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Ever wonder what the urban and rural landscapes of today looked like decades ago? All... more

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Tax Free Weekend 2010, Time to hit the shopping Malls

Tax Free Weekend 2010 is upon us, it is time to spend on the things you need, not the... more

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Happy Sequential Date Day

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TIME’s Epic Distortion of Plight of Afghan Women

Tomorrow, TIME Magazine will treat newsstand customers everywhere to one of the most... more

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A Universe With No Big Bang, No Beginning, and No End

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One of the strangest side-effects of intense fear is time dilation, the apparent slowing-down of time. It's a common trope in movies and TV shows, like the memorable scene from The Matrix in which time slows down so dramatically that bullets fired at the hero seem to move at a walking pace. In real life, our perceptions aren't keyed up quite that dramatically, but survivors of life-and-death situations often report that things seem to take longer to happen, objects fall more slowly, and they're capable of complex thoughts in what would normally be the blink of an eye.

Now a research team from Israel reports that not only does time slow down, but that it slows down more for some than for others. Anxious people, they found, experience greater time dilation in response to the same threat stimuli.

An intriguing result, and one that raises a more fundamental question: how, exactly, does the brain carry out this remarkable feat?

Researcher David Eagleman has tackled his very issue in a very clever way. He reasoned that when time seems to slow down in real life, our senses and cognition must somehow speed up-either that, or time dilation is merely an illusion. This is the riddle he set out to solve. "Does the experience of slow motion really happen," Eagleman says, "or does it only seem to have happened in retrospect?"

To find out, he first needed a way to generate fear of sufficient intensity in his experimental subjects. Instead of skydiving, he found a thrill ride near the university campus called Suspended Catch Air Device, an open-air tower from which participants are dropped, upside down, into a net 150 feet below. There are no harnesses, no safety lines. Subject plummet in free fall for three seconds, then hit the net at 70 miles per hour.

Was it scary enough to generate a sense of time dilation? To see, Eagleman asked subjects who'd already taken the plunge to estimate how long it took them to fall, using a stopwatch to tick off what they felt to be an equivalent amount of time. Then he asked them to watch someone else fall and then estimate the elapsed time for their plunge in the same way. On average, participants felt that their own experience had taken 36 percent longer. Time dilation was in effect.

Next, Eagleman outfitted his test subjects with a special device that he and his students had constructed. They called it the perceptual chronometer. It's a simple numeric display that straps to a user's wrist, with a knob on the side let the researchers adjust the rate at which the numbers flash. The idea was to dial up the speed of the flashing until it was just a bit too quick for the subject to read while looking at it in a non-stressed mental state. Eagleman reasoned that, if fear really does speed up our rate of perception, then once his subjects were in the terror of freefall, they should be able to make out the numbers on the display.

As it turned out, they couldn't. That means that fear does not actually speed up our rate of perception or mental processing. Instead, it allows us to remember what we do experience in greater detail. Since our perception of time is based on the number of things we remember, fearful experiences thus seem to unfold more slowly.

Eagleman's findings are important not just for understanding the experience of fear, but for the very nature of consciousness. After all, the test subjects who fell from the SCAD tower certainly believed, as they accelerated through freefall, that they knew what the experience was like at that very moment. They thought that it seemed to be moving slowly. Yet Eaglemen's findings suggest that that sensation could only have been superimposed after the fact. The implication is that we don't really have a direct experience of what we're feeling ‘right now,' but only a memory - an unreliable memory - of what we thought it felt like some seconds or milliseconds ago. The vivid present tense we all think we inhabit might itself be a retroactive illusion.

UPDATE: Have you ever experienced this kind of effect yourself? If any readers would like to share their experiences, I'd be very interested to hear them. You can post them in a comment here or on my Extreme Fear website. I'll be addressing other aspects of the fear response in future posts, incorporating the experiences of readers, and also sharing thoughts through my Twitter feed, #extremefear.One of the strangest side-effects of intense fear is time dilation, the apparent... more

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We May Actually Live Inside a Black Hole, Vincent

According to modified general relativity equations, our universe may be inside a black hole, the black holes in our universe may contain other universes, and the black holes in those universes may contain other universes... I need to smoke something now.

Scientists trying to explain the universe’s accelerating expansion usually point to dark energy, which seems to be pushing everything apart.

But an Indiana University professor has a new theory, reports New Scientist: We’re inside a black hole that exists in another universe. Specifically, a black hole that rebounded, somewhat like a spring.

Some fairly mind-blowing physics is involved here, but the gist is that Nikodem Poplawski of IU-Bloomington used a modified version of Einstein’s general relativity equation set that takes particle spin into account.

Including this variable makes it possible to calculate torsion, part of the geometry of space-time. It also gets rid of the black hole singularity, a phenomenon that general relativity cannot explain.

In a study published earlier this year, Poplawski said when the density of matter reaches epic proportions, torsion counters gravity. This prevents matter from compressing indefinitely to a singularity of infinite density. Instead, matter rebounds like a spring, and starts expanding again.

In Poplawski's latest study, his calculations show that space-time inside the black hole expands to about 1.4 times its smallest size in as little as 10-46 seconds -- two orders of magnitude faster, for lack of a better word, than the Planck time. This brisk bounce-back could have been what led to the expanding universe that we see today.

But here's the real kicker: as Poplawski says, we may not be living in our universe at all; we might be living inside a rebounded black hole that exists in a different universe.

We could tell by measuring the preferred direction of our universe. A spinning black hole would have imparted some spin to the space-time inside it, which would violate a law of symmetry that links space and time. This might explain why neutrinos oscillate between their antimatter and regular-matter states.

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-07/we-might-be-living-black-hole-scientist-saysAccording to modified general relativity equations, our universe may be inside a black... more

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The Secret Powers of Time [video]

In this video animation, Professor Philip Zimbardo conveys how our individual... more

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guy stops time to propose to girl

A new WEtv reality series has a team of proposal experts help a guy stop time at a New... more

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Incarnation - Mark Ryden Painting Time Lapse

Mark Ryden is an artist of some of the most surreal, creepy and beautiful paintings of... more

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50 Year Pictorial History of a Woman

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Time lapse video of Jaguar computer being built

Watch the world's most powerful computer being built by Cray at Oak Ridge... more

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RSA Animates: The Secret Power of Time

Professor Philip Zimbardo conveys how our individual perspectives of time affect our... more

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Why smartphones may replace your remote control

Well, TV remote control, it was a very impressive 60-year run. But it may soon be time... more

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The 100 Hottest Women

Megan Fox, Emmy Rossum, and Kim Kardashian made it onto Maxim's Hot 100 and that... more

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Google Pac-Man Game eats up work time

If you missed it the google icon was a playable game, it was designed to celebrate 30... more

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Investigate & publicize Mangalore air crash - petitions

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Things you have to know before start Wormhole Time-travel

A wormhole exists at the center of a black hole. Wormholes would allow travel from one... more

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TIME; Analog Re-mix

Digital Clock Lookalike–The Segmentus Clock At first sight you thought... more

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