• Question: if you could change the universe in any way what would you do? (any physics laws can be changed, its up to you)

    Asked by moing4 to Joel, Kristian, Tim, Venus, Zachary on 12 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Joel Goldstein

      Joel Goldstein answered on 12 Nov 2013:

      I would get rid of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that disorder always increases. Changing this would mean not only that my office would never need tidying up, but also that broken objects could spontaneously repair themselves and we would have free, unlimited energy!
      (Warning: changing the laws of physics can have unintended consequences – don’t try this at home).

    • Photo: Kristian Harder

      Kristian Harder answered on 12 Nov 2013:

      As much as I sympathize with Joel’s ideas for getting help with tidying desks,
      my request would be something different. Could we eliminate special relativity, which is limiting us to travel below the speed of light? I’d rather travel to the stars with an untidy desk than be stuck on a well-organized planet. 🙂
      But then again, *maybe* what I am asking for doesn’t even need a change to the laws of physics. The system as we understand it now does leave a few loopholes, errr, wormholes. If they really exist, they could make short-cuts between different places in the universe. Or someone recently pointed out that it would help the traveling if you would warp space to make your destination closer to you, essentially. None of that sounds very practical, though. 🙂

    • Photo: Zachary Williamson

      Zachary Williamson answered on 12 Nov 2013:

      Damn, I was going to get rid of special relativity too! That hard cap on the speed of light isn’t a big deal now, but in 1000 years who knows. Having to spend hundreds of thousands of years to travel between galaxies is going to be irksome.

      With that said, my second choice would be slightly changing the Earth’s atmosphere so that wasps spontaneously combust. I hate wasps.

    • Photo: Tim Hollowood

      Tim Hollowood answered on 12 Nov 2013:

      I like Joel’s answer: the 2nd law is all about entropy and someone famously said that no one understands entropy and so it would make teaching physics easier if we got rid of it!

      I would like to change the laws so we could make black holes in the lab. Then we could experiment and see whether Steven Hawking was right….because he said that black holes are not black at all. So this would require some tinkering with Newton’s gravitional constant, the speed of light and Planck’s constant. So actually a major fundamental constant over haul really.

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