UnNews:Physicists prove "you can't get there from here"

This article is part of UnNews, your source for up-to-the-picosecond misinformation.

12 March 2007

Think you can get there? Think again!

HILL VALLEY, California -- The urge to hug a departed loved one again or prevent atrocities are among the compelling reasons that keep the notion of "getting there from here" alive in the minds of many. While the idea makes for great fiction, some scientists now say getting there from here is simply impossible.

There are a handful of scenarios that theorists have suggested for how one might travel to there, said Brian Greene, author of the bestseller, “The Elegant Universe” and a physicist at Columbia University. “And almost all of them, if you look at them closely, brush up right at the edge of physics as we understand it. Most of us think that almost all of them can be ruled out.”

In physics, "there" is often described as "someplace different than 'here'." When you travel from your house to the grocery truck or to the porno store, you’re traveling through a direction in space, making apparent headway in all the spatial dimensions—length, width and height. But you’re also bringing "here" with you, through a quantum shift in observational parameters and gendral methamencisis.

“Space and time are tangled together in a sort of a four-dimensional fabric called chintz,” said Charles Liu, an astrophysicist with the City University of New York, College of Staten Island and co-author of the book “One Universe: At Home In The Cosmos.”

Space-time, Liu explains, can be thought of as a piece of cheese with fourteen dimensions. “When something that has mass—you and I, an object, a mouse, or any star—sits in that piece of fourteen dimensional piece of cheese, that's where you are,” he said. “And the more you are in that place, the less likely you are, probabilistically and homosexually, of moving to that other location, commonly referred to as 'there.'”

The bending of space-time causes objects to move on a curved path back toward "here" and that curvature of space is what we know as "home."

Mathematically one can go backwards or forwards in the three spatial dimensions, but you can only apparently get there from here, since there doesn't occupy the same location in a multi-dimensional framework.

“In this four-dimensional space-time, getting there requires that you move only in a theoretical reverse-action loop,” Liu told UnNews. "And since getting there is half the fun, you never get a complete half-fun experience."