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Psychic Computer That Can Read People's Minds Developed

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Category: Science & Technology
Hits: 117

Submitted by Bill

 2009 11 03

By Charles Smith | ibtimes.co.uk


Criminals beware - a team of international scientists have developed a "psychic computer" which reportedly can read people's minds and reproduce images of what they are seeing or even remembering by scanning their brain activity.

According to The Sunday Times, the scientists, in a major breakthrough, have been able to "decode" and convert brain signals or activity into crude moving images on a computer screen.

During the research, the scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology to scan the brains of two volunteers as they watched videos.

Subsequently, the computer, which was specially developed for the research, was used to search for links between configuration of shapes, colours and movements in the videos, and patterns of activity in the patients' visual cortex.

It was then fed more than 200 days' worth of YouTube Internet clips and asked to predict which areas of the brain the clips would stimulate if people were watching them.

Finally, the computer was used to monitor the brains of the two volunteers as they watched a new film and asked to reproduce correctly what they were seeing based on their neural activity alone.

Although the results were crude, the computer was able to correctly reproduce the rough shape of a man in a white shirt but not his face (the volunteers were watching a video footage of comic actor Steve Martin in a white shirt) and the vague image of a city skyline (the volunteers were watching an image of a city skyline with a plane flying past) minus the flying plane.

According to the scientists, the computer could easily interpret brain patterns if the subject was looking at a static image or a person or a human face but presently it is too confusing for the computer to "decode" brain patterns if the subject is looking at a fast moving object.

According to the scientists, one day the computer could be used to study people's dreams or thoughts or behaviours or even be used to help solve crimes by scanning the brain of witnesses.

"At the moment when you see something and want to describe it to someone you have to use words or draw it and it doesn't work very well," said Prof. Jack Gallant of the University of California, Berkeley.

"You could use this technology to transmit the image to someone. It might be useful for artists or to allow you to recover an eye witness' memory of a crime," he said.

However, it could also herald a new Big Brother era, similar to that envisaged in the Tom Cruise-starring Hollywood film Minority Report where police in the future read minds and make arrests based on 'thought crimes.'

No wonder, Gallant warned that their scientific breakthrough could have "serious ethical and privacy implications."

"We believe that no one should be subjected to any form of brain-reading involuntarily, covertly, or without informed consent," Gallant said.

Agrees Russell Foster, a neuroscientist at Oxford University.

"It's absolutely critical for scientists to inform the public about what we are doing so they can engage in the debate about how this knowledge should be used," Foster said.

"It's the age-old problem: knowledge is power and it can be used for both good and evil," he said.

However, Gallant's research is not the first of its kind. Earlier, scientists at University College London have conducted separate tests that detect, with an accuracy of about 50 percent, memories recalled by patients.

In America, security agencies are researching the use of brain scanners for interrogating prisoners while US defence contractor Lockheed Martin is reported to have studied the possibility of scanning brains at a distance without knowledge of the subjects in sensitive locations such as airports.

Source: ibtimes.co.uk

 

 

 

What is a Wormhole

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Category: Science & Technology
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quantum1A wormhole is a hypothetical "tube" in space connecting widely separated positions in the universe. -Eric Weisstein's World of Astronomy
Wormhole solutions to Einstein's general relativity field equation exist and were known already in 1916. All wormholes require exotic material (material with negative energy density) in order to hold them open. However, in 1993, M. Visser showed that quantum wormholes, once formed, are stable.

 

It is known that (Lorentzian) wormholes are not excluded within the framework of general relativity, but the physical plausibility of these solutions is uncertain. It is also unknown whether a theory of quantum gravity, merging general relativity with quantum mechanics, would still allow them.

 

Most known solutions of general relativity which allow for traversable wormholes require the existence of exotic matter, a theoretical substance which has negative energy density. However, it has not been mathematically proven that this is an absolute requirement for traversable wormholes, nor has it been established that exotic matter cannot exist.

