Posted by
michael
on from the close-only-counts-in-horseshoes dept.
DrBlake writes "New York Times has an article about a study of Einsteins theory of relativity that I found very interesting. Not only might the speed of light be relative under certain circumstances, the famous equation E=mc2 might not be entirely correct."
So I've been sitting here hitting refresh for a few minutes watching this post get modded. Very interesting. Seriously though, first post on the first article of the year and you didn't write "FiRST POST!!1!"? (ironic that I said seriously though before that isn't it) What's wrong with you? Maybe my inner troll is just stronger than yours. Or I am weaker. In any case, I'm drunk.
Oh and if anyone wastes mod points on this, you're silly.
Re:Oh no....
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
My world is falling apart.
No - its just wobbling slighty, everything will be fine in the morning.
Re:Oh no....
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Dude it's a joke. If anything this should be getting modded overrated.
Get over yourselfs stupid moderators.
Re:Oh no....
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Yeah, but it's been doing that since the beginning. Not necessarily entirely due to thermodynamics, though...
This messes up my whole ideal of good and evil...well then again, it was going to happen someday that someone would challenge it. What's interesting is that most people don't know what e=mc^2 means. All they see are letters and numbers thrown together...they miss out on the BIGGER picture.
-- und das ist alle fur jetz
Light Speed limits...
by
Red+Warrior
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· Score: 2, Funny
Just A good idea.
Not the law.
?
-- "If, therefore, any be unhappy, let him remember that he is unhappy by reason of himself alone."
~Epictetus
Re:Light Speed limits...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
it is actually:
e = (plus/minus) mc squared...
Re:Light Speed limits...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
If I'm not mistaken, isn't E=MC^2 an abrbreviation of the fl formula?
- BS
Re:Light Speed limits...
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packeteer
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· Score: 2
The "c" in e=mc^2 is not the speed of light. It is the maximum speed of anything. Light will theoretically travel that fast in a vaccum but that doesn't exist. Time travels that fast when there is no other movement but thats also assuming you can find something not moving at all. But then again movement is all realative. So is the speed of anything, ouch my head. Anyway light goes about 3/4 of "c" in water so calling it the speed of light isn't correct. Also this is all theoretical and never actually was a "law". I should also point out that any theory to prove e-mc^2 wrong is ALSO just a theory.
Re:Light Speed limits...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
All movement ISN'T relative - the speed of light is the absolute which replaces a global time for everyone.
And here's a pet peeve: Calling something "just a theory" or saying it's all "theoretical" is crap. Combine the _theory_ of relativity with quantum _theory_ and you get Quantum Electrodynamics - the best "theory" ever conceived. Accurate to about 1 part in 10 billion so far. Newton's "Law" of gravity doesn't have that kind of accuracy. It's just a name - if the theory always works, what more do you want from it?
The more we learn
by
cbensinger
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· Score: 2, Insightful
the less it seems that we know. I'm not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination; but considering how much of our science is based on this kind of thing I do find it amazing that that at this point in time we're now questioning the e=mc^2....
If a modification like this is proved to be needed, it won't make much more of a difference than relativity did to Newton's equations: for most purposes, what we've been using to date is going to be perfectly adequate. Only at extreme velocities, scales and energy states do we see conditions where the modified equations make a difference.
Re:The more we learn
by
oateater
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· Score: 1, Flamebait
This makes me wonder if any other "laws" are going to be questioned in the years to come. Einstein was quite the odd-ball, having hardly (if ever) experimented any of these theories. So, of course they are flawed.
"Einstein was quite the odd-ball, having hardly (if ever) experimented any of these theories. So, of course they are flawed."
I checked your post history. You don't seem to be a troll, so assuming you just need some reproof, I can't let this one fly. Einstein wrote thousands of pages in his books and lectures, explaining every minute detail of his theories and their foundations. He coined the idea that the framework of basic particle physics is so simple that it is inexcusable not to be able to explain it to anybody.
And your logic statement? Roughly "Because he never explained them, they are flawed." This is a heinous logic fallacy right off the bat, even "pretending" that he never wrote a single book to explain his theories. It just makes no sense.
The parent said "experimented", not "explained", and actually is correct - Einstein didn't empirically test most of his theories. Of course, that's not really his fault, since he lacked the tools to do so, so you could look at it another way and be astonished at how correct his theories are, despite the fact that he was unable to test them to exhaustion.
Agreed, and why is mine flamebait? Abusive moderators rock!
Even if he was off..
by
OmniVector
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· Score: 4, Insightful
It still answered some questions and anomolies about the universe and changed the way we think about the world.
-- - tristan
Re:Even if he was off..
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iamdrscience
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Exactly, gravity in the way Newton theorized has also proven to have many shortcomings and to not be adequate for everything, but it works on a small scale, so it IS useful.
Rather more disturbingly, it showed that nuclear weapons were possible, i.e. you only need to lose a little bit of m to make an awful lot of E.
-- When I am king, you will be first against
the wall.
Light Speed Relative?
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cranos
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I thought this was obviouse. If a blackhole can suck light into it then it will be affecting the speed at which it travels, all celestial bodies will, its just the magnitude that differs.
Re:Light Speed Relative?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
It affects the trajectory of the light.
Re:Light Speed Relative?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
You're a moron, you can't spell and you don't even master high school physics. But Happy New Year anyways!
Re:Light Speed Relative?
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Jordy
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· Score: 4, Informative
A blackhole warps space and time around it. Light travels in a straight line, but since the space it is traveling over is warped, it enters the black hole.
The light itself does not speed up or slow down. From outside the blackhole, light is moving away from an observer at the speed of light. From inside the blackhole, light is moving towards you at the speed of light.
You have to remember that "speed" is a function of distance and time. Time is not constant, but from any frame of reference (you for instance) however, the "speed" of light is.
-- The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
blackhole's don't "suck" anything in. anything with a gravitational field "bends" light, or acts like as a lens because light has mass.
light traveling at c across the void of space and light orbiting a super-dense mass at c are still both moving at c. it's just that the latter will never leave the "event horizon" of the black hole. still the same speed.
Granted I am not a physics expert, but isn't this pretty old news? There have been good theories around for a long while that require either ammendments or nullification of Einstein's E=MC^2 to exist.
Re:Umm...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
you sir, are a crackpot. or willing to listen to crackpot theories. which makes you a crackpot anyway.
Re:Umm...
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Anonymous Coward
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you can't call yourself a scientist.
Re:Umm...
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Anonymous Coward
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You sir, are a terrorist
IN SOVIET RUSSIA
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Anonymous Coward
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mc^2 = e
Re:IN SOVIET RUSSIA
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Anonymous Coward
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ha ha
if this joke wasn't BEATEN TO FUCKING DEATH I'd say you should be modded up for TEH BIG FUNNIEZ
here's my take
IN SOVIET RUSSIA
e^2 = mc
Re:IN SOVIET RUSSIA
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
DIE!
Re:IN SOVIET RUSSIA
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Your comment is absolutely retarded. I don't even think any of the nerds who frequent this site could ever be amused by such a lame comment.
This "In Soviet Russia" thing is not funny, never was funny, and never will be funny. It isn't offensive or anything, it's just a really pathetic attempt at humor.
In Soviet Russia, people like you would be sent to gulags.
The ukraine is full of potatoes. Soviet russia needs no more potatoes.
--
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
Re:IN SOVIET RUSSIA
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
In SOVIET RUSSIA they don't use relativity but scalar electromagnetics, wich is one of the theories (not explicitly mentioned) in the article that could replace (special) relativity.
http://www.cheniere.org/toc.html
Re:IN SOVIET RUSSIA
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Anonymous Coward
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I think he left enough loop holes in his theories, that even if we did find evidence that the theory of relativity is incorrect, quantum physics makes it so that he's wrong and right at the same time!:)
-- And why did you staple the trout to the RAM?
You mean a scientific hypothesis could be wrong?!
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saskboy
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· Score: 1
You mean a scientific hypothesis could be wrong?!
Holy moly, who'd have thought that science could have taken a hypothesis as fact, without testing it first?
Really, did anyone think that we wouldn't ever improve our understanding of science to think of "constants" in a different way?
E=M*c^2 story.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 4, Informative
The New York Times Sponsored by Starbucks December 31, 2002 E and mc2: Equality, It Seems, Is Relative By DENNIS OVERBYE
Roll over, Einstein.
In science, no truth is forever, not even perhaps Einstein's theory of relativity, the pillar of modernity that gave us E=mc2.
As propounded by Einstein as an audaciously confident young patent clerk in 1905, relativity declares that the laws of physics, and in particular the speed of light -- 186,000 miles per second -- are the same no matter where you are or how fast you are moving.
Generations of students and philosophers have struggled with the paradoxical consequences of Einstein's deceptively simple notion, which underlies all of modern physics and technology, wrestling with clocks that speed up and slow down, yardsticks that contract and expand and bad jokes using the word "relative."
Guided by ambiguous signals from the heavens, and by the beauty of their equations, a few brave -- or perhaps foolhardy -- physicists now say that relativity may have limits and will someday have to be revised.
Some suggest, for example, the rate of the passage of time could depend on a clock's orientation in space, an effect that physicists hope to test on the space station. Or the speed of a light wave could depend slightly on its color, an effect, astronomers say, that could be detected by future observations of gamma ray bursters, enormous explosions on the far side of the universe.
"What makes this worth talking about is the possibility of near-term experimental implications," said Dr. Lee Smolin, a gravitational theorist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario.
Any hint of breakage of relativity, scientists say, could yield a clue to finding the holy grail of contemporary physics -- a "theory of everything" that would marry Einstein's general theory of relativity, which describes how gravity shapes the universe, to quantum mechanics, the strange rules that govern energy and matter on subatomic scales.
Even Einstein was stumped by this so-called quantum gravity.
For now, any clue would be welcome. There is very little agreement and much confusion about the possible end of relativity. "These are times when theorists are being very adventurous," said Dr. Andreas Albrecht, a physicist at the University of California at Davis. "It's hard to tell where things will go."
The avatars of new relativity have been encouraged by hints that some cosmic rays hitting Earth from outer space have more energy than normal physics can explain. But some scientists doubt that these rays exist or, if they do, that a violation of relativity is the only way to explain them.
The cosmic ray hints are not the only signs making physicists wonder about relativity. They have also been tantalized by evidence, as yet unconfirmed, from distant quasars that a fundamental constant of nature, a measure of the strength of electromagnetism known as the fine-structure constant, might have changed ever so slightly over billions of years, shifting the wavelengths of light emitted by the quasars.
The result has been a minor explosion of interest in strange relativity, with some 70 papers being published this year, said Dr. Giovanni Amelino-Camelia, a theorist at the University of Rome.
The field, while still small, is destined for at least 15 minutes of fame next year with the publication in February of "Faster Than the Speed of Light," by Dr. João Magueijo, a cosmologist at Imperial College London. The book is a racy account of Dr. Magueijo's seemingly heretical effort to modify relativity so that the speed of light is not constant, and he will promote it on a long lecture tour.
"Ruling out special relativity by 2005 is a bit extreme," Dr. Magueijo said in a recent e-mail message, referring to the coming centennial of Einstein's famous paper, "although I would be very surprised if by 2050 nothing beyond relativity has been found."
Most physicists have yet to buy into this presumed revolution. Dr. Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, called recent arguments that some versions of quantum gravity would violate relativity "unimpressive."
Dr. Juan Maldacena of Harvard said he doubted relativity was violated in string theory -- the leading candidate for a theory of everything. "But of course," he noted, "we should always test our theories."
Dr. Carlo Rovelli, a gravitational theorist at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille, said it was a "risky" hypothesis, "but the prize if it happened to be true is so great that it is worthwhile taking the risk of exploring it in detail."
Dr. Andrew Strominger of Harvard pointed out that Einstein himself modified relativity in 1915, when he brought gravity into the picture with his general theory of relativity. Special relativity, as the 1905 theory became known, is only strictly valid in flat space without gravity, Dr. Strominger said.
He added, "It is natural to think that Einstein's relativity will in some sense be violated by small corrections, just as Newton's theory of gravity has small corrections." These corrections did not make Newton wrong, he said, they just meant his theory was not always perfectly applicable. Likewise, relativity may give way to a more complete and accurate theory.
How relativity could break down, if it does, depends on how physics might accomplish its grand dream of quantum gravity.
Many physicists are placing their bets on string theory's mathematically imposing edifice in which nature comprises tiny strings vibrating in 10 dimensions of space-time. But this theory may play out in billions of ways, and some physicists complain that it can be made to predict almost anything.
