The
Magic Number
|
Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion
years before this ocean rolled.
|
Herman Melville
|
Science is telling us weird and wonderful
things about an astronaut traveling close to light velocity through
deep space and his twin brother at home. The sibling he leaves behind
ages much faster, and “much” means millions of years. After only 12
years of traveling at the speed of light our astronaut would be leaving
the Milky Way, after 15 years arrive at the Andromeda Galaxy. Here on
Earth, however, time has moved on for some 1.6 million years. By then
his brother, civilization and the human race have disappeared from the
face of the Earth. After 18 years the journey reaches the thousands of
Galaxies in the Virgo super-cluster, and after 26 years the end of the
observed Universe, 14 billion light-years away. Meanwhile our
solar-system has reached the end of its lifespan.
I am not pretending to fully understand
all
of this, but so far I am
giving you textbook.
The
“twin-paradox” is effected by a combination of relativistic time
dilatation and the Lorentz-FitzGerald contraction of space. Among all
the gobbledygook in Star Treck,
“warp speed” is actually not in violation of physical laws. In 1994,
the Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre proposed a method of stretching
space in a wave which would cause the fabric of space ahead of a
spacecraft to contract while expanding the space behind. We know this
is happening. In the Earth’s upper regions highly energetic particles
from deep space constantly collide with atoms of the atmosphere. The
collisions create subatomic particles, so called “muons,” that continue
traveling downwards. Muons have a measured mean lifetime and not many,
if any, should be capable of reaching the planet’s surface and instead
decay after only a few hundred meters of traveling. Yet the intensity
of this (harmless) muon bombardment on the surface is far too high, and
not just in mountainous altitudes. Muons travel up to fifty miles. The
only possible explanation is a relativistic effect. Although the mean
lifetime of the muon at rest is a matter of microseconds, this
allocated span of time stretches when the particle moves at near the
speed of light (Arnold Wolfendale Cosmic Rays, 1963). Not too near, however! Surprisingly an observer at the
receiving end of an incoming particle doesn't feel any increase of
impacting forces in his environment – traveling at the speed of light
should
increase the mass of the traveling object considerably. Therefore the
muon’s travel distance is also physically contracted, allowing the
particle to travel below a velocity that would critically increase
its mass.
What the textbooks forget to
mention, however, is that, no matter how far the siblings drift apart
and
regardless of the relativistic shenanigans of traveling through deep
space, neither of them can escape
the magic number. This number is "59." Actually it is 2,482,478,336,
that is: 59 years
worth of heartbeats. Then Granny Nature’s warranty is up.
In the past
this often correlated with death – I did an extensive survey – and even
now it draws an invisible line on our hospital charts. Confident
recovery from the knocks and
blows of living turns to the anxious fragility of exposed age. We learn
to be careful. These days, of course, we live much longer, yet somehow
our body knows we are not supposed to. Moreover, the magic number is
drawing a line in the sand not only for us. A mouse in the wild lives
somewhere between 12 and 18 months, while the number of her heartbeats
– get this – averages that of ours. It seems a universal boundary – all
mammals approximate the same average total of heartbeats, the
difference lies in the frequency.
© - 1/29/2009 - by
michael sympson, 600 words, all rights reserved
