Physicists are working at the far reaches of theoretical science but even their most difficult and abstract ideas can have practical applications, as Simon Collins reports When Captain James Kirk wanted to get the Starship Enterprise to the other side of the galaxy he ordered engineer Montgomery Scott to change "warp factor", and the ship was away. Powered by an explosive mix of matter and antimatter, the Enterprise could travel through time as well as space to save Earth from some awful fate. It seemed like pure fiction at the time. But a generation later, some of Star Trek's ideas are beginning to look possible. Otago University physicist Dr Murray Barrett and a team of American scientists have just "teleported" the state of an atom from one place to another - only about 0.3mm away, but the principle has been established. And Dr Matt Visser, a Victoria University mathematician who has written a book on space-time "wormholes", says the logic of Einstein's general relativity is "completely infested with time machines". "Antimatter" is now well established. All subatomic particles, such as electrons, muons and quarks, are now believed to have corresponding antiparticles with names like positrons and antiquarks. There is even something called "negative energy". In this looking-glass world, the certainties we take for granted are liable to dissolve. Fundamental uncertainty is the hallmark of the "quantum world" at extremes of sub-microscopic size and hugely accelerated energy. This is the world where scientists expect the next big breakthroughs in technology. Switches on computer chips have already become so small that electrons are leaking out of one circuit into another, signalling an imminent end to "Moore's law", which has seen computer power double every 18 months for the past 40 years.
View: Full Article | Source: NZHerald
