Vallée and Bostrom - Is the idea that we are all just living in a big computer simulation related to what Jacques Vallée and people like that are talking about when they try to explain UFO's as not extraterrestrial craft but "control devices" and so on? That is, do they mean that the ones behind the UFO's are the programmers of this big simulation we're living in, who are doing experiments on us by sending these weird, anomalous phenomena and seeing how we deal with them? I never really understood what Vallée was getting at till I read the article on the world as a computer simulation in the current edition of the Museum of Unnatural Mystery. Thanks. - Alan Meyers

Dr. Jacques F. Vallée, a computer scientist, venture capitalist and former astronomer, has long been one of the "deep thinkers" in the arena of Ufology. Born in France in 1939 he became interested in the subject when he observed a UFO in 1955. At first Vallée was convinced that UFOs were extraterrestrial spacecraft and published his ideas in his book Anatomy of a phenomenon: unidentified objects in space--a scientific appraisal. By 1969, however, his thinking had changed and he began to see UFOs and alien abduction reports as part of a much larger phenomenon that included other paranormal events. He outlined his thinking for this in his book Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers. Vallée suggested in his book that flying saucers and alien visitors might not be from other planets, but from other dimensions or even different time periods. These ideas did not sit well with many UFO enthusiasts and Vallée soon found himself an outcast among their ranks, or as he put it a "heretic among heretics".

Vallée sees one possible explanation of the UFO phenomenon as that of a "control mechanism " with incidents as deceptions created to manipulate people and society. Sometimes this is done by other humans. For example, we know the US Air Force encouraged UFO reports to hide the flights of SR-71 Blackbird spy aircraft in the 80's. The Soviet Union also did the same thing to cover the launch of rockets that were not in compliance with the SALT treaty they had signed.

Much of the social manipulation caused by UFOs reports, however, Vallée suggests are done by non-human entities who have an agenda of which we are totally unaware. Vallée's initial thinking was that these entities were from another dimension, and were not operators of a simulated world that we are living in (See last month article on Living in a Video Game). "There is a distinction to be made between a Matrix-like virtual world and what I first proposed in 'Messengers,' [Messengers of Deception: UFO Contacts and Cults his 1979 book] namely an information multiverse with fully physical manifestations" said Vallée, in an interview with SUB ROSA online magazine.

The multiverse he is thinking about is related to some of the interpretations of quantum theory which suggest that reality consists of many nearly parallel universes. If beings from one universe successfully figured out how to cross to another universe we might interpret them as extra terrestrials. A visitor moving from one quantum parallel universe to another also might be jumping in time also leading to the suggestion that flying saucers are our ancestors' attempts to manipulate their past.

Even though Vallée initial ideas with control mechanisms didn't involve our living in a simulated universe, in my opinion the idea that UFO incidents (and other paranormal experiences) are attempts by those outside the simulation to influence our society seem to make just as much sense as the multi-dimensional approach. Remember Vallée's initial thinking on this subject was published in 1979 long before Bostrom's 2002 paper on the simulation argument came out. Perhaps Vallée, after pondering Bostrom's thinking, will address this possibility directly in some future book.

BC, AD, BCE, and CE- Why are the years are called by BC and AD and how exactly did the year change to BC to AD'? Did ancient people follow this? - Gajendra K.

The B.C./A.D. numbering system is based on the presumed year of the birth of Jesus Christ. Years before his birth are given the abbreviation B.C. ("Before Christ") designation and are numbered backwards so the further back in time you go in time the higher the number. For example, the Great Pyramid is thought to have been built 2560 years before Christ was born which would be expressed as 2560 B.C..

The A.D. stands for "Anno Domini" which is Latin for "In the year of our Lord." All recent dates are expressed in the number of years after Jesus's birth. This year is A.D. 2008 which translates to "The year of our Lord 2008" or 2008 years after Christ was born. Technically the A.D. abbreviation should go before the number, but more recently it has become common to put it either at the beginning or the end, for example "2008 A.D.".

Some people prefer to use the designation C.E. (for "Common Era") instead of A.D. so there is no religious connection (though C.E. can also thought of as "Christian Era."). The same thing can be done changing B.C. - Before Christ - to B.C.E which means "Before Common Era."

This dating system wasn't invented until A.D. 525, and was not commonly used until the 8th century. Before then dates were typically numbered years based on the start of the reign of the current king. For example, Babylon was established as the center of the Babylonian Empire during the 30th year of King Hammurabi's reign. In some cases dates were not established by the beginning of the reign of the current king, but the beginning of the dynasty of kings to which he belonged.

A few early calendars (like the Hebrew Calendar) tried to base their dates of the number of years since the world was created, but given that different religious scholars disagreed about when this occurred, the number system was never universal.

While previous number systems were adequate in ancient times when there were few contacts between different peoples and little shared history, as interactions between cultures spread, it became difficult to constantly match the years of different king's reigns together to establish correct dates. The A.D. system first became popular in Western Europe and is now the defacto standard though out most of the world. Its popularity can also be attributed to the success of the Gregorian calendar (our system of months and days) to which it has been closely tied.

Historical re-examination of the birth of Christ in the last century suggests Jesus was actually born several years before A.D. 1, but given that the system is now so well established there has been no attempt to fix it. Another quirk with the system is that there is no "year zero." This means that if you go one year backwards from A.D. 1 you will find yourself at 2 B.C.. Incidentally some people incorrectly attribute the A.D. to the abbreviation of "After [Christ's] Death" but this is incorrect as it would yield dates 33 years too low - The length of Jesus' life.

