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Wormhole Generator (Kinda) Patented
Faw writes "Someone has filed a patent for a wormhole generator. It says it is a hyper-light speed antenna, but to me it looks like a wormhole. What do you think?" Here's the abstract: "A method to transmit and receive electromagnetic waves which comprises
generating opposing magnetic fields having a plane of maximum force running
perpendicular to a longitudinal axis of the magnetic field; generating a heat
source along an axis parallel to the longitudinal axis of the magnetic field;
generating an accelerator parallel to and in close proximity to the heat source,
thereby creating an input and output port; and generating a communications
signal into the input and output port, thereby sending the signal at a speed
faster than light. "
-1: Offtopic,
-1: Stupid,
Total = -2.
I'm no physicist (I'm 14, so..) AFAIK (correct me if I'm completely wrong), light/whatever isn't going to start going backwards relative to the light/whatever going ftl. Therefore all the analogies where we are talking about the sender and reciever. The transmission has to start at some point in time...
i.e. Bose Einstein Condensate. and Plants need the sun. The sun gets its energy from "another dimension". The process is fusion, of course, and the dimension is currently best described by Kasusza-Klien-type theories such as M-theory. and Everyone needs a troll.
"those stupid liberal arts courses"
Apart from english, which gives you good writing skills which are useful everywhere, there are a number of liberal arts programs that qualitatively and partially quantitatively measure particular complex systems when impossible with hard science due to complexity. This includes psychology, political science, philosophy, parts of linguistics, major parts of economics, and behavioral sciences.
I'm sure dismissing them had to do with the prejorative given to liberal arts - but I felt I had to say it anyway.
too stupid to live. You may as well give up now and save yourself the trouble.
Actually FTL communication has already been demonstrated...
its called quantum entanglement, it sends information instantneosly(sp?), though as of yet there is no practical application
AFAIK, faster than light travel, be it a spaceship, or a beam of light, is impossible. However with quantum entaglement, nothing moves at all. if you alter the state of one entangled particle, the other one's state changes simultaneously
Well, all the possible explanations were considering 8 mins from here to Sun.. So, how about, I send a message to myself at 2X of c ( speed of light). Now my distance from myself is very small or Zero, considering I move a little bit. So, the message will reach me before I had sent it??? And if I set a trigger to send a message as soon as I receive one, say again at 2xc .. then ????? Maybe I can send a message once the knowledge is public, and patent it before these guys did, and become a TRILLIONAIRE... or here's a thought, buy DOS before Bill got his hands at it, and save the world from the EvilEmpire.. ;o) Any Explainations ????
Now, just start sending people and the likes.
I have the same reaction once I read the summary. However, if you observe our universe as timespace, one can send signal faster than light by creating a short cut between two point in timespace. I think wormhole not necessary allow all signal and matter to pass through. A wormhole for signal only is a wormhole.
Yeah, well considering america has been around a fraction of the time that europe has, It's funny to think that america is still more wealthy/powerful than any europian country. In fact, that holds true just for California alone. Oh wait, isn't Slashdot in America. Hmm, makes you think huh?
Found this quote from Dr. Hawking which seems to support your point on using imaginary numbers to re present real space time.
Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time,
"one must use imaginary time... That is to say, for the purposes of calculation, one must measure
time using imaginary numbers, rather than real ones. This has an interesting effect on spacetime:
The distinction between time and space disappears completely... we may regard our use of Euclidean spacetime as merely a mathematical device (or trick) to calculate answers about real spacetime."
Hey, didn't I see something on the site about this device effecting plant growth?
Now this thing will solve third world hunger...
BECAUSE YOU HAVE SUCH A POS COMPUTER NOONE CARES ABOUT FINDING EXPLOITS FOR IT.
Heres a question for ya: What does FTL do to lenght contraction (instead of thinking of it as time dialation)? Turn a positive length into a negative one? What's "negative length"? Think of FTL + time dialation and you get negative time, which is easily interpreted as "backwards in time", but negative distance is less easily interpreted. Adam
Funny, I just opened a new window with this URL: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2612time. html In Mac OS 7.6.1 and my OS didn't crash, I wonder why??? :)
I just clicked on that link above and it crashed windows '98!! Why is this??
classic goats wear ties
Here's a different take - can you make something so hot that the speed of sound in it is faster than light?
It comes down to which equation breaks down first.
Well, the one thing that blows holes in relativity always seems to boil down to black holes.. now, has anyone found a "speed" for gravity? I don't remember ever reading anything about it, and I suppose it could therefore be theorized that gravitational waves *might* travel faster than the speed of light... so how about oscillating a quantum black hole to communicate faster than light? Anyone know of any research on this? Pete
A method of communicating "faster than light" using a transmitting "module", a receiver "module", and a 6-inch thick steel plate.
Easily demonstratable as "faster" than light...
1) take the transmitter "module" (walkie talkie) and place its antenna against the steel plate.
2) shine a flashlight at the steel plate from the same side as the transmitter.
3) on the opposite side of the plate, listen to the reciever "module" (walkie talkie #2) and look for light, and see which signal you see 1st.
I *guarentee* that you will receive the radio signal before you see light.
Hello. I am a scientist. In one sentence I use watts, in the other fahrenheit.
Why? If an invention does not work--especially ones that violates the laws of physics--what is the harm in granting someone a patent?
A few things about patents: For a patent to be granted the applicant has to comply with three basic requirements. 1-the claimed invention must have some sort of use; 2- it must be new; 3- it must not be obvious in light of the state of the technology at the tiem of the invention. Most rejections (something like 99%)are based on the second and third, regarding the first one the office has the burden to prove beyond any doubt, that the claimed invention has no practical use. A patent is valid for 20 years from the date it is applied for. It is prohibited by law to copy, fabricate(even for personal use, use and of course sell the patented subject matter if you are not the inventor. Patents can only be granted for processes, machine device, product of manufacture of compositionn of matter. Those interested can read the US code of law chapter 35, sections 101, 102 and 103, or the code of federal regulation chapter 37. Rigth now the cited Hyper antenae patent is the center of a heated debate inside the patent office. I.
In regards to your sig.
are you sure raiment shouldn't be 'rainment'?
rainment is clothing
One small math error: a plane is generally defined by the vector that is perpendicular to it, and the point on the vector that it intersects. So for every plane, you have a single vector which describes it in 3 dimensional space.
I can't access the link, but from the abstract, this doesn't sound like a wormhole (working or not) at all. On the other hand, it might be a description of one of the other usual schemes for FTL communication.
Because Microsoft refuses to fix a bug that has been public for a few weeks.
According to relativity, FTL communications would be backwards in time for some frames, but not all of them.
Maybe I'm oversimplifying things a bit here, but if you travel from point a to point b at a certain speed, usually less than the speed of light, you take a certain amount of time to get there. If you travel at the speed of light, you get there faster. If you travel faster than light, you get there a whole lot faster. light =/= reality. What you see is what has happened already, after all. Maybe I'm being silly, but the two are not necessarily connected. Going faster than light means you get to where you're going bloody fast. S'got nothing to do with timetravel. :) (Same goes for messages)
And I'm about to create prior art.
In making his special theory of relativity, Einstein first stated the following two assumptions: The speed of light is constant and will be measured to have the same value by any observer. The laws of physics will be the same for any observer Everything else you have ever heard about relativity is a logical consequence of these two statements. This is the beauty of the theory.
What if it's just the average of the speeds of light that's the same for every observer?
Or is that just another way of expressing quantum uncertainty?
To get past the speed of light, don't you have to be travelling the spped of light at one point? Therefore it would be impossible to get past the speed of light because you can't go the speed of light.
Nope: T'=T(1-V^2/C^2)^(1/2)=T(1-6E8^2/3E8^2)^(1/2)=T(-3) ^(1/2). So it would actually seem like 8i*3^(1/2), whatever that means.
On the other hand, when applied to quantum gravity, the Euclidean (imaginary time) theory might not actually be equivalent to the Lorentzian (real time) theory. Euclidean and Lorentzian quantum gravity don't appear to be equivalent in 2D spacetime. No one knows if this is true in 4D spacetime. And if they're not equivalent, people don't know yet which approach should be considered correct if they both reduce to general relativity in the classical limit. Most researchers would probably be inclined to choose Lorentzian over Euclidean if they are inequivalent unless Lorentzian has inherent flaws (i.e., not just difficulty in doing calculations) that Euclidean doesn't or if experimental evidence supports Euclidean over Lorentzian.
This is answered in the following FAQ entry, "Does light hve mass?"
Dang, how'd you do that? That was one ugly crash. I clicked on the link in linux, but all I got was a 404. How does that work?
There are theorems in relativistic quantum field theory that say you can't "reliably change the state as desired". Of course, quantum theory could be wrong... I wouldn't bet on it though.
If FTL travel is possible, then effects really can precede causes; this is not merely an illusion due to the finite propagation speed of light. This is disucssed in the following FAQ on time travel".
Another way to state your question is: Can you make something so rigid that the speed of sound in that material is greater than the speed of light?
Needless to say that if you answer "Yes" you did not read the first paragraph.
IMHO quantum mechanics' "spooky action at a distance" already violates causality. There's almost certainly something going on that we just don't understand yet. And it ought to be possible to make the high-probability region of a photon (which itself has zero size) arbitrarily small (modulo a Planck length), or just use so many photons that enough fall through.
...us!!! darkharlequin
/.'ed aleady...big surprise. Those wormhole generators, warp drives and proton torpedos generate a lot of interest.
As to your other question, an electromagnetic field has (mass-)energy, so it will curve spacetime. But you'd need a HUGELY strong field to produce the kind of energy densities necesssary for a wormhole.
Funny thing for someone to say, who's using the internet. Wonder who invented it?
Oh, yeah. I guess the americans did! (Arpanet, etc.)
So if you don't like american inventions, get the hell off.
someone said that inorder to traval faster than the speed of light you would have to be at the speed of light at one point is incorrect, its all about the quantium machanics, if an quantized object can traval from point A to point B without ever being in the middle, then wouldn't that apply to speed because the object wouldn't be able to increase in speed, it would just instiantly be at point B, thus if an object were to go faster than the speed of light it would have to be quantized, someone email about this at Synx@aloneinthevoid.com, im only in highschool chem, and as far as i know this is correct, but given its nature of advansed math and chem i really dont know all the facts
Im going to patent sexual self gratification, ill make a fucking killing.
This would mean that Microsoft could never obtain a patent...
http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~strom/strom.html
But we've been in contact with Voyager for over 20 years now!
Check out the current mission status for some most interesting reading...
What I find interesting is that someone can get a patent on a device that claims such an impossible task as sending signals faster than light. But if you have a device claiming over-unity, the patent office will not even consider your invention. Yet several overunity generators have been publically demonstrated... (one of which I've been attempting to build my own verson of..) No matter what the invention is, I think the designer should be required to demonstrate the device, thus weeding out the truely impossible, and/or giving a chance to devices that would normally seem totally impossible. If you can show it works, then you should be given a patent.. If not, then denied...
Say that you have twins, one on earth and another one in a spaceship 10 light years away (named Charles and Manson, respectively). Now Charles gets very concerned for Manson, seeing as how getting 10 light years away always introduces the possibility of popping in and out of existence. As it turns out, though, Manson is really quite safe, stuck at the drive through window at Astro Burgers. However, Charles becomes quite depressed when the local postmaster tells him that it will take 20 years (at least!) to get any response back from Manson, and Manson was always very bad at maintaining his correspondance anyways.
And then, as has happened to many depressed and dejected people all throughout history, the solution to how to obtain FTL communication dawned upon him!
"Dear Lord," Charles prayed, "I would very much like to know how my dear brother Manson is doing at this very moment, 10 light years away."
God, upon recieving this request on his switchboard (after it was re-routed several times to avoid approaching the White House's event horizon...), went and checked upon Manson. Finding him very much the same, God boomed down from the heavens, "Charles, your brother is fine, awaiting an Astro Burger Deluxe as we speak."
Professing much thanks, and swearing to go to church more often from now on, Charles was overjoyed with the news, and was never to know that Manson had a heart attack and popped out of existence due to the Gastrointestinal Lemma, which is a corollary to the Conservation of Stink which says that when a star farts, your wave function may be flushed down the cosmic toilet. The probability for this happening is, of course, the same as the probability of finding the correct change for an Astro Burger between the seats of your Space ship, which of course is exactly what happened to Manson.
This leads us to several irrefutable conclusions:
1) FTL communications is quite possible.
2) It is enabled by the remarkable properties of godons (pronounced go-dons), which we should obviously spend more time studying.
3) Cosmic flatulence seriously challenges our notion of causality and should be investigated further.
Uh, the Relativity FAQ entry you link to explicitly states that quantum tunneling does NOT lead to FTL information transfer (communication), and why the Nimtz experiment does not represent information travel at 4.7c.
Yes, it's possible to create mediums with different speeds of light that are less than the speed of light in vacuum. And it's possible to travel through them at speeds faster than that of light in the medium. (This doesn't lead to time travel unlike travelling FTL in vacuum.) But that doesn't let you travel FTL in vacuum.
Until science is 'finished' I'd be very wary of declaring something impossible, or a violation of the laws of physics.
A century ago we knew nothing of relativity or quantum physics, and yet we now have the arrogance to think that there is nothing major left to discover? They thought that at the end of the 19th century, too.
Of course if someone did discover something new, they would probably be labelled a crank. Hell, for all we know, someone already has.
Time is an imaginary value (in the mathematical sense of the word).
On the other hand, if it's moving faster than light, then it will move more in a space direction than the time direction, and will thus be spacelike.
Also, here is some more information. (The figures don't format properly so "View original Usenet format".)
You're thinking of quantum tunnelling and the Nimtz experiment.
And even if it you managed to construct such a pole that didn't collapse upon itself, it would be so heavy - sorry - massive, that if you pushed on it, the Earth would move more than the pole. In turn, this could throw the Earth out of its orbit, which may then drift ever closer to the burning sun.
There's probably another big budget Hollywood movie in there somewhere, but no instant interplanetary communications.
It doesn't work.
