Sunday 11 December 2011

Horizon Scanning - Time

Horizon Scanning
Horizon – Time

Now onto something I am rather interested in. The future of time!
I am going to look into something that people actually believe is going to happen and whether there will be any advancement in the next year that will significantly change the way we view the concept of time.

First of all I’m going to clear up the matter of whether it will be physically possible for us to achieve time travel, i know there are stories of it happening now, but so far it’s all just theories and stories of people over the internet, and one man John Titor, that has claimed to be from 2036.



 

“Excitement as Higgs boson seminar set to announce latest LHC findings”


Looks like the Collider has been working hard for a while now.
I looked at this article talking about the upcoming seminar based in Geneva, talking about the findings that two teams working with the collider.
The seminar will take place on the 13th December 2011.
A lot of people feel that the Boson Higgs may actually have been achieved.
“So what can we expect to hear? The two main groups that hunt the Higgs boson, the Atlas and CMS detector collaborations, will describe their results separately, unlike the recent combined figures put out this month in Paris. There has been too little time to merge the most up-to-date results from both experiments”
Two teams have teamed up and look to further their progress in the science field and feel they are getting close to a major breakthrough in the science field.
But with the excitement coming from the scientists who will be attending the event it looks set to be a very good event, for those whole fully understand the field anyway.
As one Cern physicist put it: "This should be fun."”
Quotes and findings for this section are from this website report here.
With it looking like we’re going to reach a huge breakthrough with the Higgs Boson, it got me thinking about the big bang theory. Will we be able to achieve ultimate knowledge of the big bang theory? If this is possible, would we be able to re create it. And would it be a good thing or a bang thing if we did get this huge breakthrough.
So back to my original point, can this give us access to time travel; will we be able to do what John Titor said we could?
Apparently no, this is very unfortunate. A test was carried out this year, which will be furthered when the findings of the Hadron Collider are released, but in his initial findings which he showed to the world in July 2011,

“Professor Shengwang Du and his team at from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology claims to have definitively measured the maximum speed of singular photons, noting that they do not move faster than the speed of light in vacuum”.
So no time travelling for us it seems, he goes on to say:
“The research done by Professor Du and his team explain that the premise of travelling time by exceeding the speed of light is impossible because not even light itself can exceed the speed of light”.
With the research only conducted in July 2011, it seems the only thing happened in the next 12 months is the slow debunking of the theory and the belief that it will never happen, disproving all theories, and making John Titor a liarv (which people suspect already!)
With the Hadron collider though being used in successful ways to find new and exciting things about particles and even the big bang theory who knows what will happen, personally i hope that the collider finds a way to move particles faster than light, and make time travel possible.
However will all the damning evidence against time travel, people still claim
“Theories still exist that claim to keep the possibility alive”.
And who better coming to the rescue but Steven Hawking, stating


“Hawking says that surpassing the speed of light is not necessary to time travel and that it can be achieved by moving near the speed of light. He poses an anecdote of a train designed to circle the Earth leaving its station on January 1, 2050 and goes round and round the Earth for 100 years at just short of the speed of light. When it finally docks on January 1, 2150, the passengers inside would have experienced only one week of time in 100 years due to the slowing down of time within the train to protect the train from exceeding the speed of light outside”.
He is working closely in the next year with the scientists working on the Hadron collider so we will have to see whether he can move objects close enough to the correct speed in order to move in time.

After finding that my biggest scientific research might in fact not be able to be reached. I found myself asking,
 “What is possible?”
It seems a lot of people actually ask these questions, does anyone really know where we can go from here, if we can actually go anywhere from here.

It is not just new things that has been changed, old things that we have thought we have known about for years, has all of a sudden been re-examined and everything we know about it has changed.
A great example of science changing things of day to day life we have known about for years is what we are taught about in primary school, the art of photo synthesis, how a plant creates food.  We have always known a plant changes sunlight to food, but recently a scientist has looked further into this phenomenon, and it turns out it is all a part of Quantum Mechanics, a little more complex than just “the plant takes in sunlight” that we are taught in schools.



This new magazine has asked just that. Seeing where we have come from, and what we can expect in the future, with several predictions from scientists and experts alike.
Many interesting articles fill the pages of the website and there are huge breakthroughs in science that I didn’t even know about. Although they may not be huge things like breaking the speed of light or changing the world into a better place, it is still really fun to see what people come up with to make every day life a little bit easier than it already.



It seems like everything is turning their hand to technology these days, and the big thing that’s taking over, and there is nothing bigger, than the internet. Everything is found there, shops are even closing down just because of the internet’s ability to send you items from stores all over the country, making stores on the high streets inferior, but it’s not suppressing when:

“It allows users to easily access information about any topic, anywhere and anytime. Most information on the web is free making it appealing to hundreds of millions of users around the world. The internet is also a medium that allows users to interact with one another regardless of whether they are next door or thousands of miles away”.
But the internet is already here, and it’s already a huge place, what could possibly change?
Well a few things, the big one I found while searching around, was audio surfing, you see people all over trains, and in meetings using wireless devices for their phones.