Cleopatra of Egypt - We studied Ancient Egypt and I was absent when we studied Queen Cleopatra. Who is she? - Samantha

There are several Cleopatra's in Egyptian history, but the most famous one was Cleopatra VII. She was the last Pharaoh of Egypt, at a time just before the country was completely taken over by the Rome. Cleopatra herself was not of Egyptian heritage, but Greek. In 331BC Alexander the Great (who was from a section of Greece) liberated Egypt when he defeated the Persian Empire. After Alexander's death in 232BC, Egypt fell under control of one of Alexander's generals, Ptolemy. The Ptolemy family kept power there until Cleopatra was born to her father, Ptolemy XII, in 69BC. Cleopatra showed great interest in the traditions of Egypt and was the only member of her family in 300 years that bothered to learn the language. She followed the Egyptian beliefs and while she ruled she was considered the re-incarnation and embodiment of, Isis, the Egyptian goddess of wisdom.

When her father died in 51 BC, a 17 year-old Cleopatra and her 12-year-old brother, Ptolemy XIII, took over. In addition to be siblings, Cleo and her brother were married (a common trick used to keep power in the family back then). Cleo attempted to push her husband/bother into the background and get sole control of the kingdom, but lost the battle and was forced to flee Egypt.

Cleopatra's chance to get back into power came in 48BC when a political miscalculation by her brother got the Roman ruler Julius Caesar angry with him. Cleopatra took advantage of this situation: It is said that she had her servants bring an expensive Persian carpet to Caesar as a gift. When it was unrolled, Cleopatra tumbled out. Caesar, age 50, enchanted by her beauty and youth (she was only 21) and fell in love with her. He helped her returned her to the Egyptian throne which led to Ptolemy XIII's death. Caesar and Cleo had a son, Caesarion, together. It was Caesar's plan to have Caesarion rule Egypt after his death and leave Rome to grand-nephew, Octavian. Cleopatra, however, wished her son to be heir to all of Rome.

When Caesar was killed by members of the Roman Senate in 44BC, Cleopatra made Caesarion her co-regent and successor. Later she allied herself with Mark Anthony, one of the three men ruling Rome after Caesar's death. They married and had children. It is likely that Cleopatra had plans to take on Rome and make herself and her son rulers of the known world, but the Romans, under Octavian, attacked first. Anthony and Cleopatra's forces were defeated at the naval battle off the coast of Actium. Soon the armies of Rome were marching through Egypt and Anthony was mortally wounded in battle. Cleopatra was held under house arrest and commited suicide (legend has it that she killed herself by letting a deadly Asp snake bite her) in 30BC at the age of 39.

Cleopatra is remembered for her immense beauty and even more immense ambition. She ruled in a time when Greek women were expected to be submissive to their husbands. Instead of taking a back seat to men, however, she cleverly used her charms to gain political advantages over her enemies and was nearly successful in ruling the known world.

Nikola Tesla, the almost forgotten genius of electricity, hated war and for years searched for a way to put an end to it. In 1934, at age 78, Tesla thought he had found it. He had an idea for a death beam based on sending a concentrated stream of charged particles though the air. The beam would carry tremendous energy and would disrupt or melt whatever it hit. The weapon, he thought, could be used to down any hostile airplane approaching a country's borders. The beam could only be sent in a straight line and would not follow the curve of the earth, so it only had a range of only a couple of hundred miles. Because of this, Tesla felt that his invention could be used only as a defensive weapon to prevent aggression.

He failed to get much interest in it until he wrote a technical paper entitled "New Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-Dispersive Energy Through Natural Media" and mailed it to a number of Allied nations including the United States, Canada, England, France, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia. According to him the weapon would be "capable of destroying 10,000 enemy airplanes at a distance of 250 miles." The nation that showed the greatest interest in it was the Soviet Union, which tested one stage of the weapon in 1939 and sent Tesla a check for $25,000.

Tesla's design was clever. One the problems with a charged particle weapon is that the particles need to be accelerated in a vacuum, but then must be able to emerge from the weapon into the atmosphere to make the beam. To keep the interior of the weapon a vacuum Tesla devised a gateway for the particles that consisted of a blast of high-speed air blowing across the weapon's barrel. The blowing air helped maintain the vacuum, but would not hinder the beam.

Despite this, experts say his exact design appears unworkable. However, after his death some of his papers appeared to have gone missing and then, during the "cold war" both the United States and the Soviet Union tried to developed "charged particle" weapons similar in principal to Tesla's designs. Conspiracy theorists suggest this is more than a coincidence. Later a similar weapon was designed to be put aboard a rocket as part of the SDI ("Star Wars") program to down approaching missiles, but the idea was never implemented. Currently one company is experimenting with a charged particle beam weapon code named MEDUSA which they hope can be used to defend against planes and light tanks. So far, however, no charged particle weapon seems to have made it into the standard defense inventory of any nation.

The Zapotec Empire of central American (now Mexico) existed from about 500 BC to 700 AD, and reached peak population of around 16,500 around 500 AD. At this point in time they abandoned their old capital and built a new one, Monte Albán, atop a high plateau in the valley of Oaxaca. Beneath the central plaza of this city runs a labyrinth of small tunnels. The tunnels, many only a foot high, are - as you note - too small for adults and most children. Some appear to have steps and are connected chambers containing artifacts like human skeletons and funerary objects. Despite Monte Albán being one of the most studied archeological sites in the Americans, the reason behind the tunnels is unknown, but ideas have been proposed ranging from water drainage to a transportation system for diminutive aliens. One explanation seems to be that the tubes were used for sighting the different positions of the sun, moon and stars as they moved across the sky, but the existence of the chambers snd artifacts seems to also suggest a ritual connection.

This, by far, is not the only mystery about Monte Albán. On the north side of the site is an area called "The Gallery of Dancers" with many stone tablets carved with reliefs of human figures in contorted positions. Nobody is exactly sure what these figures mean, except that they are not really dancers. The leading theory is that they may be human sacrifices.