The ansible in Ender's Game ostensibly makes use of quantum entanglement. Orson Scott Card in turn took the term "ansible" from Ursula K. LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness. I don't know how LeGuin's ansible was supposed to work or even if she described the mechanism at all.
This stuff was covered in a recent science magazine, and to test it they sent a voice recording via fiber optic and a voice recording via this new method. The new method hit the destination first.
Quantum entanglement does not permit FTL communication (if "communication" is defined as "transfer of information").
LeGuin invented the term, but I think she used it prior to The Dispossessed.
Mass is related to gravity; greater mass, roughly speaking, curves spacetime to a greater degree.
For the record, I AM a physicist. Photons are vector bosons with a mass of zero. Although they have zero mass, they are affected by gravity due to the fact that gravity bends space-time. Photons will follow the straightest possible path through space-time, which, in the presense of a gravitational field, is a curve.
Just to add to the confusion, although photons are massless, they do possess momentum. "But wait," I hear you cry, "momentum equals mass times velocity, and should therefore equal zero." Ah, but you forget that m*v is only ONE term in the relatavistic version of the equation of momentum...
Better re-read your chemistry text. Ionization energies for any given orbital are never infinite.
No, photons are massless (according to modern definitions). If you're talking about "equivalent mass" (E/c^2), then that doesn't have to be similar to an electron or even small; it can be anything. (Usually not similar to an electron though... the electron mass-energy is around 0.5*10^6 eV, and we usually see photons that are closer to a few eV.)
You can travel at the speed of light if you're massless (like a photon). Relativity can't predict what would happen if you has mass and went at the speed of light, because to do so would contradict the premises of the theory.
"I think there is even a Hawking quote about "We have not seen any visitors from the future, so there is probable no way to go FTL." I am curious why everybody seems to assume that the future has already happened. Is there any real proof of that? If the thought of infinite realities is only a very radical approach to quantum mechanics, why should everybody assume this to be true, when they dont take it for granted otherwize? Isn't it possible that we are actually living at the edge of time, and that the future hasn't happened. If this is so, no time-travellers from the future would be able to visit us, because they simply dont exist. If the future has indeed already happened all along until the destruction of the universe, then we cant possibly have a free will. All our lives would just be moving along a pre-established pattern in timespace. This would also mean that at the moment of the big bang, the universe was already crumbling and being destroyed. So what then, is the point of creating it in the first place? It disturbs me that Hawking and others will rule out the possibility of free will, just to stop us from thinking any more about the possibility of time travel.
Relativity doesn't forbid FTL travel, it forbids starting STL, reaching c, and then exceeding it. But relativity would allow tachyons that always travel FTL. However, those have the usual problems like time travel.
Maybe you can go back in time and stop your (younger) self from reading IT. (The movie wasn't scary, watching IT doesn't matter).
No, the poster is right. A FTL signal will travel backwards in time according to some observers.
FIELD OF INVENTION The present invention relates to a new type of antenna for transmission and reception of RF signals. The present invention can be used to replace conventional antennas. It is believed that this invention can transmit energy at a faster speed and over a greater distance than conventional antennas with the same power. BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION All known radio transmissions use known models of time and space dimensions for sending the RF signal. The present invention has discovered the apparent existence of a new dimension capable of acting as a medium for RE signals. Initial benefits of penetrating this new dimension include sending RF signals faster than the speed of light, extending the effective distance of RF transmitters at the same power radiated, penetrating known RF shielding devices, and accelerating plant growth exposed to the by-product energy of the RF transmissions. The following describes, in simple terms, what the present invention actually does. The present invention takes a transmission of energy, and instead of sending it through normal time and space, it pokes a small hole into another dimension, thus, sending the energy through a place which allows transmission of energy to exceed the speed of light.
What I consider intriguing is.... he says he's using magnetic fields... which do, as a matter of fact, extend at the speed of light at best. So what he is implying is transmitting a signal faster than its carrier.
WooHoo If I get this I can create a Slashdot account that will stick around
I often slow down photons too, such as by placing a pane of glass or a glass of water in their path.
oh yeah i just arrived from 3145 and you cant get decent ping on quake45 with this thing at all
Just for the record ... Prof. Steven Hawkins operates with time having a real and a imaginary dimension (READ: Complex time) in his theories on singularities. By the way a "wormhole" that curves the time/space dimension is in fact a (until Now ??) theoretical possibility, in fact Einstein and Rosen both spoke of the possibel existens of wormholes in the presens of a large sigular mass. "There are more between the heavens and earth than ever dreamed about in our current philosiphy" Sheakspear.
- Store all patent in the US form 1970 onward (this include lots of IBM patent)
- Provide a shopping place for getting patents hardcopies
- Provide marketting oportunities for IBM, last time I saw it the database what some 17Terabyte of data if uncompresses, and 1.6 TB compressed
- Provide humorous oportunities like the one you sent
But despite the IBM part in the domain name, the patents are not all IBM. It's just a nice place to find digitalized copies of the patents.You absolutely do not need a working model. The inventor of the LASER made this mistake and it took 30 years for him to get his royalties.
This is does not make the patent system a joke
(Amazon has that covered.) Go ahead and patent
your 10 ideas. The 17 years clock starts ticking
and if you can't make a working model you just
wasted like 10,000 bucks.
I always wondered...say you have a REALLY rigid pole (please no jokes :P) and it spanned from here to say the Sun, and you yanked on that pole, would the information (the force of the tug) exceed the speed of light or would you have to wait 8 minutes for the opposite end of the pole to move (i think itd be instantanious, for example, spacetime is not bound to 'c') can anyone tell me? :)
While I am no scientist, I majored in Theoretical Physics in college. My understanding is that what you are referring to is the Nilheimer Effect. That is, when an object bound to more 'strict' rules of physics spans into an area with more 'lax' rules of physics, the object in question adopts the more lax rules throughout it's composition.
Hope that helps.
To quote HenrysCat::
"You are under the missguided beleif that mass is related to gravity. Gravity is not a force. An object will travel in a straight line unless effected by a force."
I always thought there were four fundamental forces:
1. Electromagnetic force
2. Strong nuclear force
3. Weak nuclear force
4. GRAVITY
I just thought I'd point this out.
ACK
Umm, not quite. Just because we can observe photons later than the signal does not mean that the signal was never sent. For us to receive the signal it had to be sent in the first place. Your logic, I think, is a bit backwards. *IF* (and that's a big if) we could send a message FTL, then the act of receiving the message would be the observation of the act of sending. And to the second point - the frame of reference for the stationary observer is a bit skewed, but the stationary observer would not see us receding at ~2c. He would see us receding from him in both directions at ~1c, which is not the same thing. In relativistic terms, velocity is not strictly additive.
Could this be used in a practical way to send a signal faster than light, or does some other quantum effect guarantee that won't work?
If it does work, could it be used to send a signal significantly (rather than only fractionally) faster?
'Information that can travel FTL' - as you know the photonspin of some photonpair could be used to transmit information. and can be. austria's scientist dr. zeilinger made up a self-encrpyting data channel, transmitting the keys by docking photonpairs. this has only been realised in lab conditions, but it is possible. and there are many other teams who realised similar.
but the thought of 'travelling FTL' is not permissible. especially when this is to be used against einstein's relativity principle. einstein's principle does _not_ cover these things. and the theories covered within these principals do not apply to these specific docking thing. the information that is 'travelling' between the pair of photons is without mass.
Stop it. You give Throbbing Niggers a bad name.
If you could "amplitude modulate" the intensity of a gravity source (as the transmitting point), and then measure (de-modulate) the strength of that gravitational source's pull at some significant distance away at a receiving point, doesn't the perceived change at the receiving point occur at the same instant in time that the disturbances happened at the transmitting point? i.e. the disturbances in the amplitude of the gravitational pull do not propagate outward at the speed of light, but instead "propagate" instantaneously since they are in fact disturbances in space-time itself. ("propagate" isn't a good descriptive word here since that implies traveling at some velocity, but I can't think of a better term right now).
Yup. My plot is to build up karma, submit a story with a link to a web page that hypnotizes anyone who visits. Then, with all the techies in my control, I will RULE THE WORLD!!!
BwuHAHhahAHAhaHAhAHAH!
But the Web was invented by Tim Burners Lee, A Brit, when he was at CERN. We can go on all day like this, slashdot, america and hot dogs wouldnt be arround if it werent for og knocking out that polar bear in 9338 BC
I wonder...
:)
If you reverse the flow polarity on the input buffers, and redirect power from a nuclear fission reactor into a tachyon stream inversion, will that cause a subspace cascade resulting in the sudden materialization of Natalie Portman in every male's bed?
(and a bowl of petunia's AND a sperm whale in the bed of every "first post"'er)
Probably not, but despite these obvious short-comings: HOT-DOG!
Don't feel bad, I'm a 4th year Physics student and I'm sitting here reading this with a PhD in Physics and it sounds like total crap to us too.
This silly concept of patents for things which are physically impossible shouldn't get too many of us down, its not like thats even the worst thing the government has pissed money and time away on today.
I'd really be interested in seeing any evidence there is that this can work.
I'll go through first, go back in time before the year 2000, and patent this in 1990. I'll also buy stock in every company slashdot hates since that's sure to make me a gazillionaire too.
For those of you not browsing at -1, I would like to reiterate:
I would like to stick my Throbbing Nigger Cock into Natalie Portman's wormhole.
Yeah bitch!
You should not fall in wormholes because if you do, it is hard to get out, especially if its wet and your wearing gumboots and a rainbow overcoat. However, if the wormhole has a trampoline at the bottom, you can jump in and bounce back out again. And Natalie Portman could be at the bottom, so try not to fall in unless your a Star Wars fan, but who actually likes Star Wars?? Especially Chewbacca, who has trouble finding his pee-hole when in a toilet, but Hans is there to help. So the point to this is that if the USS Enterprise went in a wormhole, the crew would have lots of all night partys and orgies because they can never leave the Enterprise again.
If you were able to see the antenna signal, then your receiver would receive the signal before you saw it get there.
Any data modulated on the pole would travel at the speed of sound in the pole. Of course, a perfectly rigid pole is impossible, because the interactions among the atoms in the pole are limited to c. If you push on the atom at the very end, the photon that propagates the electro-magnetic-weak force to the next atom in line in order to move it is then limited to the speed of light.
The rigid pole idea won't work. When you push on the pole, you are getting the molecules at this end to push at their neighbours, who in turn push their neighbours, and so on, and so on. The electron shell of one molecule will interact with the electron shell of the next molecule in much the same way as two magnets with the same poles interact. There is a squooshiness that happens. In other words, it takes time for one molecule to affect the next. In fact, what you wind up with is your push travelling at the speed of sound in that medium, not the speed of light.
always wondered...say you have a REALLY rigid pole (please no jokes :P) and it spanned from here to say the Sun, and you yanked on that pole, would the information (the force of the tug) exceed the speed of light or would you have to wait 8 minutes for the opposite end of the pole to move (i think itd be instantanious, for example, spacetime is not bound to 'c') can anyone tell me? :)
Actually, this is a very common question in introductory special relativity courses. The short answer is no, the information would not exceed the speed of light. The long answer is: There is no such thing as a perfectly rigid pole. Quantum mechanically speaking, there are many particles which make up length of the pole, and these particles are held together by forces, which, when acted upon, take a finite amount of time to transfer the information. In other words, the force applied to the pole would have to propagate down it through a chain reacion in the forces holding its particles together, and it would take time for the end of the pole to start moving. Even in the (improbable) case of a single particle with an eight light-minute length, the information would take a finite time to propagate. The change would have to "ripple" down the wave function of the particle till it reached the other end. (Horrible analogy I know but it gets the point across). It is true that the end of the pole could indeed be moving at or above the speed of light, however it would be impossible to transmit any information this way. To transmit information, something has to change, even in the simplest binary case, the speed or direction has to change. This entails an an acceleration, and hence a force, and hence a finite amount of time to propagate.
(Begin speculation)
I suspect that if one were to search through the papers (both classified and unclassified) of Nicolai Tesla, one might find a proposal for something very similar to what this is trying to patent.
(End speculation)
Tesla's theoretical work in electromagnetic fields was so broad that it has, in the past, discouraged some companies from funding basic research in that area. Tesla's work --> prior art --> difficult to obtain patents --> no financial incentive for the company.
This is Funny, Moderate UP!
Sigh. It's astounding how much junk science gets posted on a site that prides itself on its technical readership. A signal cannot be transmitted faster than the speed of light. Period. There is no basis at this point in time for thinking there is a hole in Relativity, and any patent examiner worth his salt should take one look at the claims made here and chuck it immediately. Some people try and make the claim that it's data or information, not matter being sent, so it can go faster than light. Nope. Data and information cannot be stored or transmitted without energy transfer. So it doesn't matter whether its a bit or a rock that you are trying to send - it CANNOT go faster than light.
The person who filed the patent claims a small hole is poked in another dimension, and the signal is transmitted through the hole. Let me guess...this mysterious other realm or "dimension" is actually Dimension X from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, right? Shredder and Krang receive the transmissions through the technodrome's bigass antenna, and re-transmit them through the subspace warp-field actuator, thereby enabling the signal to travel faster than the (surely envious) entity known as light. Does that about cover it? (if it's actually real, though...l337!)
a meaningful distance could be very small if the things to create it could be tiny as well. Processor speed are will eventually be limited moreso by relativity. That's why processors have to be so small, and why you can't just make a bigger processor with more transistors.
If we send the human to the sun at 2x the speed of light through some kind of tachyeon signal, it will appear to take 4 minutes to us, but from the point of view of the person transported, time will have regressed 4 minutes
If we send the human to the sun at 2x the speed of light, we would see them burst into flames and vaporize some time later.
On a side note, If a teleportation device existed and had multiple receivers, wouldn't that quickly facilitate cloning?
I would like to know how a Hyper-Light-Speed antenna could possibly be mistaken with a wormhole generator apparatus. I assume that the mechanisms used to generate a Wormhole (WordWeb def: Hole made by a burrowing worm.) is quite distinct from that used in the development and construction of the mechanics involved in a Hyper-Light-Speed antenna. I could be wrong, though. ---HCH---
Holy cow, 350 strokes per minute!! Lubrication might be a problem though.
or haha... not lag in EQ... maybe actually be able to zone in a reasonable amount of time :) or wait... maybe be banned for zoning in before I left the first zone...