In the late 1980's, Dr. V. Alan Kostelecky, a particle physicist at Indiana University, and his colleagues pointed out that in some of these solutions, the spins of the strings could impart an orientation to empty space, like the lines left by the weave in a fine cloth. In that case, they say, a clock oriented in one direction could tick slightly faster or slower than one oriented differently, in violation of the rules of relativity. That is something Dr. Kostelecky and his colleagues have proposed to test using ultraprecise clocks on the space station.
Dr. Kostelecky and his colleagues have constructed an extension to the standard model of particle physics that catalogs all the possible ways that relativity can be violated. Others, including Dr. Amelino-Camelia, Dr. John Ellis of CERN, Dr. Tsvi Piran of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the Harvard theorists Dr. Sheldon Glashow and Dr. Sidney Coleman, have attempted to study the ways that relativity can be violated by quantum gravity or in the high-energy cosmic rays.
Violation is not inevitable, Dr. Kostelecky said. "Is it plausible? Yes. Is it likely? Enough so that I've invested years of my life."
Few physicists would seem to have as much invested in revising relativity as Dr. Magueijo. In his book he describes how beginning in 1996 he cajoled Dr. Albrecht, then at Imperial, into pursuing with him the heretical notion that the speed of light had been much higher in the dim cosmic past as a solution to various cosmological puzzles. Cosmologists did not rally to the idea, which even Dr. Magueijo admitted violated relativity. His co-author, Dr. Albrecht, himself called it an idea that is "not even properly born yet," and said it needed to find roots "in some convincing physics."
In the intervening years, as a sideline to his day job as a conventional cosmologist, he and a growing number of comrades have continued to tinker with modifying relativity in a variety of ways that go under the umbrella name of V.S.L., for variable speed of light theories.
In the science world, the book might attract attention for its jaunty and irreverent style as well as for its content. "What the hell, it's only Einstein going out of the window . ..," he writes in one passage. In others he describes the editor at a prominent journal as a moron, his bosses at Imperial as pimps and the rival quantum gravity camps as cults.
Asked how he expected his colleagues to react to the book, he answered, "It wasn't written for them; it was written for the public." He called it "a very honest view of how scientists feel," adding, "It's the language I use normally."
The main motivation for considering V.S.L. theories, Dr. Magueijo explained, comes from the as-yet undiscovered quantum gravity. In relativity there is only one special number, the speed of light, but in quantum gravity, he explained, there is another special number, known as the Planck energy, equivalent to 1019 billion electron volts. According to quantum gravity thinking, an elementary particle accelerated to that energy will behave as if space and time themselves are lumpy and discontinuous and all the forces of nature are unified.
According to relativity, however, Dr. Magueijo explained, differently moving observers could disagree on how much energy the particle had and thus whether it was displaying quantum gravity effects or not. In short, they would disagree on what the laws of physics were.
"Perhaps relativity is too restrictive for what we need in quantum gravity," Dr. Magueijo said. "We need to drop a postulate, perhaps the constancy of the speed of light."
The most recent buzz in V.S.L. circles is about something called "doubly special relativity." In 2000, hoping to fix the cosmic ray problem, Dr. Amelino-Camelia proposed modifying the rules of relativity so that there would be a limit to the momentum that any particle could have, just as now there is a limit to the velocity.
Subsequently Dr. Magueijo and Dr. Smolin of the Perimeter Institute proposed their own doubly special version in which there is a limit to the amount of energy that an elementary particle can attain, namely the so-called Planck energy, at which the forces are unified and quantum gravity effects dominate.
One casualty of this tinkering, the V.S.L. scientists agree, will be everyone's favorite formula, E=mc2, to be replaced by a more complicated, cumbersome equation that Dr. Magueijo reproduces in his book.
A mark of all the doubly special theories, Dr. Magueijo said, is that the speed of light will vary with its color, with higher frequencies and energies going slightly faster than lower ones. That might manifest itself in observations of gamma ray bursters, distant gargantuan outbursts by an upcoming NASA satellite called Glast (gamma ray large area space telescope), scheduled for launching in 2006.
The theory also predicts that light should slow down near massive objects and actually come to a stop at the end of a black hole, preventing anything from entering that dark gate, Dr. Magueijo said in his book. In principle the effect, he said, could be tested by spectroscopic measurements of the light emitted from dense objects like neutron stars.
To some physicists, however, the very idea of variations in the speed of light in a vacuum -- the c in E=mc2 -- is meaningless. The miles and seconds by which speed is measured are human inventions, they point out, defined in fact in terms of lightwaves, so the whole notion of the speed of light varying is circular. In the last analysis, they point out, all physical measurements boil down to a few dimensionless constants like the fine structure constant, alpha. "What we measure objectively is whether alpha varies," said Dr. Michael Duff of the University of Michigan in an e-mail message.
Dr. Magueijo said those criticisms were technically correct but said the speed of light was one factor of several in the formula for alpha. So if alpha varied, as some astronomical measurements have suggested, one could choose to think of it as a variation in the speed of light, of electric charge, or even a variation in another number known as Planck's constant -- or all three -- if that made the math simpler. "It's a matter of convention," he said, adding, "you make the simplest choice."
Despite all the activity, scientists agree that they are mostly in the dark about the deeper consequences of these conjectures. "Some may eventually be developed to the point of being a credible alternative to relativity," conceded Dr. Kostelecky, saying that he suspected that others might not really change relativity or might have already been excluded by existing experiments. Without a systematic analysis it was impossible to know.
Dr. Amelino-Camelia said that the doubly special theories preserve Einstein's principle that all motion is relative, but at an unknown cost to the rest of physics."We paid a dramatic price for relativity: the notion of absolute time," he said. "This time it is not completely sure what is the axiomatic principle we have to give up."
Dr. Albrecht urged caution and said physicists needed guidance from experiments before tossing out beloved principles like relativity. "The most dignified way forward," he said, "is to be forced kicking and screaming to toss them out."
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company | Permissions | Privacy Policy
We all know...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
E = MC Hawking.:DDD
sorry.
i'm not a physicist, but...
by
condour75
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· Score: 1, Interesting
I think this is basically a rephrasing of a long-known fact, that is, that relativity doesn't have much to say at the sub-atomic level -- in other words, this equasion just says, yeah, E=mc2 as long as you're dealing with sufficient scales for quantum weirdness to even out. Can someone elaborate on this, or correct me?
Re:i'm not a physicist, but...
by
UserGoogol
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· Score: 0
My quick analysis of the new formula is that E=mc2 is true except for extremely massive objects (or, by virtue of E=mc2..., maybe very energetic objects. I'm not so sure.)
(Because in order for the formula to be very close to the current formula in normal situations, E[p] would have to be very very high. Which my memories seem to indicate. Thusly, in order for the formula to be effected, m has to be very large.)
-- "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
Of course not....
by
starsong
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· Score: 2, Informative
It's (E^2) = (m^2)(c^4) + (p^2)(c^2).
Unless everything in the universe has zero momentum, that is.:)
But no one ever said E=mc^2 for things with non-zero momentum. I think pretty much everyone in the world's understood E=mc^2 means non-moving objects have energy, which is why that statement is so profound.
... If you do i will have to shoot some sense into you all.
Will your bullets have momentum or should I quiver in fear at their rest energy?:)
Re:Of course not....
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
PLEASE don't shoot me for the senseless acts of others! PLEASE!! this isn't the Marine Corps, and i am an individual!!!!
aieee!!!
Re:Of course not....
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Anonymous Coward
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Suck my dick!
Re:Of course not....
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
"Relativistic mass" is both a misnomer and a relict from times when people tried to "save" non-relativistic relations (like p=mv) at all costs. Sadly enough, it is still found in a lot of introductory textbooks.
"Relativistic mass" is not a relativistic object - it doesn't have the correct transformation properties. In fact, it's not even a scalar object anymore if you try to keep p=mv - inertia becomes anisotropic.
"Rest mass" is a true blue Lorentz scalar and the only physically acceptable definition of mass.
Without doubt, a lot of this confusion comes from writing the relativistic dispersion equation as E^2=m^2c^4+p^2c^2, seemingly implying that energy is somehow special. In fact, E isn't a Lorentz scalar either, and the canonical way to write the dispersion relation is m^2c^4=E^2-p^2c^2 (each side of the equation is a Lorentz scalar now).
The notion that mass would depend on energy or momentum also leads to considerable difficulties in establishing relativistic field equations. It is almost trivial to do that using the (correct) relativistic dispersion relation.
No = Registration*link^2
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 5, Informative
(warning: Its new years, I am drunk.) E=mc^2 is the non-relitivistic version of the equation. Yes its only accurate when lambda is about one. When it is not the equation is E= lambda *mc^2 where lambda is like squroot(1/(1+ (V/c)^2) or something. But anyway, its silly to talk about things in physics not being absolutly correct. Nothing in physics is absolutly correct. Everything is an approximation, even the speed of light. Its just a matter of how accurate an approximation it is, and is it accurate enough for what you want to know. For most of us E=mc^2 is good enough, but for those folks who like to know the energy of particles moving really damm fast, well, they add the lambda. So that basicly is how it works.
Re:E=mc^2
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Those of us who never got past Newton and were happy with it thank you... For most of massive objects at puny speeds is still just fine.:)
Knowing that even physicists are guessing (a little) is immensely comforting.
Now you go explore the sublight physics of hangover.
When it is not the equation is E= lambda *mc^2 where lambda is like squroot(1/(1+ (V/c)^2) or something.
Um....what? E=mc^2 is the rest energy. How can the rest energy depend on lambda (or the speed of the object)?? As soon as the object starts moving, E=sqrt((mc^2)^2 + (pc)^2), which does depend on lambda, since p=lambda*mv. By the way, isn't gamma usually used instead of lambda (not that it matters).
Notation. Our professor always gave rest energy as E0, subscripted. (Forgot the CSS, too lazy to look it up. ^^; ) I like that because it's slightly clearer (to me, a programmer, who thinks everything starts with zero:3 ). And yeah, usually it's gamma.
(I almost replied to grandparent to remark that he sounds like my physics professor might when drunk. It'd be quite easy to imagine that if you knew my physics professor. He'd ofte^Wsometimes talk about random stuff in lecture, like how he and his wife accidentally stayed at this famous gay resort in Greece, and how being in physics made reading Greek road signs easier.)
Re:E=mc^2
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
"E=mc^2 is the non-relitivistic version of the equation"
I think if old Al were here, he'd beg to differ with you on that.
Re:E=mc^2
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Knowing that even physicists are guessing (a little) is immensely comforting.
Yeah, and do you know why this is so? It's because physics is about the real world;-)
can someone explain to me
by
SHEENmaster
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· Score: 3, Interesting
What c is relative to? When we say that a car is moving at 60mph we meann relative to the ground, but what is c relative to?
If it's relative to a "given thing" then doesn't that hint toward Ether theory? The further we go in AP Physics the more I realise that my school is imprepared to answer anything that comes up and that modern theories (String theory and the like) seem reminescant of the old ones like Ether theory.
-- You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Re:can someone explain to me
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MGehm
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· Score: 1
The answer is, in effect, relative to everything! That's the point of special relativity--no matter what you choose as your frame of reference, light has a speed of "c".
Since no reference frame is any more "important" than any other, the concept of an aether becomes superfluous.
-M
Re:can someone explain to me
by
Leers
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· Score: 2, Insightful
No, no, c is relitive to anything. That is the magic of the math of special relitivity. No matter what refrence frame you look at something moving at the speed of light, it is still moving at the speed of light. Distance and time are physicly warped to inforce this speed limit. It sounds crazy but its true. There is no ether.
Re:can someone explain to me
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josh+crawley
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· Score: 1
Well, I ask the basic question: Why cant matter go faster than light?
People answer that the mass => Infinity as Speed => C
Why? There must be something holding it back from reaching C . It cant be photons cause they go any which way. Somethings gotta be there resisting against everything, albeit very small. I look at that just like speed. You dont notice "time displacement" when driving to relatives, but you could notice it on high speed space voyages.. Perhaps this aether force is similar.
Could the aether force be even smaller than Plank distance?
Re:can someone explain to me
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rossifer
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· Score: 5, Interesting
c is relative to the observer, no matter which observer we're talking about. Anything that can measure the speed of a photon will always measure it going at the speed of light through that substance. Through a perfect vacuum, it's c. Through space it's c - epsilon (epsilon is an infintesimally small number). Through water it's about c/1.335.
If you are zooming past me at half the speed of light and both of us measure the speed of a particular photon at the same time, we'll both measure it's speed as c. What will be different about our two measurements is that you'll see a higher energy photon (bluer) than me if the photon is moving opposite to your motion relative to me and a lower energy photon (redder) if the photon is moving in the same direction as your motion relative to me.
