There has been some unusual news from the world of physics lately, and though they were certainly not released in any fashion that suggests that they are related, being just a hack from South Dakota, I cannot help but wonder if they are. Indeed, certain features of both stories rang a bell, so to speak. The first story was shared by Mr. V.T., and it has to do with mathematical modeling of a Traversable Acausal Retrograde Domain in Space-time, or TARDIS as they're suggestively calling it:

Physicists Just Came Up With a Mathematical Model For a Viable Time Machine

In order to harness this theoretical property, the physicists propose creating a kind of 'bubble' of space-time geometry, which carries whatever's inside it through space and time along a large circular path. If this bubble can hit speeds greater than the speed of light - something the pair say is mathematically possible - this would allow it to move backwards in time. "It is a box which travels 'forwards' and then 'backwards' in time along a circular path through spacetime," the researchers explain in their paper. ... In other words, the external observer would see two versions of the objects inside the time machine: one version evolving forwards in time, the other backwards.

Ok, simple enough: we all get that, but what's important here is the idea of curvature to create this "bubble," and incredible super-luminous velocities. I'm bold to suggest that what they're really doing is manifest by changing the word "curvature" to the word(s) rotation and spin. This is important for the second article I received this week on the topic. We'll get back to that in a moment.

For the present, however, the problem is the lack of exotic enough materials to create the mass-and-spin/rotation conditions to make all this possible.

That's why this article sent by Mr. T.M. also caught my eye:

A Rare Element From The Edge of The Periodic Table Is Breaking Quantum Mechanics

Notably, both articles appeared on the same website, though separated by seven months. Here the cause of the fuss is that electrons in the actinide elements are not behaving like they should (the very heavy synthetic elements at the bottom of the periodic table; actinides that naturally occur in nature on Earth end at uranium, the rest, neptunium, plutonium, and, for the purposes of this article, berkelium, have to be synthesized):

Among this cast of unknowns, berkelium looks to be even stranger than we realised. New experiments with this incredibly rare synthetic element have shown that its electrons don't behave the way they should, defying quantum mechanics. "It's almost like being in an alternate universe because you're seeing chemistry you simply don't see in everyday elements," says chemist Thomas Albrecht-Schmitt from Florida State University. ... What Albrecht-Schmitt and fellow researchers discovered is that when it comes to berkelium, and other heavy elements, the principles of quantum mechanics can't actually explain what the electrons are doing. Instead, it looks like the electrons are governed by Einstein's theory of relativity, which predicts that as objects with mass move faster, they get heavier. In terms of the electrons in berkelium, the thinking goes that as the electrons begin to move at extremely fast speeds around each atom's highly charged nucleus – at up to significant fractions of the speed of light – this causes them to become heavy, and behave in ways that defy a quantum explanation of events.

(Is Shroedinger's cat both alive and dead at the same "moment" to an observer outside the bubble?)

"When you see this interesting phenomenon, you start asking yourself all these questions like how can you make it stronger or shut it down," says Albrecht-Schmitt. (Emphasis added)

By "making things stronger" what Mr. Albrecht-Schmitt appears to be saying is "speeding up the motion of the electrons" will make the element even heavier(while not changing its chemical composition), which, pace general relatively, will begin to exert a curving effect on local space-time(i.e., what does a molecule of berkelium "look like" in more than four dimensions?). The problem, however, as most physicists know, is that Einstein posited this effect for very large masses in space, like planets and stars, not milligrams of berkelium. The quest to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity is indeed the great quest of contemporary theoretical physics, and has been so for some time, birthing a variety of models to attempt to unify the two. What the article is therefore suggesting is that there appear to be localized minute relativistic effects in a few milligrams of berkelium and that these relativist effects are in turn breaking down normal quantum predictions of behavior. If so, then that will be good news to physicists trying to find models by which to unite the two theories, for it might provide empirical data affording a clue as to how to do so. By suggesting "how can you make it stronger or shut it down," Mr. Albrecht-Schmitt is really saying "we need to find out how to control this."

There's another high octane possibility lurking in all this. Recall that in the first article what was lacking to make the "time bubble" work were the exotic materials capable of bending space-time in a multitude of directions, so to speak. And now the actinides - or at least one of them - appear to be doing something approximating that. Or to put it country simple, we may already possess materials of quasi-exotic nature that approximate what is needed (and in that context, think of the transuranic elements, like ununpentium (115) and so on), and which can be studied for some of these effects. It also recalls our hypothesis that nuclear and thermonuclear detonations interact with the local fabric of space-time to transduce energy into those reactions from that localized lattice structure (shades of the claims of Dr. Ronald Richter made decades ago: they're "time bombs" in a very deep sense). My high octane speculative suspicion is that certain aspects of all these phenomena might have been known for a long time in the covert projects world, and that things are beginning to "leak out" as the public realm of experimental science is noticing similar phenomena that it can no longer ignore. And it all appears to come down to...

...rotation, rotation, rotation.

See you on the flip side...