Perhaps we could understand more about the city and its strange features if we could read the Zapotec hieroglyphics that cover city walls. While the language is still spoken in Mexico, the meanings of the glyphs have been lost and only a handful are now known. Without a key, like the Rosetta Stone which allowed Egyptian script to be deciphered, the translation of these texts may never be known. For a look at the plaza and the tunnels check:

http://studentweb.tulane.edu/~dhixson/montealban/montealban.html

Additional pictures can be seen here including the entrance to a tunnel that might have been used to site the planet Venus:

http://www.le.ac.uk/archaeology/rug/AR315/fotos13.html

The "Big Crunch" is one of several theories about how the universe will end. Probably everybody is now familiar with the leading theory about how the universe started, the so called "Big Bang." According to the Big Bang theory, at the beginning of the universe all matter and energy was compressed into an infinity small point with infinite density and temperature. Then followed a period of rapid inflation and expansion (the Bang). Matter in the universe cooled and coalesced into stars, planets and galaxies. The expansion continues today as each of the local groups of galaxies, including ours, grows further apart from each other.

For many years scientists pondered what would happen at the end of the universe. While the expansion continues, gravity is trying to reverse the process and pull all matter back together. Scientists figured that either gravity would be too weak and the expansion would continue forever while just getting slower and slower, or gravity would be strong enough to bring all the matter and energy back together in a "Big Crunch."

Scientists also speculated if the universe did come back into a "Big Crunch" it might precipitate another "Big Bang" which would create another universe. Ours, they suggested, might be just one in an unending series of universes.

Initial measurements suggested the amount of gravity and the speed of the expansion were very nearly balanced. This meant that scientists had to impatiently wait for decades until better technology was available so that more accurate studies could be made and they could find out what the fate of the universe was.

In one of those moments that proved that Sir Arthur Eddington was right when he said "not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine," the results came back showing that the expansion wasn't slowing at all. It was - much to the shock of almost everybody - accelerating. Scientists have decided that the reason for the acceleration must be something they've dubbed "dark energy," but they have almost no idea what this energy might be and how it works.

If the expansion continues at the current rate the universe may end in "The Big Rip." At some point about 50 billion years in the future the expansion will become so great that everything will be ripped apart. Galaxies will fly apart as individual solar systems go their own way. Later stars will lose their planets and eventually everything down to the subatomic level will be torn asunder.

Although a "Big Crunch" seems unlikely due to this most recent finding, because scientists know almost nothing about what "dark energy" is, they can't rule out that it might suddenly reverse and cause a rapid collapse of the universe. When this might happen is also a mystery. If there is a Big Crunch, the universe would end as all matter was sucked into black holes, then the black holes were pulled together to create a single massive black hole. Scientists have no idea whether this singularity might lead to a new universe and a new expansion or not.

The notion that you can see the stars during daylight hours from the bottom of a deep well or chimney has been around a long time. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle mentions it as does the 19th century author Charles Dickens. However, any theoretical or practical evidence for this seems lacking. The British astronomer Rev. W.F.A. Ellison tried it from the bottom of a bottom of a colliery 900 feet below the surface and found the he wasn't struck by the sight of stars, but the brilliant blue of the sky when compared the darkened tube he was looking up through.

We cannot see the stars in the sky during the day because of the sunlight is scattering off gas molecules in the air, sending light in all directions - including into our eyes. (Blue is scattered more than the other colors so that is why the sky is blue). The light radiating this way during day is much brighter than most stars. A few extremely bright stars, like Sirius, are visible in the day if you know where to look, though they do not stand out against the day sky like they do at night. If you were at the bottom of a well shaft, and Sirius was directly overhead during the day, the well shaft might reduce the glare from the sun enough to make the star more visible. It would not, however, allow you to see the fainter stars and the real world chance of Sirius being exactly over your shaft would be extremely small.

Similarly planets, like Venus, can be seen in the daylight and viewing them from a well or chimney might reduce the Sun's glare and make them more visible, but you could probably get the same effect by using the cardboard cylinder from a roll of paper towels that you hold up to your eye.

Expansion of Universe vs. Speed of Light - I read "K-Pax IV," a fictional book, and an alien character suggested that light only travels because the universe is expanding. She suggests that light cannot exceed the speed of light because that's the speed of the expanding universe and if the light exceeds that speed then it's going out of the universe's bounds. Is this somewhat true or completely fictional? - Melqui

In reviewing the literature on this subject I see no credible theories that connect the expansion of the universe, as we know it, to the speed of light. Usually when we talk about the "expansion of the universe" we are referring to the way things in the universe get farther away from each other over the course of time. This started with the "Big Bang" and continues today. Recently this speed was measured to be about 71 (km/s)/megaparsec. That means that if two objects in the universe are a megaparsec apart (3261.5 light years) they will be moving away from each other at 71 kilometers a second.

This speed is well below that of light so there doesn't seem to be a direct connection. In addition, the effect is additive so that at great distances - billions of megaparsecs apart - two objects can actually be moving away from each other at more that the speed of light. This would seem to defy Einstein's Theory, but remember that the movement of these objects is because they are just being carried along by the expansion of space, not because the objects themselves have been accelerated.

There is also recent evidence that the rate that the universe is expanding is increasing for some unknown reason. This is also unlike that speed of light which almost all scientists believe is a constant. Even the few people that suggest light speed may not be a constant speculate that it is slowing down, not speeding up.

Some future theory may find a connection between the speed of light and the expansion of the universe, but it is not obvious at point in time. Still, we do not know everything about the universe - in fact we do not even know what we don't know - so there is always the possibility of new discovery over the horizon that would change everything.