No particular point in space is special. Once you identify where the observer is located, you can call that point in space an "origin" or "zero" and make all of your measurements from that point in space. The rest of the universe relative to that origin is called an "inertial reference frame", but it's just the same as any other reference frame. There's another trick. Behavior of things in inertial reference frames is time dependent because gravity pulls your frame around and changes everything around it slightly every moment. Besides that, two inertial reference frames may have a relative velocity but for a moment share the same point in space (the example above).
That's when tensor math starts to come in handy. Don't worry, I won't torture you with that.
Relativity, once you grok it, will bend your mind. From a metaphysical perspective, it emphasizes the reality that most of what we call facts are actually just high probability observations.
Remember, there is no spoon.
Regards, Ross
Re:can someone explain to me
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GMFTatsujin
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Lordy... You don't ask much, do you?
The speed of light is constant in all possible frames of reference, according to Einstein. Basically what he's saying is that for any two objects at rest relative to each other (regardless of their motion to the rest of the universe, they appear not to be moving to *each other*), time and space behave in the same way. The beauty of his theory is that no one object can be said to be at universal rest to everything else -- there is no universal frame to measure against. Therefore, every frame of reference is valid and will behave the same way. This kills Ether theory dead, since Ether theory depends on a universal frame of reference. If it didn't have a universal frame of reference, then space and time would start behaving oddly within your *own* frame of reference depending on your motion. This is not the case - the light on Pluto behaves the same way as the light on Earth, even though the two are moving in different frames.
It's only when you introduce out-of-frame references (I'm standing still, the train is moving at 60mph away from me) that relativity kicks in and the laws start to behave weirdly.
Not inconsistantly, just weirdly. It's all in shifting your viewpoint.
The trick with light is to realize that although it travels at the same speed in every frame of reference, the *wavelength* is what changes between frame. This is what that whole red-shifting/Doppler effect is about. The speed of light is constant; the color, however, changes depnding on your frame of reference. If you shoot a blue light at me while we're both standing still relative to each other, it looks blue to me. If I run away *really fast*, it will still be blue to you, but it will appear red to me because the wavelength alters even though it still travels toward me at a constant rate. Ditto if *you* run away from me - the light is blue to you, but again, it appears red to me, even though it travels at the same speed.
Light does not behave in the Newtonian way - acceleration does not effect its speed, only its wavelength. That's where the question of why light is constant to everything, even moving objects, is answered.
Weird, huh?
For a far, far, better explanation (and a fantastic grounding on String Theory in terms for non-physicists) check out The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene. If I could, I'd give this book a Pulitzer every year until the day I died.
Re:can someone explain to me
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
The fact that "c" = "c" only in a perfect vacuum tends to escape most people. That's why I'd love to explain Cerenkov Radiation to students when I used to work at a research reactor, and watch them get confused looks on their faces...
Re:can someone explain to me
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Interesting
it is time that is holding you back.
you can't go faster than light because time acts like drag. that is your opposing force.
you can't go any faster than time can travel. maybe it shouldn't be called the speed of light, but the speed of time? for every tick in the universe you can only move so far. sort of like the 1 ghz duron sitting next to me...only so many operations can be done in a second.
Re:can someone explain to me
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Guppy06
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· Score: 1
"What c is relative to?"
I may as well throw in my $0.02.
Don't think of it as a speed, think of it as a fixed ratio. Meters and seconds mean different things to different observers, but no matter where they are or what they're doing, there's always 3E8 meters per second.
c is constant. It's space and time that are relative.
Re:can someone explain to me
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GraZZ
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· Score: 1
c can be measured against any inertial (non-accelerating) frame of reference. So us sitting on planet Earth would be a good candidate, while us sitting on a rocket ship blasting off Earth would be a poor one.
Re:can someone explain to me
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
The way it is supposed to read is that an object's energy is equal to its mass at REST times the conversion factor squared. For some reason or other the 'r' is left out of the famous version of the equation.
An object that is moving has already had a drastic change in mass.
Re:can someone explain to me
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Old+Wolf
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· Score: 1
Since when is (c - an infinitesimally small number) smaller than c?
Re:can someone explain to me
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nathanh
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· Score: 2
What c is relative to? When we say that a car is moving at 60mph we meann relative to the ground, but what is c relative to?
Relative to the observer.
If there are two observers then both of them see light travelling at c, even if the two observers are moving relative to one another.
The further we go in AP Physics the more I realise that my school is imprepared...
The word is "unprepared". Don't neglect your English studies.
Re:can someone explain to me
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Soul-Burn666
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· Score: 1
Small correction. The wavelength 'changes' because your frame of referance forces a change in space/time to allow light to travel at the same speed relative to you.
-- "Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
Re:can someone explain to me
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ColaMan
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· Score: 2
Since when is (c - an infinitesimally small number) smaller than c?
Perhaps your infinitesimally small number is negative.
(ducks and runs for cover)
--
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike. There is a lot of hype here.
And, preemptively, I apologize if I screwed up, it's just that any attempt at understanding this relativity stuff will mess with your head, until you understand it thoroughly.
-- "Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
Re:can someone explain to me
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
"Relativity, once you grok it, will bend your mind. From a metaphysical perspective, it emphasizes the reality that most of what we call facts are actually just high probability observations."
Einstein did not play dice... and neither GR nor SR is based on probability.
Well, I ask the basic question: Why cant matter go faster than light?
People answer that the mass => Infinity as Speed => C
Why? There must be something holding it back from reaching C .
Not necessarily. First, I don't like that view of mass varying with speed, because then mass is no longer what one is used to. I prefer to reason in terms of momentum and kinetic energy: "p=(gamma)mv" and "Ec=(gamma-1)mc^2", with "gamma=1/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2)".
Then, as you can see, your momentum p climbs to infinity as you approach the speed of light. So, if you are to accelerate, a (finite) force F has to push you, and "dp/dt=F". But however strong F is, p cannot reach infinity in a finite time. Therefore you cannot reach lightspeed that way.
That's the big thing about relativity: c is absolute. That's why the Ether theory doesn't work. No matter what frame of reference you're in, you will always measure c to have the same value.
The contortions the universe must go through to preserve this invariant are truly mind-boggling, and lead to all the strange "relativistic effects" you may have heard of, such as items gaining mass as they approach the speed of light.
-- Patrick Doyle I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Re:can someone explain to me
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Actually, that's the idea behind tacheons, that they are particles of matter that travel faster than light. They would have to move backwards through time to do this, which has some evidence to support that they do and do exist. The problem is, nothing with mass is supposed to be able to travel AT the speed of light. Not much stands in the way of going faster than light (a particle actually goes faster as it loses energy at that point, as it would be traveling backwards through time and reverse back to when it had zero energy) except for the speed limit AT the speed of light.
For reference, read John Gribbon "Unveiling the Edge of Time". It is, of course, a laymans book on physics. But the man who wrote it is a genius at the stuff, unlike myself. He can explain the idea better than I can.
Re:can someone explain to me
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
What evidence is there for tachyons? Anything experimental at all?
Re:can someone explain to me
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rossifer
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· Score: 2
That's true, and not what I was talking about. When you understand GR or SR from a theoretical level up through the practical applications, the tendency to make forceful assertions goes way down.
You will have been dragged over the coals of conditional thinking and understanding to learn this stuff. At that point, unless you think like a scientist about what you know, you're going to come to a lot of overeager conclusions.
Re:can someone explain to me
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Q+Who
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· Score: 1
Dude... excellent troll. You are a master.
Respect.
Re:can someone explain to me
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cyberkreiger
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· Score: 1
+5 Insightful. Your comment made my brain go "click".
-- Stumbling in the dark
I hear slavering of jaws
Eaten by a grue.
Re:can someone explain to me
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bitfoam
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· Score: 1
The speed of light is constant in all possible frames of reference, according to Einstein
Alwright, I gun the throttle of my Model Z Star Cruizer, and accelerate steadlily towards lightspeed.
Now, in my frame of reference (i.e. from the cockpit of my Cruizer), the light from my console radiates away at, well, the speed of light. The light that radiates thru my forward viewport travels ahead of my vehicle's path at, again, the speed of light, yes? And this would be true at any speed that I travel at?
If I understand this correctly, then, I would never be able to travel fast enough to catch up with the laser bolt that I shoot ahead of my trajectory.
When do I really really approach "the speed of light?" When does my increase in mass approach infinity, prohibiting acceleration beyond a given velocity? Is my own frame of reference paramount or inconsequential?
The mind boggles.
Re:can someone explain to me
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
btw. do you know the shortest math joke?
epsilon < 0
Re:can someone explain to me
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osu-neko
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· Score: 1
When do I really really approach "the speed of light?"
The moment you begin accelerating, you're approaching the speed of light.
When does my increase in mass approach infinity, prohibiting acceleration beyond a given velocity?
If by "approach infinity" you mean get bigger, this happens as soon as you begin accelerating. It's not like you're mass doesn't start to increase until you reach a certain speed -- the moment you get up and walk across the room, your mass increases. When you mass increases, it requires more energy to accelerate, or the same amount of energy yields less acceleration. It will always be positive, so you will never reach a point where you can't go any faster. You'll never reach a point where you're prohibited from accelerating. But you'll always be short of c, and when you accelerate, you'll make the amount that you're short smaller, but you'll never be able to get it to zero.
Is my own frame of reference paramount or inconsequential?
It's paramount to you, it's inconsequential to me...
-- "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Re:can someone explain to me
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bitfoam
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· Score: 1
The moment you begin accelerating, you're approaching the speed of light.
Yes, but even when I'm "near" the speed of light, if I shoot a laser beam forward it will travel away from my ship at the speed of light! Leaving the math out of it for the moment, this concept seems to imply that there are no limits to velocities that I can accelerate to.
Getting back to the point: how do we explain an apparant increase in mass with velocity, when velocity is relative to your frame of reference? From my frame of reference now I am stationary typing at my keyboard. From another frame of reference, I may be ripping past at an astounding speed as a result of the combined movement of the planet, solar system, etc. This whole "mass increases with velocity" thing seems to demand an absolute frame of reference to hold true... surely there must be an essential concept that I'm missing here.
Let's take another situation: we have three bodies, A, B, and C. From C's frame of reference, C is stationary, while A and B are travelling at velocities approaching the speed of light... toward each other. Now, before A and B collide, what does A see from his frame of reference? He passes C at a velocity near the speed of light, while he is heading toward an immenent collision with B at, what... twice that speed?
Someone please smack me upside the head, something inside ain't working....
Re:can someone explain to me
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Tardigrade
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· Score: 1
"You'll never reach a point where you're prohibited from accelerating. But you'll always be short of c, and when you accelerate, you'll make the amount that you're short smaller, but you'll never be able to get it to zero."
This seems to imply a non-disrete space and/or time. I thought the Planck units implied disreteness. Can you please explain?
Not too new; E = mc*c
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
There is an excellent book called "Concepts of Mass in contemporary physics and philosophy" that is worth reading. In it, they explain that Einstein was never able to be satisfied with his derivation; he was never able to establish a general proof of the relation. Chapter 3 discusses this.
happy new year to you, sir or madam
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Here's wishing you and yours the best in 2003.
Your Pal, Anonymous Coward
Could it be???
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
FP! And Einstein could never suck his own cock, so I don't know what all the fuss is about.
gravity effects are instantaneous
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JeanBaptiste
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· Score: 1
like if the earth suddenly teleported to twice the distance away from the sun that it is now, the change in the effect of gravity would happen right away, rather than at the speed of light. I think magnetism is the same way. If nothing can go faster than the speed of light... still might there be a way to communicate faster than the speed of light using gravitational or magnetic fluctuations? Is there anything else that would effect instantly?
Re:gravity effects are instantaneous
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Feanor1
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Well this is still in debate. Since it is impossible to "transport" an object in that sence, no one has yet to be able to say that it is instantanius.. and Magnatism is definitely not the same way.. I believe its logical to assume that Gravity is Not Instantanious.. Example.. The stars as we see them in the universe are not actually where we see them.. we see them as they were several to hundreds to Thousands of years ago.. Yet if we calculate where gravity is interacting, its where we see it..
There is a study being done now I believe that is designed to find out if gravity travels instantaniously or if its trackable.. but as a logical person, I find it much more likely that at best it travels faster than we can track, not instantaniously. Much the way Light was thought to travel instantaniously before it was clocked at really really fast.
-Slashdot, Add spell check!:)
Re:gravity effects are instantaneous
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rsidd
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· Score: 5, Informative
Wrong. Newtonian gravity suggests effects should be instantaneous, that's why Einstein knew it was wrong and came up with the general theory of relativity, which is the best theory of gravity we have today (and unlike special relativity which was built on the work of others, GR was Einstein's own, nobody else was even thinking along those lines.)