 

whsimIn March 2005, Amos Ori envisioned a wormhole which allows time travel, does not require any exotic matter and satisfies the weak, dominant, and strong energy conditions. The stability of this solution is uncertain, so it is unclear whether infinite precision would be required for it to form in a way that allows time travel and also whether quantum effects would uphold chronology protection in this case, as analyses using semiclassical gravity have suggested they might do in the case of traversable wormholes.

 

Definition The basic notion of an intra-universe wormhole is that it is a compact region of spacetime whose boundary is topologically trivial but whose interior is not simply connected. Formalizing this idea leads to definitions such as the following, taken from Matt Visser's Lorentzian Wormholes: If a Lorentzian spacetime contains a compact region Ω, and if the topology of Ω is of the form Ω ~ R x Σ, where Σ is a three-manifold of nontrivial topology, whose boundary has topology of the form dΣ ~ S2, and if, furthermore, the hypersurfaces Σ are all spacelike, then the region Ω contains a quasipermanent intra-universe wormhole. Characterizing inter-universe wormholes is more difficult. For example, one can imagine a 'baby' universe connected to its 'parent' by a narrow 'umbilicus'. One might like to regard the umbilicus as the throat of a wormhole, but the spacetime is simply connected.

Wormhole types Intra-universe wormholes connect one location of a universe to another location of the same universe (in the same present time or unpresent). A wormhole should be able to connect distant locations in the universe by creating a shortcut through spacetime, allowing travel between them that is faster than it would take light to make the journey through normal space. See the image above. Inter-universe wormholes connect one universe with another. This gives rise to the speculation that such wormholes could be used to travel from one parallel universe to another. A wormhole which connects (usually closed) universes is often called a Schwarzschild wormhole. Another application of a wormhole might be time travel. In that case, it is a shortcut from one point in space and time to another. In string theory, a wormhole has been envisioned to connect two D-branes, where the mouths are attached to the branes and are connected by a flux tube. Finally, wormholes are believed to be a part of spacetime foam. There are two main types of wormholes: Lorentzian wormholes and Euclidean wormholes. Lorentzian wormholes are mainly studied in general relativity and semiclassical gravity, while Euclidean wormholes are studied in particle physics.

eyeofgodTraversable wormholes are a special kind of Lorentzian wormholes which would allow a human to travel from one side of the wormhole to the other. Serguei Krasnikov suggested the term spacetime shortcut as a more general term for (traversable) wormholes and propulsion systems like the Alcubierre drive and the Krasnikov tube to indicate hyperfast interstellar travel. Theoretical basis It is known that (Lorentzian) wormholes are not excluded within the framework of general relativity, but the physical plausibility of these solutions is uncertain.

Most known solutions of general relativity which allow for traversable wormholes require the existence of exotic matter, a theoretical substance which has negative energy density. However, it has not been mathematically proven that this is an absolute requirement for traversable wormholes, nor has it been established that exotic matter cannot exist.

In March 2005, Amos Ori envisioned a wormhole which allows time travel, does not require any exotic matter and satisfies the weak, dominant, and strong energy conditions  The stability of this solution is uncertain, so it is unclear whether infinite precision would be required for it to form in a way that allows time travel and also whether quantum effects would uphold chronology protection in this case, as analyses using semiclassical gravity have suggested they might do in the case of traversable wormholes.

Schwarzschild wormholes Lorentzian wormholes known as Schwarzschild wormholes or Einstein-Rosen bridges are bridges between areas of space that can be modeled as vacuum solutions to the Einstein field equations by sticking a model of a black hole and a model of a white hole together. This solution was discovered by Albert Einstein and his colleague Nathan Rosen, who first published the result in 1935. However, in 1962 John A. Wheeler and Robert W. Fuller published a paper showing that this type of wormhole is unstable, and that it will pinch off instantly as soon as it forms, preventing even light from making it through. Before the stability problems of Schwarzschild wormholes were apparent, it was proposed that quasars were white holes forming the ends of wormholes of this type. While Schwarzschild wormholes are not traversable, their existence inspired Kip Thorne to imagine traversable wormholes created by holding the 'throat' of a Schwarzschild wormhole open with exotic matter (material that has negative mass/energy).