A WOW in SETI - What do you know about the WOW signal, and have scientists found any possible source (other than aliens)? Could it have even been faked? Or is it more likely to be a genuine signal from aliens? If that's the case, why haven't we heard any more? - Jonathan .

This signal (called the "WOW" signal because that's what the scientist who first saw the data wrote on the printout) was observed by the "Big Ear" radio telescope at Ohio State University on August 15, 1977. The Big Ear was part of a SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project run by the college for almost 30 years. The signal was the closest thing to an alien contact that the project - or anybody else involved in SETI - has ever found.

There are several things that make the signal so interesting. The first is the strength. It is extremely high: The most powerful signal ever received from space from an unknown source. Second is its duration. Almost exactly 72 seconds. This is significant because the Big Ear was a fixed radio antenna which swept the sky as the earth turned and 72 seconds was exactly the length of time it would take for the antenna to sweep by a pinpoint source in space. Also the growth and decay pattern of the signal is exactly what one would expect for a fixed celestial source, making it unlikely it was an earthbound transmitter. Third is its frequency: It is very near the frequency of hydrogen and very concentrated. The hydrogen "line" is considered to be by most scientists the logical frequency to choose if you where trying to broadcast to another civilization. The fact that that signal did not extend much above or below that frequency is a strong indication that the broadcast was artificial, as natural sources a rarely so concentrated.

Another intriguing aspect of this signal is that is that it was only observed from one of the Big Ear's two "horns" but not the other. They scanned the same section of sky about two minutes apart, so in that short period something, or somebody, stopped the transmission.

As fascinating as the signal was, it has never been found again despite many researchers revisiting that location in the sky using, in many cases, much more sensitive equipment. This both deepens the mystery and makes it almost impossible to hope for a solution. The follow up surveys have almost eliminated the possibly of some weird natural source. However, the lack of any additional signals also makes it seem very unlikely that aliens are trying to contact us. Most scientists believe that they definitely would try more than once (although we ourselves have only sent a sent an outbound signal once). The only way we may have missed their additional signals, if they exist, is if they are being repeated at very long intervals (at least 14 hours apart).

In science, unless something is repeatable, it doesn't count for much. Some have suggested that the signal may have been a man-made space probe that the SETI team wasn't aware of, but there is no way of proving that one way or another. So, the mystery continues. We can only hope that if E.T. was trying to contact us, he tries to phone again, soon.

Time Speeding Up? - Someone just said to me she thinks the last 3 years have aged everyone more than in the past because the actual minute itself (the unit of time) is speeding up. Can this be possible? - Jennifer E.

I suspect your friend is referring to the insertion of "leap seconds" into the calendar in the last few years. If this is the case, it isn't so much that time itself is speeding up, but that the earth's rotation is slowing down.

Of course, how you look at it depends on how you define time. We casually define our days as one rotation of our planet, hours as one 24th the length of that day, minutes as one 60th of the length of that hour and seconds as one 60th the length of that minute. If the Earth rotation slows (which it does due to the pull of the moon and sun's gravity on our oceans which create friction between the water and land) the days get longer by a few fractions of a second each year.

While this tiny difference is unimportant to most people, it is of great concern to scientists who need to measure things carefully down to the thousandths of a second for many scientific experiments. If the length of a second is changing as the earth slows down it can't be used to compare the results of one experiment with a similar one done years earlier. To solve this problem scientists invented the "physics second." A physics second is length that the second was according to the rotation of our planet in 1900. Scientists then use atomic clocks (that measure time as a function of the change of states in the element cesium) to track time without having to refer to the earth rotation. When the atomic clocks slip out of sync with the rotation of the earth by about a second a "leap second" is inserted into the clocks tracking to keep it aligned with the astronomical day.

If you thought of the real value of time as the length of the day, then indeed you might come to the conclusion that time is going faster - after all we are inserting extra fractions of a second into those days so time must have sped up, right? Well, not really. It is probably more accurate to think that time has stayed the same, but our days are getting longer.

Weird Findings - What do you do if you find pieces of a creature unlike that of anything of this earth? - Charlie

Probably your best bet, when trying to identify an unknown animal (extraterrestrial or not) is to contact a biologist professor at a local college or university. They will be familiar with animals in your area and can eliminate some possibilities of an unusual, but earthly species. Most scientists would jump at the chance to identify a new species (even an earthly one) if given the chance. If they find one, they get to write a paper on it and they become famous (at least within the biology world).

This goes for fossils too. If you find a fossil, which you think might be something significant you can contact a geologist or paleontologist at a local college or university. It could be an important find. It has happened before:

In 1974 a contractor working on a housing development in South Dakota came across some strange bones. His son, who was a college student, recognized them as fossils and contacted a university. Scientists came out and examined the location and immediately discovered the remains of at least four Columbian Mammoths. Later excavations revealed that the location was an ancient sinkhole which had trapped mammoths for centuries and was a treasure trove of important fossils. The housing project was abandoned and a museum built on the location: The South Dakota Mammoth Site near Hot Springs. It's great place to learn about mammoths while visiting South Dakota.

