We see so many day-to-day advancements in science, from increasingly powerful smartphones to a potential AIDS cure, that we kind of get numb to it. But somewhere out there, scientists are still reaching for stuff that's so far above and beyond that it sounds like black magic. As we speak, there are researchers who are performing such witchery as ...
#5. Recording Your Fantasies and Dreams
See, this is what we're talking about. Having a stranger look directly into your dreams and fantasies isn't science, that's freaking sorcery. Yes, we understand that the images you see in your mind are just electrical signals from your brain, and that theoretically somebody could capture and decode them.
But ... these are our dreams here. A magical other world where we ride dragons with Shaquille O'Neal, and the dragon speaks in the voice of our old gym coach and continually yells at us for not wearing a cup. Are you saying scientists can hook cables up to our brain and watch it happen? Or see our daydream where we win the Super Bowl and play lead guitar at the halftime show?
"Who's ready for a blistering rendition of the first six chords of 'Smoke on the Water'?"
Pretty close, yeah.
How the Hell?
It was scientists at UC Berkeley who developed a way to literally see what your brain sees, and they did it by manipulating the magic of YouTube. They showed the subjects a bunch of movie trailers with electrodes hooked up to their heads, and computers recorded their brain activity. After that, they fed the computer millions of YouTube videos and asked it to compare what it had recorded with the millions of images of cats and people falling off bikes that they were showing to it.
The computer then selected the top 100 videos that best matched what popped out of the subjects' brains, and created a kind of composite image of what it thought it saw. The result, while not exactly Blu-ray quality, is pretty striking:
Now, before you go crazy over the possibility of literally recording your dreams, we clearly have a ways to go. But this at least serves as proof of concept, that we can actually transform mental pictures into video. It's just a matter of refining the process of defining which brain activity equals "I'm somehow competing in a spelling bee wearing only a jockstrap." Then we can put that shit straight up on YouTube!
It doesn't stop there; this process of breaking down how the brain works and building machines to interpret it will open up all kinds of weirdness. For instance, a team in the Netherlands has successfully invented a system that allows the users to type just by thinking the letters -- even if the user is comatose. They discovered that by asking a vegetative patient to imagine, for instance, herself playing a game of tennis, a certain area of the brain lit up. From there it was just a matter of training the patient to associate letters on a keyboard with certain thoughts, and using a machine to detect that activity. Boom -- you're now mind-typing.
"Sir, you may want to tone down the fantasizing. Our nurses have filed a restraining order."
#4. Slowing Down Light to the Speed of Traffic
"The speed of light" is what's known as a universal constant -- which means it doesn't change, ever. It's literally the speed limit for the universe. The speed at which your flashlight beam illuminates the serial killer on the other side of the room is around 186,282 miles per second, which is the fastest that anything can ever go, according to the laws of physics.
So if light didn't travel that fast -- if we adjusted it to, say, 38 miles per hour -- wouldn't the whole universe collapse or something? Even if not, what would freak you out more than seeing your car outrun your own headlights?
If you slowed down light enough, the world would look like a constant acid trip.
Well, amazingly, scientists have managed to slow light down to the speed of Los Angeles traffic.
How the Hell?
It turns out that describing the universe's top speed as "the speed of light" isn't entirely accurate. Light is just the only thing fast enough to hit that wall, on account of the fact that it has no mass. So that's how fast light ordinarily travels, but light is made of particles, the same as anything else, and so theoretically it can be slowed down, or even frozen in place.
Wait, did we say "theoretically"? Because Danish physicist Lene Hau found that she could slow light to a crawl by firing a whole mess of laser beams through a dense, super-cooled chunk of sodium. In layman's terms, it's like shooting a bullet into water.
So what are the possible applications for slow light? Hau has no idea, but reminds us that the guy who invented lasers had no idea what they could be used for, either. Could they make a novelty flashlight where the light kind of oozes out like ketchup? We'd buy one of those.
"Goddammit, what kind of paper towel even cleans this up?"
#3. Teleporting Information
If we tell you that scientists have discovered a way to "teleport information," the problem is that you may not get what's amazing about it. After all, information is kind of instant already -- we use our cellphones to "teleport" information around the world every day, right?
But of course, in reality you're just shooting radio waves into the air, and they have to make their way from one place to another, which is why there's a delay if you're on the phone in New York trying to talk to someone in Mozambique. And those waves can be blocked by all sorts of things.