Oh no, now the clown can generate a wormhole to travel back in time to the days when I used to sleep.
So what you are describing is a kind of asymtotic function where it might be possible for the function to flip if you go faster than speed of light?
That would make for some interesting scifi at least. Coming soon to your local theatre "The other side of the asymtot"!
" (Spock with a goatie = classic) "
I didn't know goats wore ties!
That should be "goatee", BTW.
(troll) Pag! I didnt know you visited slashdot!! Cheers, Turtled Terran (/troll)
a kid, probably in early junior high. Don't post.
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
"Everyone should write the USPTO right now before this thing gets approved and make sure that the system isn't abused once more and ensuring that future generations will have unlimited access to wormhole generating technology. " Patents are only good for 18 years. Do you really think that the public will have wormhole generating EQUIPMENT (read: nonvaporware) in 18 years? True, this shouldn't be passed. But America (and society in general) is ___________(insert opinion there) PhiberKut]AfZ[ www.ziest.com
Elijah Chancey www.elijahsadventure.com nomadic IT consultant, bicycling across america "all that you touch / and all
HELLLLLLLLLLO. 11th post....will post again after i read article
Wacked-Support NT
Nope. Read the posts about special relativity.
Moderate this down to (Score:-1,Troll)
Trollz rool.
Nope. As said before, atoms can't push each other faster than the speed of light (or so Einstein says), so it would take at least eight minutes for the pole to move, then another eight for you to actually see it move.
Moderate this down to (Score:-1,Troll)
Trollz rool.
I think Einstein's theroy of relativity also says something about this. How about T'=T(1-V^2/C^2)^(1/2)? According to this equation, a mathematical impossibility would arise if V > C (velocity > the speed of light) since the expression inside the radical would be negative, and square roots of negatives aren't real numbers. Just a thought.
Moderate this down to (Score:-1,Troll)
Trollz rool.
But how about having complex values for time? Correct me if I'm wronng, but this doesn't make sense.
Moderate this down to (Score:-1,Troll)
Trollz rool.
Actually, the time would be a complex number, according to Einstein's equation that I've mentioned above, T'=T(1-V^2/C^2)^(1/2). Einstein actually hypothesized that the speed of light can't be surpassed, and mathematically, his equation, which has been tested and proven to be accurate, supports this hypothesis.
Moderate this down to (Score:-1,Troll)
Trollz rool.
You're right. The effect is just not so noticeable in the glass situation.
Moderate this down to (Score:-1,Troll)
Trollz rool.
Light travels really fast, but it still takes time. You couldn't get the message before it was sent, but you could get the message before the visual image of it being sent was received. If the transmit rate was twice the speed of light, you wouldn't percieve the difference at close distances, but on a astronomical scale, the time savings would be huge.
accelerating plant growth
This whole thing seemed rather dubious, but this can't be argued. BS does indeed aid plant growth!
On a related topic, I was reading an article about some scientists that had successfully slowed down light. They drop a certain chemical compound to near absolute zero and pass photons through it. They say they can fire off some photons, go for a cup of coffee, come back, and the photons are still moving through the apparatus. Cool!
No, they didn't really think that at the end of the 19th century. There were many unsolved mysteries, such as the structure of atoms, the photoelectric effect, and why Mercury's orbit was odd. These helped drive research into relativity , particle physics and quantum mechanics.
A nice example (and a link to a better explanation) of this effect can be seen here.
>If the signal travels faster than light, wouldn't it get received before it was sent??
:) it takes light 8 minutes to reach the earth, and say u used this and it transmitted at 4c (4 times the speed of light) then you would simply see stuff from the sun in 2 minutes rather than 8
:P) and it spanned from here to say the Sun, and you yanked on that pole, would the information (the force of the tug) exceed the speed of light or would you have to wait 8 minutes for the opposite end of the pole to move (i think itd be instantanious, for example, spacetime is not bound to 'c') can anyone tell me? :)
probably not
what ACTUALLY happens at super-luminous speeds is theoretical though.
I always wondered...say you have a REALLY rigid pole (please no jokes
"There is no spoon"-Neo, The Matrix
"SPOOOOOOOOON!"-The Tick, The Tick
Who says you have to be a rocket scientist to read slashdot?
-----
If Bill Gates had a nickel for every time Windows crashed...
Actually, the only mathematical impossibilty arises when you go exactly the speed of light.
So light travelling at the speed of light routinely breaks this equation? What are the implications of that?
the information that is 'travelling' between the pair of photons is without mass.
If it has no mass, then it couldn't be called matter...then I guess it doesn't matter!
So why bother sending it in the first place?
OrbNobz
- I hate people that are redundant, repetitive, and say the same thing over, and over, and over again!
| David Strom is an experimental particle
| physicist with ties to CERN and University of
| Oregon's physics department.
The inventor: Strom; David *L.* from Aurora, CO
The physicist from UO: David *M.* Strom
I don't think the inventor and your physicist are the same person.
-- Rick
Does that mean I get to do a inter-galatic travel via wormhole some 25 yrears or 50 years - depending when the darn patent expires - from now?
Wow !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
If the phrase "wormy-talkies" is original to you, better get it copyrighted, registered, whatevered right away :)
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
They're probably in the catalog but with the purple stock numbers so that you have to special order them. Of course if actually want the thing to work you might not want to use Radio Shack parts :)
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Then they could have posted that "Stephen King book on the internet" story back when it *was* news. :)
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
This wasn't by any chance filed by the LinuxOne people, was it?
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
I think you're right. Perhaps this was used to transmit the story backwards in time from April 1. The ultimate April fool's joke. :)
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
Right, there is no material that you could use to build such a rod. Also, imagine that you were on the moon and were tracing a line from New York to Los Angeles with a laser pointer. If you swept this beam back and forth fast enough, the spot could move over the Earth's surface at greater than the speed of light. BUT.
Neither people in LA, nor New York could affect the path of that beam as it is controlled from the moon, so they can't send any data.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
IBM's site seems to be down at the moment, but you can use the USPTO's site. Indeed, very frightening.
I'd like to see the math behind these claims. In general, when one thinks one is sending something faster than the speed of light, one has neglected to take into account some factor. All claims that I've seen in the past have crumbled when shown that the distance distortion, for example, when taken into account shows that the signal propigates slower than the speed of light.
Many scientifically literate people I know get
infuriated by "new ageism" and pseudo-sciences
like astrology, parapsychology, etc, etc. Most
of them are concerned, and rightfully so, about
the effect that these fads have on children,
the uneducated, the naive.
How is this mumbo-jumbo different? How many
of you are naive enough to think that this is
anything but pseudo-scientific quackery?
Not many, I hope, but just think of the damage
this causes among the scientifically illiterate
nerd crowd.
Many of you may disagree, but I feel that these
sort of stories, like stories on astrology,
numerology and clairvoyance, simply don't deserve
to be given further publicity.
Granted I'm still a wee 2nd-year physics student, but this sounds a little far-fetched to me. I would be most glad to see it become a reality. I recall hearing one experiment in which allegedly a binary version of Mozart's 40th was sent faster than light and was thoroughly impressed, however I've been unable to find any additional information. Is anyone else actually knowledgable in this area?
EMYL,
An observer at the other end of the machine, will first see some energy appear at his end of the machine, then later see some disappear from the other end. This would violate the law of conservation of energy for the second observer and is thus a no-no.
I agree, except for one minor change: This would appear to violate the law of conservation of energy for the second observer and would appear to thus be a no-no. I'm no expert on relativity, but I do believe that appearances deceive :-)
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana." --Groucho Marx
Aaargh. Preview is what I wanted, of course.
Anyway.
My point is that, what the hell, it doesn't look too tough to build one of these things (if a waste of a few hours / a weekend), so it couldn't hurt to try and see if you get anything besides a halogen lamp in a magnetic field....
Is this really a wormhole as described here? Or is it just, as it says, a way of transmiting a signal faster than light speed?
There comes a time in every man's life when he must say, "No mother! I do not want any more Jell-O!"
Sure, I will get on it right away. Now where is the HOWTO?
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Exactly, he used the device to send himself a message back through time describing how to build the machine which could send the message ;)
Actually, if we teleported someone to the sun on a signal traveling at the speed of light, it would appear to take ~16 minutes. We here on earth would have no knowledge of his arrival until the light from him reaches us, 8 minutes later, 8 minutes travel time, 8 minutes time for light signal to reach us == 16 minutes. at 2c, it would appear to take 12 minutes to get there from our perspective here on earth.
I thought you could only patent things that you could demonstrate... maybe we can have a mass outing to see this puppy... :)
I always wondered...say you have a REALLY rigid pole (please no jokes :P) and it spanned from here to say the Sun,</I>
The movement effect travel along the pole with limited speed. Much lower speed than ligth too - it is the speed of sound in the material used. Really rigid material have a much higher speed of sound than air, but still way below the speed of light.
The pole would actually move when you pulled it, however, you would have to wait 8 minutes to see the end at the sun move, therefore, yes, it would appear to bend, then 8 minutes later, appear to straiten out.
Make that 16 minutes. (At least) 8 minutes for the pull to propagate, and another 8 minutes for you to see it. And the pole wouldn't merely appear to bend - it <I>would</I> bend.
You don't usually see the bending effect in real life, as you don't handle poles that long. But try pushing someone with really low propagation speed such as water, and you'll see a wave.
but perhaps for some of these they should require a working model to be demonstrated for a patent office clerk.
"I want to patent this improved thermonuclear device." "Sure - bring it in for a demonstration, we'll have to see that it works as advertised..."
As far as I know, this has only been in the realms of science fiction. I would like to know if they can get a meaningful distance between the two ends of the 'hole'. A meaningful distance in this instance would have to be extraplanetary, as light does travel pretty damn quick.
The low speed of light is already a problem. Try low-latency communication with something on another continent - it is too slow for some uses, no matter what bandwith you have. Even playing quake around the globe gets too much lag.
Young Lady, In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
Doh! Lousy Gravity! -Homer J Simpson
I'm in college, and that's probally about the most intelligent post i could ever make.
wanna take it for me?
Ha! You should have checked out if you got the first post before you submitted (with all the wrinkles in time, it should have been possible, right?), so you could have gotten 1st instead of 12th!
After all, there's a 620 watt halogen bulb as the heat source. With that much light I'm sure that plant growth nearby is somewhat accelerated due to a billion year old invention known as photosynthesis.
:)
The fact that they included this bit of information is a sure sign that this is a hoax.
Besides the fact that it is impossible of course.
If Slashdot added this to the Slashdot servers [presumming the signal went backwards in time.. there is some chatter suggesting otherwise] then submitions could be sent back in time and Slashdot could accually scoop the news media..
.. once signal is receaved by a time earlyer than destination.. hold signal and transmit on scedual..
:) DSL? Cable? No I have a FTL connection...
:)
"The CNN news link will be [here] 3 weeks from today"
This of course would encurage other news agentcys to read Slashdot even more so they can know when news will break and where to get the first linear report (as in first report with out the use of time travle).
All those government agentcys could also use this to report porn etc BEFORE it gets transmited.
And of course the FBI can use this to catch terrorists before they act [ala '7 Days'].
Mind a "transmit to the past" device needs the folowing...
To be allways on.. (if it is off at any point during the travle back in time the signal will stop at the point where the device was off)
(If the signal arives at it's destination and the device is off then the signal will not be receaved).
Presume a coil.. send signal into coil.. signal comes back 30 min in the past.. then look at signal.. if destination is ferther in past.. send again... of course signal will overshoot
Ok again.. device must be on to receave and retransmit... as well as communicating the message on scedual..
Now... device needs reliable operating system... wops GPF... and now we have signal... and now it's gone...
Could this work? Not likely...
Practical aplications of device... predict downtime. Predict stocks.. Predict criminal activity.
More likely applications...
zero "lag" (the time it takes a signal to reach a destination) in procesors speedding system up...
Faster bandwith...
My application? Lotto numbers... thats all I'm sayin
PS... This is a joke.. I'm not even slightly sereous...
I don't actually exist.
I've had about enough of this FTL==backwards
in time buisness. BTW: sorry if this is a
bit obscure for some, but its already long enough
w/o explanations.
A particle moving "faster than light" moves
along a SPACE-LIKE rather than TIME-LIKE
line in 4-space. We all know what space
like lines are, they are just what we usually
call LINES. Now you can do a geometrical
construction involving arrows alongs space-like
lines which goes zigzaging back through
time, but if someone could tell me what
those lines really mean in terms of MOTION, i'll
buy them a beer.
This is nuts. A) If it can't be built and working now, it's a concept and is unpatentable.
B) If this patent holds water I should patent a thruster that I have a concept of that works on the quantum scale.
C) For all you FTL/Relativity freaks out there. The signal doesn't travel faster than light, it takes a shorter distance from point A to point B which makes it appear to travel faster than light, but simply travels a shorter distance punched through a hole at coordinate A to coordinate B in space. (in a nutshell)
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
I think that one's called "vger", in fact I'm sure of it ;P
Lowmag.net
According to various types of relativity, going faster than the speed of light violates the concept of linear time, so we would be receiving signals before they were sent (looking at it simplisticly, there are other "things" that prevent it from happening); however, I would assume that if this thing works at all, it modifies space-time such that from our perspective it appears to be going faster than light whereas from the pespective of the signal, it is travelling slower than the speed of light (probably close to it though).
Actually the light speed is ~ 300,000 km/s (in empty space), not 186,000 km/s; maybe you're refering to another system? ;-) (Metric, etc.)
Perhaps I'm just behind the times, but when I was a kid, I always learned that to get a patent you had to already have a working model--which doesn't necessarily invalidate some software patents: write some one-click software, get a patent for exaample (and don't respond re: this point please, thats just an example).
But lets say I have some great idea for, oh, e-commerce for example. Can I just patent it, then write the software later (regardless of whether or not we agree with software patents) ??
