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Science Stranger Than Fiction (July 25, 2003, Two)

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Program Summary

If your students are fans of “Star Trek,” then they know all about warp drive, wormholes, and time travel. Getting around in the science fiction world of “Star Trek” is so much easier than it is for us! But hold on to your plasma conduit: Interstellar travel—even time travel—may be possible.

The warp drives, wormholes, and time machines of science fiction are grounded in scientific fact. Someday, we may actually be able to board our star ship and jump to warp 10. But we’ve got a long way to go before that happens. As one of Ira’s guests points out, objects in space are immensely far apart. The fastest travelers we’ve created so far are the Voyager probes, which whiz by at some 35,000 miles an hour. Even at that speed, they would take 85,000 years to reach our nearest neighboring star system, Alpha Centauri. But by warping (bending) space, a ship could ride the warp like a cosmic wave, shooting ahead at speeds even greater than the speed of light, or 186,282 miles per second. Or you could just pop into the nearest wormhole and, blip, out the other side in a matter of seconds at Alpha Centauri’s front door. Did you see the movie “Contact”? The way Ellie Arroway traveled to Vega was via wormhole.

And what about time travel? Surely that’s complete fiction, right? The truth is we’ve already proven that one. Ira’s guest Dr. J. Richard Gott explains: “Einstein’s theory of special relativity . . . showed that moving clocks tick slowly. We know this is true because we’ve put atomic clocks on jet airplanes going around the world to the east, where their velocity adds to the velocity of the Earth, and they come back about 59 billionths of a second slow relative to the ones that stayed at home. So we know this effect works. And as you go faster, you get a larger effect.” He goes on to name a man who’s actually gone forward in time: cosmonaut Sergei Avdeyev, who spent 748 days on the Mir Space Station, traveling 17,000 miles per hour. When he got back to Earth, he arrived a 50^th of a second into the future. In other words, he was 1/50 of a second younger than everything else on Earth. Pretty cool, eh?

Trouble is, a contraption that could accelerate the time-alteration effect would have to weigh five times as much as the planet Jupiter. So a working time machine might be a few years off yet.

Guests

J. Richard Gott, professor of astrophysics at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, and author of “Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe: The Physical Possibilities of Travel Through Time” (Houghton Mifflin, 2001)

William R. Alschuler, professor of science at the California Institute of the Arts in San Francisco, and author of “The Science of UFOs: What If They're Real?” (St. Martin's Press, 2001)

Related Links and Resources

NASA’s Warp Drive When?
National Geographic online, December 13, 2002: “The Science of ‘Star Trek’”
NOVA Online: Time Travel
Science Friday Kids’ Connection, May 23, 3003: A Man Who Changed the World: Albert Einstein
Strange New Worlds: Using Science Fiction to Teach Science: Study Guides and References for the Science Teacher Who Wishes to Incorporate Science Fiction in the Classroom

For Discussion:

• Where would students go if they could travel faster than the speed of light or jump through a wormhole?
• Scientists think that traveling back in time might be problematic, but traveling forward seems possible. How far ahead would students like to travel and what do they think they’d find?
• Do students think scientists will ever invent a ship that can travel at light speed or better? Do they think someday someone will build a time machine?
• Considering how much money and time would be spent in devising methods of interstellar or time travel, do students think it would be worth it?

Activities

Get up to speed. A good primer on the speed of light and light in general is what-is-the-speed-of-light.com. There students learn how light speed is calculated and how long it takes light to travel to various points in and out of our solar system. They can also read about the history of measuring light speed. The site features grade-appropriate quizzes to assess students’ en-light-enment.

If you build it, they will time travel. Time Travel is a companion site to the “NOVA” program of the same name. On the site your students can listen to an interview with astronomer Carl Sagan, read an article by IBM researcher and science writer Clifford Pickover called “Traveling Through Time,” and play an interactive game in which they get to Think Like Einstein and reason out the time travel problem. In the Teachers section, look for an activity on measuring time, program viewing ideas, and resources.

Be a space cadet. Okay, this one’s mainly for fun, but students will learn about engineering and extreme environments as they Discover Extremes at Starfleet Academy, a tryscience adventure. To play this online game, students choose a cadet character from among several human and alien races. They then use a tricorder, universal translator, holodeck, and probes to study environments and life forms, and collect cards to increase in rank. Upon successful completion of the game, students graduate as Starfleet ensigns.

Use the search box below to perform a Google search within any of the specifc sites or general domains mentioned in this Activities section.

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