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Last September I had an article in Scientific American about what it would mean for time to end--how the world might cease to unfold in a unidirectional sequence of cause and effect. Some processes, for example, could cause time to morph into just another dimension of space . Last week experimenters announced that they have simulated such a temporal calamity in the laboratory. Unable to keep up with the gush of physics papers on the preprint server anymore, I came across this one on the arXiv blog , which I highly recommend to all physics aficionados.What Igor Smolyaninov of the University of Maryland and his colleagues have done is indirect--an analogy to an analogy. They did not bring time as we know it to a crashing halt. Rather, they created an experimental version of the spacetime diagrams that physicists routinely draw. On these diagrams, one of the axes--by convention, the vertical one--is designated time. Then, lines represent objects in motion. New geometrical rules are imposed to ensure that nothing travels faster than light. Smolyaninov's group in effect constructed a composite diagram: the bottom half was spacetime, the top was spacespace. At the midway point, the vertical axis abruptly changed from time to space, the rules of geometry reverted to their usual Euclidean form, and the fun was to figure out what happened to matter at that junction. [More] Read More ...
