I enjoyed it. I don't understand many of the criticisms - it's a film, were we somehow expecting to have our humanity validated by it? A scientifically accurate description of a mission would be boring - they'd almost certainly die in the wormhole.

The science wasn't unreasonable. It was a lot closer to reality than anything in star trek or star wars. Anne Hathaway's character muses on the power of love and suddenly it's a force of the universe? My memory might be flawed, but i don't remember hearing anyone confirm that or discuss it - in fact, the state her "lover" was in was kind of contrary to the opinion she gave and certainty to how she felt. We really do have no idea about black holes, either, so for all we know it could be manipulated by some future technology. The tesseract "library" was an interesting take on time travel/time manipulation.

The only thing that broke my suspension of disbelief was the bit when they said they thought they had years of good readings from the water planet due to time dilation. But that doesn't make any sense, because the number of signal pulses sent from the surface must equal the number of signal pulses received in orbit. My best guess is that the pulses would be elongated and have their wavelength shifted, possibly, but one thing i am certain of is that the total number can't be different.

The problem is, the older you get, the more you know about science, the less faith you have to put in films to give you a mind-bending experience that works on so many levels. None of it is plausible, so why rule it out based on what Hathaway thinks about the nature of love, or anything else?

Good film! And funny video. Someone's got to defend it though!

esoog, ever read rendezvous with rama? Great series of books that deal with humans and interstellar travel much like this (although no gravity/wormhole travel). A simular situation happens there so it was not unfamiliar territory to me. Space travel is simply not friendly if you try to anchor yourself in a certain time and place.

Maybe the black hole is just an end of a half-vortex in space, or is that a wormhole?

Also, I'd let her move her curved coherent vortex line through my stationary matter.
badum, cha!

SO COOL!

I absolutely agree with toferyu. The wormhole is a plot device. it may not be the most realistic device ever, but it works. And I can't wait

> plausible space exploration technology

You must be referring to the giant sphere of galaxies where they can pick and choose where to wormhole in

*backup=[...snipped...] from http://www.sciencechannel.com/tv-shows/through-the-wormhole/videos/this-fungus-turns-victims-into-the-crawling-dead.htm ...

I'm kinda sceptical. I love the premise, but I'm not a big fan of Mcconnaghey. Would rather not have a magic wormhole either.

In case you're wondering (like me) what this movie is about:

A group of explorers make use of a newly discovered wormhole to surpass the limitations on human space travel and conquer the vast distances involved in an interstellar voyage. (imdb)

I took the heralded "third toke" and let me tell you from first hand experience smoking as much of 40mg as quickly and stoically as my Ego would allow: HOLY SHIT!!!!! OH MY FUCKING GOD!! That was what I was screaming in my head as I closed my eyes and I started flying through what seemed like outerspace, for real, at the speed of light. The "carrier wave" came in and tore my entire soul apart (something I did not even believe in). It was the loudest thing I could ever have imagined, it sounded like an electronic torpedo of frequency starting low bending to the highest frequency possible that it just blew everything I was apart. I swore I either died, or I was coming out of this completely fucked up. Retarded. Seeing fractals and unable to speak.

To this day, as someone who is much more on the side of science and discovery, that seemed absolutely real, just on a level that humanity will not understand for a long while.

And last but not least, DMT is AMAZING taken in smaller more manageable doses. I've smoked out many people and everyone has been astonished by what happens. Taking just 10-15mg is brilliant, even that will be the most amazing, orgasmic, alien experience and will come back amazed at the Universe, your own life and feel just very happy to be apart of it all. Even though, what you just witnessed - is some sort of parallel dimension, alien, Gnostic, Kabbalah reality that exists in some 9th dimension. Even if it were your mind, if you have taken it you will wonder, why and how is this possible? It obliterates all status quo conceptions that have occurred for the last 1,000 years+ as it is completely unlanguagable/uneglishable.

Only take that 3rd hit if you want to see how far your brain can propel you into some sort of wormhole into some other dimension of reality that humans may never understand. It changed my life for the better but I thought it was quite terrifying and I have had many DMT sub-breakthroughs... nothing can prepare anyone mere flesh being for a breakthrough; because, at least to me and many other intrepid folks, it proves we are not JUST flesh beings and that the nature of existence is far more mysterious than most of us Westerners and cultures influenced by ages of oppression, could ever have supposed.

Thanks for posting this, the world has a right to know that this exists and to have a "first hand" experience with "it".

I was oversimplifying. I don't know enough about the theoretical physics of black holes to know in what ways they are infinite. However, the only way I can think of to extract energy from the black hole is if you could put a wormhole at the center that led back to its lip, tapping the energy from falling matter through the resulting Escher's Waterfall.