The Berkeley Horror - I have a book by Daniel Cohen called Worlds Most Famous Ghosts. In it is a chapter on something called the "Berkeley Square Horror" in London. It is something about a room at 50 Berkeley Square that if anyone stays one night in there they will either be dead or have gone insane. Supposedly this has happened several times. I have searched several sights including wikipedia.com and I have found nearly no info. It would be much appreciated if you could help me out. - Frank

There are multiple stories about 50 Berkeley Square, many of them contradictory. The house was constructed in 1740 and for a number of years was the home to British Prime Minister George Canning. The source of the haunting stories starts around 1830 with either young woman who committed suicide by jumping from the top floor, or a Mr. Myers was preparing the house for the just new bride and went insane after he was jilted. Or maybe the haunting really comes from a Mr. Dupre, who confined his insane brother in an upper story room. Or maybe the story about the little girl who was tortured to death by a sadistic servant is what started it. Well, take your pick. According to the story after Mr. Myers/Dupre/young woman/little girl was gone and a new family had moved in, a maid was found in a third floor bedroom screaming and muttering she has seen something "horrible" there. The story continues next with a Captain Kenfeild, fiancée, to the family's daughter (In other versions this is a young aristocrat named Robert Warboys) who decides to challenge the apparition by staying in the room overnight. He sees something that either kills him with fright (in some versions) or leaves him crazed.

Another tale connected with the house brings the story into the 20th century with two sailors in 1943 who break into the long empty house to stay overnight and encounter a monstrous, shapeless, oozing mass in the third floor room. One sailor escapes to tell the tale while the other jumps out the window to his death (speared on the points of an iron railing) to avoid the horror.

The house became famous for these stories and by the beginning of the 20th century and was listed by some authors as "the most haunted place in Britain." The current owners still get visitors from time to time curious about the house. The stories were also an inspiration for a 1947 movie "The Ghosts of Berkeley Square."

As far as I am aware nobody has carefully researched the history of the house to determine if any of the 18th century stories are real. This could probably be done by checking records to see who owned the house, who died there, and going though police reports associated with the house, etc. Clearly there are problems with the 1943 story as it indicates the house was empty, but history shows that in 1938 Maggs Brothers Rare Books moved into the location. The company reports no ghostly incidents since they have been there even though there were many all-night fire watches held during the Second World War.

You can visit the building, even the supposedly haunted 3rd floor, by going to the Maggs Brothers website and taking a virtual tour. So far nobody has reported any virtual horrors. http://www.maggs.com/maggstour/0/exterior.asp

Elongated Night Reflections - If you look at the reflection of a street light from across a body of water, it appears long in one direction but not the other? Why? - Tariq

Water, under the right conditions, reflects light just like mirror. Of course, a mirror is a usually composed of solid material (most commonly glass with a silver backing) and water is liquid. As long as the water is perfectly still and flat the image reflected is almost mirror-like, but should a breeze start to ripple the water, strange things start to happen.

The ripples cause the shape of the surface of the water to change into a series of up and down curves. This means that the light normal reflected by the surface doesn't come straight to the viewer, but is distorted much like in a fun house mirror. While fun house mirrors are usually static - either making you look tall and thin or short and fat - the many ripples in the water are always moving and changing giving the reflected image a vibrating quality.

Because a lake might have thousand of ripples between the viewer and a distant object on the other side of the lake each ripple as it moves is capable of picking a tiny bit of the light coming from the object and reflecting it back to the viewer (see diagram) making it look like the object is in thousands of different locations.

During the day when everything is evenly lighted these bits of light are overwhelmed by all the other reflections involved and only contribute to the overall reflected image by making it look fuzzy. At night, however, when the most of the background is dark, all these tiny reflection become visible. They tend to appear to elongate the lighted object in the direction where the ripples appear spaced closely together from the viewer's perspective. That is vertically as you have observed. It is possible to see some spreading horizontally, however, depending on what direction the wind is blowing the ripples.

Before Big Bang - I'm a 60 year old scientist and I have a rock-solid understanding of the concept of entropy, including the idea of life as a temporary bump in the overall decline of order and organization in a system. All I want before I die is to know if there is any credible scientific theory about how the spring originally got wound 14-or-so billion years ago - Bob W.

Let me re-phrase you question as, "What was there before the Big-Bang and where did all the energy it requires come from?" At this point I don't believe there are any "credible" theories to explain this as none of the ideas scientists have about this area can be tested by experimentation. In fact, there is not likely to be anything testable until scientists can first create a Grand Unified theory of everything combining Einstein's General Relativity with Quantum Physics. That quest, which has been pursued by physicists like the Holy Grail for almost a century, so far does not seem near a conclusion.

So the best I can do is to throw out one of the more intriguing ideas floating around cosmology circles these days. This particular model comes out of string theory (One possible candidate for the Grand Unified Theory that says all energy and matter is composed of super-small vibrating loops of strings.) This idea was worked out by Paul Steinhardt (Princeton University) and Neil Turok (Cambridge University). They suggest our universe is part of a much larger universe. The model says that our universe exists on a three dimensional membrane ( or "Brane" in string theory lingo) and there are other branes close to ours, only millimeters away, but invisible.

Every trillion years or so these branes are drawn together and when they collide a huge amount of energy is released making a "Big Bang" that creates a universe on the brane (other universes can be created at other locations of the brane that may collide at other times) This process of collision Steinhardt and Turok named ekpyrosis which is the Greek word for conflagration. In addition to creating a smaller universe, ekpyrosis also pushes the branes apart.

Over the life of the universe some of the big bang energy turns into matter which becomes stars, galaxies and, of course, us. Eventually the energy involved in our universe spreads out as stars burn out and the universe grows cold. According to this idea, however, the branes which still contain the energy, and they are drawn back together again to collide and create another universe in an eternal cycle.

They only problem with this, and alternate theories like it, is that there is no way to test these theories experimentally to know if there is any evidence that they are true. Even if this idea is true, however, we may have just moved the question back a little bit further: What created that greater universe and where did all its energy come from?

Big Packaderm vs. Little Sport Device - Could an elephant have the same momentum as a golf ball? - Anonymous.

The easiest way of thinking about momentum is the force necessary to stop a moving object. It involves both the mass of the object and speed of the object. Technically, in classical physics, this can be expressed as the mass of the object mulitpled by its velocity. The formula is:

P = mv

Where P is the momentum, m is the mass and v is the veolocity.

