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Described as the most destructive force in the Universe, Gamma Ray Bursts are only a recent discovery.

However it quickly became apparent that GRB’s carry with them the power to vaporise everything within hundreds of light years.

Imagine an explosion so fierce and intense that it carries with it the power to destroy everything in its path for hundreds if not thousands of light years away. No this isn’t the realms of science fiction but the amazing world of Gamma Ray Bursts.

Astonishing discovery.

Gamma Ray Bursts, or GRBs as they are otherwise known were first detected during the late 1960’s. US monitoring equipment on a space satellite set up to detect Soviet nuclear weapons testing began to notice intense gamma ray bursts that were hard to explain.

For a long time it also proved impossible to determine the origin of these bursts. Then in the last decade of the 20th century astronomers made the astonishing discovery that these phenomenal bursts of radiation emanated from the observable extremities of the known Universe.

Nothing rare.

Dramatic though the discovery of Gamma Ray bursts was, there is nothing particularly rare about them since they were, and continue to be spotted at a rate of around one a day. But what were these bursts? They were obviously some form of intense radiation coming from an unimaginably distant location but how could they be explained?

Very quickly astronomers began to surmise that GRBs were exploding stars. These are usually known as supernovas but GRBs were in a whole new category and made even the tremendous force of a supernova look minuscule by comparison. Scientists have now speculated that Gamma Ray Bursts may be associated with black holes capable of releasing a fireball of energy into a high pressure jet that in turn creates the shock waves that lead to the formation of Gamma Rays.

Long and short duration.

For all their astonishing power GRBs are of extremely short duration and fall into two categories. The first involves those with an average of just a third of a second and others with a much longer average span of 30 seconds. Astronomers then conjectured that different causal forces lay behind the origin of the two categories. As it is there is still a huge amount we do not understand about GRB’s, but one thing we do know for sure is the great damage they would be capable of causing.

Deadly consequences.

Since most GRBs are at the extremities of the Universe and occurred when the Earth was very young there is seemingly nothing to worry about. Yet the very nature of GRBs mean that an explosion at even several thousand light years distance could prove deadly to all life on Earth. Indeed some scientists believe that GRBs were responsible for at least some of the frequent mass extinction’s that have swept the planet over millions of years. For more on the possibly drastic implications that GRB’s could hold for our planet please turn to the accompanying …

When the land bridge connecting Europe and Africa at the Straits of Gibraltar finally gave way it would have created a wave of unimaginable proportions.

Our feature also tells how the Mediterranean mysteriously dried out at least five or six times

The Mediterranean Sea is the subject of one of the greatest mysteries on Earth. Geologists have proved that over the course of time the Mediterranean has frequently come to the point of drying up completely.

Evidence for this can be found in the vast layers of salt deposits discovered lying beneath the bed of this enigmatic sea. The very dense and numerous evaporite layers sandwiched between marine sediments laid down in deep water prove that since deepest antiquity the Mediterranean must have dried up at least five or six times.

Fertile conditions.

At the height of this desiccation the Mediterranean basin would have resembled a particularly arid desert, leaving only tiny lakes and rivers running down from bordering mountain ranges. However these sterile conditions would certainly not have applied to the entire Mediterranean Basin. Indeed there is no reason why localities close to main rivers and fresh water lakes could not have developed comparatively fertile conditions. This would have provided ideal conditions for life to flourish and it is highly probable that the Mediterranean Basin once held a particularly rich variety of flora and fauna.

Idyllic Nile Delta

In the vicinity of the Nile Delta there is likely to have been a resplendent wealth of life situated around lush valleys and river branches providing a thriving and endurable eco system lasting for perhaps thousands of years. Yet any life that found any kind of foothold here was ultimately doomed to disaster. The geology of the Mediterranean meant that every so often the entire basin would dramatically fill up with sea water extinguishing all life to be found there.

Repeating disaster.

Experts have discovered that over the course of millions of years the cycle of a dried up and fertile Mediterranean giving way to the waters of a flooding sea occurred at least five or six times and possibly more. In other words this was a recurring source of catastrophe with a long periodicity that operated over the course of millions of years.

Rising sea levels.

But what exactly was it that caused the flooding of the Mediterranean and its subsequent drying out ? One of the most frequently advanced explanations is a rising and falling in the level of the worlds oceans. The Mediterranean is almost entirely land locked and fed only by water pouring through the relatively narrow Straits of Gibraltar. Here at the very mouth of the Mediterranean ( see pic below )the waters are comparatively shallow, forming a narrow sill between Africa and Europe. Many actually believe this was the point of an ancient land bridge spanning the two continents.