I thought the USPTO *still* required that the claims in question refer to a device/process which *ALREADY EXISTS* ??
Hell if not I've got 10 ideas right now I'll file patents for. Of course so does everyone else. Which makes patents ridulously pointless.
Did they remove this requirement or just not enforce it? If they've removed it, why hasn't everyone gone hog wild patenting ideas like they do in Japan (IIRC) ?
James
i'm sorry but i just don't buy that.
what you "SEE" is not what is actually happening. just because the other other person sees the energy entering the machine at the time of doesnt mean it's entering the machine -- it means it entered the machine (speed of light) * (distance) b4. ok just so someone doesnt mistakenly refute this, lets say the speed of light is 5 ft/s and this machine makes energy go 200 ft/s. the input is 200 ft from the output. when i put energy in the machine at the input it will get to the other end in one second. the person at the other end doesnt see me put it in until 40 seconds later.
c'mon people this is BASIC physics. think about it for a sec.
don't you remember that Mr. Wizard with the walkie talkies and speed of sound?
An object my appear to be recieved before it was sent but it would not be traveling in time. The object would still take time to travel the distance. Time is not relitive to the speed of light meerly our precption of time is based on the speed of ligt.
My mind hurts now....
The patent should have enough info to build one. Then send yourself the plans two years ago and you can get the patent first.
Remember, you first have to install the magnets from here to Jupiter to create the magnetic fields.
Of course, the photons from the hot surface increasing photosynthesis has absolutely no effect upon the plant growth nor the shrinkage of your wallet.
Someone tell John Crichton, he's comin' home!
...it looks likely that generally a lot of very idiotic stuff gets patented.
There are a LOT of weird patents, some may be valid, like maybe this one:
US04182651
some probably trash... if you've got a few months to kill search through the patent database sometime. Scary stuff in there. Chicken glasses... sheesh.
Actually, it's not a theory, it's Einstein -Podolsky-Rosen, which was recently proved as a law of quantum mechanics with a neat little experiment...
In a nutshell, EPR implies that in an entangled state, certain particles would seem to violate local reality by "agreeing" on their quantum state, with no perceptible particle exchange (which means it's not limited by the speed of light), even when separated by great distances.
The problem is, for now, that we have no way of predetermining quantum states in entangled pairs, meaning we can't yet use it for FTL data transmission. But it is the principle behind quantum teleportation, which is unspeakably cool.
ObKomputerGeek->Relevance: Information stored in quanta has some freaky properties.
THS
---
"Poor girl looks as confused as a blind lesbian in a fish market." - Simon R. Green
This is not a serious patent . Somebody is playing with the language to see what they can put over on the patent department . Look at what they are saying in detail and get into a Freshman year Physics textbook (college) . You will be able to decipher what they are saying from that and see why we can expect to wait for years ( if ever )
before some method of FTL is possible .
There is still no theoretical way that information can travel FTL . Don't talk to me about the "spooky action at a distance " either . The instantaneous effects of that can't be used to transmit usable information without a conventional communications route added to it .
Your Squire
Squireson
It will make it a lot easier to chat with those Mars-orbiting satellites if it works.
Let's see, if I can set this wormhole generator correctly, then Slashdot should get this 15 minutes ago, and I WILL have first post. Yeah, baby. Well, it's time to press submit, then immediately go check it out.
Didn't work. I guess I forgot to allow for /. sluggishness.
Actually I submitted it in February 2002, and it slipped backward through a wormhole to where you first saw it.
Eat Garble and Die
http://boldra.com/garbleboy/
Now i can send messages faster than light while i use my pyramid powered time machine and discover the secrets of the universe via my magnetic mind reading device.. sheesh.
Dreamweaver
"If a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he isn't fit to live" -- MLK, Jr.
In short (IANA physicist, just an engineer) when a photon is split in half, each half communicates instantaneously because it is just one thing (or something like that). Theoretically, if you split the photon into two parts and then seperate the photon, whatever you do to one will show up on the other.
This was ACTUALLY tested about two years ago over in Europe. They seperated the semi-photons by like a mile or 4 miles (can't recall) and they couldn't simultaneously measure the position of one and the velocity of the other (that whole Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle combined with the fact that any measurement interferes with the state of the measured thing). Einstein predicted this but could never prove it (too far ahead of technology); he also hated this idea.
Anyway, I read all this in Popular Science about 2.5 years ago (I don't remember the issue). You can try to find it if you like.
So, NO, this magnetic comm. thing is nothing like the ansible in any way except fast communication. The magnetic thing is hyper-light speed, the ansible is instantaneous.
For the record, I can't even imagine how this magnetic thing could actually do anything except come up with data that looks like info traveled faster than light, but was just doctored data... or something.
IANAL, but I play one on
The Patent Office
Accepts troll patent. What's next?
Natalie Portman?!
So what are you saying?
You have a really long pole and you move it. The other end moves "instantly" and thus you have transmitted information at faster then the speed of light?
No.
Poles are made of atoms. There are attractive forces between these atoms. Poles have lattice structure. The tug has to propigate along and individual atoms do not go faster then light.
--
Fourth law of programming: Anything that can go wrong wi
Any thing that can shorten the 250+ms round trip to geosyncronous satellites would be good... those ping rates in Quake3 are killing me!
'Intellectual Properties' are uncontrollable in the wild. To base an economy on them is just stupid.
From what I read of it, it seems to be an antenna that can transmit data at speeds faster than the speed of light. It seems that it does not transmit conventional matter and consequently cannot send a space ship through it. This brings up interesting solutions to problems with any sort of "intergalactic Internet."
Chris Hagar
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
Second part: Um, cone rotated sideways (ok), FTL travel pointing backwards: eh? you just warped everyting. How can that work?
The point is that when I'm in an accelerated referance frame realitive to you, then my equal time surface in space-time is not the same as your equal time surface.. and some points which happen at the same time to me happen in your past.. so if I have the ability to just jump off to the side to one of those points then I can just jump to your past.
Third part: the world is flat, the universe goes round the earth, etc, etc. Sorry, that's no proof
Well go learn the physics! I was not tring to give a proof. Most slashbots wouldn't understand a proof if it farted on them. Instead, I gave credible sources who believe that they have proved it.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
I think there is something called length dialation. It says the faster you go, the shorter things appear
:)
No, it says that actaully ARE shorter from a non-accelerated frame of referance. I have no idea what long objects look like when accelerated.. that is a harder question.. they probable look pretty wierd.. bent maybe.
I've also heard that the reason we haven't seen any visitors from the future is because we haven't invented a time machine yet. Some(can't remember who) say that you can't bring something back before it existed. I guess that makes sense. So if this worm-hole generater thing actually works for backwards time travel, then start looking for things arriving from the future.
These sort of discussions are (to the best of my understanding) pure speculation. Famous physicists sometimes make comments about ways to circumvent the causality parodoxes involved in FTL and time travel, but these comments are probable intended to make students think about all the options and practce their critical thinking skills.. and not as serious scientific hypothoses. I'm saing it is not impossible that time travel is possible and constrained to logical consistancy, but it would violate Ocams Razor to make such an assumption today. Plus, what loon would want to assume logic and causality are prior to reproducable experence (physics).. you should want to believe that logic and causality are physical effects. The simple answer is "186,000 mps It's not just a good idea, It's the laws!"
And no this "invention" will not work.. the world is full of crackpots.. some go to lectures and ask silly irrelevent questions.. some apply for patents.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Unfortunately I am not well versed on the theories of time travel. But..light speed is not instantaneous. Light, like other energies/radiations take some amount of time to travel *the concept behind the measurement lightyear*.
Again, im not up to date on my sci-fi mumbo jumbo...but if I remember correctly...a worm hole is a fold in space. Your not actually traveling really fast..."there" just happens to be a lot closer to "here" by traveling through such a fold.
Forget me if I'm right, flame me if I'm wrong.
(not logical...but were dealing with people)
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Can I make one from parts at a Radio Shack?
--
Don't lead me into temptation... I can find it myself.
It sounds like scalar waves to me. Search the web for more information, I'm too busy to write a 5 *-rating post ;o)
As I understand it (not to a great degree, admittedly), the answer depends on limits inherent in measurement and observation. It might be helpful to look at it this way:
Say the signal is initiated by me throwing a simple toggle switch, and you stand across the room from me watching for a light to turn on, indicating the receipt of the signal. You see me throw the switch only after the light reflected from my hand on the switch reaches your eyes. Since the signal travels faster than the light, you see the light turn on before you see me throw the switch.
The question of whether limits to observation and measurement are tied intimately to limits to "physical reality" is still an open question, IMHO.
On a more whimsical philosophic note, I rather like the idea that such a device muddies the distinction between "creating a state where x occurs, which then causes y to occur" and "creating a state where x and y occur in tandem". It's that whole "everything is connected" deal that sounds so sappy until you start applying it to energy states and particle decay and such beasties...
This program correction has be completed and tested before the crash in the electronic funds transfer that will happen four hours and 38 minutes from now.
Please install this upgrade.
For payment withdraw funds from the attached bank account # and purchase 10000 Shares of Wireless Wonder stock.
Deposit the certificates in the cornerstone of that new building being constructed at Queen and Royal York.
I'll collect them when I have that crumbling relic demolished tomorrow.
If only you can figure out how to reliably change the state as desired of the particles (create a particle stream) you can have instantaneous communication.
This would be great for interplanetary real time controlled missions. (The process of moving the ship to the destination would guarantee an instantaneous link from the get-go.)
penguinicide... when jumping out a window just won't do.
What I want to know is how rigid could one be produced, taking into account the law of dimishing returns.
penguinicide... when jumping out a window just won't do.
I am not a physicist, but I learned enough to know that photons are not mass-less. Similar, but not equal, to electrons; it is very small.
;)
I also recall from chemistry, that it would take an infinite amount of energy to liberate an electron from its orbital. But yet, something tells me this is commonplace
I can't remember the resolution of the contradiction between light having mass, and yet travelling at C. Perhaps the duality- when you see energy as a particle, it will have mass, but no direction- and vice versa.
NT[1]
:-)
[1] Microsoft conspiracy
void recursion (void)
{
recursion();
}
while(1) printf ("infinite loop");
if (true) printf ("Stupid sig quote");
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
You're forgetting that as you speed up, time slows down. Let's say (woo-hoo) someone invents a teleporter device, and a "human" can be transported over some kind of signal.
Now, if send the human to the sun over this signal at the speed of light - it will appear to take 8 minutes for us, but for the teleported human, it will have appeared to take no time at all.
If we send the human to the sun at 2x the speed of light through some kind of tachyeon signal, it will appear to take 4 minutes to us, but from the point of view of the person transported, time will have regressed 4 minutes. (OR something like that)... from what i remember from high school physics.
hm... throw a wormhole somewhere between the RC-5 jack and the server, and watch those packets fly! Might even make /. readable.
Heck, while I'm at it, I'll forget this road runner crap and go back to my 300 baud modem (with Wormhole Inside (tm) )
lf.o
Is that 2 moderators found this "interesting" rather than "funny." :)
If they're filling up warehouses full of models of inventions why not destroy/return/eat/copulate with(I'm being nice)/whatever the things once they're done reviewing it?
(Or perhaps I'm lacking the mythical clue and you're talking about warehouses full of unreviewed models?)
i kan speel jast ass gud ass u kan.
actually, you aren't moving anything with that laser pointer. you don't move any particle from new york to los angeles - the particles that hit the ground at any point are all different. your laser dot on the face of earth is not a single object that you can claim have moved faster than light, it consists only of multiple collisions between your beam and the ground.
Well, it doesn't really.
If you can make sense of it then you would be a shoo-in for a nobel prize in physics. Hell, they'd probably throw in a literature one too just 'cause.
I'm not saying that there necessarily is a real interpretation of this, but the mathematics don't rule it out.
---CONFLICT!!---
Yeah, essentially. If you graph it that's what you get. The idea is that only at the speed of light does the equation blow up. I think that this is what led to the theory of "tachyons" which were theoretical particles which only travel faster than light. I don't think anyone believes in them any more though. What imaginary time is though I have no interpretation for though as Troller pointed out.
---CONFLICT!!---
Actually, the only mathematical impossibilty arises when you go exactly the speed of light. The expression inside the radical would be zero and it's in the denominator hence infinite. The square roots of negatives are not real numbers, but that doesn't mean that they are fake :-). They're complex which are actually more complete than the reals. Complex numbers arise in reality. Inductors and capacitors have a complex impedance (resistance). Also Feynman's quantum theory of the electromagnetic field, QED, (think Maxwell's equations on crack) only works when you realize that you can't just "throw out" the complex solutions. I think they show up in general relativity too, but I don't know for sure.
;-) They just got a bad rap since they were originally called imaginary.
The complex numbers are your friends
When the Greeks first discovered the irrationals, (hypotenuse of a right triangle with sides length 1) a cult started to hide their existence since they thought society would freak out if they knew there were such "not nice" numbers.
---CONFLICT!!---
Yes I'm now patenting the warp drive:
A device that will be used for interstellar travel at speeds greater than light. (details ignored).
Prior Art: First there was sneakers. Then Henry Ford made the car and the piston engine. Now Rolls Royce has jet engines.
Too bad it costs and avg of US 20K to patent something. I could be rich some day.....
-- Moondog
very interesting though.
Well he does somehow manage to squeeze himself into those leather pants, now doesn't he?
In a Quantum universe causality does not mean a whole lot. If my grandfather invents something and I inherit his plans, and the I go back in time (using a CTC) and give him the information before he invents where did it come from. It is information out of nothing. Many worlds... Many worlds...
I should like to know what sort of plant's growth this would be used to accelerate. I think the inventor has been rolling it in paper tubes and lighting it...
The original Doctor Dark.
______________________(
IIRC, light can do it because photons have zero mass.
It's particles that have non-zero mass where the zero denominator causes trouble, because their mass theoretically approaches infinity as their velocity approaches c.
Physicists, please confirm/correct this!