If we had and elephant that weighed 7200 Kg (about 15840 pounds) running at 1 meter per second, the elephant would have:

7200 kg m/s = 7200kg 1m/s

That means that 7200kg is the mass, 1 meter/second (m/s) is the velocity and 7200 kg m/s ("kilogram meters per second") is the momentum.

It is easy to see a trivial situation where any two objects, no matter the size of their mass, would have the same momentum. Any object that has no veolocity has no momentum. So both an elephant and a golf ball would have the same momentum if neither were moving.

There are also cases where the elephant and the golf ball could have the momentum even if they were both moving. Imagine our 7200 kilograms elephant from above and a golf ball weighing .046 kilograms. If we set up the equation with the elephant on the left and the golf ball on the right:

Mv = p = mv

Or

7200kg 1m/s = 7200kg m/s = .046kg V m/s

we just need to solve for the V, the velocity of the golf ball:

7200kg 1m/s = 7200kg m/s = .046kg 156521 m/s

We can see that an elephant running along at 1 meter per second has the same momentum as a golf ball moving at 156,521 meters per second (around 351,000 miles per hour). So an heavy elephant moving along at a trot would have the same momentum as small golf ball going very, very fast.

Now, a couple of additional considerations. This is the formula for momentum under classical (Newtonian physics). The formala under relativistic physics is slightly different and allows for objects like photons, which have no mass, to still have momentum. Also a complete description of momentum for an object includes the direction (or vector) of the motion.

Very, Very Cold - Is it possible to attain 0° Kelvin? -Feloxi

Zero on the Kelvin temperature scale is often referred to as absolute zero. To get an idea of what absolute zero is, we first need to know a little bit about heat and temperature. All atoms and molecules "vibrate" with thermal energy. The more vibration, the more heat the atom or molecule has. As the atoms and molecules of a material are cooled, the vibration slows down and the energy decreases. The point at which all heat energy has been removed from a material is called absolute zero. This is approximately -459.67 °F on the Fahrenheit scale or 0° on the Kelvin scale.

According to the third law of Thermodynamics you can never completely achieve absolute zero but only approach it, but scientists have come darn close. In September of 2003 scientists at MIT managed to get a small group of sodium atoms down to 240 millionths of a degree above absolute zero. Larger objects are harder to cool, but another group at MIT managed to get a mirror about the size of a dime down to just 0.8 °K above absolute zero. They did this by shooting laser pulses at it to "trap" and "damp" the molecular motion.

These laboratory temperatures are just a bit colder than any reported in nature. The coldest known place is about 5,000 light years away from Earth in the Boomerang Nebula located in the constellation Centaurus. Astronomers think the temperatures there run around 1°K. If you ever visit it, better bring a jacket.

Scientists are very interested in the behavior of objects very close to absolute zero. It may give them the chance to observe quantum physics effects that normally are too small to see because the are lost in the heat motion of the material. Just a final note: There is also something called a negative temperature (less then absolute zero on the Kelvin scale) but negative temperatures are actually hotter then absolute zero.

Quantum Mechanics is one of the two great physics theories of the 20th century that replaced classical (Newtonian) physics. The other was General Relativity. Interestingly both were fathered by the same man: Albert Einstein. While he loved the one child the other was disliked. Einstein never felt comfortable with Quantum Physics.

General Relativity is mostly used to describe how the world of big things work: The movement of planets, stars, rockets, etc. Everything down to about the size of an atom. Below that size scientists almost always use quantum physics to do their calculations. Both were needed as classical physics created by Issac Newton in 17th century couldn't predict how the things worked when dealing with extremely large objects (like planets and stars) or extremely small objects (like photons and electrons).

While the rules of general relativity seem to make some kind of sense to us, the rules involved with quantum physics are bizarre and challenge our understanding of reality. Little in this realm is for certain. Everything is based on the probability of something happening. This is one of the reasons Einstein disliked it. He has often been quoted as saying, "He [God] does not play dice" with the universe.

One illustration of the strangeness of quantum theory is the dual nature of light. Is light a particle or a wave? The experiment that scientists used to find this out is called the double-slit experiment. A barrier with two narrow slits is placed between a light source and a screen. If light is a stream of particles we could expect to see each particle pass through one slit or the other and create two separate lines of light on the screen behind it. This isn't what occurs, however. We see a pattern of light and dark lines all across the screen. This, known as an interference pattern, is the result of waves of light passing through the two slits, then interacting as they hit the screen with the wave crests reinforcing each other to make the light lines and the wave troughs making the dark lines.

So I guess light is a wave them, huh? If you close one of slits, though, suddenly light starts behaving like a particle again. We see it piling up behind the open slit. Well, maybe light only behaves like a wave when a lot of light particles are moving together. Unfortunately this is not the case. When the double slit experiment is performed sending only one photon (light particle) though the barrier at a time the photon doesn't show up behind the slits. It can show up anywhere on the screen. In fact, as you send more and more photons though the experiment one at a time the interference pattern slowly builds up, just as before. Does that mean that each individual photon is a wave that interferes with itself? Yep. Does this mean that the photon passed through both slits at the same time? Indeed, this seems to be the case.

When scientists have placed photon detectors at each slit to see which side the photon goes though a strange thing happens. Suddenly the interference pattern disappears and there are just two lines of light one behind each slit. The detector has somehow forced the photon to stop behaving as a wave and act like a particle again. Even if the detector is placed on the opposite side of the barrier, after the photon passes though the slits, the photon still acts like a particle. How did it know that there was going to be a photon detector on the opposite side of the barrier so it would behave like a particle and not a wave when it passed though the barrier?