As for magnetism, that travels at the speed of light -- that has been known since Maxwell's time. Basically, that's what electromagnetic radiation is: a changing magnetic field causes a changing electric field, which causes a changing magnetic field,.... The paradox was that Maxwell's equations give you a constant for the speed of light, without reference to the velocity of the observer, so people assumed that they are valid only in the rest frame of a mythical "ether". Einstein showed that Maxwell's equations are correct for all observers, and it is Newton's/Galileo's ideas which are wrong.
Incidentally, just like electromagnetic radiation, GR implies that gravity waves should exist too.
Re:gravity effects are instantaneous
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Fastolfe
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· Score: 2
This is incorrect. Gravitational and magnetic fields are most certainly limited by the speed of light.
This is how we have things like electro-magnetic waves and gravitational waves. If time (speed) did not factor in to magnetism or gravity, there would be no such thing as a wave based on either of these things.
Re:gravity effects are instantaneous
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
If the Earth were to suddenly teleport, then that would be the fastest way to send a signal.
Since a mass cannot be accelerated beyond c, and we have no way of sending a signal faster either, you could never find out if gravity effects travelled faster than light. The concept of 'simultaneous' is meaningless when you are dealing with more than one observer in our universe.
Re:gravity effects are instantaneous
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Esion+Modnar
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· Score: 1
Actually, the use of tuned phase multipliers can achieve FTL communication. But I've said too much...
--
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
The speed at which changes in gravity are detected really depends on the fundamental nature of gravity which is still not understood. Is it caused by a type of displacement in space-time as often described using the rubber sheet analogy or is it the result of some kind of theoretical graviton particle(I haven't seen any actual research on this, but I've heard a professor mention it)?.
If it's caused by a displacement in space-time or any other of a huge number of phenomena that we haven't discovered yet, it's entirely possible for changes in gravity to take effect thoughout the entire universe instantaneously. Our rules of physics only currently apply to phenomena that exist in the four dimensions we're aware of. Gravity has a 3-dimensional component that we can measure to determine the gravitational attraction between bodies, but it may also have extra-dimensional properties that appear to break some of our existing rules. Should gravitational force be the result of something beyond what can be perceived 3-dimensionally, then it doesn't necessarily have to be bound by our current understanding of physics.
I'm reminded of the example of a cone. As you look down into the cone if you were a two-dimensional being you would see only a circle; you could not perceive the depth of the cone. In fact, you'd think the shortest distance from one side of the circle to the other were to traverse the diameter. Since this is a cone, however, it's shorter to actually traverse half the circumference instead to reach the other side.
As simplistic an example as that is, it serves to show us that we perceive 3 (and to a limited degree 4) dimensions out of a possibly infinitely dimensional universe. Forces that act on dimensions beyond what we can directly perceive may "break" the rules that we make for dimensions we can perceive.
You may agree with me... you may disagree... but it doesn't really matter.:) All that matters is that we keep an open mind and not let the "rules" constrain us as we attempt to explore the unknown.
Re:gravity effects are instantaneous
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noshellswill
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· Score: 0
Constant C w.r.t any reference frame...I believe that was an experimental observation by Michaelson & Morley .
Re:gravity effects are instantaneous
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JayateMo
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· Score: 2, Informative
As someone pointed out, its work in progress(everything is). Kopeikin will try to settle this once and for all but One should know that there is people who disagree with Kopeikin's
experiment model(pdf),
e.g. H.Asada.
He's view is that it will measure the EM speed, which everybody(well almost..) agrees
on.In this(pdf) paper he points to
the Light-cone effect on the Shapiro time delay
(and here is Kopeikin's
answer to that). There are a people out there, mostly physics and astronomers who questions
the Gravity propagation speed(yeah..what speed are we talking about?), many of them called crackpots. Among famous astronomers
you'll find Tom Van Flandern and friends here.
You'll find he's wrap-up on the matter
here. And if you
want more, follow this thread.
Please try to use EM instead of just light, some people get confused:)
Re:gravity effects are instantaneous
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Old+Wolf
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· Score: 1
you seem knowledgable.. so can you explain how a photon works?
when you say 'there is an electric field' you mean that if there were a charge in the area then it would feel force.. so how can a bit of field move so far away from its source (without losing its strength?)
When you look at a star does that mean there is an electric field between you and the star?
also, normally when you talk about waves, it's force propagating through something (eg. in water waves the energy moves along and the water moves up and down). You can distinguish transverse waves from longitudinal waves by which direction the 'something' moves. With light waves, what's moving up and down? (and if you say 'nothing', then how can you call light waves transverse?)
Re:gravity effects are instantaneous
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
>>"can you explain how a photon works?" Too much math involved to really answer this here (Also I only know classical E&M, not any quantum so I'm not even qualified to answer)
>>"when you say 'there is an electric field' you mean that if there were a charge in the area then it would feel force.. so how can a bit of field move so far away from its source (without losing its strength?)" This again requires quite a bit of math to prove but it comes from the idea that changing an electric field will produce a magnetic field and vice-versa, so that you can have fields that go on producing themselves forever while propagating through (free) space. (It is all predicted by Maxwell's equations, which require vector calc to really understand)
>>"also, normally when you talk about waves, it's force propagating through something (eg. in water waves the energy moves along and the water moves up and down). You can distinguish transverse waves from longitudinal waves by which direction the 'something' moves. With light waves, what's moving up and down? (and if you say 'nothing', then how can you call light waves transverse?)"
The electric and magnetic fields point in different directions from the direction in which the wave is propagating. This is what it means when someone says they are transverse waves. You have to think of the fields as vectors where the field at a given spot in space is pointing in a particular direction. Then as the wave passes, the fields (electric + magnetic) are pointing 90 degrees from eachother and 90 degrees from the direction of propagation (this is actually only true in free space), which of course is possible in 3D (not in 2D, just don't want to confuse you)
hope that helped
Re:gravity effects are instantaneous
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Kourino
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· Score: 1
No. As far as we know, all four "fundamental" forces (counting electric and weak separately) take time to take effect. This time depends basically on the qualities of the force carriers for this force.
(Note, turning simplification "on" because I have a simplistic view of a complex theory here:) Also, this is mostly correct, though I'm probably explaining some things poorly due to poor recollection and lack of sleep.)
The strong force happens on an order of 10e-22 seconds for an interaction. It's the quickest of the forces because it happens over short distances (atomic nuclei) and its force carriers (gluons) are massless, though they have strong charge.
The weak force is still relatively fast, but is between nine and fourteen orders of magnitude slower than the strong force. It happens over shorter distances (three orders of magnitude shorter than the strong), but its force carriers (positive/negative W and neutral Z bosons) are very massive, 80 or 90 times more massive than a proton. (ie, about as massive as a strontium atom) The high-massed particles limit the force's range, and high-massed particles don't tend to move. So, the weak interaction is slow.
The electromagnetic force is faster: its force carrier is the familiar massless proton, which doesn't decay (IIRC!). So, the electromagnetic force has higher range and basically happens at the speed of light (since "light" is its carrier).
Finally, gravity. We don't know much about gravity except that it's weaker and slower than any of the other forces. (Well, we know some of what the characteristics of its force carrier "have to" be from theory, for example, that "gravitons" have to have spin 2 for lots of other things to work out right. But coming up with a good quantum gravity theory, like we have quantum theories for the other three forces, has been *hard*, and a good one hasn't been decided on.) Gravity is basically 40 orders of magnitude weaker than the strong force and works slowest.
Of course, we like to think that there's some underlying interaction that these forces come out of. We haven't found it yet. That's what grand unified theories of everything are about. However, since none of these forces act *instantly*, and would take noticeable times to travel over large distances (if they could at all! W/Z bosons would probably decay), no, there probably isn't a way to exploit fundamental forces to communicate instantaneously, at least assuming that gravity follows a nice, clean quantum theory (which probably most people hope it does).
Probably. I have heard interesting things about communicating via pairs of particles with almost identical quantum states that basically mimic each other's state no matter what, but I don't remember much about this and it's actually quite different than communicating via "gravitational or magnetic fluctuations". There are many strange and rather counterintuitive bits about QM...
Re:gravity effects are instantaneous
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Kourino
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· Score: 1
With light waves, what's moving up and down?
Errm. Light also behaves as a particle though.:) That's why CCDs work so well. Someone else will hopefully come explain this better. (Me saying this now should encourage that due to akpm's Theory of Incorrect Patches -_^ ) But...
Light can best be thought on simple terms as being comprised of particles with wavelike nature. It's often most convenient to think of actual light particles. (For example, the photoelectric effect is best explained by particles of light.) However, these "particles" interact with each other in ways that are more suggestive of classical wave theory. (Hence interference and Moire patterns in diffraction gratings.) Both of these happen on a fairly fundamental level.
One of the best (mathematically cleanest, most handily explains observed effects) solutions as to what exactly is happening with light is QED, quantum electrodynamics. I don't have a real solid grasp on this yet, but I understand it basically explains photons and electrons as energy perturbations in a ubiquitous quantum field. I guess this would mean that the behaviours we observe as photons are kind of like wave packets. The particles are really just bunched-up waves. What's waving is the universal quantum field.
This is fairly complex stuff, graduate-level physics. I'm told that Feynmann's "QED, the Strange Theory of Light and Matter" is a good relatively elementary introduction to what QED actually is and means, and how it explains light and electricity. (Richard Feynmann being one of the co-developers of the QED theory and the single name most often associated with it.)
So yes. I'm not sure that calling light a "transvers wave" is 100% accurate, as far as the theories go, but it's a good way to explain observed behaviour. (Kind of like Newtonian mechanics isn't accurate for all cases, but it's "good enough" for most things everyone will ever deal with.)
Re:gravity effects are instantaneous
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rsidd
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· Score: 2
There are a couple of other good answers to your question already. About photons, it's best to keep that out in this discussion: basically, there are two different, separate corrections to classical Newtonian mechanics: relativity, and quantum mechanics. It turns out that classical electromagnetic theory is already correct with respect to relativity. quantum electrodynamics is the quantum version of it, but it is needed only in the limit of small photon numbers: that is, when the intensity of light is very low, or when interactions with single electrons (or other subatomic charged particles) are important. If we're thinking about radio waves, optical telescopes, etc, we don't need to worry about single photons at all. But to understand how atoms emit light, or the photoelectric effect, or how CCDs work, we do need to use quantum mechanics.
Even in quantum mechanics, photons aren't the same "sort" of particles as electrons. You can put any number of photons in the same "state", thereby approximating a classical wave. You can put no more than one electron in the same state (two if you ignore spin), so you can never have anything like a classical wave of electrons.
About your other questions: yes, the field does lose its strength as it moves out (except for special cases like a laser). Light is a rapidly oscillating electromagnetic field. We call it transverse because the electric and magnetic fields point perpendicular to the direction of motion (and also perpendicular to each other). All this comes out of Maxwell's equations, and is discussed in elementary texts like Resnick and Halliday. Not possible to give a detailed answer on slashdot, I'm afraid.
Re:gravity effects are instantaneous
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Photons:
"First quantization is a mystery, but second quantization is a functor."
There is a formal procedure for taking a classical field theory (based on a continuous Lagrangian) and transforming it into a quantum field theory. This is particularly simple for photons because they are spin-0 particles and the Lagrangian is simple to write down (take Maxwell's equations and perform the standard magic on them: see Goldstein). We basically get a Hamiltonian in terms of some coordinate p and its generalized momentum q. We posit that p and q satisfy the normal commutators [p,q]=ihbar and then introduce creation and annihilation operators (which represent creating or destroying a single photon of a given polarization and energy from the field). A notable early result is the existence of a zero-point energy in the field. Incidently, this is responsible for the radiative decay of excited atoms (see Einstein's A and B coefficients). Wonderful stuff!
Re:gravity effects are instantaneous
by
Fulcrum+of+Evil
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· Score: 2
As I recall, if you model the solar system with gravity propagating at C, everything crashes into the sun in fairly short order.
-- "We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala,
it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Re:gravity effects are instantaneous
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Not to get technical, but:
Buffalo feces.
Re:gravity effects are instantaneous
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Photons are spin 1.
Re:gravity effects are instantaneous
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
There's no connection between the strengths of the four forces and their speeds of propagation. The EM force carrier is the pHoton. The range of the forces is determined by the mass of the carrier - for EM (and almost certainly gravity) that mass is zero, which means the force can be felt over an arbitrarily large distance. The strong & weak forces are mediated by massive particles (like the W+/- and Z for the weak force, which incidentally do decay), and that's why they have short ranges. The uncertainty principle says if you're borrowing lots of energy (for massive particles) from the vacuum, you have to give it back quickly, which means the particle won't travel too far.
