Depp Arture & Dreamwatch : Snatches

Saw Charlie & the Chocolate factory with mashugenah, stephanie_pegg, and Ray from the WMG.

( discussion cut for potential spoilers )

Johnny Depp is a lucky guy. He gets all the fun roles.

Went to Nando's for dinner afterwards, then walked back along the waterfront. Numerous couples were out taking advantage of the mild twilight and the calm harbour, including one couple that were having a picnic dinner, and some were using the playground equipment as well. Spring is obviously in the air!

Got home and ended up seeing more CSI. Still didn't get to bed until after 1.00am. Slept until five when something woke me up.

Dropped off again and dreamt about kissing someone whom I've never thought about in that way before, in front of a whole pile of friends and acquaintances, starting with a small tentative peck and then progressing to a full-out clinch. Looking up from the kiss to see everyone watching, and looking back down into the eyes of the other person and seeing that they didn't care either.

I dreamt of finding some cheap miniatures in a strange second hand shop, in a town that was similar to a village near Sheffield, and asking how much they were. the shop-keeper said $1, and I said cheekily "Each, or for the lot?"

Shortly after I was having to pull my trousers on under a coat in public, as I was rushing to meet someone and hadn't had time to put them on before leaving the house.

Then the alarm went off.

Oh, and Happy Birthday jaadfan!

Here Bishie, Bishie!

Via elfs :
( The Bishounen I am: )

Visser Wormholes

A most intersting talk from Matt Visser at the Phoenix meeting tonight, in which he described the theoretical requirements for the creation of stable wormholes that could be used for transportation.

Matt is a mathemetician with a special interest in cosmology, and has written papers wth such luminaries as Bob Forward, Greg Benford, John Landis, and Timothy Ferris.

The precis is that in order for a wormhole to be traversable, it can't have an event horizon. To do this one needs to pump large quanities of negative mass into them. As an example, to create a wormhole of a minimum width for a human to pass through, say about 1 metre in diameter, one needs to feed in a negative mass about the size of Jupiter. To make it large enough to pass radio communications at microwave frequenceis one needs a negative mass about Earth size.

Yes you read that right. Negative mass. Negative mass is not anti-matter, which has positive mass just with a differnt charge, etc. Negative mass is what you get when you take hard vacum and make it have less mass. Something with less mass than a vacuum.

The amazing thing is that such a thing can actually be created relatively simply, by taking large, non charged, metal plates and moving them closer to each other in a vacuum. When this is done, because the metal plates have greater conductivity than the vacuum, tiny charges causd by zero point energy transfer more easily through the metal and thus travel awasy from the vacuum betwen the plates, creating something that is less than a vacuum betwen the plates. Of course there are significant issues in how one creates the wormhole in the first place and how one gets the negative mass into the wormhole or how one generates enough of it.

Matt said that it would be easier to find an exisitng wormhole and feed negative mass into it in order to elminate the event horizon. Still, we would need to have engineering capabilites on the order of being able to move stars around to be able to accomplish this, so we're not likely to be building any soon. .

The good thing is that once the mass has been fed in, and assuming the rest of the wormhole was stable, it would remain a stable gateway. Even better, the negative mass would be concentrated around the edges of the wormhole, so it would actually look something like the classic stargate concept, a "hole in the sky".

And this still fits within the framweork of general relativity so does not result in any closed time-like curves or other abominations.

Another interstng thing that was discussed was that experimental evidence is beginning to make it pretty certain that the rate of expansion of the universe is increasing. This has serious consequences for our cosmological models.

For the Mage players, Matt also mentioned that a concept similar to "Paradox" in a Mage:the Ascension exists.

He didn't quite say those exact words, but what he did say is that many cosmologists prefer the theory that an attempt to create a wormhole structure that would violate causailty would result in the "Chronal Protection Factor" kicking in to prevent casuality from beng violated. Of course, this is only a theory. The most likely other result is that it would cause a total breakdown of localized space-time.... yes, everything would be destroyed.

Sound like a plot line you're familiar with?