By SUSANLATIMER
Added: Tue, 01 Nov 2011 07:42:41 UTC

I thought it might be fun to start a discussion for laymen who have questions for physicists( if physicists and phyics afficianados are interested in indulging us) that we are worried are too stupid to ask but that keep us up at night. I think that there might be some good questions that are worth exploring and also some "stupid" questions that physicists can easily clear up.

I'll venture a stupid question. I KNOW it's a stupid question but I'm not exactly sure why. It's about time travel. If a spaceship managed to travel one hundred years into the future, what confuses me is that it's mass/energy would exist in another time. As a limited ape , that SEEMS to mean that it doesn't exist now but suddenly exists one hundred years into the future. It seems like matter/energy would be destroyed in this time and suddenly added to a hundred years from now.

This tells me one thing. I don't understand all of the implications of Einstein's theories ( no shock there). Sergei Avdeyev has already been documented to have travelled 20 milliseconds into the future so it can't violate Einstein's theories or it would have been mentioned by now but I'm not clear why. I wonder if anyone is able and willing to explain it in layman's terms. I'm happy to be a sacrificial lamb in the "obviously or maybe just possibly stupid questions about physics" inquiry.

I remember someone in the last year asking if space is expanding, what are the implications on time? Is time expanding too? That same question had always kept me (and STILL keeps me up at night). Steve Zara responded that it wasn't a stupid question, that it was a good question and that he would look into it. I never saw a follow up.

So, here's to a lot of stupid questions. They might generate the occasional good one. If people with a knowledge of physics don't feel like spelling it out, they might at least provide the best links. I'm not even sure where to start sometimes.

TAGGED: PHYSICS, SCIENCE