Recent content by VVet1968

The very first science fiction book that I read in the 1950s was Heinlein's "Time for the Stars" which focused on this same problem. Nearly seventy years later I still remember being blown away by the concepts as it was my first introduction to relativity. Sure, it's not an "adult" scifi, but...

Nevertheless, Feynman Diagrams routinely depict particles travelling backwards in time. And antimatter appears, for all purposes, as matter travelling backwards in time. I heard an interview (a decade or more ago) with a particle physicist on Science Friday who stated quite clearly that...

The simple "time clock" thought experiment used in virtually every popular science book on relativity clearly demonstrates that anything moving at the speed of light (in a vacuum, of course) moves neither forward nor backward in time. It cannot and still maintain the speed of light. For the...

Author writes of antimatter " it just behaves as if it is following an opposite arrow of time to normal matter. " without any proof or even logic behind that statement. If it appears like normal matter moving backwards in time in every aspect (and it does), the just maybe that is exactly what...

I believe you are mixing up empty space which does have quantum properties with nothingness -- the nonexistence of anything. Since no thing exists, there can be no properties of a thing. However, you mention "quantum leaps" or, more commonly, quantum jumps. Those occur, not in nothingness...

I'm sure the good Count Alfred would have a great time discussing this concept of nothingness. It's intriguing to be sure. We might be better served, however, to try to define and characterize those other closely related terms that you mention: vacuum, empty space, void. Of course, that...

Thanks for raising this question. I've read several respected physicists writing about how everything can come from "nothing" when in reality, they are assuming an empty, and presumably infinite, space. That "nothingness" that they write of has quantum properties that allow for...

A photon can travel past the event horizon, but only one way. It can go in, but it cannot escape. The gravitational pull of the black hole is so powerful that anything inside the event horizon would have to be able to travel faster than the speed of light in order to escape. In fact, that is...

Wonderful illustrations! Thank you!

Doesn't the 2nd law actually say that entropy cannot decrease? That's not really the same as saying it must increase. If all processes are reversible (just hypothetically speaking here), then total system entropy can stay the same, correct? I'm asking because I recently read in Quanta about...

Perhaps not impossible, but it was certainly rejected as being unprovable. The consensus at the time was that no information could be obtained earlier than the Big Bang -- it provided an impenetrable barrier -- so it would be impossible to prove any previous universe.

Since space and everything in it appears to be expanding in all directions, it would seem to be closer to the "end of the beginning" as you put it.