h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I've always been able to argue that my hair curls enough already, so I don't need to eat crusts.



[also the speed of light isn't as constant as you may have supposed... the 3x10^8m/s is only in a vacuum- light speed is dependent on the refractive index of the material the light passes through, so its slower in glass, say...]

[I meant to say without varying it to account for cosmology]

J'au-æmne, secure in the knowledge that she's done her particles and cosmology homework already this week...

Yeah, I did know that. Did YOU know that using a wacky state of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate, they can now slow down a light beam passing through it to literally walking pace? How weird is that?

Thanks for reading!

H.

(Off topic again, but..) I read that by shining a laser through a field of, um... I think it was gaseous .. um .. some metal... anyway, the point is the laser beam actually left the field before it had completely entered it.

I think they did it at MIT or Berkely or somewhere ...

=)

Sounds like a causality violation to me... are you sure?

And if not... have you read a chemistry paper called "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline"?



H.

Is that the Issac Asimov one? A genuine question, I read his 'fake' paper when I was but a nipper and have been vaguely hoping I'd come across a copy for the last 15 years.

Good spot, Havelock! Yes, I am referring to the good doctor's little tale, which I also read as a nipper and have been looking for ever since.

Summary: someone notices that resublimated thiotimoline dissolves VERY quickly when you drop it in water. Closer inspection reveals it actually dissolves BEFORE you drop it in the water... it somehow knows a split second in advance that it's heading for dissolving. The rest of the tale discusses how this mucks about with causality.

Asimov did his final interview to obtain his PhD, and had been studying really hard, and was very nervous going in. He had a thorough grilling, and the interview drew to a close, and his PhD supervisor said something along the lines of "One last question, Mr. Asimov." His heart leapt because he was sure he hadn't missed anything and they'd covered every conceivable angle of the subject he was being examined on. The question was "What can you tell us about the endochronic properties of resublimated thiotimoline?" at which point the examining interviewers (who were, it seems sf fans who had read his story in a recently published magazine) broke into smiles and congratulated him. Top stuff, I just wish I knew where I could get a copy.

H.

Hi, Hoovooloo and Havelock!

I remember that Asimov story too. Checking that wonderful site, the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
http://www.sfsite.com/isfdb/
it appears to have been republished in a 1972 American anthology, The Early Asimov.
This anthology seems to have been published as three paperback volumes by Panther in the UK. I'm sure that's where I read the story, since I used to have a copy of at least one of those volumes.

Checking abebooks, http://dogbert.abebooks.com/abe/BookSearch
which is a really good site for locating secondhand books, it looks as if paperbacks of The Early Asimov Volume 1, 2 or 3 are available for a few pounds secondhand all over the place. I can't say which volume had the Thiotimoline story, but that's a start, anyway.

, and congratulations on such a thought-provoking entry - it will never appear on the most-neglected list!

Azara

Oh, yeah, I remember now. It didn't actually go back in time, but it did travel faster than the speed of light.

So they made light travel faster than the speed of light. (I believe it was a cloud of gaseous Caesium)

Mind you, that's not too far-fetched. After all, light slows down when it travels through glass or water, so why not have something in which it travels faster than it does in a vacuum?

=)

Because when it "goes through" things, it is really being absorbed and retransmitted by atoms. This is what slows it down. You'd need time travel after all, because the atom would need to re-emit the light before the light hit it.

I know (vaguely) about the bose einstein condensate. Its cool... not just literally. You can also use one to make a laser of atoms... and thats the extent of my knowledge.

I've seen a Bose Einstein condensate, they look like seeing a cue-tip from the side. And they aren't as much fun as I thought. The light speeds up again when it comes out. I heard at the moment they have made it stop, and are now working on making it go backwards. Some guy also believes he can use slow light to build a time machine.

That thing with MIT has been heard of a few times. Most believe it is the tunneling effect, but there are others who think Einstein has been proven wrong. I would have thought some statistical calculations would have been able to determine it.

THere was a sequal to the article called "Thiotimoline to the Stars" and a story based on it called "Flying with Thiotimoline" Unfortunatly, I don't know which books they are in.

It looks like "Thiotimoline to the Stars" and "Flying with Thiotimoline" are available in a number of collections: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pe.cgi?24318.

TRiG.