In its arduous quest for truth, science has been amazingly successful in a wide array of intellectual arenas. Many such propositions generally considered truth in other fields such as psychology, philosophy and, yes, even religion become consummately acceptable only if they are marshaled at the backings of confirmed scientific facts. In consequence of this truth-seeking undertaking of the natural sciences, many strange and bizarre ideas have naturally surfaced but remain wanting for their entrance into the glorious realm of scientific reality. The most popular of which are given below.

 Time Travel

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Being a creature plagued by the agony of our consciousness that everything is fleeting, man has been for eons contemplating of traveling back and forth in time. Time travel in the literary arena was well-taken and well-discussed by the great British scientific visionary H.G. Wells in his ageless Time Machine. Now a classic book on the subject, Time Machine discourses on the possibility of time travel by pointing out that time is just equivalent to the three dimensional space that we walk on everyday. Grounded on this hypothesis, the author went on to boldly infer that time travel is therefore possible with a time machine. This is however a case of complete fiction, thus decidedly wanting scientific and mathematical underpinnings to make the idea cogent and credible. Amazingly, in just less than a decade after the publication of the now classic book, Einstein published his famous Special Theory of Relativity, in which the once mind-boggling and deviating idea of time dilation is introduced. It says that a clock in motion at close percentage to the speed of light appears to tick slower than its stationary counterpart. Generally, time runs slower in any system or frame of reference   moving at ulraspeeds. Time dilation as one of the most radical scientific ideas ever conceived in the 20th century has been experimentally confirmed in a number of ways. Presuming a space traveler has a twin when he left Earth, and after several years of intergalactic cruising when he returned, he will get astonished seeing his twin aged much older than him. This twin paradox, a telling consequence of time dilation, is tantamount to journeying in time back to the past in order to compensate the traveler looking younger than his twin. Further, in 1916, Einstein published his even more famous General Theory of Relativity, in which time and the three dimensional space are placed on the same footing – time being the fourth dimension. Einstein called this single fabric of space and time, space-time. Hinged on this premise, one is well safe to  conclude that time travel – present to future or present to past – is possible, as if the time traveler is just having a casual journey on the three dimensional space that we earthlings naturally do.

 Parallel Universes

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As evidenced by an opulence of records in world literature and mythology, the idea of parallel universes or multiverse has been playing in the minds of man since time immemorial. But it does not gain popularity among natural scientists until the advent of the new science of quantum physics, the modern and novel theory that gives the most consistent descriptions of the subatomic world. One of the foundations of this science is the probability of atomic particles such as electron to be situated elsewhere at the same time, a complete contradiction with what is predicted by the old physics. In addition, this omnipresent behavior of matter appears to run counter to our collective intuition. However, quantum mechanics has been doing considerable success in various physical arenas where classical physics fails. Now faced with this seemingly irrefutable fact, scientists went groping at coming up with the most cogent interpretation of quantum mechanics; one of which is the now widely accepted Copenhagen Interpretation. It states that every subatomic particle is describable by a mathematical representation called wavefunction and is used to calculate the probability for the particle to be found in a particular position. But the very act of measurement disturbs the state of the particle, thus the indeterminacy of the measurement and the probability of the particle being found elsewhere.  Proponents of the Copenhagen Interpretation call it wavefunction collapse. On the other hand, the Many Word Interpretation, known otherwise as MWI rejects the objective idea of the wavefunction collapse, but argues that every possible outcome to every event defines or exists in its own “history” or “world”, not as a result of the wavefunction collapse.  To put it simply, MWI presents the idea of the existence of a very large gap, perhaps infinite number of universes that simultaneously accommodate events happening in the known states. By which some scientists contend that this behavior of subatomic particles holds an exact cosmological parallel, putting the idea of the possible existence of some other universes apart from our own. Probably, in one of those universes, there exists an indistinguishable duplicate of ourselves

