FRANKLIN COUNTY, Ohio -- Local students learned about time travel in a hands-on experiment, and the man who presented the program plans to expand it around Central Ohio.
Marshall Barnes says he has taken his SuperScience for High School Physics program to Bexley High School and Columbus Africentric Early College and plans to expand the program throughout Central Ohio. Barnes is a R&D engineer and technologist.
Four out of 12 Columbus Africentric juniors and five out of 25 Bexley seniors solved a complex experiment involving rocket ships and time travel.
The students realized it was not possible.
They used a model created by Kip Thorne, who was a consultant on the film Contact, which starred Jodie Foster.
The students examined an experiment involving two connected wormholes.
In physics, a wormhole is a hypothetical feature of spacetime that is, fundamentally, a "shortcut" through space and time.
One wormhole was on earth, and one wormhole was in a rocket ship traveling at the speed of light.
The rocket ship is thought to cause time to slow down and affect the wormhole.
The initial and accepted thinking is that the wormhole on the ship is younger and if one entered the wormhole on earth and exited the one on the rocket, one would travel to the past.
The students realized, like Barnes, that it wasn't possible because once outside the rocket, you step into the same external universe, which is not connected to the past.
Barnes said he believes the students retain sensory perceptions that world-renowned scientists have lost. He calls it the Oppenheimer strain, named after J. Robert Oppenheimer. Barnes said he believes many scientists have a psychological bias that high-school students do not.
He said students tend to use a more holistic approach.
Barnes was to announce the expansion of his program at the Columbus Metropolitan Library Auditorium at 7 p.m. Tuesday.
His goal is to inspire students to pursue science education and careers in line with the new White House initiative.
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