Depends on how far you want to stretch the “barring the limitations of materials and energy” bit, but there are several working theories of gravity drives and things similar to ‘warp drive’ out there. They just have massive energy consumption requirements it would require materials so dense that they approach carrying around a black hole with you. And they would go very, very fast, but not actually faster than light.
In the original story, NASA finds a glowing diamond-like structure on the Moon. For various reasons, Kubrick decided to go with something else. They edited the storyboards and put a black rectangle over the diamond. The rectangle was a symbolic TBA. One day they were looking at the boards and realized that the monolith would actually look very cool.
Years later, after thousands of speculations, a fan approaches Arthur C. Clarke and tells Clarke he’s unravelled the mystery. The ratio of the rectangle is 1 : 4 : 9; those are the squares of the first three numbers. Clarke liked it so much he used it himself.
Dick Tracy’s communicator watch actually seems pretty shitty by today’s standards. His didn’t have a high def LCD screen in it.
Star Trek’s PADD also seems obsolete by real world standards. Those were just e-readers. A tablet is an entire computer, and a smartphone is an even smaller, pocket size computer. There are even phones and devices that connect to phones that do tricorder like scanning of vital signs, the atmosphere, even analyzing the elements that make up an object through spectrographic analysis. Meaning we have the ability to combine the ship computer, a PADD and a tricorder into one device.
Well, the Tricorder had very advanced scanning capabilities. We can’t diagnose and cure cancer with a handheld device yet, but I did get some viral and bacterial tests done in a manner of moments by some desktop lab equipment the other week, so we’re definitely getting there.
One of my favorite scenes is where Seven is handing Naomi a stack of PADDs: “Read this one, then this one, then all these…” Naomi internal: “Bitch, this coulda been an email…”
Real life quantum physicist here. When you say you want the uncertainty principle to be bigger, what you are really saying is you want Planck’s constant to be a bigger number. This has much bigger consequences than you might expect, because if nothing else about the universe changes (for example Coulomb’s constant) then the energy levels of atomic transitions all get out of whack, you break chemistry and chemical bonding, and there is no such thing as a basketball because there are no such thing as rubber molecules.
A good way of exposing this idea to people is showing them the step by step of how to get the particle in the box energy equation and then generalizing it for 3d.
It becomes really obvious the issues that happen when you have degenerate states.
With even a small increase in uncertainty in electron position, electricity would start to behave differently. Everything electronic, which depends on electron flow through very tiny conductors, would become unreliable as the electron flow would be unpredictable. Even basic light bulbs probably wouldn’t work.
Chemistry is the exchange of electrons between atoms. All molecular bonds happen through the exchange of electrons from one atom to another… so an increase in uncertainty would result in the bonds breaking down. Molecules would break apart, every material you think of as solid would disintegrate into its base atoms.
So, your rolling ball would cease to be a cohesive ball, and the surface it is rolling on would also cease to be.
My (flawed) understanding is the innermost rings of the accretion disk spin around the event horizon at nearly the speed of light, and it is friction (that is material collisions) that raise temperatures so high. So when a bunch of mass (say, a rogue asteroid) falls towards a black hole, it gets broken down and spaghettified by tidal forces and then combines into the accretion disk. As it moves towards the center, the friction creates a lot of light and heat which we can detect, and have called a quasar (a quasi-stellar object).
So it sure seems to fit all the parameters that make fusion likely. I can’t say if we’ve ever detected fusion within a quasar event.
Ever seen a cloud form out of clear air, or burn away to nothing?
The thing is, all the water that makes a cloud visible is still in the air even when you can’t see it—it’s a combination of temperature and pressure changes that cause invisible water vapor to condense into visible water droplets. So you could be looking at a clear sky on a warm day that actually holds a greater mass of water than a sky full of clouds on a cold day.
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