There's no reason to believe gravity travels more slowly than light - in fact, if gravity has an infinite range, gravitons must travel exactly at the speed of light.
As far as the FTL communication with quantum states, google for Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen, Alain Aspect, and John Bell. You can't use these things to send a message.
Re:gravity effects are instantaneous
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ChaoticLimbs
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· Score: 1
but there IS no gravitational "field". Gravity does not exist. Space simply deforms around massive objects. Gravity doesn't travel. It just appears to exist. If you were teleported away from the earth in zero seconds( instantaneously), the EFFECT of gravity would seem to disappear instantly as well. If the earth were suddenly removed from underneath you, it would feel exactly the same way. If a distant object were removed instantly, the gravity from it would also disappear instantly. Space would lose its curvature, but would travel no faster than c. This means that the effect of gravity upon space, as we can see it, would appear to travel at c or slower, while the actual forces at work deforming space would disappear in zero time. To describe gravity as existing in a field ignores the fact that every object bends space in a fashion that exists at all points in the universe, but more of this effect is detectable near the object. It's as if you had a tablecloth stretched way out until its surface was perfectly flat, and then placed a single grain of rice at the center. You may not be able to detect the curvature, but in reality, every point on the tablecloth has been deflected to some degree. There is no longer a plane. There is a curve with a smaller radius at the rice, and approaching an infinite radius at the edge. It will NEVER reach that point where it is flat. The size of the tablecloth is irrelevant.
Re:gravity effects are instantaneous
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ChaoticLimbs
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· Score: 1
Gravity is instantaneous. If you punch a trampoline and then withdraw your fist, even distant points feel the force at exactly the moment you punched the trampoline. However, they cannot move until the trampoline fabric moves in a ripple. That's what's wierd about relativity as I see it. The effect of an action can contain no more energy than the energy of the action plus any energy released by the action.
To demonstrate that space behaves like an elastic fabric AND that effects of "gravity" have no time, I suggest comparing the ripple created by punching a trampoline with the effect created in the next illustration: Fill a rigid tube with similarly rigid balls of a very slightly smaller diameter. at one end, add another ball. You will notice that the ball at the end of the tube falls out at the same moment you added the new ball. This would be true even if the tube were 10 billion miles long. (the problem then would be difficulty of accelerating all of those balls at once diring any new-ball insertion) The neat thing is that space has no mass, so deflecting it is easy. Doing it requires no energy. If you could magically create a 10 lb bowling ball at the center of the trampoline, the ball and trampoline would deform at 9.8m/s but in a spacetime curvature it happens all at once. Objects and other stuff in space is limited to c, so they don't all drop at once.
That's the paradox...
by
starsong
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· Score: 5, Informative
...and the beauty of special relativity.
They key thing is that the speed of light is fixed relative to *everything*. This means that if I'm standing by the highway and measure it, I get the same speed as a person in a car going 60 mph away from me. And since the speed of light is fixed, everything ELSE distorts to make up for it. That includes time (time dilation) and space (Lorentz contraction). It leads to some pretty freaky and amazing consequences.
Re:That's the paradox...
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Trogre
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· Score: 5, Informative
A good way to observe (well, simulate) some of these effects is to download lightspeed and have a play. Effects such as Lorentz contraction, doppler shift, headlight effects and optical aberrations can be observed. Very cool with the add-on Starship Voyager model.
There's also some very nice mpegs floating around the net of tram cars and flashing lamp posts in a world where the speed of light is slowed to a couple of meters per second. Now if only I could dig up the URL...
-- "Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Re:That's the paradox...
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Canar
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· Score: 2, Informative
Not the site exactly you're looking for (I've seen that one too), but another site with relativity ray tracings: [LINK]
well, of course...
by
QID
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· Score: 5, Informative
E=mc^2 is actually a simplified form of the real equation, E=mc^2/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2). A convenient graphical depiction can be found in a few seconds with google, or here: http://www.btinternet.com/~j.doyle/SR/Emc2/Derive. htm.
E=mc^2 is the simplified form used for massive particles. The equation, which must be used in general circumstances is
E^2= c^2 * p^2 + m^2 * c^4.
If the momentum(p=dx/dt) is zero, i.e, the particle is not accelerating(which is different from at rest or not moving), we end up with e=mc^2, or the oft cited rest energy. If the particle is massless, it still has momentum, and therefore energy.
The full equation describes the energy of all particles, both massive and massless, within theory of special reletivity.
I suspect that any discussion that uses the other two special cases is flawed.
-- "She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide."
Orphan Black
E=mc^2 is generally well known as the rest energy of a piece of matter in a non-inertial frame of reference (if v=0, your equation simplifies to it). Hence it isn't really simplified; the equation you give is just more general.
It's not Einstein's fault that the public was content to take a dumbed down version:P
If v=c, you've got a chunk of matter moving at the speed of light, and energy has every right to be undefined when impossible things like that start happening.
They are the same equation in different form. You can derive one from the other. Although the latter one is admittedtly nicer, because you can use it for particles with no rest mass (m0=0, v=c), when the first one gives just 0/0.
I believe that E=mc^2/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2) is a simplified form too. I seem to remember an infinite regress of derivitives in the derivation. There's a pretty good argument that the contribution from all of the higher derivitives is negligible, but it is truncated. I believe that they stopped with acceleration, and didn't include the higher derivitives (surge, jerk, etc.). This creates the logical possibility that someone with one of those rotating weight gizmos actually has something real. But, of course, there's a bit of a difference between a logical possiblity and an actuality. Still...
OTOH, I seem to recall that it was solved exactly for circular motion (closed paths? It's been so long I wouldn't even know where to look this up.), and proved equivalent to the simplified form. So perhaps the more general case could be handled if anyone saw any reason to.
--
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Re:well, of course...
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DudeG
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· Score: 3, Informative
I think you're thinking of the expansion of E=mc^2/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2), which produces
E=m c^2 + 0.5 m v^2 +...
where m is the rest mass. This is a beautiful piece of math. It shows that the kinetic energy that we already knew about (0.5 m v^2) is actually an artefact of the relativistic change in mass.
The rest of the terms are negligible for low v, which is why we never noticed it in the lab before Einstein.
Anyone else read this and get a flashback to an exam, say in college were you got the answer right but the prof. took off points because there was some slight flaws in your work or thinking. You were not wrong you just had a few things sketchy or didn't explain it well enough. One of those deals you just want to go insane on the prof on. Your right enough and nothing bad will happen with your result. Can just see a prof. pulling one of those on Albert.
> If you're in a car that's going at the speed of > light, what happens when you turn on the headlights?
Moot question. It would literally take you an infinite amount of time to turn on your headlights. Well, not *infinite*. Better word to describe it is that it's a number divisible by zero. Since your rate of time progression is zero, so the amount of time required to do any action would be proportionate to the inverse of that rate.
-JC
IN SOVIET RUSSIA
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
The gulags would be sent to people like YOU
I just thought of the funniest joke
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 2, Funny
Hope you like it:
IN SOVIET RUSSIA,
mc**2 = e
Heheee. +5 FUnny,.
so if two objects are traveling toward the same
by
SHEENmaster
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· Score: 2
point at c/2 from opposite directions they both gain infinite mass!?
By that same argument if I am traveling at c toward Earth, Earth gains infinite mass and the gravitational pull drags me toward it even faster!
No offense, but this makes no sense. Either none of us understand it, or the emporor has no theory.
-- You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Re:so if two objects are traveling toward the same
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lirkbald
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· Score: 4, Informative
point at c/2 from opposite directions they both gain infinite mass!? Nope. Drop all your newtonian physics assumptions out the window. Speed is relative as well, and doesn't add in such a straightforward fashion. An observer on one object will actually measure the velocity of the other as something less than c. (pardon me if I don't go look up the exact equations right now). That's where relativistic time dialation comes from- time has to slow down to make up for the non-additive properties of velocity.
By that same argument if I am traveling at c toward Earth, Earth gains infinite mass and the gravitational pull drags me toward it even faster! Wrong again. You can't travel at c toward earth, so the question is meaningless. It takes infinite energy for a massive to reach that velocity, so it's impossible.
No offense, but this makes no sense. Either none of us understand it, or the emporor has no theory. Quite a bit of offense taken, actually. You missed the third possibility, that *you personally* don't understand it, and that physicists do. Do you really think that points as obvious as yours would have been missed in all the years that Relativity has been under close scrutiny?
Oh, well. People who argue "I don't get it, therefore it's wrong" annoy me.
Re:so if two objects are traveling toward the same
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NewbieProgrammerMan
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· Score: 1
As someone else remarked elsewhere, wtf? Maybe this is an example of Relativity Ass-Talking Syndrome (RATS), a close relative of Quantum Ass-Talking Syndrome (QATS)
I am not a physicist, but I have some minimal exposure to the concepts of relativity, and I think I can make the following statements:
1) You can't just add speeds of two objects traveling in opposite directions at c/2 and end up with a mutually relative speed of c. Another example: If you're riding on a vehicle traveling at 0.5c, and you throw a baseball at (from your perspective) 0.5c, a 'stationary' oberver (one who sees you fly past at 0.5c) will see the baseball traveling at 0.86c (I think) instead of c.
2) The only thing that can travel towards Earth *at* c would be light. IIRC Einstein discussed what an observer riding on a light wave would see, but that was just a thought experiment and I don't really recall much about it.
These things do not 'make sense' to our brains because we don't deal with relativistic speeds first-hand. Maybe things would be different if our ancestors had routinely traveled at a significant fraction of c.
You might want to go look up "Lorentz transformations" or get Einstein's works (the "Relativity" book on my shelf is ISBN 0-517-029618). If you're lucky enough to have access to it, there was a TV series called "The Mechanical Universe" that has some cool explanations of these things.
-- [b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
Re:so if two objects are traveling toward the same
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Alsee
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· Score: 2
so if two objects are traveling toward the same point at c/2 from opposite directions they both gain infinite mass!?
The problem is that you think 30mph + 30mph is 60mph, but it isn't. 30mph + 30mph is really 59.99999999999999999mph
Is is so close to 60mph that you can't measure the difference. 30mph is extremely close to zero c so the "missing speed" is close to zero. As you get closer to the speed of light the "missing speed" gets closer to one.
0.99c + 0.99c = 0.99995c 1c + 1c = 1c
Speeds never add up to a value above c.
Either none of us understand it, or the emporor has no theory.
No, things just get really wierd at high speeds and you don't understand it.
-
-- - - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Re:so if two objects are traveling toward the same
by
wass
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· Score: 3, Informative
point at c/2 from opposite directions they both gain infinite mass!?
NO, you cannot look at a relative velocity in a simple Newtonian method, as others have described above.
You can realize this easily by looking at the Lorentz transform of an object in a moving frame as observed from the rest frame, to determine the relative velocity. Or from the moving frame.
Just to get you started, because it looks like you're rather confused, here are the Lorentz transforms. I hope you understand what the Lorentz transforms are. Basically, they let you convert an event occuring at a specific time/place in one frame to the time/place in another frame. We'll assume 1-D systems here, which is essentially true because only the direction of motion is Lorentz-contracted. Note, these formulae convert a moving frame to the rest frame (where the moving frame is moving at velocity v in positive coordinate number relative to the rest frame).
x'=gamma(x+v*t)
t'=gamma(t+v*x/c^2)
Okay, now the fun part. Assume an object moves distance dx in time dt in the moving frame. how far does it move in the rest frame?
Plug in, and then divide and we get our relativistic velocity.
The object in the moving frame moves at velocity dx/dt, so we'll call that velocity u. Thus, we want the speed u as measured in the rest frame.
u'=(u+v)/(1+uv/c^2)
That is the formula you should be using. Note that at very small relative velocity between frames, uv/c^2 is practically zero, and hence you can use the Newtonian relative velocity formula u'=u+v. But at appreciable speeds, it's not valid. And plugging in numbers for your v=c/2 example, from one of the incoming reference frames you would see the other frame moving at v=(4/5)c, which is CLOSE to c but definitely LESS THAN c.
Happy New Year to all you other folks on slashdot, It's 4am here, and i'm not sober yet, but my girlfriend is still talking to her family in El Salvador so I'm still browsing/. yay...
--
make world, not war
Re:so if two objects are traveling toward the same
by
Old+Wolf
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· Score: 2
Funny that you open your post with "30 + 30 isn't 60" and your tagline is making fun of "50 + 1 - 1 isn't 50":)
Re:so if two objects are traveling toward the same
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mgv
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· Score: 2
Funny that you open your post with "30 + 30 isn't 60" and your tagline is making fun of "50 + 1 - 1 isn't 50":)
You see, the karma you have - k - can never exceed 50. Its pretty much the same with light. Because ordinary human brains have alot of trouble understanding karma, Cmdr Taco has hidden the underlying relavistic changes in our k by simply describing it. The maths of karma are simply too complex for most geeks to understand, and they just end getting confused.