Wormhole and Faster Than Light Travel

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A wormhole is a theoretical distortion of space-time in a region of the universe that would link one location or time with another, through a path that is shorter in distance or duration than would otherwise be expected. To simplify matters, space -time can be viewed as a 2D surface which when folded will allow the formation of a wormhole bridge, putting two points in intergalactic space greatly closer; this is in complete analogy to a pair of two points on a piece of paper which can be made many times closer by folding the paper over.  So far, there is no available observational evidence to support it, but wormholes are one of the valid solutions of the General Theory of Relativity, giving strong credence for its existence because the theory has been confirmed to be correct in many quizzical instances such as the bending of light near a massive star and the successful explanation of the anomalous orbit of Mercury. Wormhole appears with two mouths and can be traversable and non-traversable. In the case of the former, a faster than light travel is possible, not that the traveler actually travels faster than light; the Special Theory of Relativity precludes it from happening; it means that it would take light greater time to traverse distances between remote places in intergalactic space without allowing it to pass through the mouths of a wormhole than for an ordinary traveler via intergalactic beeline – wormhole. In addition, those extremely remote galaxies become reachable for the traveler’s normal lifetime becomes sufficient to accomplish a complete back and forth cruise of the wormhole.

Antigalaxy

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In his 1928 relativistic quantum theory of the electron, P.A.M. Dirac, an English physicist, discovered that both positive and negative energy are possible for the total relativistic energy of free electrons, making him infer the existence of the positron or anti – electron, whose physical attributes are completely the opposite of the original particle, thus the positron is seen as an electron of the opposite charge and magnetic moment. It is a positively charged electron. In 1932, Carl D. Anderson discovered positron in his studies of cosmic rays. Henceforth a wide variety of antiparticles were discovered like the antiproton and antineutron, whose assemblage with positron will fashion a fundamental antimatter.  Indeed, in 1995 a group of Italian and German scientists at CERN triumphantly created the antimatter of the hydrogen atom – aptly called antihydrogen. The earth being dominantly made of matter, these antihydrogens were very shortlived, giving each 40 billionths of a second only.  Notwithstanding this extremely ephemeral lifespan of antiparticles, some scientists surmised that antigalaxies could have evolved from a dominant presence of antimatter in some point in the universe far removed from our own. Over the course of progress in cosmology, there was no such antigalaxy or antistar observed.  Cosmologists eventually reached at the idea of matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe, with matter being extremely preponderant, putting antimatter completely at a loss of survival. This asymmetric property of the universe rid us off any worry of getting annihilated in any case our Milky Way galaxy gets closer to its supposed antigalaxy because it will not happen for there is no such antigalaxy in existence; its non- existent is caused by a complete shortage of antimaterials necessary for such antigalaxy to form. In the same line of reasoning, one need not worry getting annihilated due to a possible catastrophic rendezvous with his/her antiself.

Black Hole

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Black hole is a region in spacetime or an invisible massive and high-density body scattered across galaxies. The black hole’s enormously strong gravitation prevents all objects and radiation from escaping that get stumbled into its region of influence called the event horizon. Yes, not even light is spared from getting pulled, thus the name black hole. A high density and very massive body warps spacetime as predicted by Einstein‘s General Theory of Relativity, and the greater is the mass and density of a body the greater is the magnitude of curvature that it causes on the space- time encompassing it.  Since space-time is the arena of all events in the universe, then any moving entity through a curved space-time are constrained to traverse the curvature. On Earth we never observed a bent light beam – except those which are incident on transparent substances – for the spacetime curvature produced by the relatively inferior mass and density of the Earth is considerably insignificant.  However, in the case of a very massive star whose mass is close to three solar masses is massive and becomes high density enough when it shrinked after its death; in this stage, the curvature produced by a dead star becomes huge enough to grab everything that happens to cross the vicinity, making it a black hole. Interestingly, numerous proofs for its existence have been so amazingly provided by observational cosmology; one of which is the discovery of gyrating body due to the gravitational pull of another but invisible body. For another, is the discovery of an electromagnetic radiation being sucked by an invisible abyss. Those observations are all attributed to the hidden presence of a black hole, and as far as modern science is concern, this highly strange body is arguably existent.

 In the current scientific context, these ideas are bizarre and strange, however, in the foreseeable future, they might become casual scientific facts. Moon exploration as enshrined in the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe and novels of the great French scientific visionary Jules Verne was never taken seriously as it was viewed to be a thing of impossibility during which time.  But moon landing has been a household reality for almost half a century now.  So, this poor creature called man, might one day catapult himself at the pedestal where the stars are.