In the end, light is both a wave and a particle at the same time. If you think that doesn't make sense, you are right. However, that doesn't change the fact that it is true. If you can explain why all this happens and support your ideas with experimental proof, you're probably on your way to a Nobel prize.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Quantum Physics weirdness. As you get deeper and deeper into it what you find seems to make less and less common sense. You might try to argue that scientists simply have gotten the thing wrong except that quantum theory is one of the most successful theories of all time and is used in the design of such everyday things as TVs and cell phones. Experiments show that not just light is both a particle and a wave, so are electrons, protons and atoms. These maybe small things too, but remember we are just made of atoms. At some level are we just waves too?

Scientists have grappled to figure out what this means in the real world. Some interpretations include the ideas like "nothing is real until it is observed" or that there are countless "multiple universes" each differing just slightly from the one next to it. There isn't room here to discuss all the ramifications of quantum theory, so I'm going to give you a couple links that may help. Prepare to see the world in a different light after reading these, or at least have an awful headache:

http://www.thekeyboard.org.uk/Quantum%20mechanics.htm and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics

End of Magnetism? - If the earth's magnetic field collapsed would there still be magnets? - Anonymous

Magnetism is one of those funny things we see everyday - use everyday - but never know how it works. As it turns out, it is the result of moving electric charges. Almost everybody has done the experiment of wrapping a wire around an iron nail in a spiral pattern, then connecting the wires to a battery to product a crude electromagnet. The current flowing though the wire (in the form of electrons) creates the magnetic field. This field then influences the iron nail to become a magnet also, adding to the strength of the effect, though it would work even without the nail.

If you need a moving electric charge to make a magnetic field, how do permanent magnets work? After all there is no battery involved and no apparent electric charge. Well there actually is, however, a moving electric charge at the atomic level. The electrons orbit around the nucleus of each atom in the material. The electrons also have a quantum-mechanical property called "spin" which looks like a moving electrical charge. These two effects produce a tiny magnetic field for each atom.

In most materials the magnetic fields of each atom are aligned in no particular order so they cancel each other out. In some special materials, however, the fields line up (or can be made to line up) in a particular pattern so that their strength adds up. That's why the nail in the electromagnet experiment above becomes a magnet when exposed to a magnetic field. The field created by the moving electric charges in the wire lines up the nail's fields properly and then those fields can add their own strength to the overall effect.

If you want to see this at home take a paper clip and hang it from a permanent magnet. The paper clip isn't a magnet in itself, but will become a temporary magnet in the presence of a magnetic field. You can then hang a second paper clip from the first one and it will also become a magnet because of the field of the one before it. It is easy to construct a whole chain of paper clips this way. Detach the first one from the permanent magnet, however, and the whole chain falls apart as each of the magnetic fields fall apart one after another.

For centuries scientists have puzzled about why Earth has a strong magnetic field. (The magnetic field of Venus is barely detectable.) They still don't understand the details, but they do know that the outer core of the Earth is mostly molten iron that moves in a convection pattern due to heat at the core. This movement, along with the Earth's spin seems to make the Earth into a big electromagnet. The magnetic field of our planet isn't as stable as we might think, however. There is evidence that the poles of this gigantic magnet have moved, changed intensity, and even reversed many times in past.

If the magnetic field of the Earth went away would we still have magnets? Yes, because each magnet generates its own magnetic field independently. The Earth is just a big version of our experiment with the wire and the nail. A collapse in the Earth's magnetic field, however, would mean that compasses (which are just little magnets in the form of pointers that align with the Earth's magnetic field) would not point the right direction. This would cause problem not only for humans who depend on compasses for navigation, but also for animals that have developed internal compasses in their bodies for use in migration.

Fortunately, though the Earth's magnetic field has weakened in the past 150 years, it looks like it will many centuries before a full collapse and reversal. In fact it may be just as likely that nothing will happen at all in the near future and the original orientation will regain its strength.

One of the fundamental questions scientists have struggled with over the years is the size, shape and destiny of the universe. The prevailing theory is that the universe came into being about 13.7 billion years ago in what has been whimsically called "The Big Bang." It has been expanding (some people use the term "inflating") ever since. Gravity - the force that pulls all forms of matter toward each other - is working against the expansion. For a long time scientists debated over whether there was enough matter in the universe given its size (what we call the density) to bring the expansion to a halt and eventually reverse it. If there isn't, gravity will just slow down the expansion but never stop it. If the universe came back together it would end in a "Big Crunch." If it continued with a slow expansion it would just sort of slowly die out as all energy was expended and evenly distributed through out all of space.

The scientists were blown away when recent observations showed that the universe is unlikely to either be pulled back together or just slowed down. The universe's expansion actually appears to be accelerating, for some unknown reason. Scientists have speculated that is due to an unknown force we can't detect which they have dubbed "dark energy." If this is the case, if the universe is accelerated enough it may end when it is actually ripped apart at the atomic level in some distance future.

The shape of the universe is related to its density because higher density means more gravity. If the density is beyond a certain critical value, space, as seen in four dimensions, will be rolled up into the shape of a ball. If the density is just at the critical value, it will be as if the surface of the ball had been flattened out into a sheet. If the density falls below that critical point, it will be as if the sheet had been bent down on two sides and up on the other two forming a "saddle" shape.

The shape of the universe, in turn, has an impact on theories about how large it is. For example, the observable universe (that is the part we can see) is about 92-94 billion light-years across. If the universe were a closed sphere, however, it could actually be quite a bit smaller than this because light traveling in a "straight line" would eventually follow the curve of the sphere and come back to its starting point. This means that if you used a telescope to look at a distance galaxy, you might be actually be looking at your own galaxy from the other side. It might seem that it would be easy to look at a distant part of space and see if the galaxies there matched up with any galaxies in opposite direction, but an experiment like this is extremely difficult to do. In reality the great distances involved mean that we are seeing the galaxies at different times in their history, so they may not look the same or be in the same position.

