THAT'S BULLSHIT!!! Ricky "RICO" Style and "Stretch" (Joe Kwiatkowski, are 2 veteran musicians and entertainers whose collective careers span almost 70 years. This unique combination of worls traveler and wearysome citizen has spawned the essential talk show, "THATS BULLSHIT" with Ricky & Stretch. Join them each Wednesday at 7:00 p.m. as the unload on their favorite targets of vent and rant. AND DON'T GET IN THEIR WAY.

THE INEXPLICABLE TRUTHS OF TIME TRAVEL

In the movies, time travelers typically step inside a machine and—poof—disappear. They then reappear instantaneously among cowboys, knights or dinosaurs. What these films show is basically time teleportation.

Scientists don’t think this conception is likely in the real world, but they also don’t relegate time travel to the crackpot realm. In fact, the laws of physics might allow chronological hopping, but the devil is in the details.

Time traveling to the near future is easy: you’re doing it right now at a rate of one second per second, and physicists say that rate can change. According to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, time’s flow depends on how fast you’re moving. The quicker you travel, the slower seconds pass. And according to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, gravity also affects clocks: the more forceful the gravity nearby, the slower time goes.

“Near massive bodies—near the surface of neutron stars or even at the surface of the Earth, although it’s a tiny effect—time runs slower than it does far away,” says Dave Goldberg, a cosmologist at Drexel University.

If a person were to hang out near the edge of a black hole, where gravity is prodigious, Goldberg says, only a few hours might pass for them while 1,000 years went by for someone on Earth. If the person who was near the black hole returned to this planet, they would have effectively traveled to the future. “That is a real effect,” he says. “That is completely uncontroversial.”

Going backward in time gets thorny, though (thornier than getting ripped to shreds inside a black hole). Scientists have come up with a few ways it might be possible, and they have been aware of time travel paradoxes in general relativity for decades. Fabio Costa, a physicist at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics, notes that an early solution with time travel began with a scenario written in the 1920s. That idea involved massive long cylinder that spun fast in the manner of straw rolled between your palms and that twisted spacetime along with it. The understanding that this object could act as a time machine allowing one to travel to the past only happened in the 1970s, a few decades after scientists had discovered a phenomenon called “closed timelike curves.”

“A closed timelike curve describes the trajectory of a hypothetical observer that, while always traveling forward in time from their own perspective, at some point finds themselves at the same place and time where they started, creating a loop,” Costa says. “This is possible in a region of spacetime that, warped by gravity, loops into itself.”

“Einstein read [about closed timelike curves] and was very disturbed by this idea,” he adds. The phenomenon nevertheless spurred later research.

Science began to take time travel seriously in the 1980s. In 1990, for instance, Russian physicist Igor Novikov and American physicist Kip Thorne collaborated on a research paper about closed time-like curves. “They started to study not only how one could try to build a time machine but also how it would work,” Costa says.

Just as importantly, though, they investigated the problems with time travel. What if, for instance, you tossed a billiard ball into a time machine, and it traveled to the past and then collided with its past self in a way that meant its present self could never enter the time machine? “That looks like a paradox,” Costa says.

Since the 1990s, he says, there’s been on-and-off interest in the topic yet no big breakthrough. The field isn’t very active today, in part because every proposed model of a time machine has problems. “It has some attractive features, possibly some potential, but then when one starts to sort of unravel the details, there ends up being some kind of a roadblock,” says Gaurav Khanna of the University of Rhode Island.

For instance, most time travel models require negative mass—and hence negative energy because, as Albert Einstein revealed when he discovered E = mc2, mass and energy are one and the same. In theory, at least, just as an electric charge can be positive or negative, so can mass—though no one’s ever found an example of negative mass. Why does time travel depend on such exotic matter? In many cases, it is needed to hold open a wormhole—a tunnel in spacetime predicted by general relativity that connects one point in the cosmos to another.

Disinformation Specialists at Their Very Best

Social Media: Vessels of Misinformation Social Media — A Vessel of Untruths

The entire globe is facing information wars of an unprecedented nature. Social media is the transporter of misinformation and disinformation. Big Tech has been under fire for not implementing enough measures to uphold the democratic process and increase transparency. These platforms are the primary sources of (fake)news across the globe, and even with efficient fact-checkers, they cannot filter out the untruths, which travel further and faster than facts.

Summary of Perils Human beings are inherently complacent and callous about affairs that do not personally disrupt their lives. With over 2.77 million users, social media is one such universal disrupter. Digital platforms are the most convenient mode of communication to keep in touch with loved ones, entertainment news, and engaging with like-minded people and brands. However, with the advent of social media, society has been introduced to numerous afflictions like cyberbullying, teen depression, hate speech, false information surrounding democratic processes, the coordination of terrorist groups, and many more. There have been documented lynchings and deaths in many parts of India due to false news spread via social media. These attacks have been aimed at religious minorities in an effort to establish an authoritarian Hindu Nationalist government in India. In a more recent news discovery, these same Hindu Nationalists have been found to be spreading their right-wing agenda through the Indian American diaspora to influence the 2020 US Presidential election. The 2016 US Presidential election has already been tainted due to propaganda spread by external parties on social media. Our sovereignty seems to have been compromised and the 2020 US Presidential election has been described as a billion-dollar disinformation war.

The Coronavirus pandemic suffered at the hand of misinformation spread via social media as well. Our leaders failed us, media outlets failed us, and misinformation on social media platforms became the nail in the coffin. Some examples of misinformation were bogus treatments and cures, conspiracy theories about the origins of the virus, and inaccurate information on testing facilities.

What Next? Sinan Aral, author of “The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health — and How We Must Adapt.” aptly draws attention to move past the discussion of whether “Social Media is Good or Bad”. He encourages us to deliberate over how we must adapt and consciously nudge ourselves to be more reflective, leading with values that make us a flourishing society. The ad-based revenue model to capture audience attention, which is a precursor to persuasion, must be re-engineered. It is the 21st century and social media platforms are still allowing heinous and vile content to be published under the garb of “freedom of speech”. The people must take action and ensure these gigantic corporations running information across platforms are regulated and that they align themselves with principles and ethics that hold people accountable for malicious and irresponsible acts. Corporate corruption must cease to exist in the government. Integrity is an unknown characteristic in many global leaders today, who are willing to lie, cheat, and deceive to benefit their agenda and themselves. Therefore, people must gain awareness, protect themselves and their loved ones from these vicious establishments.

Preserve our Empathy The air of racial tension around the world is burdensome. Empathy heals divides. Empathy’s most avid promoters have strongly felt its absence. The current global climate rewards the pursuit of self-serving goals. That is exactly what the big technology companies, pharmaceuticals, and corporations are doing. The world needs more than just lip-service from these organizations. I urge all of us to be more cognizant of the struggles of people different from us and hold institutions accountable for unjust activities. Parents, educators, teachers must instill future generations with a strong sense of empathy. With the current trend, we are not far from a catastrophic crisis that transcends borders and races. Digital applications do make our life more colorful, but we must be very cautious about the hype surrounding social media platforms.