On a side note, the underlying theme of this thread is that one should never try and explain qantum mechanics when drunk after new year. It just doesn't work.
Michael
-- There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
Re:so if two objects are traveling toward the same
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shogun
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· Score: 2
You see, the karma you have - k - can never exceed 50.
Don't forget the cases where people who gained a lot of karma before the universal karma cap was imposed could still have a karma well in excess of 50. Of course back on topic maybe theres some objects out there in the universe floating around at speed like 30c as they gained that velocity before the speed limit was put in.</handwaving>
Re:so if two objects are traveling toward the same
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Alsee
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· Score: 2
your tagline is making fun of "50 + 1 - 1 isn't 50":)
Hmm, maybe I need to change my sig because you aren't the first person to missunderstand it. I have absolutly no problem with 50+1-1=49. It makes perfect sense to me. What I was making fun of was the fact that Cmdr Taco actually went through the work of HIDING the fact that 50+1-1=49 just because of people who don't understand it.
It works correctly, he just hid how it works so the non-geeks wouldn't hurt their brains on it. "Solving" a problem by giving people LESS information is a very non-geek solution.
-
-- - - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Re:so if two objects are traveling toward the same
by
Alsee
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· Score: 3, Funny
The maths of karma are simply too complex for most geeks to understand
No, I doubt the geeks had any trouble with it. It was a perfectly logical system. It was the non-geeks who didn't get it.
2+2=0 (mod 4 arithmetic) 2+2=1 (mod 3 arithmetic) 2+2=1.9999999 (relativity) 2+2=2 (bitwise OR) 2+2=3 (karma cap at 3). 2+2=5 (2 is really 2.4 rounded down and 5 is really 4.8 rounded up) 2+2=10 (base 3 arithmetic) 2+2=22 (string concatenation) 2+2=44 (sum of ascii characters, hexidecimal) 2+2=100 (sum of ascii characters, decimal)
Geeks "get it". Non-geeks don't understand anything other than 2+2=4.
Re:so if two objects are traveling toward the same
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Alsee
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· Score: 2
In base 3 arithmetic, 2+2=11
Oops, yep. I meant to say 2+2=10 in base 4. The 11 makes a good addition to the list.
-
-- - - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
hmmm... Maybe that is why it is
by
SensitiveMale
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· Score: 1, Redundant
the 'Theory of Relativity?
Even if his theories are improved
by
backslashdot
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· Score: 4, Insightful
He will still be a great physicist that helped bring us to where we're at in science today.
I dont see the big deal in "disproving" him. It's sad that people will take some sort of glee in thinking "Ha! Einstein was wrong!" Einstein himself would be glad to see people come closer in figuring out the natuer of the universe.
Given the knowledge and tools available to him at the time, its amazing he came up with something in 1904 that people nearly 100 years later are still trying to figure out how to improve or disprove. Today we have the advantage of knowing how to look at things the way he did.
Einstein's abilities, creativity, and ideas will have a permanent influence on humanity's acheivements.
Enstein was pretty close
by
Newtonian_p
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· Score: 1
Assuming the new formula is correct, Enstein's is almost equal to the right thing.
Ep is a very big value so mc^2/Ep is approximately 0 which give E ~= (mc^2)/(1+0) ~= mc^2.
--
There are 2 kinds of people in this world: Those who write in decimal and those who don't
All these posts should probably be prefixed with "IANAP" (I am not a physicist). Of course modern physics is so strange that even real physicists can't seem to agree on much. Not the newest stuff, anyway. Maybe one day all this crazy theorizing will actually lead to something practical. Here's hoping.;')
Nah. It's pretty damn obvious when somebody is not a physicist. This is different to law, where the kind of crap that comes out of American courts makes it impossible to tell. For example, how could a court find that the baseball bat manufacturer is at fault when a fielder got hit in the head by the ball ????
Simple. The manufacturer has to put on the bat that when used for its intended purpose, the possibility of injuring others exists, and that under no circumstances whatsoever the manufacturer can be held liable, should such a thing occur. Obviously you could add another 400 pages of exceptions, until in the end the manual for a baseballbat exceeds the size of LOTR...
Didn't you know? According to American law the consumer can leave his brain on the nightstand when going out shopping. Unless ofcourse the EULA for the nightstand forbids it. Or the EULA for the brain specifies you're not allowed to lend it to other entities. You'd have to check with The Man Upstairs on that one...
--
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
I don't mean to be a troll, but I really want to ask this. Why is it so frowned upon to question evolution?
By the nature of science, it is granted that theories and current "knowledge" may be overturned in light of future counter-evidence. However, evolutionists give the impression that they consider their views to be rock-solid, indisputable Truth that is impossible to disprove now and forevermore. Anyone who dares to disagree is dismissed out of hand as a kook. (See, I had to post as AC to even ask.)
Re:You misunderstand completely
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Hektor_Troy
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· Score: 5, Funny
The job of the scientist is thus to question *everything.*
Why?
-- We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
lars_stefan_axelsson
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· Score: 5, Informative
I don't mean to be a troll, but I really want to ask this. Why is it so frowned upon to question evolution?
By the nature of science, it is granted that theories and current "knowledge" may be overturned in light of future counter-evidence. However, evolutionists give the impression that they consider their views to be rock-solid, indisputable Truth that is impossible to disprove now and forevermore. Anyone who dares to disagree is dismissed out of hand as a kook. (See, I had to post as AC to even ask.)
Well, I don't know if it's really the case that evolutionists consider their views to be a "truth that is impossible to disprove" etc. (at least not the scientfically minded ones, for any theory there are supporters that one could do without).
Now let me start by saying that I'm not really an expert on evolution, since I'm european I've never had to be. There are no creationists here to speak of, and hence I'm not well versed in their way of thinking. I am a "scientist" however, so I'm somewhat qualified to speak about that.
Now, not to write an essay answering your question, but much of it boils down to what we mean by "wrong." First some preliminaries though. The strength of any scientific theory rests on its predictive powers, how well does it foresay and explain the outcome of experiments or observations (past of future). Any good scientific theory then is very specific (or strong), what we like to call "easily falsifiable", i.e. it is simple to detect when its predictive powers are failing. (Hence many of them in the natural sciences are formulated in some form of logic; "mathematics" since that provides for a stronger statement to be made). So, strong theory equals "easy to prove wrong" given contradictory evidence.
Now, then what does it mean to be "wrong" in the scientific sense? In short it's when there are observations made that cannot fit into the current theory. A prime example would be Newton's law of kinetic energy E=1/2mv^2. For a long time that was thought to be all there is to it, and all the experiments and observations that could be made corroborated that. Today we know that it's not "true". It's OK for lower speeds, but it completely fails to take relativistic effects into account (see previous posts in this thread), and hence has been relegated to the scrap heap of scientific theories, right?
Well, not quite. It's still a very good approximation for most macroscopic real world phenomena. It still explains them very well, and even post Einstein, it hasn't really lost any of it's predictive powers in the domain in which it was thought up. So even though it may now be thought "wrong" in the strictest sense of the word; it may not tell all of the truth to all people, it's still a pretty darn good theory if you're a bit more careful with it's application.
This is also true of Darwinian evolution. It's a very well tested theory (or "fact" if you will) by now, with wast predictive and explanatory powers. Any later theory that superseeds it must still explain all the observations with the same (or better) accuracy as Darwinistic evolution has to date. So even though evolution as a theory may be proven "wrong" at a later date, it'll still be mostly "right." As Newtons' laws still are.
Now, in order to completely close the sack, we also need Occam's razor. I.e. given two equally predictive theories, we prefer the simpler one. It's really a common sense argument. Why make things harder than they have to be. It's also the only scientific loophole that creationists can exploit. By invoking a "deus ex machina" in the form of an omnipotent God, that stacks the deck so that scientists cannot make correct observations (or make them correctly), you can of course invalidate any and every theory. And that's why science doesn't deal with that. If someone stacks the deck, we won't play! (Then we can continue various philosophical arguments, and in doing so rapidly leaving the natural sciences.)
And that's incidentally why science isn't "just another religion", science specifically is about absolutely minimising the things that have to be taken on faith (such as the existence of the rest of the world etc), while religion(s) are about systematising the things you take on faith. Often that means that science cannot say very much on a subject, and people having a natural tendency towards taking things on faith, often over interprets scientific statements (it takes practice to so thoroughly disiplining your subjectiveness as the scientist must do). This leads to "scientific" statements or belif in the general public, that really aren't. But that's not the fault of science, more a fault of the schooling system.
If you're specifically interested in evolution, I have it on good authority that you could do worse than studying talk origins. I haven't got any good references on the philosophy of science in english for you, but I'm sure that a few minutes of googling will turn up a multitude.
-- Stefan Axelsson
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
jonadab
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· Score: 2
> Why is it so frowned upon to question evolution?
Because, evolution has to do with origins and therefore fundamentally is not science. It falls into the same category as archeology, human psychology, and history -- there is no way to conduct experiments to test hyphotheses and theories in these areas. Put another way, there is no way to conduct science in these subject areas. So instead the people who study them do it by examining whatever existing evidence they can find and then sitting around thinking about what it probably might mean, and making up theories they will never be able to test or verify. No one will ever prove or disprove any of it.
Physics is somewhat different. In physics, as in math, if your theory isn't quite right, sooner or later somebody will *prove* that it's not right.
-- Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
This is why speaking with religious zealots is a bad thing. It only encourages them.
Re:You misunderstand completely
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JCMay
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Lars wrote:
This is also true of Darwinian evolution. It's a very well tested theory (or "fact" if you will) by now, with wast predictive and explanatory powers.
Actually, nobody has ever seen "evolution" happen in a way congruent with the theories proposed by Darwinian evolutionists. Their theories include rates of change that are so slow as to be unobservable.
Furthermore, no evolutionist has ever explained creatures like the Bombardier Beetle and its built-in flame thrower. This strange little insect has a defense mechanism based on the hypergolic reaction of two chemicals that it (obviously) stores in seperate sacks, mixing the two only in its rear-mounted "combustion chamber." The chemistry and mechanical complexity of the system is high enough I don't think simple evolutionary changes can account for it-- it must have been put in the beetle completely operational: how did it get two chemicals that are hypergolic into its body and learn to control them without blowing itself up?
Later you rightfully mention Occam's Razor. I think that upon honest reflection, you will find that holding dogmaticly to Darwinian evoltion isn't nearly as satisfying and compelling as you previously thought compared to other, ultimately simpler, ideas.
Happy new yera!
Re:You misunderstand completely
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
no it hurts my head, please explain it to me so I don't have to think.
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
It falls into the same category as archeology, human psychology, and history -- there is no way to conduct experiments to test hyphotheses and theories in these areas. (emphasis mine)
Not quite true. There are many questions in human psychology that can be answered scientifically, you just have to ask them right. For instance, does sleep deprivation impair memory? Well, set up an experiment and find out. The test group is sleep deprived and evaluated on their ability to memorize and recall new facts. The control group is just evaluated.
Granted there are questions like: Do women unconciously suffer from penis envy as per Frued's theory? There are untestable hypotheses in psychology, but not ALL of them are like that.
Such questions exist in physics as well. Take wave-particle duality. You see wave-like properties of light if you look for them, but you also see particle-like properties if you look or them. But you can ask, "Is light a wave or particle when I am not looking?" Obviously you can't answer that since you have to look in order to test it.
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
brianerst
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· Score: 1
Isaac Asimov had a book on just this topic called the Relativity of Wrong. He wrote a brief essay on the subject that can be found all over, but here's one spot.
Basically, while theories are often supplanted by new ones that handle a broader or deeper set of conditions, the equations and values generated by the "old" theory are generally still valid on the original condition set (e.g., the equations for Newtonian mechanics still work quite well for day-to-day engineering). The old theory is wrong, but much less wrong than the preceding theory, and even less wrong than the one before that. I would tend to use the term "model" instead of theory, as the theory can indeed be very, very wrong (I'm thinking epicycles in astonomy), yet the "model" is quite predictive.
Re:You misunderstand completely
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jaoswald
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Did you actually read the link you included from talkorigins.org? It contains a plausible sequence of evolutionary changes that would lead to the bombardier beetle; exactly what you claim is impossible.
In any case, argument from design doesn't provide any "explanation," much less a better one. How did the designer make the beetle, and all its close genetic relatives, where none had existed before? Why the variety of mechanisms in the close relatives, instead of a single design?