Granted, it's possible for someone closer to the point of reception (R) than he is to the point of transmission (T) to 'see' the reception before he 'sees' the transmission. And yes, from that observers viewpoint the reception would seem to happen before the transmission, but any signal that observer sent to (T), even if it was sent by the magical FTL device, would arrive at (T) _after_ the original signal was sent. So, nice try, but no time machine.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
The patent claims to make the EM wave travel faster than *A* speed of light, *not* the speed of light in a vaccuum, which is what relativity is based on. From reading the abstract, I think the "device" simply generates a "heat tunnel", contained by opposing magnetic fields, which therefore means that the air (or other medium)in the tunnel is less dense, meaning EM waves can travel faster than the speed of light *in the surrounding medium*.
Saying that it looks more like a worm whole(yes the whole hole) generator is kinda like saying that it looks more like an apple than fruit. Of corce I could be wrong but my understanding of Esp. Relitivity goes to say that there is not much difference between worm holes, FTL and yes time travel. But I am far to lazy to actualy pick up a book and refresh my memory so I think I will just send a incomprehensible, misspelled, most lickly wrong, and slighly off topic post to my favorat pool of (miss)information.
maby some of you guys could enlighten me on the time travil aspect assuming that this thing actualy works it seems to me that an out side observer (i.e. not the message) would see the data get to its destination almost instantly with absolutly 0 signal loss. (Or would the signal get stronger?? t=t0/sqrt(????) how do those equatios go?)
Only if lightspeed were instantaneous, i.e., took zero seconds to arrive from point A to point B (for instance, if point A were our Sun and point B was the Crab Nebulae). To be faster than zero, yes, would require time travel.
However, this is not the case, we know that light takes a certain amount of time to travel, so improving on that time does not necessarily mean going backwards in time.
Also, when you think about what is being proposed, the radio signals are not travelling faster than light, but they are arriving faster than light. The difference is that the worm hole is a shortcut from point A to B, but still has a measurable distance. If you shot a beam of light through the worm hole along with the radio signal, you would see that the radio signal has not actually increased its speed relative to the speed of light.
kl;
I claim...
-generating heat from a heat source...
My God!!! He's managed to generate heat from a heat source!!!
...end sarcasm...WTF!?!? The claim above sounds like something out of the redundancy department of redundancy. :)
-----
"I will be as a fly on the wall... I shall slip amongst them like a great
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
3. The method of claim 1, wherein said magnetic fields are generated by permanent magnets.
Hmmm... magnetic fields from permanent magnets...7. The method of claim 1, wherein said accelerator is linear in polarization.
Okay..is it circular or linear...?8. The method of claim 1, wherein said accelerator is circular in polarization.
9. The method of claim 1, wherein said communications signal is generated by a magnetic injection assembly and a BNC connector.
All I need is a magnetic injection assembly...Ooops, I forgot. And a BNC connector... Can't do without that.10. The method of claim 9, wherein said magnetic injection assembly further comprises a one-quarter wavelength coil antenna.
So is it 3/4 wavelength, or 1/4 wavelength?11. The method of claim 9, wherein said magnetic injection assembly further comprises a three-quarter wavelength coil antenna.
-----
"I will be as a fly on the wall... I shall slip amongst them like a great
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
13. An improved antenna comprising:
Hmm. An antenna with a heat source, magnetic source, an electromagnetic injection point, a signal inserter and an accelerator. It seems they're expanding the definition of the antenna. It's usually just an energy converter(ie. kinetic energy and potential energy of electrons, to magnetic and electric energy radiated as EM waves).-a heat source;
- at least one magnetic field source in close proximity with said heat source;
-an electromagnetic injection point formed in close proximity to said magnetic field source; -at least one accelerator in close proximity with said heat source;and
-an electromagnetic signal inserter placed at said electromagnetic injection point whereby a communication signal may be generated through said signal inserter, thereby sending the signal at a speed faster than light.
-----
"I will be as a fly on the wall... I shall slip amongst them like a great
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Finally! I can make it to work on time!!!
Reality is an Illusion created by sleep depravation
This is more likely to be a serious attempt than a hack.
Due to Slashdot's odd rating method. You probably aren't reading this.
Profit motivates invention.
Patents are open source on a different time scale...
Of course your mass increases as you near the speed of light.
If somthing travels at the speed of light, it is not affected by time.
Light travels at the speed of light....
Therefore light does not travel through time.
Ha! Think about that!
Actually, this goes a long way to explain quantum mechanics.
IANAQM (I am not a quantum mechanic)
:p
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
--
Populus Vult Decipi, Ergo Decipiatur.
Charlie Marshall, Chief Designer, Alkali Media
Just like driving a car:
(D) to go forward
(R) to go backward
It sounds like except for the phrase "faster than light", which is vague, (He didn't say faster than the speed of light, just faster than light), he patented sending an electrical signal through a wire. Let's see:
generating opposing magnetic fields... Well when you send current through a wire, you generate a magnetic field going clockwise around the wire. So the magnetic fields on opposite sides of the wire are opposing. Their maximum force is in a circular direction around the wire, which sounds a lot like "perpendicular to a longitudinal axis of the respective magnetic field".
Generating heat... Ever wonder how a toaster works? Of course it would generate heat along the wire.
Generating accelerator... if you put a magnetic particle close to the wire, it accelerates, simple. The closer to the heat source, the more powerful the acceleration. Electromagnetic injection point isn't even a word, as far as I know.
generating a communication signal... Yeah, I do this everyday when I use the ethernet.
So, I guess this guy can claim a patent on:
A/V equipment, toasters, extension cords, basically anything that uses electricity.
Amazon currently reports it as being out-of-print!
I would like to know if they can get a meaningful distance between the two ends of the 'hole'. A meaningful distance in this instance would have to be extraplanetary, as light does travel pretty damn quick.
But, think about it, you could just use multiple units and band them together into repeaters... Then, even if the distance isn't too great, you can get some improvement.
Now, of course, the time gained by the instantaneous gap would have to be greater than the time that it takes to read the signal, and relay it to the next transmitter, or else this is moot.
There's no reason for them to require that a working model be submitted _and left_ at the patent office, but perhaps for some of these they should require a working model to be demonstrated for a patent office clerk. That might cut down on some of the wackyness.
The answer to that is simple. I could patent things that are likely to be "invented" in my lifetime: - A fusion reactor. - A laser propulsion space craft. - Anything in the future section of popular mechanics. If I'm rich, and have 20k to play with it might be a fun exercise, and if they are vague, and just one of them becomes reality I could reap royalties in the billions. At one time people didn't think you could make money off of domain names.
I think the whole point of Einstain is that the time is not just added, but you have to apply some constant to it, 1/(1-(v/c)) or something. Which means that if it travels very fast, you'll have to wait more time.
Anyway, is there a picture of this? I didn't understand the abstract of the patent (doh!)..
--
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
The "faster than light" part is too vague. I also can send a signal faster than the speed of light would be in a copper wire, using only this simple torch... (What is the RI of copper anyway?)
"... and more and more now there are all kinds of electronic goodies available" -- Pink Floyd 1972
This is how they make money. You get complete quack applications that will never be refuted (or demonstrated), the examiner gets a laugh and the USPTO gets ~15K for the coffers to pay for the patents that require hundreds of hours to be investigated by the examiners.
And then they start selling you platinum engraved plaques declaring your new patent to put on your office (garage, bedroom) wall to impress your friends with...at a steep price I might add.
no sig.
dEdT=h-bar - change in energy times change in time is less than or equal to h-bar (on the order of exp(10, -12)) But this doesn't respond accurately to the previous post concerning appearances being deceiving. While relativity does put an end to familiar concepts like simultaneaity (however that word is spelled), it doesn't let you get away with a violation of conservation of energy that is macroscopic, like several watts gone for seconds or minutes. Heisenburg uncertainty allows for electron volts gone for 10^-15 sec or so. (on the other hand, W-bosons are massive devils. But they only live for something like exp(10, -19) or so.)
IP is just rude.
Is there any torture so subl
Sort of-
if you knew the initial particle state of the universe you could, in theory, divine any other given state of the universe (given enough computing power) which would include conversations, "thoughts" and in fact, everything else.
(All this depends on your personal feelings towards the uncertainty principal and chaos theory)
The universe is simply one long crypographic equation.
Now the linguists will need to create some new tenses. The French have had "actions completed in the past" and "actions started in the past and continuing into the future" (passe compose and plu-perfect as I recall).
Now we can have actions started in the future and completed in the past.
In any other situation the transmission would just be recieved extremely fast. The closest analogy would be a radio station. The signal from the station reaches someone 14 miles away before someone in the back of the radio booth can hear it. this doesn't cause any major problems. (parodox, time travel, the like) Nor would faster than light extra dimensional transmisions.
A blog about stuff.
I don't know how to read these patent documents. The dates at the top are 1993 and 1996, clearly long after the commercial introduction of accujac. But the date at the bottom shows some Swiss publication in 1932 (with a dead hyperlink). Which is the date of this patent?
The Dirac Transmitter got turned into a time machine info transmitter in a later installment of the series. I think Einstein and Feynman would prefer it that way.
The trek fans (myself included) must feel so proud. :)
q
"PROFANITY is the inevitable literary crutch of the inarticulate MOTHER FUCKER." -- some PC user
he does it by reading bugtraq
archives at securityfocus.com
email listserv there for subscription options
What about the ability to slow down the speed of light in different enviroments. I remember hearing something about being able to dramatically slow down the speed of light.
--Justin
Isn't this question just another form of Zenos paradox?
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Now let me get this straight, someone out there has a patent for a means of transfering radio waves faster than light.
As far as I know, this has only been in the realms of science fiction. I would like to know if they can get a meaningful distance between the two ends of the 'hole'. A meaningful distance in this instance would have to be extraplanetary, as light does travel pretty damn quick.
I am dubious. I'm sure that I wouldn't understand the basis of the science, but I'd love to see it work.
~snort~snuffle~root~
This is actually an enlarged shockwave effect; through wood, that would be travelling at about 400 metres/second.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
This is the stuff bad episodes of Star Trek are made of. I cringe when I think of all the stinkers that resulted from transporter accidents. Except for the first one, of course. (Spock with a goatie = classic)
I think there is something called length dialation. It says the faster you go, the shorter things appear.(it's mind boggoling to think about whether or not the actually 'are' this way) This makes sense. I think the equation for this is something like (1/y)*L, where y is gamma and L is the original length. It's an interesting thought experiment. Picture a yard stick(i suppose we could make it a meter stick too), horizontal to the ground, pointed away from you. Imagine a frame of reference where the speed of light is slow. Now push the meter stick away from you. As the end close to you leaves, that end appears to move away. But, the light from the far end hasn't reached your eyes yet, and it appears to be in the same spot. Since the close end is getting farther away, and the far end is remaining in the same spot, the yard stick appears to be shorter. So, if you think about applying it to that x+y stuff, it starts to make a little sense. Either it eventually vanishes, or the close end becomes the far end, and appears to arrive at the destination before the original far end.
I think there is even a Hawking quote about "We have not seen any visitors from the future, so there is probable no way to go FTL."
I've also heard that the reason we haven't seen any visitors from the future is because we haven't invented a time machine yet. Some(can't remember who) say that you can't bring something back before it existed. I guess that makes sense. So if this worm-hole generater thing actually works for backwards time travel, then start looking for things arriving from the future.
Another thing i find interesting about traveling at the speed of light:
If one could start from a stop and start accelerating towards the speed of light, time would slow down. The person going the speed of light wouldn't go through as much time as the person standing still. So eventually this person(we'll call him Light Man) reaches the speed of light. Between Light Man and the person standing still, it would appear that all time has stopped(for Light Man) when he goes the speed of light. That's interesting enough to think about, but what else does it say. I saw a good quote the other day: "Everywhere is within walking distance if you've got the time." Well, this guy definately has the time, if none is passing. It is saying that he can go anywhere with out any time having passed. He can in effect be everywhere at the same time. I guess that's something to think about.
Wigs
--"As a scientist, I expect statistical proof whenever possible to convince me of most things. But as I continue to mature, I've become more and more impressed by the frequency of statistically highly improbable events. In their very improbability, I began to see the fingerprints of God." --M. Scott Peck, M.D.
Nope... go back to your physics class. The glass DOES distort. As the previous poster correctly explained electromagnetic waves (or Photons if you like. That is what keeps your glass from falling apart.) does not travel faster than c. Thus the pole will NOT move at the end if you push at te front. Cheers, Peter
KdenLive/PIAVE - non-linear video editing
KdenLive/PIAVE - non-linear video editing
IBM has all kinds of neat patents.
:)
Some a bit more disturbing than others.
Well, I think that means that the patent website is now blocked by censorware.
Sorry, according to special relativity it would take +- 4*sqrt(3)*i minutes from the frame of the person.
Let me get this straight - a 620 watt halogen pencil lamp, permanent magnets, 22 awg wire, and a signal injection point? So a good Halogen work lamp for $19.95. Two bar magnets from the Science store. 22 gauge speaker wire from RadShack, and a BNC from the same place. Build two - one to receive and one to transmit, plug in your Ham radio and go to town?!? ---Did anyone notice that they said they observed increased plant growth? It sounds like someone did already build the thing, but why would plants grow faster? That's the scary part for me - remember, Madame Curie gave herself radiation poisoning playing with Uranium.
All eye rolling and snickering aside, I think that the owner of this patent deserves a Slashdot interview. That way we can start to determine whether:
A. This is a revolutionary invention that puts us one step closer to Star Trek.
B. This invention is completely misunderstood and does something less-than-revolutionary, but still interesting.
C. This invention has been translated to lawyer-speak and is really just a toaster.
D. This guy is total quack with too much time and money.
"I shoulda never sent a penguin out to do a daemon's work."
Cat, the other, tastier white meat.
Is this another case of patent first and invent later? Maybe I'll patent transporters, warp drives, phasers, etc.. ohh wait. would the creators of Star Trek have rights because my inventions were based on their intellectual property? Or does amazon.com have some broad patent that covers all these thing? Maybe the guy who invented the transistor would have rights since it was based on his work. The idea of ownership of ideas has gone too far.
probably not :)
Actually, if you put any stock in space-time diagrams, relativity, or pretty much any other current theory of how things work, then yes, a signal travelling faster than light will travel backwards in time. Anyway...