..Coot looks like he wanted to get some extra mileage outta those modifications....

He's got the oscilloscope modified for hypothetical negative energy conversion..

That display in the center is so positioned to interface with the the invariance of the speed of light created by compensation for inference, and I'm only guessing here, that those buttons on the steering wheel/alignment cradle are some sort of Michelson-Morley interferometer.

Got a great deal onnit but he won't be able to keep a wormhole stable in an open perimeter....good try though, looks like someone helped their kid win a pre-school science fair!!

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

>> ^garmachi:
It's been many years since I studied physics. What does the lowercase gamma in the bottom left represent?


Me to, I think the answer is in here, but eff if I can remember.
Edit: ok I think it is the "Lorentz factor" . 7.089 Lorentz factor is 0.990 ratio to the speed of light (or very very close)


Lorentz sounds like it to me too. There are only a few other choices it could be, but I don't see them really relating very well to the what's in the video (gamma brightness for the "video", or gamma radiation factor from nuclear sciences--both I highly doubt).

Lorentz transformations (which is linked above by @GeeSussFreeK ) would be the way you would calculate many of the dilation effects caused by relativistic effects traveling near the speed of light.

Traveling at the speed of light you would have a pinpoint in front and in back. The light up front, the size of a point and basically nothing behind, as it would be shifted to very low levels of radiation. If you're going at the speed of light you wouldn't be doing any calculations as time has stopped, but from your vantage point everything happens at the same speed. As you slow down though far from the speed of light, in less than a second you instantly see things change all around you depending on how long of course you had been going at the speed of light (if you had been going that speed for 10 years you won't see too much; but, what about one billion years--can you imagine...).

But, to you a second was still one second even at that speed, or any speed, even as time slowed down the closer you got to the speed of light. Everyone else will of course still count their seconds the same as well. Hence, relativity.

If you did go that fast, yet had mass you would be facing some HUGE problems. At the front you would find a tremendous amount of energy (I'd guess all of it would be shifted to the highest energy level; one huge one-dimensional jet of gamma radiation) and at infinite amounts. In other words, it's impossible to do it. that is why a lot of Sci-Fi uses space warping/tearing/etc... to connect yourself to another place, like a wormhole; or bend space in front and back of you like Star Trek and use warp.

Gotta love Einstein and his little revelation--and all revelations in science or otherwise that add to the understanding, the expanses created, broadening our horizons, windows to the wondrous mountains of the mind put into view, and all of reality's grandeurs still there to be conquered and our dreams explored. It makes this world just a bit more interesting and worth bothering to get up every morning and go about our daily routines.

/corny

Lately I pretty much always act as though people from the future or aliens are observing everything I do. Wormholes, dudes. The light of other days!

I've always wondered if you would not just pop up in the middle of empty space if you time travelled without compensating for the fact that the earth is moving through at what like 1500 M/s through the solar system? And the solar system is orbiting the galactic centre. And the galaxy is moving away from all other galaxies (or vice-versa) as spacetime itself apparently expands. It all depends on how you think about frame of reference WRT your model of time-travel.

Like in Back to the Future, they travelled 30 years at a time. And they appeared to "portal/shunt" as opposed to "tunnel". It seems to me on a gut level like a portal or shunt would probably just dump you into empty space a fraction of a light year behind or ahead of the solar system if you jumped 30 years. A wormhole (Doctor Who or Bill and Ted style) is easier to imagine as being connected to the same "place" (according to what frame of reference I can't mentally peg down) in both times.

>> ^MichaelL:

>> ^JiggaJonson:

@Sarzy YOU'RE NOT THINKING FOURTH DIMENSIONALLY!!!
Biff can't gradually return to a different future. Just like Doc says when they leave Jenifer behind "The change will be instantaneous!" I'm with Lucky on this one, if the past was modified, Biff should not have been returned to the original timeline, he would have gone to the future where Biff was a millionaire and built a casino in that shitty town.
And I for one think the second movie would have ended well with Doc and Marty sucked into a wormhole of nothingness, leaving no room for the pile of dead cheeseburger meat that was the third film.


Actually, there's a deleted scene on the DVD in which Old Biff, after breaking his cane and stumbling away from the Delorean, gradually disappears. You're supposed to infer that the alternate Biff didn't live to be that old, which made Old Biff disappear -- though that's pretty confusing (which is why they cut the scene).

That supports the fact that certain changes occur gradually, otherwise Old Biff would have disappeared the second he handed Young Biff the almanac.