Traversable wormholes Lorentzian traversable wormholes would allow travel from one part of the universe to another part of that same universe very quickly or would allow travel from one universe to another. The possibility of traversable wormholes in general relativity was first demonstrated by Kip Thorne and his graduate student Mike Morris in a 1988 paper; for this reason, the type of traversable wormhole they proposed, held open by a spherical shell of exotic matter, is referred to as a Morris-Thorne wormhole. Later, other types of traversable wormholes were discovered as allowable solutions to the equations of general relativity, including a variety analyzed in a 1989 paper by Matt Visser, in which a path through the wormhole can be made in which the traversing path does not pass through a region of exotic matter. A type held open by negative mass cosmic strings was put forth by Visser in collaboration with Cramer et al., in which it was proposed that such wormholes could have been naturally created in the early universe. Wormholes connect two points in spacetime, which means that they would in principle allow travel in time as well as in space.

In a 1988 paper, Morris, Thorne and Yurtsever worked out explicitly how to convert a wormhole traversing space into one traversing time. Wormholes and faster-than-light travel Special relativity only applies locally. Wormholes allow superluminal (faster-than-light) travel by ensuring that the speed of light is not exceeded locally at any time. While traveling through a wormhole, subluminal (slower-than-light) speeds are used. If two points are connected by a wormhole, the time taken to traverse it would be less than the time it would take a light beam to make the journey if it took a path through the space outside the wormhole. However, a light beam traveling through the wormhole would always beat the traveler. As an analogy, running around to the opposite side of a mountain at maximum speed may take longer than walking through a tunnel crossing it. You can walk slowly while reaching your destination more quickly because the length of your path is shorter.

Wormholes and time travel
A wormhole could allow time travel. This could be accomplished by accelerating one end of the wormhole to a high velocity relative to the other, and then sometime later bringing it back; relativistic time dilation would result in the accelerated wormhole mouth aging less than the stationary one as seen by an external observer, similar to what is seen in the twin paradox.

However, time connects differently through the wormhole than outside it, so that synchronized clocks at each mouth will remain synchronized to someone traveling through the wormhole itself, no matter how the mouths move around. This means that anything which entered the accelerated wormhole mouth would exit the stationary one at a point in time prior to its entry. For example, if clocks at both mouths both showed the date as 2000 before one mouth was accelerated, and after being taken on a trip at relativistic velocities the accelerated mouth was brought back to the same region as the stationary mouth with the accelerated mouth's clock reading 2005 while the stationary mouth's clock read 2010, then a traveler who entered the accelerated mouth at this moment would exit the stationary mouth when its clock also read 2005, in the same region but now five years in the past. Such a configuration of wormholes would allow for a particle's world line to form a closed loop in spacetime, known as a closed timelike curve. It is thought that it may not be possible to convert a wormhole into a time machine in this manner: some analyses using the semiclassical approach to incorporating quantum effects into general relativity indicate that a feedback loop of virtual particles would circulate through the wormhole with ever-increasing intensity, destroying it before any information could be passed through it, in keeping with the chronology protection conjecture. This has been called into question by the suggestion that radiation would disperse after traveling through the wormhole, therefore preventing infinite accumulation. The debate on this matter is described by Kip S. Thorne in the book Black Holes and Time Warps.

There is also the Roman ring, which is a configuration of more than one wormhole. This ring seems to allow a closed time loop with stable wormholes when analyzed using semiclassical gravity, although without a full theory of quantum gravity it is uncertain whether the semiclassical approach is reliable in this case.
 
 
 
 
 

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