About your rigid pole question. The other answers I read seemed to dodge the question, saying that the pole would not be infinitely rigid. They didn't say why, however: A pole of infinite rigidity would require infinite energy to create, and thus could not exist. That's the theory, anyway.
The streets shall flow with the blood of the Guberminky.
Well... you seem to be accurate in your analysis, but this device (if it even worked) would not actually send something faster than light. What it would do would be to create a shorter way of getting wherever the signal was going, then traveling through that at normal speed. The information would arrive before it would have if it had traveled at the speed of light through the normally-connected universe, instead of through the shortcut.
well I'm glad someone had the sense to point this out, I was going to post something similar.... Something I want to add which is more the point I was going to make is that this "science" that is being purported to be a comms method faster than light - will no doubt attract BIG attention from people/companies with BIG money? Perhaps applying for a patent for something like that is a great way to attract investors, especially ones with more money than they know what to do with and are willing to throw a coupla 100k at anything that even smells of more money.......
"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom" -William Blake.
Not sure who's crankier -- the guy who filed the patent, or the reader who say "faster than light" and concluded "wormhole."
max
The pole would actually move when you pulled it, however, you would have to wait 8 minutes to see the end at the sun move, therefore, yes, it would appear to bend, then 8 minutes later, appear to straiten out.
-- Napalm sticks to kids.
Three words:
Then again, the fact that it disrupts space-time and breaks the laws of physics may jeopardize the device's chance at FCC compliance...
Oh well... as long as it's compatible with my antigrav pods, my time transporter, and my ACME Junior Scientist Home Alchemy Kit(TM), then I guess I'll still get one.
Of course, I'll be ordering it online (can you imagine the sales tax on these things?)
And it had better get here before I order it!
--
Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.
If time travel were possible, would we not already know? I'm sure that someone in the future would have already come back to our time -- and would have done something to let us know -- maybe even as extreme as openly saying: "Hey, I'm from the future, time travel is possible." before suddenly disappearing. Hmm Just a thought.
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Rob Flynn
Pidgin
No, your tug propagates up the pole at no more than the speed of light. The interactions between the atoms in the pole do not magically exceed the speed of light.
If the signal travels faster than light, wouldn't it get received before it was sent??
Maybe this was addressed in the patent write up but I wasn't able to read it, presumably because of the Slashdot effect.
-Markus
Rainy days and automatic weapons always get me down.
If they are patenting the idea of sending signals through a wormhole, there is prior art: Star Trek Voyager.
There is an episode where Reginald Barkley (back on earth) comes up with a way to create an artificial wormhole, then he briefly opens a channel to Voyager.
I also posted this idea to Slashdot as part of a response to a story about optical "wormholes". So if they are patenting the idea of sending signals (or anything) through a wormhole, it's a bogus patent.
OTOH, if they've found a way to create a real gravity well they've got something. I just hope they don't get careless with it. Hey, what's that tugging on my
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Hey, now we will be be able to get great throughput to that martian base without having to have a huge satellite array ;-)
Eh...
...throught the wormhole beside my head!!
But seriously, how long is it from this to matter transmission(and you thought people object to cloning)?
They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
Well, since this would destroy the patent office, I think this would be very popular on /.
Then I invented the Warp drive. Then I invented the teleport. Then Iinvented the cloaking device. I think that was a mistake. I put them all in the same place and forget where I put them.
If anyone ever walks into an invisible spaceship please let me know.
To start, there's almost theory behind this device. The author states that it works by poking "a small hole into another dimension ... which allows transmission of energy to exceed the speed of light." How it does the poking is not explained nor is any characterization of this other "dimension" given to explain why it would allow "transmission of energy to exceed the speed of light." Just because you claim to be able to transmit energy in another dimension does not automatically guarantee that it will travel faster than light. If I shine a flashlight straight up, the light will not travel any faster than if I shined the flashlight straight ahead even though these are two different "dimensions".
Second, his statement that the magnetic field can be produced by either a permanent magnent or an electromagnet is almost laughable. The field of an electromagnet is much more predictable and controllable than a permanent magnet. Besides which, the intense heat source (1000 F) would probably tend to de-magnetize whatever material was used for a permanent magnet. No experimental physicist worth his oscilloscope would use a permanent magnet over an electromagnet.
Next, think about this: Black holes are probably the closest thing to a "wormhole" and black holes take an enormous amount of energy to create - the energy of a collapsing star. To generate that kind of energy with the proposed device is impossible. The author must be relying on some kind of "cold fusion" type argument where the RF transmission "tunnels" into and out of hyperspace without the actual creation of a wormhole.
Finally, consider this. The author claims that to create a hyperlight antenna one basically only needs 1) an intense heat source and 2) a strong magnetic field. One also needs to be able to locate the "injection point", presumably where the proper mix of 1 & 2 is. Is there any naturally occuring phenomenon that has 1 & 2? You betcha! We call it THE SUN. If such a hyperlight antenna actually worked as stated, there would certainly be ample "injection points" all over the surface and interior of the sun. Do we see light mysteriously vanish from the surface of the sun? No! (Yes, sunspots appear dark in visible light, but if you look at different wavelenghts you can see them, so sunspots cannot be explained by this). Also, our knowledge of the interior workings of the sun is not complete, however we know enough to say that there is no anomalous disappearance of energy into hyperspace inside the sun (if there were, the sun would have collapsed long ago). There is the solar neutrino problem. Yeah, that's it! All the solar neutrinos are being zapped into hyperspace!
In my humble opinion, Mr. Strom's invention is far from being a wormhole generator but extremely close to being a BS generator.
"There is no shot you can take that I cannot simply deny." - Ertai, wizard goalie
Reading the abstract, this guy is not patenting faster than light anything. He's patenting electro magnetic waves. At least thats if you read the abstract. Go into the background and summary and you get way deep into nutdom here. If I understand the patent right, he's saying that by putting a magnet in front of a heat lamp, you open a wormhole into hyperspace. Yeah... I wanna get the drawings from the USPTO so I can build my own. It'd be a great conversion piece. In the meantime, set your oven on clean, run two wires paralell to the heating elements, and put current going in opposite directions, and you too can communicate with friendly aliens in the Peliades cluster. And, your plants will grow faster too. Does it cure baldness and help with hemoroids too?
Also, I'd model a halogen lamp as a point heat source (from far away) or as a semispherical or cylindrical mesh, depending upon the lamp configuration. Perhaps the cylindrical configuration is your "axial heat source", but the axis is not very long, and the bulb rather thick (unless they've made a non-standard one). I'm not sure how you're getting a current along this same axis, seeing how the halogen bulb is a very good insulator.
Even the basic physics does not seem to be very credible.
--Adam
"Invincibility is in oneself, vulnerability in the opponent." --Sun Tzu
--Adam
"Invincibility is in oneself, vulnerability in the opponent." --Sun Tzu
Yes, it travels faster than the speed of light, but exactly *how* fast does the signal travel?
I assume it's not instantaneous. If that were so, the words "travel" and "faster" wouldn't apply. Ultimately, this technology will be used to aid in space exploration, so the question is, how helpful will it be? It takes 6 hours to get data from a satellite orbiting jupiter now, so will it take 3 hours with the new tech? 3 minutes? what?
Judge Pag, the Learned, Impartial, and Very Relaxed
so can i hook this up to my computer and get really good pings in quake 3
lose != loose
What does it matter if a potential patent is COMPLETELY RIDICULOUS? As long as it doesn't work, who cares whether it's private intellectual property?
the USPTO works fine.
Sam Coskey
Import some real knowledge & cut the geek cool.
I'm not a mathematician or a physicist, I'll leave the discussions about whether it could work or not to them. I can think of a couple of applications if it does work: If you were transmitting to Mars, for example, you could eliminate the time-lapse and communicate in real-time. Imagine driving a Martian rover around, and having direct control. Also, let's say a tornado touches down. The tornado hunters could use this to send a signal back in time to be able to warn people to take shelter. I know it sounds fanciful, but what if it does work?
I agree, this is almost as bad as someone, say, buying up a million dictionary-based domain names and waiting for some big company to buy one when they need it.
-Effendi
-Effendi
In fact yes - it would only appear to violate it.
You can create energy/matter out of nothing, the amount will be inversely proportional to the time it can exist in this universe.
Quantum Mechanics say the universe is a seething quantum soup of virtual particle pairs appearing and disappearing constantly over time
Therefore the energy will appear, hang around a periond inversely proportional to h bar / 2 (as I recall) then disappear.... The less energy, the more time it will *appear* to violate the CofE law.
Thats AFAIRecall anyway!!
...Upgrade now to Schrodingers Dog...
Well, there's a bright side to the earliness of the patent. Given that, now that its patented, nobody but the company's gonna research this, this technology will take well over a decade to get anywhere near usable. Therefore, by the time we start bitching about wanting opensource wormy-talkies, the patent will have worn off.
Place two nuclear clocks at different altitudes and therefore under different accelerations in respect to the Earth's center of gravity. This was done by the airforce with two Rubidium standard clocks accurate to within 10-13 seconds. One clock was in a plane at 30 thousand feet for a few hours. The other was at sea level. The clock on the ground had run slower than the clock in the air. This demonstrated that time does slow down under greater accelerations. This also explains how the speed of light remains constant regardless of the observers acceleration. Since an observer traveling at near the speed of light has a drastically reduced time reference, light say, from a flashlight, still jumps forward from its source in respect to the observer. With modern nuclear clocks such as the cesium beam clock accurate to within 10-17 seconds an extreme altitude variance is not required to achieve an observable effect.
The experiment I propose is to use some sort of FTL communications technique as a constant frame of reference between two clocks placed at different altitudes. The purpose of course is to find gravity waves. Since a "wave" in gravity should produce a surge in relative time, an FTL frame of reference would detect gravity waves.
For all our accomplishments we are still trapped inside the universe attempting to discover the nature of our cage. Any sort of FTL communication would give us a perspective on our prison from "outside" the universe. Plato had more insight than he knew.
We are all computer people so we all hopefully know that regardless of the format information is carried in it is still the same information. ...---... is SOS as much as 010100110100111101010011 or 53, 4F, 53. Everything physical is subject to entropy. People die, the universe winds down, everything loses complexity. But somehow life seems to break this rule. Life gets more complex with the passage of time. From the first single cell bad ass to you reading this is a fantastic assault on the law of entropy. Except that life is a manifestation of the information carried by DNA. Information is not a physical thing. Information is carried by physical things but is not itself physical. That is why life seems to break entropy every chance it gets.
There is another side to this. The /. effect. Too much information is just so much white noise. The moderation system combined with setting your threshold again brings order where there was once just chaos.
So, it really is a philosophical question as to whether information can break entropy. But if information can break entropy, there are other obstacles not far behind. The conservation of matter and energy. The speed of light.
Yes, information is carried by physical energy and matter. At the same time information has transcended its confines in the form of life. The information carried by your DNA and mine is a billion years old. Suns have had shorter life spans.
So regardless of whether FTL communication, if even possible, comes in the form of spooky action at a distance or a nutcase with an antenna, the view from outside the universe must be spectacular. Welcom to the TOH and knowledge singularity. To think that they are trying to build a quantum computer when they could have the TOH instead. The shame of it reminds me of another "my processor is better than yours" battle going on.
Alright a little heavy on Philosophy. Join me next week when I decide to launch a new startup to manufacture those IBM toys...
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
(geez!! Had to wait 5 minutes before this reply form came up....what gives??)
Don't get your hopes up, folks...this HAS to be an early April Fool's Day joke.
Anyway, I Am Not A Physicist (IANAP), but I've read in many science magazines and books, not to mention seen on TV documentaries, that any kind of faster than light communciation or travel is strictly impossible. Has to do with causality.
There are some fantastic theories floating around about how do do these things, but they require exotic things like antigravity or negative energy, which I gather aren't strictly disallowed by modern physical theory, but then again, may just be mathematical oddities that happen to work with our equations and don't actually have any reality.
I seem to remember reading that wormholes would require antigravity and negative energy to stay open...plus wormholes are smaller than the diameter of atoms, which I believe precludes their use as channels of communication.
I love Star Trek, but we aren't there yet.
Doesn't teleporters work by duplicating an object and then destroying the original? So when you turn on your teleporter, you actually die, but noone else notices since your duplicate goes marching on... Or ? Kinda disturbing thought. ;-)
The articles reads that and electromagnetic field is created. I am curious as to what outcome placing a magnet (r any conducive material for that matter). Any experts outthere know if this is even possible?
Well I actual read through it and it's cross-filing. "It" appears to be the specs of a test set for the experiment. There is no math. The cross-filing states that it is a dimensional hole to another dimension that does not use space and time like our world. It does not elaborate further but does say it grows plants nicely as well. Really neat waste of time for everyone pondering this. It is BS.
Someone please send Captain Janeway's com-badge frequency to Leutenant Barkley and his faster than light machine!!!
This sound's like a essay I read that related to Tesla coils but went further than that. What was described was a system where two antennas would be coupled together and the power levels could be adjusted on the remote antenna just as quickly as on the sending one. The idea was that the information (power level) would be sent faster than the wavelength or even the speed of light. I saw this at: http://www.amasci.com/tesla/tesceive.html Nathan Brown
The truth is: None of this really matters. First of all, there is NO way to catalogue the complete molecular structure of anything (much less a human). This is due to the fact that the position of the electrons in the electron cloud CANNOT be measured or predicted and they never will be. If you could code a human, you could never recompile him/her on the other end for the same reason. Also, it appears everyone has the dillusion that we could somehow line up a stream of tachyons and send this imposible code. This is of course imposible and if it were, we could cause SERIOUS problems by simply setting up a sensor and turn off the stream when they are detected. Because they are detected before they are fired according to all of you. You could turn off the machine as soon as they are detected, never fire them at all, and make one heck of an unpleasant paradox to ponder. Give up on breaking the speed of light. It is a limit we cannot change or meet and we should just learn to live with that fact.
