blog@Yantrajaal

In a quiet chamber chilled to near-absolute zero, a mirror was coaxed into doing the unthinkable: it reflected a photon before the photon arrived. Not metaphorically -- literally. In an experiment grounded in the Dynamical Casimir Effect, scientists simulated a relativistically moving mirror not through motion, but through ultra-fast changes in an electrical boundary. The result? Real photons appeared from empty space, and some were reflected before being emitted, as if causality itself had stumbled. With a little bit of philosophical extrapolation, this suggests a provocative analogy to time bending. In fact, this is no trick of perception; it is a crack in the temporal wall -- a glimpse of a reality where time may be reordered, and effect may precede cause. From Emptiness to Form Physics has long flirted with paradox, but here, the void births not silence, but light. The Dynamical Casimir Effect suggests that empty space is a seething fabric of quantum fluctuations -- a vacuum that ...

In the evolutionary ascent of man, the idea of time is perhaps the first concept that differentiates him from his animal past. Unlike a human being, an animal, say a cow, has no -- or very rudimentary -- memories of the past, and certainly no hopes and plans for the future. It lives in the perennial present and is motivated only by the current state of its environment and its own current state of hunger, fear, libido or discomfort. Time is also an enigmatic concept that defies definition. Trapped in a peculiar case of circular logic, where “the snake swallows its tail”, we say that “Time is what is measured by clocks and a clock is what measures time”.  We obviously sense the passage of time but this flow is another mystery because if it indeed flows, like the water of a river, then what exactly are the banks of the river that it flows through? Then again, do we sit still while time flows past us? Or do we move along through stagnant time? There have been questions galore but hardl...