Especially by your nagging, bitchy friends who want you to "just hang up and find a real man."
So the idea that scientists can relay information between two places instantaneously, without anything passing between them, is every bit as weird as zapping a person from one side of a wall to the other, without them ever passing through the wall, or around it, or under it. Not only is it possible, but scientists have done it.
How the Hell?
In 2009, scientists at the University of Maryland teleported information from one atom to another one meter away. Not to be outdone, Chinese researchers in 2012 did the same thing -- over a distance of 60 miles. Instant teleportation. We don't mean it traveled really fast -- we mean it didn't travel at all. The "signal" was instantly just there.
The consequences were unfathomable.
The phenomenon is called quantum entanglement. It means that two atoms that are "linked together" can then be separated, one taken miles away from the other, but (here's the kicker) whatever you do to affect one immediately affects the other. They're not communicating in any way, they're just "entangled" across space and time by forces that we're pretty sure are impossible for the human mind to grasp. Hell, even Einstein had a difficult time wrapping his head around this stuff.
And that's why he'll forever be known as "the stupidest man to ever live."
If it sounds like the sort of thing that could accidentally create a black hole, you don't need to worry. Scientists have already found another way to do that ...
#2. Creating Black Holes
You probably have some idea from science class or, at least, Stargate SG-1 about what a black hole is. Basically, when a star gets big enough, it gets so heavy that it collapses on itself, rips a little hole in reality and starts doing some serious Star Trek shit.
From this description, it should be obvious why we can't (and shouldn't) create a black hole on Earth. We can't just pack a bunch of material billions of times larger than our own sun into a beaker and shake it until it destroys the solar system. No matter what science fiction tells you, we'll never be able to collect so much mass into the same spot that the gravity of it can bend light.
Not like this. Stay in school.
Oh, except that they sort of did, in China, in 2009. And you've probably noticed that we're not dead.
How the Hell?
Scientists in China managed to find a way to "mimic" what a black hole does, on a smaller scale, without all the inconvenient problems associated with dragging a supermassive star into a lab.
The original purpose of their research was to design a more effervescent Michelada.
They created their artificial black hole using a bunch of concentric circuit boards made of "meta-materials," which are man-made substances capable of bending radiation like light through means other than massive amounts of gravity. We probably couldn't give you a schematic that wouldn't melt your brain, but the result is the same as if the light was passing close to a black hole -- it gets sucked into the middle and can't get out.
This has only been accomplished so far with microwave light, because it's easier to manage, but scientists are hoping to figure out how to do it with visible spectrum light. Which, in addition to looking super cool, could completely change the way we gather solar energy. Instead of unwieldy giant mirrors, an artificial black hole could just vacuum up a lot of light from a much smaller area. And, sure, these panels probably wouldn't make the roof of your house look like a huge, swirling mass of cosmic destruction, but that's the way we're picturing it anyway.
#1. Creating Something from Nothing
One of the most fundamental rules of the universe is that you can't create matter out of thin air, unless you're a magician. But, like usual, scientists heard this and simply replied, "Anything is possible, as long as we have enough lasers."
So, in the late '90s, scientists used the Stanford Accelerator (the Large Hadron Collider's older brother) to do what David Copperfield can only pretend to do -- create matter out of nowhere.
Peter Wrona/Thornton Tomasetti"Science is like magic, except it's real and it's not magical." -Anonymous
How the Hell?
To achieve this, scientists did the same thing they do to solve virtually every problem -- they shot two incredibly powerful lasers at each other until science happened. In this case, the energy created by the experiment "broke down the vacuum" into tiny chunks of matter and antimatter.
Of course, breaking nothing down into something sounds like they're living in opposite world, but the reality is that a vacuum isn't really empty so much as buzzing with energy, so what they were really doing is kind of a reverse explosion -- instead of converting mass into energy, they lasered a bunch of energy until mass popped out.
Of course, before you start trying to make a hamburger with a laser pointer, you should know that this requires a tremendously powerful laser. Just one of the lasers they fired was a trillion watts -- equivalent to around 16 billion light bulbs -- and they still needed to add another laser just to squirt out matter that only amounted to a couple of electrons. Still, some theorists say we might be able to ramp up the process. So maybe someday we'll have, like, a pair of Death Star-sized lasers that can collide and make a cup of mashed potatoes. What would be the point of doing that? We told you: lasers.
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