Re:You misunderstand completely
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jaoswald
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· Score: 2
Evolutionary biology, as with archaeology, is an historical science. It makes claims as to what happened in the past (continuing in the present). The way to test theories in evolutionary biology is to continue studying existing organisms and fossil specemins in ways that determine their historical development.
With the tools of modern biochemistry, for instance, we can use DNA sequencing to test whether organisms that we believe to be related from previous studies actually share common DNA patterns that are consistent with common descent.
To find that the DNA sequences are incompatible or unrelated would create a difficulty that must be resolved. If it can't be resolved in the frame work of evolutionary theory, then that is disproof!
As an extreme example, if the fossil record started showing (what are currently belived to be) relatively recent forms (e.g. modern humans) in much older sediments, then that would cast serious doubt on the current picture of human descent. Given that DNA sequencing pretty convincingly links humans to other primates, and to other mammals, and the current fossil record sets pretty firm limits on the time when these various groups came into being, the possible ages of human fossils are actually pretty well constrained by current theory. That is, it isn't hard at all for a fossil discovery to disprove evolution in the case of humans. That no such fossil has yet been found is evidence, in the provisional sense of all scientific evidence.
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
NoMoreNicksLeft
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Actually, nobody has ever seen "evolution" happen in a way congruent with the theories proposed by Darwinian evolutionists. Their theories include rates of change that are so slow as to be unobservable.
Wrong. We also can't see electrons, or stars/galaxies at the edge of the universe. We don't need to see them to observe them though. Evolution has been observed in the fossil record, and even to some extent in the laboratory. Still, the lab observations are fairly new (the last 30-40 years) and science is busy debating whether or not it is indeed evolution... after all, as you pointed out, it is a slow effect.
Furthermore, no evolutionist has ever explained creatures like the Bombardier Beetle and its built-in flame thrower.
Huh? Of course evolutionists don't know everything at once... they don't claim to be omniscient. However, that doesn't mean they are doofuses without a clue. There have already been several possible explanations suggested in the scientific community, and no one disputes that something unknown is going on. You must not be researching this issue very thoroughly, if you believe there are no explanations at all, and that biologists are all sitting around dumbfounded.
Some of the more radical ideas center around the possibility that DNA acts more like a computer than a raw blueprint. That it might "store" a bunch of "mutations", saving them for a rainy day when some threshhold is reached. This "computer" might even span many individuals in the population. So instead of a gradual change into a "bombadier beetle" where there are many transitionary variants doomed to blowing themselves up, evolution simply "skipped over" those and went straight to the version capable of blowing up its enemies, and not itself.
Was it Greg Bear that said "Even evolution is evolving, becoming better at what it does." ?
Besides, lay off Darwinian evolution. Most people today see it as only the crudest approximation of the reality of evolution. Would figure that a bible thumper would be reacting to the scientific community of 100 years ago... you guys are always more than a few steps behind.
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
athlon02
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
Well, I don't know if anyone is still reading posts for this article, but in case anyone does, I'm throwing in my $0.02.
I think you somewhat misunderstand certain people in the religious world. Now as a whole, many who practice a religion, especially in so-called "Christianity", take everything completely on faith. And certainly you cannot prove the existence of God's soul, or heaven, or hell, or any other spiritual beings, because they exist outside the universe and time.
However, those of us who are truly dedicated to Christianity don't take God entirely on faith. Rather we look at the design in the universe, and I believe rightly conclude, that this order could not have happened by mistake, nor that the universe is eternal. We look at what we call "Christian Evidences" to help solidify our faith. And Christian Evidences are another word for scientific facts we use from both creationists *AND* non-creationists scientists alike, to show that no other theories of the existence and organization of the universe can be valid or than the God of the Bible.
One big and well-known website in the brotherhood dedicated to presenting these facts is apologeticspress.org. For instance, one thing I recall reading on there is that the earth moves about 18 miles/sec in its orbit and for every 19 miles I believe it was (I might have those 2 numbers switched) the earth departs from a straight line by about 0.9 inches. Now if the earth moved 0.8 inches or 1.0 inches instead, all life on earth would either freeze or incinerate. The probability of this happening by chance, as I'm sure you can imagine, or not too good. And there's 1000's, if not millions, more facts like that out there.
So while as Christians, we are forced to take certain things on faith, it is not a blind faith, but rather one based on the evidence around us.
And scientists are the same way with scientific theories. Either you blindly accept scientific theories (a blind faith), or you believe scientific principles based on the facts. I believe Galileo could back me up here with what he went through in his time.
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
PsionicMan
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· Score: 2, Insightful
One big and well-known website in the brotherhood dedicated to presenting these facts is apologeticspress.org. For instance, one thing I recall reading on there is that the earth moves about 18 miles/sec in its orbit and for every 19 miles I believe it was (I might have those 2 numbers switched) the earth departs from a straight line by about 0.9 inches. Now if the earth moved 0.8 inches or 1.0 inches instead, all life on earth would either freeze or incinerate. The probability of this happening by chance, as I'm sure you can imagine, or not too good. And there's 1000's, if not millions, more facts like that out there
You are absolutely right in asserting that the probability isn't so great--and not only for that; there are many, many other factors that might come into play when discussing a planet and whether or not it is fit for life, most of which are also with a low probability. But guess what? There's universe is so friggin' huge that even with those small odds it's not so surprising that it has happened, and it's also not completely out of line to think that it has happened more than once (i.e. life on other planets).
--
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
the_2nd_coming
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· Score: 1
well, right now, the only oposition to evolution (which has a very general definition, hence its perceived correctness) is creationism. Creationism relies on faith in religion, science relies on fact. so, untill you can come up with something better than: "Speicies adapt to changes in their environment and those that do not become extinct"
and that better idea is based in fact, then you might get some evolution folks to listen. the fact is that since evolution is so flexable, it will be difficult to change the minds of folks.
--
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
j3110
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Surely there would be a simpler way of explaining how the speed of light could be constant. Even if there wasn't, I think it's nearly impossible to falsify. No matter what sane experiment people come up with that bends it, someone always claims it doesn't break it. If I said we all live in the Matrix, you may be able to bend my theory, but not break it. This is basically what the theory of relativity is. The theory of relativety says we live inside a warped universe. Our mass and our dimension changes depending on our speed. Which boarders contradiction of conservation of matter.
Then you have to consider that photons created by different orbitals are different wavelength. Where does that fit in to the theory? It's called different "energy" photons. This energy can't make the photon go faster, so it bounces more? Doesn't that make it go faster along the wave? If so, then does the theory mean you can't travel in a straight line faster than c? Then the theory falls apart for any peice of the wave.
The cesium chamber experiment alone proves that either the cesium chamber was moving at phenominal speeds without us seeing it, c ~ infinity, or the chamber is shorter than was measured. Some experiments actually get photons out before they go in. According to everything I've read about the theory, "all calculations of the speed of light will be the same to any observer." This clearly isn't true in the cesium condensate experiment.
Really now... Occam's Razor tells me that it would be much easier to believe that we can't measure the speed of light properly with our equipment, and it could be possible to travel faster than light. This is especially true considering that c is the speed of light in a ray at an ungiven wavelength instead of the speed of a photon along a wave.
There are more complications caused by the theory of relativity than those it sought to fix. I would rather go back to the original failures of the "classic" equations and fix whats wrong than fix a theory that seems to generate loop holes every month. It would be easier to scrap it and solve the original problems than make a patchwork theory.
-- Karma Clown
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
the_2nd_coming
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· Score: 1
your so right........
everytime Dr. over-use an antibiotic he destroys the old bacteria species and creates a slightly modified one that is imune to the antibiotic.
and when the air becomes to poluted, the white peper moth is destroyed and a full replacement of the old population is created that will match the new color of the tree bark.
However, those of us who are truly dedicated to Christianity don't take God entirely on faith. Rather we look at the design in the universe, and I believe rightly conclude, that this order could not have happened by mistake, nor that the universe is eternal. We look at what we call "Christian Evidences" to help solidify our faith. And Christian Evidences are another word for scientific facts we use from both creationists *AND* non-creationists scientists alike, to show that no other theories of the existence and organization of the universe can be valid or than the God of the Bible.
Well, this is the sort of argument that has a tendency to degenerate rather quickly, but I'll give it a shot. Not that I'm an expert on religion. I'm a bit intrigued by the beliefs held by you (and people like you) since as I said, they are not very common on this side of the pond. (I can think of a historic reason or two why this is so, but I digress).
What I cannot really understand is why faith isn't enough? Upon reading your post I get the feeling that you're reading moral statements where a scientific statement was intended. None of the astronomers I know (mostly radio astronomers but there you go) believe that the universe came to be by "mistake." Ranodom events play a large part in their models, that's for certain, but no moral judgement as to whether that was/is any worse or better than anything else.
Now, there isn't really any conflict between the natural sciences an religion as I see it. They deal with disjunct sets of questions. Since there is no way of proving scientifically whether there is a god or not, we're not even trying. We deal only with what can be observed and verified.
And even though I don't believe myself, I cannot see the point of a religion that leaves no place for doubt.) If indeed it is as you claim, that the earth's orbit couldn't have happened by chance, then all rational people must conclude that there is a (christian) god, right? What then of free will? That's severely restricted now that you only have the options of irrational, or believer? I'm sorry but I was under the impression that the very idea was to take god on faith? We as scientist doesn't deal with that. At all. So it's not a question of protestantism, versus catholicism versus science. The latter doesn't try to answer the questions that the former two try to. Science tries very hard to answer the question how we came to be, but not why. If you want to call that boring or limited, sure, I can agree up to a point.
Now, and here's the inflamatory part: When it comes to the hard observable facts, is where your argument disintegrates. Now, the statements as such aren't understandable, the earth doesn't move in a "straight line" around the sun, and hence cannot deviate a certain amount from it (other than the trivial, if it deviated more or less than what is required for the orbit to meet up, then of course the earth wouldn't stay in orbit). If you're saying that the exentricity of the earths orbit cannot deviate from a true circle more than a tenth of an inch, for all life to cease, that's patently false. The earths orbit is a lot more eccentric than that. As in several orders of magnitude more eccentric. Try the analemma site for a very readable (and nicely illustrated) introduction to the earths orbit around the sun, and how it give rise to the analemma and the equation of time. So, I'm sorry, but arguments such as these will only convince me that you're not doing good religion, but bad science.
As I don't know much religion, nicely done religion (addressing the problems of the field) would probably be interesting to me. As a person the questions that religion addresses interest me. However, bad science (and I do know a thing or two about that) doesn't interest me at all.
If you wish to correct my attemt at religion, as I've corrected your attempt at science, I'd be more than willing to listen. I don't profess to be an expert.;-)
-- Stefan Axelsson
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
pauljlucas
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· Score: 2
Why is it so frowned upon to question evolution?
The thing that so many people confuse is theory vs. fact. Evolution is a proven fact. Darwin's natural selection is one theory to explain evolution. Another is Gould's punctuated equilibrium.
An analogy: gravity is a fact. Newton's laws of classical mechanics are one theory to explain gravity. They were later displaced by Einstein's theory of relativity. But while physicists argue about theories of gravity, that doesn't make gravity any less of a fact.
So too with evolution.
-- If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
Yunzil
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· Score: 2
Rather we look at the design in the universe,
How do you tell something that's designed from something that wasn't?
Now if the earth moved 0.8 inches or 1.0 inches instead, all life on earth would either freeze or incinerate.
Do they present any scientific evidence to back this up? Or are they making unsupportable assertions? Considering that the distance to the sun varies by over 3,000,000 miles over the course of the year, I'm rather doubtful of their claims.
And there's 1000's, if not millions, more facts like that out there.
Facts? I don't think so.
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
NortWind
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· Score: 1
...one thing I recall reading on there is that the earth moves about 18 miles/sec in its orbit and for every 19 miles... the earth departs from a straight line by about 0.9 inches. Now if the earth moved 0.8 inches or 1.0 inches instead, all life on earth would either freeze or incinerate. The probability of this happening by chance, as I'm sure you can imagine, or not too good. And there's 1000's, if not millions, more facts like that out there.
If you imagine that the Earth was formed from a spinning disk of dust, by accretion, it is easy to guess why the orbit is so close to circular. It had to be, the probability was close to 100%. It also explains why all the orbits of all the planets are nearly in the same plane, and go in the same direction. If some diety or another put the planets in their orbits, they might as well put the planets in orbit in opposite directions from one to the next.
You are right that there are millions of facts like this, that seem to be outrageous coincidences, until we understand how things really work. What are the chances that all the grains of salt in your salt shaker are cubes, with no tetrahedrons? Who made them all that way?
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
quax
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· Score: 1
One thing Lars failed to mention is the fact that evolutionary mechanism (e.g. genetic algorithms) work quiet nicely in computer simulation.
