Teleportation? Invisibility?? Time Travel???

Teleportation and forcefields possible within decades, says Professor Michio Kaku

[The Abdal (people of the step) and other Awliya have achieved these things hundreds of years ago!!]

By Matthew Moore

Teleportation and forcefields could become scientific realities within decades, and time travel will also be possible in the future, according to one of the world’s leading physicists.

Professor Michio Kaku of City University in New York has studied a range of scientific “impossibilities” and concluded that most will almost certainly be achieved as our knowledge expands.

Information appearing on telegraph.co.uk is the copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited and must not be reproduced in any medium without licence. For the full copyright statement see Copyright Applying the rule that unless something breaks a law of physics “then it’s not only possible, it is sure to be built someday”, Prof Kaku has established a hierarchy of “impossibilities”, separating those phenomena that are sure to remain science fiction from those which are likely to become reality at some point in the future.
Teleportation, telepathy, forcefields and invisibility are Class 1 impossibilities, meaning they are likely to be realisable within a few decades or at most a century.Class II impossibilities may take centuries or millennia to perfect, while Class III impossibilities are truly impossible.

Class 1

Teleportation is likely to be achieved through “quantum entanglement”, a property that allows connections to be formed - and information transmitted - between particles many miles apart.
Applying the process to larger objects like people is just a scientific “engineering problem”, that is likely to be solved in time, Prof Kaku writes in his new book Physics of the Impossible.
Similarly, telepathy will be made possible by improved MRI machines that can effectively read minds, and electrodes that can then pass the information into the brains of other humans.

Invisibility will probably be achieved using a recently-built “metamaterial” capable of bending light rays, he argues. Alien life will most likely be discovered within decades as our ability to analyse the universe improves.

Class II

Time travel is a Class II impossibility because, while it need not break the laws of physics, science still has major knowledge gaps to cross to make it a reality, Prof Kaku believes.
“What makes them [Class II impossibilities] so difficult is that they generally require vast amounts of energy, and their underlying physics is not totally understood,” he writes in this week’s New Scientist magazine.
The research of Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein and the physicist Kip Thorne has shown that time travel is theoretically possible, but no-one has yet found a way to produce the energy necessary to keep a “wormhole” open.
“This technology is only achievable for a civilisation significantly more advanced than ours,” Prof Kaku writes.
Parallel universes and travelling faster than the speed of light are also Class II impossibilities, he argues.

Class III
The only two science fiction phenomena which Prof Kaku believes are truly impossible - Class III impossibilities - are perpetual motion machines and telling the future (precognition), both of which break the fundamental laws of modern physics.
“In considering what the future may hold, then, we should keep an open mind to Class 1 and Class 2 impossibilities,” Prof Kaku writes.
“What is unthinkable today might not be forbidden in a few decades or centuries.”

Source

True Cost of War in Iraq/Afghanistan

I remember one of my teachers saying (two years into the Iraq war) maybe this is a means by which Allah bankrupts an arrogant superpower…

Link for article - The true cost of war

Extracts -

Some time in 2005, Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, who also served as an economic adviser under Clinton, noted that the official Congressional Budget Office estimate for the cost of the war so far was of the order of $500bn. The figure was so low, they didn’t believe it, and decided to investigate. The paper they wrote together, and published in January 2006, revised the figure sharply upwards, to between $1 and $2 trillion. Even that, Stiglitz says now, was deliberately conservative: “We didn’t want to sound outlandish.”

And the borrowed trillions have to come from somewhere. Because “the saving rate [in America] is zero,” says Stiglitz, “that means that you have to finance [the war] by borrowing abroad. So China is financing America’s war.” The US is now operating at such a deficit, in fact, that it doesn’t have the money to bail out its own banks. “When Merrill Lynch and Citibank had a problem, it was sovereign funds from abroad that bailed them out. And we had to give up a lot of shares of our ownership. So the largest shareowners in Citibank now are in the Middle East. It should be called the MidEast bank, not the Citibank.” This creates a precedent of dependence, “and whether we become dependent on Middle East oil money, or Chinese reserves - it’s that dependency that people ought to worry about. That is a big change. The amount of borrowing in the last eight years, on top of the borrowing that began with Reagan - that has all changed the US’s economic position in the world.”

In figures
$16bn
The amount the US spends on the monthly running costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - on top of regular defence spending
$138
The amount paid by every US household every month towards the current operating costs of the war
$19.3bn
The amount Halliburton has received in single-source contracts for work in Iraq
$25bn
The annual cost to the US of the rising price of oil, itself a consequence of the war
$3 trillion
A conservative estimate of the true cost - to America alone - of Bush’s Iraq adventure. The rest of the world, including Britain, will shoulder about the same amount again
$5bn
Cost of 10 days’ fighting in Iraq
$1 trillion
The interest America will have paid by 2017 on the money borrowed to finance the war
3%
The average drop in income of 13 African countries - a direct result of the rise in oil prices. This drop has more than offset the recent increase in foreign aid to Africa

Women spend nearly 3 years..

.. of their lives getting ready to leave the house.  Men spend 3 months waiting for their wives and girlfriends while out shopping.

Daily Mail 25th November 2007 

Ancient Bogs

The Harappan civilisation in what is now Pakistan and North West India, had flushing toilets in houses linked with drains in 2500BC.

Spiked Online 30th October 2007

No Way!

According to official figures, Iran has between 15,000 and 20,000 transsexuals.  It performs more sex change operations than any other country, bar Thailand.  Ayatollah Khomeini passed a fatwa authorising such operations.

The Guardian 26th September 2007. 

Alcoholics Anonymous & Ouija Board

Bill Willson the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous used the Ouija Board to contact spirits.  His wife said that he would get messages directly without even using the board.

For a while, his participation in A.A was deeply affected by his involvement with the Ouija board. Wilson claimed that he received the twelve step method directly from a spirit without the board and wrote it down.

Pass It On, New York A. A., 1984.

Pants Sagging

The fashion of wearing pants with their waistband around the hips (or lower) originally began in U.S State Prisons.  Some inmates were provided with pants few sizes too large coupled with a no belt regulation (otherwise could be used for suicide or as a weapon) lead to a style of wearing pants which exposed most of their butt!

The style was adopted by some Hip Hop artists and now it is a fad with more mainstream pop culture kids.

2% of the electricity…

… used by a light bulb is converted into light, the rest into heat.

[New Internationalist]

Etymology of ‘Mafia’

The word “mafia” is taken from the old Sicilian adjective mafiusu, which has its roots in the Arabic mahyas, meaning “aggressive boasting, bragging” or marfud meaning “rejected”.

Wikipedia: Mafia