (the ability of a particle to exist partly in all its particular theoretically possible states simultaneously). Compared to a digital computer, where one bit can hold information in the form of either 0 or 1, one qubit (quantum computer alternative) can hold either 0, 1, or anything in between at the same time. The idea is to use this property and build a quantum computer capable of performing millions of operations at the same time. Still in the early years of development and far before commercial use, quantum computers with up to 512 qubits developed in D-Wave, one of the leading companies dedicated to the future quantum computer market is making chips specially manufactured for quantum computation. Maybe it is still too early to say, but I have a feeling that quantum mechanics is mature enough and ready for practical applications, especially in the field of communications and IT. Along with nanotechnology, this would someday in the near future be one of those truly breakthrough discoveries capable of changing the world entirely.

At the very end, let me continue the story with a few short notices about "Quantum Space", amazing science fiction by Douglas Phillips and his first novel in the series. If you read the entire post and didn't have much knowledge about the science itself, I am sure by now you are better prepared to read the book and enjoy it much more. Of course, Douglas did a pretty good job with his characters explaining the science as well, perhaps on a much better level than I did, so there are no worries about understanding the quantum mechanics to follow the book. Much of it is still the unproven theory, so it's harder to distinguish science from fiction anyway. Nevertheless, for the fiction as far-fetched as it is, and even though the theory is weird by its nature, I found it to be, well, believable is maybe not the right word, but definitely intriguing. I loved the idea of expanding the microdimension and the way of solving the Fermi paradox within the storyline. The characters and the writing are also great, so in all the effort to write spoilerless reviews, all I can say is that I will eagerly wait next year for the sequels.

Image ref:
https://futurism.com/brane-science-complex-notions-of-superstring-theory/

Quantum Space
http://douglasphillipsbooks.com/books

*Stephen Hawking's Grand Design: Action of Electrons
http://www.discoveryuk.com/web/stephen-hawkings-grand-design-action-of-electrons

** Quarked!
http://www.quarked.org/askmarks/answer24.html

*** Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinov: The Grand Design
http://www.amazon.com/The-Grand-Design-Stephen-Hawking/dp/055338466X
http://www.amazon.com/Velika-zamisao-Stiven-Hoking/dp/4095178361 (serbian edition)

Refs:
http://www.wikihow.com/Calculate-Average-Velocity
http://pratthomeschool.blogspot.com/2010/10/geometry-lesson.html
http://www.superstringtheory.com/
http://www.nuclecu.unam.mx/~alberto/physics/string.html
http://www.zmescience.com/science/physics/physicists-quantum-photons-08092012/
http://www.zmescience.com/science/physics/quantum-entanglement-iss
http://www.discoveryuk.com/web/stephen-hawkings-grand-design/videos/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment

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

Science of Life in Solar System

There will come one day in the future. Relatively and astronomically speaking, it might come sooner than we think. It could happen way before we realize that there is no turning back. The day when Mother Earth will simply say, Sorry guys, I have no more energy to sustain this kind of life anymore, and when most of the biodiversity cocoons on Earth will reach the ultimate hazard and start imploding back into themselves. Air and water pollution will help a lot, and not even the planet's regular motions will be able to take us into another interglacial cycle. It is as much inevitable as what we are going to do next. We will take a long look toward the stars and say, "Well, we have to do this sooner or later. It's time to leave the Earth. Time to jump into Christopher Columbus's shoes again. And find the new home."

But we will not get far. There will be no warp drives, "phasers on stun", robots, AIs, or artificial gravity like in sci-fi blockbusters, and there will be no scientific breakthroughs that will bring Moon or Mars gravity to the comfortable number of 1. No, we will be completely helpless in all our efforts to terraform other planets and gas giants' moons. Not at first. Or fast. Or to make large asteroids rotate. Or to initiate Mars' core to fire its lost magnet. Or to make Venus act a little less than hell.

Artificial biodomes of Eden in Cornwall, England^*

Welcome to MPJ

Hello folks, or should I say random web reader! Or perhaps you are here on purpose. Or maybe you are a humanized or automatized bot or crawler, doing your scheduled intelligence for whatever reason you do that every now and again. Either way, now that you are here, this probably means you read at least one of my posts and are now wondering who I am? Well, even though I believe in privacy on the net, I guess when you are having a public journal, it is not really possible to maintain. Therefore, I created this page so I can introduce myself a little and say something about the blog itself.

My name is Milan Zivic, and basically, this would be just a stream of my texts, thoughts, or whatever I think is worthwhile publishing. Actually, I don't think of myself as a writer, especially in written English, which is not my native language, and the fact is that this is not what I do best. What I do best is programming, and I have been doing that for several decades professionally. I like to think that I am one of those at the other end of the outsourcing chain. However, writing is sort of a habit I am enjoying more and more with every passing year. The feeling is just right, and as long as I have ideas, inspiration and imagination, I will be around.

On the other end, I really wish to have more time for writing, but free time is something precious these days, and ultimately, in short, I decided to establish a website instead of actively participating on several social networks. I think it is important; after all, every now and then, I have something to say. It's not always smart or right to the money, but this way it will stay written rather than forgotten, and someday far in the future it will be a nice collection of thoughts and written memories.

The website structure itself is more or less the same as what you can stumble on in all other weblogs on the web. Additionally, my own background within web design and website development is giving me a chance to maintain a little bit of a customized look and feel for the complete application. I chose Blogger to host it mainly because it is one of the best services out there, and they did a really great job connecting blogs with other services, not to mention that using client scripting is free and almost without any limitation. Please do not hesitate to share stories you like on your favorite network for discussion, feedback, complaints, etc. Please feel free to contact me on any occasion and for any feedback.