Ok, I've seen a number of intelligent (and even more not so intelligent) comments on this FTL communications device. Many have shown some good math (some of which is beyond me) to demonstrate why this patent is wrong. The problem here is really two-fold: the patent shows NO math to prove itself and no one else has reproduced the results. Science is driven by reproduction of results (along with a hearty imagination and unstoppable will), so someone must test this device. Here's the basic plan: Build two devices (the plans at the patent web site seem complete enough). Get four identical transceivers. Now, make two 'stations', each station has two transceivers, one FTL antenna, and a PC. The stations need to be as far apart as possible, but within normal range of the transceivers. A program for the PCs will be required that generates a short signal, say a 1KHz tone for 1 second. This program will need to be able to 'hear' one tone, start a time, then stop the timer when it 'hears' the second tone. Here's what happens: At station one, the PC sends the tone (OK, doesn't require a PC here) to both transceivers at the same time, one of which (obviously) is connected to the FTL antenna, the other, to a normal antenna. This produces two signals at the same time, from the same place (a couple meters apart). Station two will receive the two signals via its two transceivers (set up identically to station one). If the patent is correct, then there will exists a time difference between the two signals, which will be calculated by the PC. The problem with this plan is the requirement for a large distance between the two stations. The speed of light being so fast, the PC may have difficulty calculating the differnce if the range is too short. Conversly, many com signals are line-of-sight and reletively short-ranged. Any HAM opporator can help find the right frequncy and power level for the test, though, and, perhaps, a group of people can run the test, say someone in California, and someone else in New York or London. The point is, reproduce the results. If they can't be reproduced, its a fraud. If they can be, then somebody better find the math to describe it!
Hey, I may be slow, but I don't catch on!
Ask your MOM for details
From what I've read lately, Dickinson seems to be focused on streamlining the patent process so that more people can receive patents more quickly. A bad thing IMO. He wants to give patents on anything and everything possible and give out as many patents as possible. After all, the PTO is a business now and is supposed to support itself. That's the biggest problem I think. The PTO shouldn't be required to support itself. That just begs for corruption and a shift in focus from the original goal of promoting innovation to their new goal of promoting patents as a method of generating revenue.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Why? If an invention does not work--especially ones that violates the laws of physics--what is the harm in granting someone a patent?
Because if you can patent something that you can't actually get working, you can speculativly patent things you believe may be made to work (by someone else) within 10 years or so.
Example, Wait another 5 years or so then quietly patent a tokamak (sp?) fusion reactor that actually surpasses breakeven. Do plenty of hand waving around everything that isn't current practice. Now wait another 5 years for the more or less EXPECTED achievment, then sue. Since you'll have the patent, you'll have the benefit of presumption on your side. Your investment: $10,000 and some time spent over a 1 year period. THEIR INVESTMENT: $10,000,000,000 and 30 years of research (at least).
On the other hand, if the successful applicant must show a working model (say within a year or two of provisional acceptance), the people who did all the work and invested all the money will win the patent and you'll waste $10,000 (as it should be).
I say within a year or two of provisional acceptance for a reason. That will allow an inventor to get a provisional patent and then on the strength of that, get backing from investors and industry in order to build a potentially expensive working version. By the same token, it will not allow scum to race to the patent office while the real inventor toils over making the thing actually work.
used to explain electricity through through a wire. The general version uses a tube of billiard balls rather than a pole. Push a ball/electron in at one end of the tube/wire, and a ball/electron pops out at the other end aftera delay indicated by the speed of light. It's not the *same* ball/electron,but the information travelled at lightspeed (for the medium in question).
hawk, onetime physicist among his many hats
compound perfect (passé composé): I have loved
pluperfect: I had loved
future perfect: I will have loved
past historic: I loved
imperfect: I was loving
past anterior: umm, OK, sort of like the pluperfect..., but a bit posher.
The real problem here is that English is not taught properly anymore, so teaching grammar is left up to the poor French, Spanish, German and Latin teachers. Most Anglophone kids have no idea what 'voice', 'mood' or 'gender' mean until they start studying a second language which is a real shame.
OK, bonus points to anyone who can come up with a future subjunctive clause in six words or less (in English)...
Nick
-- "It's a sad day for American capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on a kite over Central Park" - Jim Moran
Does this remind anyone else of the Ansible (sp?) in Ender's Game? It still maintains the limit on travel that is set by light speed, but removes the limit on communications. Maybe this is just another example of life imitating art.
Or maybe it's just some crackpot with some good drawings.
...with the emphasis on art. It's somewhat interesting to note that several patent applications were denied because Jules Verne had already described them in his science fiction novels. The best known case of this was for the periscope, which Verne had described some years earlier in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I have been told that there were other instances of this from Verne's novels, but don't recall what they were.
-- "Ever wonder why the SAME PEOPLE make up ALL the conspiracy theories?"
I really don't have a problem with this, although I'm sure the other 499,999 Slashdot citizens probably will. Patents exist, in theory, to guarantee someone that their years of hard work and research won't go for naught by having their great idea stolen from them. If whoever this person can generate wormholes (pretend with me for a second), then by all means, he should be able to patent his idea. By doing so, he will be encouraged to work further on it. The benefits to all of humanity from being able to create wormholes far, far outweigh any highbrow philosophical qualms I might have about patents.
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
You said:
"Maybe this was addressed in the patent write up but I wasn't able to read it, presumably because of the Slashdot effect."
Don't you realize that Slashdot itself _has_ caused the time to travel backwards !
The Slashdot Effect [tm] has turned back the clock so much that the server that supposed to store the patent info hasn't got the chance to get the info yet !!
Yea ! We have done one of the "impossibles" - now what is left for all the slashdotters is to do another of the "impossible" - we are going to travel to the future using our (in)famous Slashdot Effect [tm].
:)
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
You have a glass on the table. You pick up the glass and move it to the other end of the table. Since the atoms have to catch up to each other, the glass distorts until it stops?
No.
Atoms are held together by their own properties. Moving a glass across the table doesn't go any faster than moving a pole that spans halfway across the solar system. You're not transmitting information at the speed of light, or anything faster. BUT, since the other end of the pole is outside the near-immediate viewing perspective of the POV, light takes time to catch up. The pole moves instantly, but we don't SEE the whole thing move instantly.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
Okay, forget the patent...
If you want to send something faster than light, take two particles, and get them to have some association with each other...then separate them...if you do something to one, it will affect the other, instantaneously.
Or theoretically anyways...an example of this can be done with diffraction slits.
--
Sorry Accipiter, but that's just plain wrong. The far end of the pole does *not* move instantaneously.
The physical explanation is this: the volume of any solid matter is filled with, indeed entirely composed of, the electromagnetic fields of the electrons within it (the positive atomic nuclei themselves are relatively small and being sheilded from one another don't tend to interact with each other very much). These fields might be hybrid electron orbitals - though in the case of metals the electronic structure is rather more complicated than that.
In any case, when you apply a force to one end of a solid, you deform the electromagnetic field of the atoms therein, which then pushes back and in doing so alters the spatial position of those atoms in relation to their immediate neighbours.
The atoms now exert an altered electromagnetic force upon their neighbours with a similar result: said neighbours change their spatial arrangement in response to the force applied. Those neighbours, having moved in relation to their other neighbours, now exert an altered force upon them, so that they in turn change position. And so on all the way through the solid.
There is a strictly temporal causal sequence. Nothing happens instantaneously, because it takes *time* for the force felt by the electromagnetic field on one side of an atom to transmit around to the other side. And that in turn is because information propagation through an electromagnetic field is not instantaneous but always occurs at the velocity c. That is what c *is* by the way; the velocity of a wave moving through the electromagnetic field.
Conclusion: there is _no_such_thing_ as truly *rigid* (except in childish jokes about male genitalia). This is in fact necessary since spacetime itself has variable geometry.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Hey, we're all scientifically minded here. Does anyone want to build one and let us know if it works?
Well, maybe... but why would we ever want to?
Oh, perhaps to taunt them...
Basically, the theory goes that if you have atom with two electrons in the same quantum state except for spin, and you know the spin of one of them and then change it, the spin of the other electron is changed instantly, regardless of distance. However, I think this interaction occurs at the speed of light, and not instantly. It's just that we can't tell the difference between the two because there's no way (presently) to separate the two particles by very much distance.
This is not true. If you know something about the state of one of a pair of entangled particles, you instantly (regardless of distance) know the state of the other particle in the pair. However this cannot be used to communicate at faster than light speed, because there is no way to encode information in this measurement. The state of the pair is a superposition of the possible states, and the eigenvalue you measure is totally random. You haven't transmitted anything.
rangek@origin.msi.umn.edu
If this doesn't prove that the U.S. Patent Office is so broken that it will let anything become patented, then I don't know what will.
;-)
At the very least there should be some way of verifying that the item being patented does what it is claimed to do before the patent is granted. Not that what this patent claims is impossible or anything...
Notice that there are a lot of schematics in the images -- someone should try building the thing and see what, if anything, it actually does.
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
From the application:
The present invention has discovered the apparent existence of a new dimension capable of acting as a medium for RF signals. Initial benefits of penetrating this new dimension include sending RF signals faster than the speed of light, extending the effective distance of RF transmitters at the same power radiated, penetrating known RF shielding devices, and accelerating plant growth exposed to the by-product energy of the RF transmissions.
I love how they tack on "accelerating plant growth" right on the end. Classic Kook stuff.
Reading more about the plants:
It has been observed by the inventor and witnesses that accelerated plant growth can occur using the present invention.
For accelerated plant growth, first, you need to create a hot surface that is more than 1000 degrees Fahrenheit. Next, you need a strong magnetic field. Only one device is needed for this function. This allows energy from another dimension to influence plant growth.
Later he goes on to talk about how to make this thing with a halogen lamp (honest! That's his heat source) and some wires wrapped around it (the accelerator). So I guess he really could send a "working model" to the USPTO.
I bet you could influence the plant growth even more if you use a grow light in place of the halogen.
People need to understand how patents work. ;)
If you have an invention (doesn't have to actually exist.), an idea, whatever, that you can put down on paper, and file a patent, it goes through several steps.
This is far from exact, but as long as it is
1) Not too similar to an existing patent
2) Not something that has mucho prior art.
3) Is unique
Then you can have your patent. It's NOT a problem, not like the software/business model patents.
Look at it this way.
If this guys inventions DO work, does he not deserve the patent for coming up with it in the first place? What if 20 years later he is RIGHT. The world used to be flat, remember.
If he's NOT right, and it's bullshit.. who cares? who's rights is hegoing to infringe on? some other guy who wants to build one too
Hopefully, the patent office will treat this like they treat applications for patents on perpetual motion machines.
Erm...
I agree that peretual motion and the like isn't likely to be something I'll ever see, but last time I heard conservation of ebergy was a theory, nothing more.
It seems to fit, but has it actually been shwon to be true? If it hasn't, all power to anyone trying to disprove it with perpetual motion machines. If they've got that much free time, why not?
Greg
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
(see : http://slashdot.org/articles/99/08/25/209211.shtml )
The problem is quite. Simple (should you take the time to look at it if you were able to. Pass a Cisco door examination ( as i did, being quite intellectual ).
Looking at it with the Octet Rule ( which i invented Obviously to help with our IP addressing problems ), you will find that if you take The subnet of the hyperspace transducer ( which is obviously where these people who did not get Consulting/IT degrees ) and apply it to the force. Of negative ( not bad ) polarity using an electro subnet.
Unbelievable! To think that simply using common ( for professionals who network as Do I ) engineering principals ( even aginst Obvious people against me ) such as inversion of.
Never the less, the scheme similar to the one i used ( Obviously ) before when I wrote such a bad. Ly written paper that used ( to be truthful ) incohearant logic That I used before.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
Whoever wrote this patent has a very good understanding of Power Supply construction, specifically in relation to Switch Mode Power Supplies. Wether the rest of the premise is actually viable is not for me to guess.
The way they are talking about using accelerators, magnetic fields, and a heat source tends to give me the idea that this thing could be re-arranged to look like some big "Flux Capacitor" from Back to the Future. *grin*
Is this really a wormhole as described here? Or is it just, as it says, a way of transmiting a signal faster than light speed?
Yes you are right, the patent is to transmit a signal faster than light speed. I posted that way originally but it was declined. I posted it again and I mention wormhole in the subject and it is suddenly interesting enough to post!
But what the hell, they allow software patents that have exactly the same characteristics, why not approve this one too?
Who really cares if somebody patents something that doesn't actually work after all? So he's got a patent on something broken. Big deal. It costs a lot to patent, so most people won't bother unless they think they have something that works.
The PTO had to do something about perpetual motion machines because they're so popular that the examiners were getting buried. But the occasional warp drive / FTL communicator, or other probably bogus invention isn't as much of a load as having the examiners try to make a call on whether every darn thing submitted actually does what it's supposed to do.
And who knows? Maybe one of these days somebody will bring in a warp drive or FTL communicator that DOES work. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Assumption: The patent is "that which promotes plant growth and comes from a male bovine"
If my hypothesis of the sequence of events is proven correct, however, then the applicant has falsified government documents with the intent of committing fraud. I hope he is nailed, jailed, and won't be bailed....
www.eFax.com are spammers
Inventor(s): Gellert; Reinhard R. , Arlington Heights, IL 60004
So it's not IBM that has the patent, per-se, you just used IBM's patent database.
---
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
...I mean, do they really expect us to believe that Ricky Martin is really capable of this? Just look at the patent application, his name's on it! (He shortened it to "Rick" to try and throw us off -- the cad!) I'm sure everyone's favorite Latin pop sensation may think the world of himself, but come on, Ricky, even you can't violate the laws of physics!
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
... since patents only last 20 years. By the time anyone even considers using this technology for practical or commercial purposes, it'll be free tech. One less thing monopolized, whoohoo!
You know what to do with the HELLO. ...
Help create an open-source world
They can file for a patent, even if this thing can't work, or won't work, or even if it violates the laws of thermodynamics. However since this won't work they won't have any trouble with people infringing on their patent, will they?