It is also believed that on numerous occasions world ocean levels rose to a level that they poured over the sill of the Straits of Gibraltar …

Are we living in a computer simulation run by a post human civilisation. Some people believe we are and cite statistics as proof of this.

Extraordinary concept.

One extraordinary concept of modern thought is the idea that life as we know it and perceive it may not be as real as it seems. This theory holds that each one of us may represent no more than a model within a giant computer simulation run by a super civilisation of the future.

Post Human Civilisation.

Some even theorise that such a program may actually be the work of a post human civilisation out to construct a vivid and totally authentic simulation of what life was like thousands of years in the past. This of course means that we would be living out a simulation of events as a form of entertainment orchestrated for the enjoyment of a civilisation that may not even be of human origin.

Just to emphasise the true depth of this concept it is important to mention that this simulation would be just one of millions like it, all run to different specifications and each one representing a distinctly altered view of the world as seen from the perspective of billions of separate individuals. The name of this idea is Ancestor Simulation.

Not so crack pot.

You may suppose ideas of this sort are eccentric beyond words – something so far fetched it would be too ludicrous to contemplate. However in today’s altered academic environment that now includes the String Theory, Chaos, Quantum mechanics, and time travel , the arrival of an idea like Ancestor Simulation is surprisingly sane and one that some scientists and philosophers are treating with a great deal of respect.

Matrix.

Ideas of being imprisoned within cyberspace have already formed the inspiration for numerous films like the Matrix. In fact the idea of Ancestor Simulation has been around for quite some time. However it did not receive widespread publicity until 2001 when Nick Bostrom from the Department of Philosophy at Oxford University in England wrote a paper entitled “Are you living in a computer simulation”?

With great scholarly logic Bostrum argues that a post human civilisation of immense computing power would not hesitate to inaugurate major computer simulations accurate to the tiniest level. This would include sentient but simulated individuals that could accurately mimic the real world at any given stage in history. Bostrum argues that “we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation”. In the abstract to his paper, the final version of which appeared in the Philosophical Quarterly (2003), Vol. 53, No. 211, pp. 243-255.

Bostrum writes the following:

This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.

It couldn’t be …

Unpredictable actions.

Some things in life just don’t fit into neat predictable categories that science loves to discover and investigate.

Because of this we have the Chaos Theory that attempts to accommodate apparently disordered actions.

In the beginning there was chaos..!!

One of the main unifying themes linking the traditions of ancient cultures is the belief that in the beginning there existed nothing but Chaos. In considerably more modern times Chaos has again assumed a prominent place. This time not as a chief Cosmological explanation but as a scientific and mathematical idea that endeavours to come to terms with some of sciences more imponderable mysteries.

Disordered circumstances.

For years scientists struggled to come up with a mechanism for dealing with apparently disordered circumstances. Classical physics deals entirely with ordered states and it seemed to some that within the natural world there was a definite tendency towards disorder or even Chaos. Several of the more quoted examples include the interaction of weather systems that appear to develop entirely random patterns; the changing shape of water droplets; the swirls and eddies within a column of rising smoke, or perhaps the most famous example of them all – a butterfly beating its wings in an Amazonian rain forest causing a tornado in the Philippines.

To the theorists examples like this were certain evidence that not everything in the world could be explained by the mechanism of exact proof as science had always demanded. What was needed was the medium of an entirely new type of logic that would accommodate this thinking.

Feigenbaum Numbers.

It was not until the 1970’s – with the advent of the number crunching capabilities of computers – that the required framework for the Chaos Theory really took root. One of the principal proponents was the American physicist Mitchell Feigenbaum. His principal discovery was a consistent pattern of rate doubling as circumstances tended towards chaos. This led to the introduction of what became known as Feigenbaum numbers, which amongst other things were also found in the period doubling that occurs before heart attacks.

The Mandelbrot Set

The Chaos Theory was evolving and it was evolving in a very exciting way. It was also known to be linked with fractal geometry. Fractals involve complex shapes that are smaller variations of themselves repeated to a very fine level.

There is no greater visual representation of this than Benoit Mandelbrots which are mathematically created fractal images produced on a home computer, that later became known as the Mandelbrot Set. For those interested in creating their own variations the latest version of this programme is available for free download from the following site.

http://spanky.triumf.ca/www/fractint/getting.html

The Catastrophe Theory.