Recent data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) NASA launched in 2001 suggests that the shape of the universe - at least the observable universe - is nearly "flat" with a minimum size of around 78 billion light years. However it is more likely that it is quite larger and may indeed be infinite. For comparison the diameter of the orbit of Neptune, our outer most planet, is a little more than one thousandth of a light year wide.

Faster than the Speed of Light? - I read somewhere that they found a star that's traveling faster than the speed of light (because of its red shift.) Is this true? If it is, then it contradicts' Einstein's theory. - Rowell

Actually there are whole galaxies (collections of billions of stars) moving away from us faster than the speed of light. As amazing as it sounds, this does not really contradict Einstein's theories.

Let's start at the beginning. If you stand along a road and listen to a car zoom by you will hear the pitch of the sound it makes suddenly drop as it passes you. This is because the pitch of the sound is based on how many sound waves per second reach your ear. When the car is traveling toward you, the waves come by you faster than normal because the speed of the car is added to their normal speed. The sound becomes lower when the car passes by because then the speed of the car moving away increases the time it takes each wave to pass you by. This is called the Doppler Effect.

The Doppler Effect works with sound, radio (you may have heard of Doppler radar) and light waves. As a lighted object moves away from you the light is pushed to a lower frequency (toward the red end of the spectrum therefore scientists say it is "red shifted"). Using this red shift is one important way of measuring how fast an object is moving away from us in space. The famed astronomer, Edwin Hubble, also noticed that, in astronomical terms, the speed an object moving away from us will also tell us how distant the object is from us. Why? Because apparently the universe is undergoing an expansion and had been for the last 13.7 billion years starting with the "Big Bang." The best way to imagine this expansion is to picture a balloon with two marks drawn on it. As the balloon inflates the marks are pushed farther apart.

Now replace those marks with galaxies and the balloon with the universe. As the universe expands it carries the galaxies father apart. In fact, if the galaxies are far enough separated, they will move apart at a speed faster than the speed of light. This can be confirmed by looking and seeing how much a galaxy's light has been "red shifted."

Einstein's probation on faster-than-light travel isn't broken; however, because the galaxies were not accelerated to those speeds like a rocket ship, they are simply being carried along by the inflation of the universe. In fact, if you were sitting in that distant galaxy it would seem to you like you weren't moving at all (Our galaxy would seem to be the one speeding away).

Many galaxies are in this position relative to ours. In fact, any galaxy father away than a distance of 4,200 mega parsecs would be moving away from us at the speed of light or faster. Eventually, over billions of years, as these galaxies get far enough away they will first appear to freeze, then fade, as the light from them can no longer out run the movement of their galaxy away from us.

Can Light Slow Down? - I heard that light never stops or slows down. The beam from your flashlight only seems to dim in the distance because the light waves are spreading out so you can't see them as well. If that is true, couldn't you "fill up" a sealed room with light. If the light waves just keep bouncing around the room and you keep adding more from a bulb, wouldn't the room just get brighter and brighter or where would the light go? - Wick W.

In a vacuum, like out in space, light always travels at approximately 186,000 miles a second. However, if light travels through some other medium it can slow down. You can see this with a lens, a prism or a glass of water. When light hits a denser medium at an angle, part of it slows down sooner than the rest. This causes the light to change direction. This property, called refraction, allows a lens to focus light to a point. Because different wavelengths also travel at slightly different speeds in a medium like glass, a prism can be used to change the angle of each color differently allowing normal white light to be split up into is component colors. If you put a straw in a glass filled with drinking water it will look as if the straw is bent because as the light passes into the water it slows down and bends making the straw look out of position.

In addition to just slowing it down, scientists have even managed to stop light completely in recent experiments where they channeled light through special materials. They hope to harness this capability to make ultra-fast quantum computers.

While a beam of light will get faint in the distance because the light is spreading out, it also loses strength because it is being absorbed and reflected by dust, water vapor and other materials floating in the air. In fact, the only reason you can see a light beam in the air is because part of it is reflected off of material floating in the air back to you. In a perfect vacuum light is invisible.

Putting a flashlight in a sealed "clean" room empty of air and dust would remove that problem, but the walls of the room would still absorb much of the light as the beam bounced against them. You could replace the walls with mirrors so that the light would be reflected and bounced around the room, but no mirror is perfect and a little light would still be absorbed with each reflection so the room would never "fill" with light.

Reversed Gravity - I was wondering if you could help me to track down a hill I remember reading about as a young boy. In the article it mentioned that you could roll a vehicle up the hill without any mechanical assistance. - Ian W.

There are a number of these locations throughout the world going under names like "Gravity Hill," "Mystery Hill," "Confusion Hill," "Magnetic Hill," "Spook Hill," etc.. Some are just locations along the road. Others have become commercialized. Basically they all work the same way: They are natural optical illusions. The horizon in these places is obscured, or partly obscured so that it can't provide a reference to your eyes about what is level. The objects in the area the might tell you want is straight up or down (like trees) are slightly off-kilter giving you a false impression.

While your inner-ears gives you some clues to what is level, they are not very exacting and can be fooled if what your eyes see convinces you otherwise. Because you can't really tell what level is, the hill appears to be going up hill, when it is really going down, so your car looks like it is rolling up, while it is actually moving downhill.

Some of these have gotten reputations as places where there is a gravity anomaly or some paranormal energy, but in truth they are just really cool natural illusions. For more information and a list of locations check out this webpage: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/roll-uphill.html

For more Q&A check the archive!

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