The Science of Science Fiction, or at least the science of the TARDIS.

Source of Information? Here ya' go! Listed Below!

"The Science of Doctor Who" 

By: Paul Parsons.

So, what do i do with my spare time? I read books on the Science of Science Fiction. such as how the TARDIS from Doctor Who is bigger on the inside than on the outside. Well I found an interesting bit in the book that science people will probably enjoy so I want to share my nerdy-ness. remember the book "A wrinkle in time"? the part where they talk about the ant traveling to explain how the wrinkle works? well supposedly that's kind of how the TARDIS fits the 'bigger' inside the 'smaller'. kind of like a balloon. a small opening with a bigger plane inside... but more complicated. anyway, scientists seem to have the need to have formulas and such. they can't just speculate about theories without a base for their ideas, so a scientist named Van Den Broeck had to 'find' a type of matter that would allow one to bend space and time so it would support his theory. the matter they came up with to bend spacetime they called 'exotic matter'. apparently exotic matter works in a way that has a negative pressure that would actually make your tires flatter if you tried to pump it up with them. So it's a good thing that this matter is hard to come by. some varieties of exotic matter also have a negative mass. Sounds crazy right? well the part that impressed me is that small quantities of this exotic matter HAVE been produced in labs, in a phenomenon called the Casimir effect. Which was discovered in 1948 by a dutch scientist called Hendrik Casimir. Casimir was able to cause two metal plates separated by just a few millionths of a meter in a vacuum to be pulled together slightly by the negative pressure of exotic matter placed between them. That's pretty impressive! How cool would it be to have witnessed a form of matter you found PULL two metal plates closer together?! to continue, apparently the Casimir effect happens because empty space isn't REALLY empty. 'empty' space is actually filled with subatomic particles which pop in and out of existence over very short times. which is known as vacuum fluctuations. and is predicted by quantum theory. so that's why supposedly empty air can be caused to move metal plates together.

...So yeah. I found this SUPER awesome.... but hey.... not everyone gets a kick out of this sort of stuff. Sorry my geek is showing quite a bit today. :S oh well....DEAL WITH IT!

So back to reading science stuff. later earthlings.