My colleagues and I are studying something called augmented reality (a field of computer research dealing with the combination of real-world and virtual reality)," said Christopher Dede, professor in learning technologies at Harvard University, "Alien Contact," for example, is an exercise developed for middle-school students who use hand-held devices that can determine their location.

These "thought experiments" were pages of calculations signed and submitted to the prestigious journal Annalen der Physik by a virtual unknown.