The Plants' Internet: The Wood Wide Web

English: Fungus. Large fungal growth on a tree on 199525. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Who could have thought!

Hidden under your feet is an information superhighway that allows plants to communicate and help each other out. It’s made of fungi ........ That tree in your garden is probably hooked up to a bush several metres away, thanks to mycelia. ..... They aren't just sitting there quietly growing. By linking to the fungal network they can help out their neighbours by sharing nutrients and information – or sabotage unwelcome plants by spreading toxic chemicals through the network. This "wood wide web", it turns out, even has its own version of cybercrime. ..... Simply plugging in to mycelial networks makes plants more resistant to disease. ..... mycorrhizae also connect plants that may be widely separated. ..... similarities between mycelia and ARPANET, the US Department of Defense's early version of the internet. ..... James Cameron's 2009 blockbuster Avatar. On the forest moon where the movie takes place, all the organisms are connected. They can communicate and collectively manage resources, thanks to "some kind of electrochemical communication between the roots of trees". ..... large trees help out small, younger ones using the fungal internet. .... when plants are attached by harmful fungi, they release chemical signals into the mycelia that warn their neighbours. ..... broad beans also use fungal networks to pick up on impending threats – in this case, hungry aphids. ...... plants' fungal connections mean they are never truly alone, and that malevolent neighbours can harm them. ...... some plants steal from each other using the internet. There are plants that don't have chlorophyll ..... plant cybercrime can be much more sinister than a bit of petty theft. ...... spotted knapweed, slender wild oat and soft brome can all change the fungal make-up of soils. According to Morris, this might allow them to better target rival species with toxic chemicals, by favouring the growth of fungi to which they can both connect. ...... The wood wide web

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Time Travel

Interstellar

Time travel is easier than you think

The crux of all of the methods is that space and time are actually one big thing called space-time, meaning you can manipulate your position in time by changing how you move through space. The speed you are traveling and your distance from the earth both affect how fast you travel through time: If you stand up, for example, your feet age 10 femtoseconds less than your head. And then there are wormholes and infinitely large spinning cylinders.

Stephen Hawking: Space and Time Warps

today's science fiction, is often tomorrow's science fact. .... For more than two thousand years, the axioms of Euclidean geometry, were considered to be self evident. As those of you that were forced to learn Euclidean geometry at school may remember, one of the consequences of these axioms is, that the angles of a triangle, add up to a hundred and 80 degrees. ........ in the last century, people began to realize that other forms of geometry were possible, in which the angles of a triangle, need not add up to a hundred and 80 degrees. ...... so one could imagine that the three dimensional space in which we live, was the surface of a sphere, in another dimension that we don't see. ..... one can not deduce the geometry of the world from first principles, as the ancient Greeks thought. Instead, one has to measure the space we live in, and find out its geometry by experiment. ..... although a way to describe curved spaces, was developed by the German, George Friedrich Riemann, in 1854, it remained just a piece of mathematics for sixty years. It could describe curved spaces that existed in the abstract, but there seemed no reason why the physical space we lived in, should be curved. ...... not only of curved space, but of curved or warped time as well. ...... the time and position at which one thought an event occurred, depended on how one was moving. This meant that time and space, were inextricably bound up with each other. The times that different observers would assign to events would agree if the observers were not moving relative to each other. But they would disagree more, the faster their relative speed. So one can ask, how fast does one need to go, in order that the time for one observer, should go backwards relative to the time of another observer. ........ If one couldn't go faster than light, the round trip to the nearest star, would take at least eight years, and to the center of the galaxy, at least eighty thousand years. If the space ship went very near the speed of light, it might seem to the people on board, that the trip to the galactic center had taken only a few years. But that wouldn't be much consolation, if everyone you had known was dead and forgotten thousands of years ago, when you got back. That wouldn't be much good for space Westerns. .......... We have experimental evidence, that space and time are warped. ..... can space and time be warped enough, to meet the demands from science fiction, for things like hyper space drives, wormholes, or time travel. ....... A particularly interesting one contains two cosmic strings, moving past each other at a speed very near to, but slightly less than, the speed of light. Cosmic strings are a remarkable idea of theoretical physics, which science fiction writers don't really seem to have caught on to. As their name suggests, they are like string, in that they have length, but a tiny cross section. Actually, they are more like rubber bands, because they are under enormous tension, something like a hundred billion billion billion tons. A cosmic string attached to the Sun would accelerate it naught to sixty, in a thirtieth of a second. ........ Cosmic strings may sound far-fetched, and pure science fiction, but there are good scientific reasons to believed they could have formed in the very early universe, shortly after the Big Bang. Because they are under such great tension, one might have expected them to accelerate to almost the speed of light. ...... Since General Relativity can permit time travel, does it allow it in our universe? And if not, why not. ......... Such wormholes have been seriously suggested, as being within the capabilities of a future civilization. But if you can travel from one side of the galaxy, to the other, in a week or two, you could go back through another wormhole, and arrive back before you set out. You could even manage to travel back in time with a single wormhole, if its two ends were moving relative to each other. ...... One can show that to create a wormhole, one needs to warp space-time in the opposite way, to that in which normal matter warps it. Ordinary matter curves space-time back on itself, like the surface of the Earth. ......... What one would need, would be matter with negative mass, and negative energy density, to make space-time warp in the way required. ...... Quantum Theory is more relaxed, and allows you to have an overdraft on one or two accounts. If only the banks were as accommodating. In other words, Quantum Theory allows the energy density to be negative in some places, provided it is positive in others. ........ The reason Quantum Theory can allow the energy density to be negative, is that it is based on the Uncertainty Principle. ..... The more accurately the position of a particle is defined, the greater is the uncertainty in its speed, and vice versa. The uncertainty principle also applies to fields, like the electro-magnetic field, or the gravitational field. It implies that these fields can't be exactly zeroed, even in what we think of as empty space. ...... the fields would have to have a certain minimum amount of fluctuations. One can interpret these so called vacuum fluctuations, as pairs of particles and anti particles, that suddenly appear together, move apart, and then come back together again, and annihilate each other. .......... virtual particles actually exist, and produce real effects. ..... experimental evidence from the bending of light, that space-time is curved, and confirmation from the Casimir effect, that we can warp it in the negative direction. So it might seem possible, that as we advance in science and technology, we might be able to construct a wormhole, or warp space and time in some other way, so as to be able to travel into our past. ........ A possible way to reconcile time travel, with the fact that we don't seem to have had any visitors from the future, would be to say that it can occur only in the future. ........ But because we can warp space-time only in the future, we wouldn't be able to travel back to the present time, or earlier. ...... according to Quantum Theory, the universe doesn't have just a unique single history. ........ the laws of physics conspire to prevent time travel, on a macroscopic scale. ...... According to string theory, which is our best hope of uniting General Relativity and Quantum Theory, into a Theory of Everything, space-time ought to have ten dimensions, not just the four that we experience. The idea is that six of these ten dimensions are curled up into a space so small, that we don't notice them. On the other hand, the remaining four directions are fairly flat, and are what we call space-time. If this picture is correct, it might be possible to arrange that the four flat directions got mixed up with the six highly curved or warped directions. What this would give rise to, we don't yet know. But it opens exciting possibilities.

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