The idea of Chaos as a mathematical concept also has close links with the so called Catastrophe Theory. This was first advanced by the French mathematician Rene Thom in 1968. It attempts to deal with sharply discontinuous events that progress from one state to another in very abrupt stages. According to the theory events reach a critical …

Time Travel – Is it really possible?

For a many years time travel was solely in the realms of fantasy writers. Now it is very much in the mainstream of scientific thought, and many experts agree that theoretically speaking time travel is definitely possible.

Einstein.

Major breakthroughs in our idea of time came with Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Yet ground breaking though this theory was there are still sizeable restraints.

One is that the speed of light cannot be broken, because if it were this would lead to infinite mass and time would just stand still. The other constraint is that while forward travel in time is possible it would be out of the question to travel back to other ages.

New thinking.

Of course science does not like restraints and more recent theories hold that brilliant though Einstein’s theories were they are not so solid as was first supposed. Now there is the feeling that forward, as well as backward time travel will one day be possible.

Illusive definition.

Defining time is no easy business. We perceive events as having a past or a present but even defining the present is a difficult business. For instance whatever moment you define as the present quickly becomes the past and we see that time is extremely fluid. As for the future – that’s something we never seem to reach and it could be said with some authority that the present – whatever that is – is the only reality we will ever know.

Altering perceptions.

When it comes to time travel it is important that our perception of time should be modified. We nearly always think of time as linear, yet modern experts believe that time may really be circular. In other words we could travel so far into the future that eventually we would come back to the year of our birth.

Paradoxical arguments.

One of the arguments against backward time travel is that we could go back and alter details of the past that would render ourselves and maybe even the world itself nonexistent. The much quoted example is of traveling back and killing your grandmother, thereby eliminating the steps that led to ones birth. In this theory one would literally cease to exist. But if so then how could one travel back to stop being born in the first place if one did not exist??

Perhaps one answer to this enigma is to think of time as neither just linear or circular but a combination of both. For instance the Earth travels around the Sun once a year whereupon the seasons repeat themselves, but events do not. Perhaps then super time is just a more complex example of going around and forward at the same time, part of both a loop and forward travel. In this system events could be added to even if they appeared to conflict with what had already happened.

Many conundrums.

The above mentioned circumstances highlight just some of the many conundrums involved in …

Scientists and mathematicians say that new and amazing dimensions may be closer than we think. In fact literally a skins breadth away.

Could this be a gateway to other worlds?

The Theory of Everything.

Justifiably or not mainstream science is sometimes accused of being restrictive, myopic and highly unimaginative. Accusations which all give way when we consider the mind blowing implications behind one of sciences most sensational ideas – The String Theory.

Theory of Everything.

The String Theory – an astonishing work of scientific deduction, heralded as The Theory of Everything, claims that aside from the three dimensions we know and take for granted lie countless others that may exist remarkably close to us yet remain totally invisible.

These extra dimensions might well represent other and profoundly different forms of life where our own laws of physics are replaced by others that are so much stranger. Under this theory it is even possible there may be other dimensions like our own – a mirror image of this Universe we know and take for granted. But is the String Theory scientifically viable or is it merely a case of Fantasy Mathematics. To answer this lets take a closer look at what the String Theory really says.

Confined Universe.

Not too long ago the intellectual concept of the Universe was much more confined with equally confined ideas to explain it. Under this notion the smallest parts of atoms were point particles outside of which were Electrons over an interior composed of Protons and Neutrons. These were thought to be indivisible but String Theory says otherwise.

It claims that at the heart of matter lie tiny corks made up of vibrating strings that are either open ended or closed in loops.

These strings are thought to be highly versatile, vibrating in limitless patterns to create all the fundamental particles of nature. It is thought that by understanding the rhythm of strings it is theoretically possible to understand all the forces of nature and has the unique potential to be known as “A unified theory of everything.”

Inter dimensional travel.

The most exciting assertion of all is that these string loops are said to be capable of travelling between dimensions, creating a crack in time. In effect a worm hole between two or more separate dimensions.

Five Separate Theories and The M theory Union.

Although String Theory has become vastly popular the pioneering mathematicians who first thought of it laboured for years in strict isolation. One of the most baffling enigmas was the early realisation that there seemed to be at least five separate String Theories. This difficulty persisted until the brilliant physicist Edward Witten showed this to be merely five separate ways of looking at the same problem. It was at this point that the String Theory really gained widespread renown and respectability, and became renamed by Witten as the M theory which he cryptically explained as being M for Magic, Mystery and Matrix.

M Theory and the extra dimensions.

From this …