It’s not just the typing that people are thinking about revamping and removing, remember minority report? Well since things like the Wii was realised, people have been searching ever since for new ways to interact with things round their homes, the latest in these steps forward was the Kinect for Xbox 360.
Apple has even begun to shape the future with this beautiful little creation. It’s a new little mouse that, well, it’s not a mouse, its move of a camera that you stick to your desk and you wave your hand at!

The mouse replicates the motion sensor aspect for your pc and makes your mouse camera based instead. So does this mark a future for interactive media used without peripherals, which would replicate the scenes in “Minority Report”.
Here is a little picture demo of the mouse in action, it only needs you to click, and this is just the beginning, it is looking more and more likely that peoples comfort for interface usage is going to go a lot further, even in the next year or so.
There is always a new iPhone and iPod coming along every year or two and this year we saw the release of the iPad 2 and the upcoming Wii-U
“The Wii U is the first of the 8th generation games consoles”
This is an interactive touch screen and camera filled controller which will be used in for the console.


The controller is above. And this is another step forward in the interaction we have with our consoles.
First it was the Kinect, using cameras and voice recognition, and motion control, and now Nintendo will be jumping on the band wagon of futuristic gaming in the coming year, with his new lovely 1080p console.

A thing i have found interesting in phone and console development, is there is a prototype in the works for an application which can save a trip to the doctors!




A couple of South Korean scientist have started to work on application that can take samples of fluids and diagnose minor illnesses, and this could be seen in use in the next year.

“The pair wants to check for disease markers in a tiny drop of a bodily fluid by pressing it against a touch screen, so your diagnosis could come straight from your smart phone. While there’s no app for that yet, the scientists recently finished a proof-of-concept study showing that a touch screen could differentiate between various concentrations of bacterial DNA—a first step towards diagnosing your disease by spitting on your iPad”.

So soon we may not need to floor the doctor’s office, and our applications may actually be useful for once instead of just being used to be guitar replicators, or mini games played on the bus.
It slowly shows that people are taking this research and application technology more seriously,  perhaps we will see alot more useful items to come later in the coming years which can cut down on face time in Doctor’s, meetings and perhaps interviews.

But if that’s not good enough, and you think it’s a waste of technology research, it is rumoured that:

“Brain-computer interfaces allowing the paralysed to walk again”
 “By 2012 date, a prototype full-body exoskeleton has been devised which allows the paralysed to walk again - using their thoughts alone to control it
This is achieved using a neuro prosthetic device with a highly advanced brain-computer interface (BCI) at its core, driven by neuro chips implanted in the patient's skull. These monitor electrical brain activity and adjust the movement of the limbs accordingly.

So people will soon be able to move freely and be free from what some people call a curse, and is a huge step in the right direction used by science.
But I will talk about this more in the Forecast section later on, as there isn’t a great amount of supporting evidence for me to back up this information.
But don’t worry about any of the upcoming year, because the worlds GOING TO END!!
“Mass hysteria grips the world as the Mayan calendar reaches the end of its current cycle”


As the site predicts people will go into mass hysteria involving the end of the written Mayan calendar, will it end? Who knows, but i can tell you one thing, people are terrified by the mere concept.
“Many commentators predict massive and sudden destructive events of global and even cosmic proportion that will result in the loss of billions of human lives. Some suggest the Earth itself may be destroyed with the loss of all life”. 
They are mainly religious goings on about how the world will end in 2010, and it coincides with the ending of the Mayan calendar. The original prophecy is as such:
“The prophecy is based on the "precession of the equinoxes:" The Earth resembles a wobbling top. The earth's axis very slowly draws a circle across the sky. It takes about 25,765 years for the Earth to complete each circle. This is called a "Great Year" or "Platonic Year." 
But if that’s not enough reason, the Mayans telling us were all going to die, how about these little fun little events that people actually believe that will actually happen in 2012.
Sun Storms


Solar experts from around the world monitoring the sun have made a startling discovery:
“Our sun is in a bit of strife”
. The energy that the sun gives off, like most things in nature, cyclic, and it's supposed to be in the middle of a period of relative stability. However, recent solar storms have been bombarding.
“The Earth with so much radiation energy, it's been knocking out power grids and destroying satellites. This activity is predicted to get worse, and calculations suggest it'll reach its deadly peak sometime in 2012”
The Atom Smasher”
Which is the nickname that people have given to the large Hadron Collider that i have already talked in depth about, and how people are scared will blow the world into pieces.

The great concept that the bible just “says so”
Interpretations of the Christian Bible reveal
“that the date for Armageddon, the final battle between Good and Evil, has been set down for 2012”.
The Chinese book of Changes, says the same thing, as do various sections of the Hindu teachings.

Finally my favourite thing of all that cannot be avoided is the change of the magnetic poles surrounded the world are going to flip and apparently kill us all!

“We all know the Earth is surrounded by a magnetic field that shields us from most of the sun's radiation. What you might not know is that the magnetic poles we call north and south have a nasty habit of swapping places every 750,000 years or so - and right now we're about 30,000 years overdue. Scientists have noted that the poles are drifting apart roughly 20-30kms each year, much faster than ever before, which points to a pole-shift being right around the corner. While the pole shift is underway, the magnetic field is disrupted and will eventually disappear, sometimes for up to 100 years. The result is enough UV outdoors to crisp your skin in seconds, killing everything it touches”. 
There is nothing like finished a section with the knowledge of impeding death and destruction.

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