Because no known particle has an imaginary rest mass we need another way to send data or people. A wormhole could act as a "shortcut" from point A to point B without traveling the space in between. It was thought that one could use a wormhole as a time machine by accelerating one end to reletivistic speed, but it now looks like any attempt to use it as a time machine would cause it to explode.
A gravity drive could "warp" space time and let you travel at any speed without acceleration or time dialation but first you need anitgravity.
Quantum particles may be able to break (or at least bend) the universal speed limit. A photon can sometimes seem to "quantum tunnel" from one side of a very thin barrier to the other without existing in the space between. It stayed at light speed but skiped part of the journey. You can also speed up photons with a vacume chamber and two copper plates. By placing two grounded conductive planes in close parallel you prevent any particle with a wavelength longer than the distance between the plates from existing in that space. Normaly in empty space particles pop in and out of existance all the time. These are called "virtual particles", "quantum soup" or "quantum fireworks". With less virtual particles in the way a lazer seems to move faster between the plates.
This is all simplified and may be out of date. Serve with a hefty sprincle of salt.
This is true, however there is another consequence of the equation you cite. If there is a current and an independent magnetic field perpendicular the medium of the current will experience a force mutually perpendicular to the first two. (id est: current along x-axis, magnetic field y and then force z) generating heat from a heat source along an axis parallel to the longitudinal axis of the magnetic field;
An axial heat source need only be a material with uniform generation in a cylindrical shape. (any heat generating rod will be the hottest at its centre and heat will travel outwards.
In the "preferred embodiment of the patent a halogen lamp is suggested as the heat source.
In any pure isotropic material heat conduction hsould definitely be uniform. The other component of conduction is the gradient. (net heat transfer is from a hotter area to a cooler area) So the shape of the heat generation could affect it.
Another useful phrase for patents that this one uses is "it is believed". He hasn't gotten this thing to work yet but wants to benefit if someone else does
No, actually. A beam of light sent from the tugger to earth would arrive either first or around the same time as the *tug* (depending on how rigid your pole is!).
To understand this, you have to accept that the pole can not be infinitly rigid, it is comprised of molecules which themselves must move the distance of the tug. So imagine the pole not as a single object, but as an enormous number of segments pushing or pulling each other (as it actually is).
This means if an observer could follow the pole from the sun to the earth at the speed of light, s/he would see a ripple of compression travelling the length of the pole all the way to the earth.
Having a pole with no space between molecules would violate many laws of nuclear physics I'm sure, and the pole itself would probably be so dense it would collapse in on itself and both ends would shoot towards each other into a black hole in the middle.
Like some sort of cosmic, nuclear sex change.
Ace905
Ace
Combining my experience of a couple of years at Uni studying physics with the knowledge imparted here by Mr acgetchell I think we can safely conclude that this patient is just a load of bollocks. I will eat both my legs with a spoon if it really works.
How do these CRAZY ideas get this far without someone saying "Hey! That is just shit! Stop wasting everyones time."?
Maybe it's real, but most likely, it's some losers idea of a practical joke. I must admit though, that for all the screaming about patents that goes on here, it would be kinda cool to have a patent of my own. My patent would be on something that's definately obvious, but harmless to everyone. Something like "Patent on a method for ultra-high-speed avoidance of job-related injuries using three pounds of cool-whip, a pair of scissors, and a copy of the new Stephen King eBook (after I had bitfrobbed it out of whatever pathetic format they're distributing it in) while walking and chewing bubble gum"
Just you fools wait! You'll all owe me MILLIONS when this type of activity becomes all the rage!
Alternately, I could preemptively patent the "Natalie Portman/Hot Grits" post, and make TRILLIONS of dollars. (But #2, why make trillions of dollars, when we could make....BILLIONS OF DOLLARS!!!!) Also possibly in the future is the Jon Katz flame post patent, the "Slashdot sucks since it's become freshmeat" post patent, and the all-important meta-whiner post patent.
I think that all right-thinking people in this country are sick and tired of being told that ordinary decent people are fed up in this
country with being sick and tired. I'm certainly not. But I'm sick and tired of being told that I am.
- Monty Python
It's an option...
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
I think it's past time for the USPTO to reinstate its requirement that patent applications be submitted with working models.
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
Quoting from page 16, column 1, lines 22-28:
... include ... and accelerating plant growth exposed to the by-product energy of the RF transmissions.
Initial benefits
and further, same page and column, lines 48-55:
It has been observed by the inventor and witnesses that accelerated plant growth can occur using the present invention.
For accelerated plant growth, first, you need to create a hot surface that is more than 1000 degrees Fahrenheit. Next, you need a strong magnetic field. Only one device is needed for this function. This allows energy from another dimension to influence plant growth.
I want to know more!
How do you protect the plants from the hot surface? Is this the purpose of the magnetic field?
Does this work on cattle, pigs, and other carnivorous delights?
Is there any bill to pay to the other dimension whose energy is used?
The hell with plant growth! Why not simply use the energy to replace oil wells and coal mines and nuclear reactors?
--
Infuriate left and right
Consider an electromagnetic wave travelling in a particular direction, say down the positive x axis. The oscillatory magnetic and electric fields comprising these waves oscillate in mutually perpendicular planes, and perpendicular to the direction of propagation. For the sake of argument, let the electric field's plane of oscillation be the +/-y axis, and the magnetic field's plane be the +/-z axis.
The Poynting vector (roughly E x B, where x indicates the vector cross product) defines the momentum density of the EM wave. In this case, E x B is proportional to EB(y x z [= x] ). Thus, the momentum carried by the EM wave is transmitted down the longitudinal axis of the wave.
From Newton's second law, F = dp/dt. When the EM wave is incident on a surface, the wave reflects, changing the direction of travel. If the wave is normally incident on a surface, its direction goes from +x to -x, such that the direction of dp is +x, parallel to the longitudinal axis.
Note from the quoted section of the patent application that this wormhole method of communication requires a plane of maximum force perpendicular to the longitudinal axis of the magnetic field. There is no plane of maximum force, there is only a direction (vector). A vector (one dimensional object) can lie in an infinite number of planes (two dimensional objects).
Either this guy has developed a completely new universe in which his physics is drastically different from ours, or he never bothered taking a graduate level E&M course.
Eric
with this, and of course, I may be misunderstanding, is one of perception.
Yes, we say that to observe is to modify (and indeed, it is).
The theory is that until one of the pair is observed, the particles exist in a superposition of states. When we observe one, we 'cause' it to collapse into the appropriate state. This also, as the particles are entangled, causes the other particle to assume it's state.
This is largely an exercise in abstract thought. THe real issue is that we do not KNOW the state of the other particle in the pair, and by observing it, we screw with the process.
In short, the only way real information can be transmitted using this method is to also transmit initial state information via a conventional method, which defeats the purpose altogether.
You can deform spacetime, at least in principle, but not using toys like antennae and such. see This little nasa page
It [should] go without saying that this patent is pseudoscientific babble masquarading as a real invention that some patent examiner bought. Unfortunately, this is not very surprising considering what other, ahem, odd patents have been approved.
For example, numerous perpetual motion machines have been patented, as well as unlimited energy supplies and other such nonsense. These are really great for laughs on a rainy day when your own project is on the fritz. Of course, they never work, but this never seems to stop the USPTO from issuing the patents anyway. The laws of physics (and the gross violation thereof) don't seem to bother the patent office.
Q. Todd Dickinson is the Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Commissioner of Patents and Trademarks. He's only been on the job for 4 months, so we can't blame him personally for many past failings, but he's the one to address about making it stop. According to his biography, "Under Dickinson's leadership, the PTO is implementing the most sweeping reform in patent law in a half-century and its restructuring into a performance-based organization."
Since IANAL, I can't make much sense of Dickinson v. Zurko, but it might give some insight on Disckinson's attitudes. It vaguely makes it look like he tried pretty vigorously to strenghten the legal force of PTO decisions that something was prior art and couldn't be patented. It may or may not also strengthen decisions that something is patentable. He says he's trying to hire many more people familiar with software, and make more resources available for recognizing prior art.
There's several of his speeches available at the PTO site.
Dickinson did praise the late Judge Giles Sutherland Rich, who wrote the opinion in the State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group Inc. case that explicitly made it acceptable to patent mathematical algorithms and business models.
It would be great if the slashdot masters could arrange an Ask Slashdot with this guy.
WooHoo! Now we can contact Voyager!
(P.S.: If that's the abstract, I don't want to see the specifics. heh)
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
They stopped requiring working models for everything but devices to violate the conservation of energy after they filled up a bunch of warehouses with working models of everything under the sun. (A lot of it was big farm implements.)
Many of the Smithsonian exhibits are old working models from patent applications.
Interestingly: A very efficient still (using counter-current heat exchangers and creating near-vacuum by being 30ish feet tall at approximately atmospheric pressure at the bottom) was initially rejected for being a perpetual motion machine (for which they have rather high standards, in addition to the working-model requirement. B-) ) But the inventer was able to convince them to grant the patent after he showed them that you still had to input the heat of solution plus some heat for various losses.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
IBM has all kinds of neat patents.
Some a bit more disturbing than others.
I'm sorry. First, Jeff Bezos and Amazon patent One-Click Shopping and now this!? Are they completely nuts?! Do they realize that wormhole generation technology has been alive and well on the Internet for the past umpteen years? I mean, come on, if they're giving out patents for this stuff, I'd better reserve my spot in line for Air!
It is common knowledge that transmitting and receiving electromagnetic waves which comprise opposing magnetic fields having a plane of maximum force running perpendicular to a longitudinal axis of the magnetic field; generating a heat source along an axis parallel to the longitudinal axis of the magnetic field; generating an accelerator parallel to and in close proximity to the heat source, thereby creating an input and output port; and generating a communications signal into the input and output port, thereby sending the signal at a speed faster than light is the easiest way to generate a wormhole. Other more difficult methods include being an alien species in control of vast amounts of subspace energy and doing something weird with the warp core.
If this patent goes through, it will mean the death of the Internet e-commerce for sure. Companies will have to stop using wormhole shipping techniques and revert to slower, more earthbound methods like UPS and Airborne Express. Everyone should write the USPTO right now before this thing gets approved and make sure that the system isn't abused once more and ensuring that future generations will have unlimited access to wormhole generating technology.
NOTE: This post not for the humor (or humour) impaired.
I submitted it three weeks from now. Come ON!
In general, to create a wormhole one must manipulate the general metric, which is a tensor that describes spacetime (for example, the relatively flat Minkowski metric takes on the form diag(-1,1,1,1) where diag refers to a diagonal matrix). Most "constructed" metrics that produce a wormhole solution have pathological flaws. For example, a Schwartzchild wormhole necessarily occludes the throat with a black hole, which tends to kill off passersby. The Kerr metric solution requires a several solar mass black hole formed into a ring and spun at relativistic angular velocities: how we might accomplish this feat of metric engineering anytime soon is troublesome.
The two most plausible ways of doing so is a Morris-Thorne-Wheeler wormhole, which simply requires exotic matter and violation of ANEC (Averaged Null-Energy Condition), and the Alcubierre spacewarp.
"Exotic" matter is simply matter with negative energy density. All matter and antimatter known has positive mass, and so there's only one way that we know of to get it: the Casimir effect. Briefly, the Casimir effect comes about due to vacuum fluctuations. Even the purest ideal vacuum is not truly empty, but has countless particle-antiparticle pairs appearing and disappearing within the time limits set by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. The continued existence of these virtual particles has a noticeable effect, and is possibly a source of Einstein's Cosmological constant. At any rate, by setting up a parallel plate capacitor, one can reduce the likelihood of the virtual particles appearing, and thereby generate a negative energy density.
Unfortunately, it would take a spherical capacitor the size of the Earth separated by an angstrom (10 E-10 meters) to create a 10 meter or so wormhole using the Casimir effect.
Robert Forward nicely sidesteps this issue by postulating "negative matter" in his novel "Timemaster". As he explained it to me, "Why not?".
Alcubierre's metric contracts spacetime in front of the "ship" and expands it behind. It also requires exotic matter and violating the weak, strong, and dominant energy conditions. Lastly, Pfenning and Ford (1997 Classical Quantum Gravity 14 1743) show that this configuration is rather implausible, and Hiscock (1997 Class. Quant. Grav 14 L188) shows that a backreaction (warp drag) or tuning of the warp field may be required for it to maintain the Alcubierre metric, a difficult proposition given that past and future event horizons are causally disconnected.
In sum, there's really a renaissance occuring in General Relativity, and these issues are discussed in the professional literature. Like everyone else, I'd have to see a publication in the technical literature to consider seriously the claims made in this patent.
Now, with this in mind, after reading the abstract this patent seems to be nonsensical. Examining the claims:
Generating opposing magnetic fields each having a plane of maximum force running perpendicular to a longitudinal axis of the respective magnetic field;
The Lorentz force is given by Il x B, which means that the magnetic force is due to a current, and in general, circulates about the current flow. Due to the cross product, the resultant geometry is not planar. Since we have not discovered any magnetic monopoles, magnetic induction in general forms loops from one pole to another.
generating heat from a heat source along an axis parallel to the longitudinal axis of the magnetic field;
Unless the heat source is a thin wire, it is difficult to imagine an axial heat source. Heat conduction tends to be uniform, and while I'm not a material scientist, it is difficult for me to think of a material that has non-isotropic heat conduction (ie different depending on direction -- a composite material with fibers might do the trick).
generating an accelerator parallel to and in close proximity to the heat source, thereby creating an electromagnetic injection point; and generating a communication signal into the electromagnetic injection point, thereby sending and receiving the communication signal at a speed faster than a known speed of light.
What is exactly meant by "an accelerator"? Why does this magically add up to FTL?
Also note one of the other claims:
It has been observed by the inventor and witnesses that accelerated plant growth can occur using the present invention.
For accelerated plant growth, first, you need to create a hot surface that is more than 1000 degrees Fahrenheit. Next, you need a strong magnetic field. Only one device is needed for this function. This allows energy from another dimension to influence plant growth.
Again, there seems to be no basis in which to make this claim. A wormhole would certain create a characteristic signature, even leaving causality problems aside. --Adam
"Invincibility is in oneself, vulnerability in the opponent." --Sun Tzu