Elsewhere in the universe...

Scientists are now visualizing what happens in the collision of two black holes.  There are ripples in both space and time, stretching outward from the point of this collision, just as there is wake from when a rock is thrown into a pond or lake.  There is even a new word in the scientific lexicon for the lines of that stretch objects caught in said space-time warping: tendex.   As stated in the article...

 "Tendex lines describe the stretching effect of a strong gravitational field. "Tendex lines sticking out of the moon raise the tides on the earth's oceans," said David Nichols, the Caltech graduate student who coined the term. When many such lines are bunched together, as in the surroundings of a black hole, that creates a super-stretching region called a tendex. An astronaut passing through a tidal tendex would be pulled apart like taffy — an effect sometimes known as "spaghettification.""

By the by, David Nichols is no relation.  

There are a good many startling implications this research could have towards space studies, not the least of which is the notion that such a collision of black holes might result in a gravitational burst so powerful that the newly merged black holes are flung from the galaxy.  Wow.  Truly force on a scale that is difficult to comprehend.

In other news, time travel just can't happen.  At least that's what two electrical engineers at the University of Maryland say.  These researchers have simulated the Big Bang, the theoretical detonation that give birth to our universe, inside a metamaterial.  In watching this process, they were able to observe how light expanded since that point and how it suggests that time travels forward in a linear manner.  Thus, it seems unlikely that one would be able to move backward or far forward on the line.  Or more to the point...

"But when further analyzing the situation, they found restrictions on how light rays could move in the model. Although certain rays could return to their starting points, they would not perceive the correct timelike dimension. In contrast, rays that do perceive this timelike dimension cannot move in circles. The researchers concluded that Nature seems to resist the creation of CTCs (close timelike curves), and that time travel - at least in this model - is impossible."

To be sure, there are those who find this model to be flawed.  Then again, any model is flawed to one degree or another.  And that's the nature of science, isn't it?  Just when we think we have it down, something comes along to cause enormous vicissitude in our understanding of how the universe works.  


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