Gone Today, Here Tomorrow

Scientists fiddle around with cool shit.

From "National Geographic":

"Time Cloak" Created; Can Make Events Disappear
Experiment is first to make a hole in time, expert says.

Brian Handwerk for National Geographic News Published January 4, 2012

Einstein's theories of relativity suggest that gravity can cause time to slow down. Now scientists have demonstrated a way to stop time altogether—or at least, to give the appearance of time stopping by bending light to create a hole in time.

The new research builds on recent demonstrations of "invisibility cloaks" that can make objects seem to disappear by bending waves of visible light.

The idea is that, if light moves around an object instead of striking it, that light doesn't get scattered and reflected back to an observer, making the object essentially invisible.

Now Cornell University scientists have used a similar concept to create a hole in time, albeit a very short one: The effect lasts around 40 trillionths of a second. ...

Making Time Stand Still

To conduct their time-stopping experiment, described this week in the journal Nature, [study co-author and Cornell physicist Alex] Gaeta and colleagues aimed a laser beam at a probe and passed the beam through a device called a time lens.

While a conventional optical lens bends a beam of light in space, the time lens modifies the light's temporal—not spatial—distribution.

"It's a way of being able to really control the properties of a light beam in the time domain, and shape and distort and do funny things like this to light in the time domain," Gaeta said.

Study co-author Moti Fridman, also of Cornell University's School of Applied and Engineering Physics, devised a method in which he crossed the laser beam aimed at the probe with a strong "pulse" laser inside specialized fiber optic glass.

"This changed the frequency and wavelength of the beam so it moved at a different velocity, and this is why a [time] gap was created," he explained.

A second pulse laser on the other side of the time hole reversed the changes, restoring the beam to its original properties.

In the experiment, an event that happened inside the time hole wasn't detected by the probe.
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As insanely cool as this all is (and it is) the scientists conducting the research seem strangely unaware that others have been working along parallel lines for years.

In fact just recently a well-funded outfit called "The GOP" made a unit of time known in temporal legerdemain circles term as "Every fucking thing before January 20, 2009" completely disappear without a single "time lens", "flux capacitor" or any other of your fancy-schmancy "science".

Instead they used money. Lots and lots and lots of money. Enough money to bend spacetime, the memories of millions of Americans and will of thousands of media executives.

Of course, there were a few, terrifying side-effects...