So we have theories that explain given observations by means of an understandable mechanism versus creationism that relies on some outer-worldly intervention of god, who most certainly can not
be simulated in a computer.
It boils down to a very simple matter: As soon as you invoke god to explain anything you leave the realms of science.
A biology teacher of mine followed what I thought was a better approach to bring his believe system and scientific education into alignment: He studied the earliest bible texts in their original language (old Greek, Hebrew etc.) to prove that whoever wrote Genesis actually received a vision of the evolutionary process and tried to put it into words as well as the language of the time allowed him (or her) to.
Anyway my old teachers motivation puzzles me as much as the one of creationists because it looks to me as in both cases people feel the urge to uncover some "prove" that their believes are right. Correct me if I am wrong, but from my point of view somebody who is secure in his faith shouldn't have to fish for such "proves".
Happy 2003 to all.
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I'm posting this anonymously because it's not going to contribute anything to the discussion, but here goes.
That was a very well stated, thoughtful, informative discussion. The world could use more dialog at that level. Thank you.
Ok, the ass kissing has ended. You may return to your regular tasks.
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
> the earth departs from a straight line by about 0.9 inches. Now if the earth moved 0.8 inches or 1.0 inches instead, all life on earth would either freeze or incinerate
It is called a stable system. We don't see the planets (or proto-planetoids) that depart by the wrong amount, they spun off into deep space or wound up in the Sun billions of years ago. What _evolved_ from the coelessing spinning disk of debris some billions of years ago was those parts that could remain stable enough to survive - the 'survival of the fittest' formed the solar system as we see it today.
Of course over time some parts may interact and may become unstable and eventually leave.
Unfortunately the 'faith based' and 'scientific' methods are unreconcilable. Generally the 'faith based' start with a conclusion (Goddunnit) and fit or discard evidence to support the conclusion.
For example the chances of huminoid, thinking, 1.8m tall, bipedal mammals existing on the third rock of an insignificant star is infintessimally small, therefore goddunnit.
This is based on 'in his image', and 'in his garden' and therefore the outcome that we are is required.
However, just like a lottery, the chance of any one person (outcome) winning is tiny. The chance that there _is_ an outcome is quite high. If we were purple aquatic blobs discussing this then some would be claiming that the whole universe was designed by a committee of supernatural purple aqautic blobs.
Taking the solar system again, if the proto-system gas and debris disk had a different swirl, or was larger or smaller, faster or slower then _different_ parts would become stable resulting in planets evolving and the sun would be a different size. Just like if you redraw a lottery a different ticket comes out. We evolved as we are because of our planet. The deep sea volcanic vents show that different forms of life can exist in completely different conditions, our form is the result of circumstance and is not a design.
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
One big and well-known website in the brotherhood dedicated to presenting these facts is apologeticspress.org [apologeticspress.org]. For instance, one thing I recall reading on there is that the earth moves about 18 miles/sec in its orbit and for every 19 miles I believe it was (I might have those 2 numbers switched) the earth departs from a straight line by about 0.9 inches. Now if the earth moved 0.8 inches or 1.0 inches instead, all life on earth would either freeze or incinerate. The probability of this happening by chance, as I'm sure you can imagine, or not too good. And there's 1000's, if not millions, more facts like that out there.
That God guy is pretty smart, setting the Earth's orbit just perfectly to create conditions for life here. But if he's so smart, why were humans designed so poorly? For example, we breathe and eat through the same tube. How many people have choked to death over the years because of that design choice? It's hard to believe that God is careful enough to get the Earth's orbit down to the inch, but gets sloppy when it gets down to designing our anatomy.
Oh yeah, while you're researching creationism, you might also want to look up the anthropic principle.
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
scrytch
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· Score: 2
The job of the scientist is thus to question *everything.*
Why?
Why do you ask?
-- I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
NoMoreNicksLeft
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· Score: 2
For crying out loud...
He was working with what he had. Budget cuts, deadlines moved forward, half his dept. was layed off, it was a mess. You're actually lucky you don't *shit* out of that same tube, the divine marketdroids were sure that was the only way to come in at budget and still have a viable Human(TM).
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I think the probability the poster was talking about is the extraordinary fact that the Earth moves in just the right place to be suitable for life. Too near or too far and nothing could survive.
Cooincidence? Of course not! But it's not by design either -- life exists on this planet because the planet is suitable for it, not the other way around. If the planet hadn't been suitable, life wouldn't have grown. Ergo, any planet that grows life must be suitable for that life form. What are the chances of that?
Well, one in a lot apparently, because no other planet we've discovered so far has life. Does this mean we are god's chosen people? No, it just means that, as the poster said, the probability of a planet being life-sustaining is shockingly low. More's the pity.
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Sweetly put, KFG.
The nice thing about scientific knowledge is that it doesn't depend on faith -- IF you have the expertise, laboratory equipment and the time to independently verify.
Otherwise you have to trust the scientists. But that isn't the same as faith, is it?
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Wow, you are an idiot.
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
JebusIsLord
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· Score: 2
Simpler ideas such as...
Please, I am all for simpler working models that explain biological diversity. I think we all are.
Extra terrestrials, divine intervention et al. all require large leaps of complexity wholey unsupported by evidence, so I hope you do not suggest that these are easier to believe.
I expect you have an ulterior motive (usually religious) anyway for saying this however, so I won't waste my breath. Pardon me if I misinterpret , Its just that every single time I have this discussion with someone it is EXCLUSIVELY because they have fundamentalist belief in the bible, and frankly those people are a waste of time to converse with.
-- Jeremy
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
lazarius
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· Score: 1
How do you tell something that's designed from something that wasn't?
To use Robert Sawyer's argument from Calculating God (a novel - read it; it's worth it even if you are fundamentalist religious or fundamentalist scientist), consider the ``Game of Life'':
There are a few rules to the game that are set up beforehand (that I don't quite remember) - something along the lines of if there is an unoccupied square beside one that is it becomes occupied... and a few others to guide it.
There are just a few rules set about. Now, the interesting thing is that the program develops into predictable patters. That certainly wansn't designed.
Now, given those results and the fact that there were rules in the first place, then *someone* (read: whoever invented that thing) set those rules in the first place.
As I believe it to be, God is the being that set up the rules for our Universe. We have the rules right? How are they what they are?
Therefore, to me, science and religion can coexist peacefully.
MIKE
-- Beware the JabberOrk.
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
babbage
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· Score: 2
Thank you. That was the clearest & most thorough answer to that question that I have ever encountered, and I've been reading [and using] less well-stated versions of this comment for years now. Every school board in the USA should be forced to read this before trying to impost creationism on their poor students...:)
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Well, let's face it, there could have been millions of evolved designs in which the beetle did blow itself up. But there's hardly likely to be any record of those now, is there...?
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
Tyreth
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· Score: 2
So even though evolution as a theory may be proven "wrong" at a later date, it'll still be mostly "right." As Newtons' laws still are.
You know, you might have actually hit the nail on the head here. Most evolutionsts (or perhaps all) that I have encountered have simply not understood the creationist argument. In fact it surprises them that creationists also believe that natural selection occurs, and is quite natural. They think that we reject natural selection. One even suggested that I believed a different brand (one of many) of creationism to the rest. This is false, since the most recognised creationists all agree that natural selection occurs. It's a process, its maths, it simply happens.
Now when you say evolution, you are most likely talking about natural selection. Natural selection is proven, demonstrated. What has not been demonstrated is that chance mutations can lead to the introduction of benefical genes that will later lead to a new species and a superior lifeform. Natural selection is merely the selection of genes. Where the two sides differ is where the genes originally came from. Creationists say they were present in the beginning from the two parent species, while evolutionists say these genes came from chance mutations.
Now, getting back to what you were saying - if evolution were proven false then it will still leave a remnant that is "mostly right". This remnant would be natural selection. This process appears to support evolution, but in fact it is expected of the creationist model too. And I think this is one of the main reasons why evolutionists are so confused as to how the creationist could reject evolution when there seems to be so much evidence.
Now let me start by saying that I'm not really an expert on evolution, since I'm european I've never had to be. There are no creationists here to speak of, and hence I'm not well versed in their way of thinking. I am a "scientist" however, so I'm somewhat qualified to speak about that.
I'm used to being ridiculed as a believer of fairy tales when the people who say it obviously don't understand what I am saying. I hope that since you have not encountered us much you are willing, and will remain willing, to discuss these opinions with respect towards each other as we all try to understand the truth - because that is ultimately what is important. I don't believe creationism because I need to, but because I genuinely believe it is true and has the weight of evidence. If I was proven wrong then I would believe in evolution. I encourage you to find out more about the creationist argument. If you genuinely learn our model then you will probably be surprised at how coherent it is and how well it fits the observable facts. But please don't become like everyone else I have encountered - who is quick to speak without understanding even the basics of the creationist model. As I mentioned before, like those who think that the creationist model of the universe rejects natural selection.
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
PyroMosh
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· Score: 1
Hey, I just wanted to say I thought it was really cool how you took the time to respond to some of these posts, and that you responded in the most clear, concise, rational, and most importantly, civil manner I've yet seen on the science vs. religion debates. Welcome to my friends list.
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
All that preamble and no payoff? Would it kill ya' to tell us what exactly you think creationism is? Let's cut the shit. When it comes to all the lovely animals that prance about here on Earth where do you think physics ends and God-the-magic-maker-who-looks-like-jebus-and-lives -in-the-sky begins?
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
If you believe that the "delicacy" of Earth's orbit smacks of Divine Intervention then you need to read "How to Lie with Statistics".
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Facts? I don't think so.
Actually bud, I think there are an infinite number of "facts" like this to be found as they all have a similar structure. Did you know that 2 is one-billionth of 2,000,000,000?!
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Therefore, to me, science and religion can coexist peacefully.
In fact it surprises them that creationists also believe that natural selection occurs, and is quite natural. They think that we reject natural selection. One even suggested that I believed a different brand (one of many) of creationism to the rest. This is false, since the most recognised creationists all agree that natural selection occurs. It's a process, its maths, it simply happens.
Well, I spent an hour surfing the link that someone provided, and there seems to be other "creationists" around, that doesn't subscribe to your version of the theory...
However, I'm not expert enough to answer whether scientific evolutionists today completely rule out that the DNA structure today could have come from a single molecule (or a pair), so there may be a place there for a god hiding in the wings (as it were).
We scientists don't need a god behind it all for our theories to work. That's not to say that we necessarily rule out the posibility, indeed we couldn't. There's no way to prove the existence of a god, and likewise to way to prove his absence. He's god after all, can do whatever he pleases, including screwing up our experiments. And if we cannot make an experiement (not even in theory), we don't deal with it. (Or we don't call it science).
And this is incidentally where Occam comes in. Since it isn't necessary for our explanations, we don't put him in. If it were otherwise we'd actually be in trouble, if he was necessary, we'd have "proved" his existence (to a point), which would make science meaningless (well, very strictly speaking at least), we'd have to give up cause and effect (speaking of physics, not morals).
If you wish to find a place in science for a creator, I'm sure there'll always be room for one (at least for the foreseable future), but as I said, religion is what man turns to when he wants other questions answered, "why are we here, and what's the point of it all?" I'm pretty certain that science will never answer those questions (at least not in our lifetime) as fundamental as those may be. We're just trying to understand the mechanics of it all. Interesting, but perhaps not as soothing for the soul.
-- Stefan Axelsson
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
mashx
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· Score: 1
Agreeing with you and adding my very simplified opinion, science and religion not only can co-exist but were in the past one and the same thing. The only problem was that the ones who didn't understand science came to take charge of the religions around the world and refuted that which they didn't comprehend. (I'm talking between thousands and tens of thousands of years ago here in Neolithic cultures). My arrival at this opinion is based on having been brought up as a Christian (although I always had issues that the priests couldn't answer) and excelling at science at school. I am not a Christian, the closest I think is Pantheism. Having investigated shamenism in ancient cultures, and add to that various other points such as entymology of language etcetera, I have a framework which is personal, and ever evolving.
Thus science developed, and religion stagnated (at various times depending on the religion). I cannot claim to be religious myself, but that doesn't mean that they cannot co-exist.
I have one question for you though from your comment: does this mean that for proof of God's existance, you require life?
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
Tyreth
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· Score: 2
You are correct about science not taking into account God in its predictions. However, I would be disturbed if believing in God implied that science, and indeed logic, would have no place. You are implying that when God acts that our predictions will fail. I believe that the world is rational with God and irrational without.
Moving on, I do believe you can prove God. When you say that He cannot be proven to exist, you are working underthe assumption that everything can be explained through science. I put it to you that the earth is only 6000 years old (or close enough), and that evolution over millions of years therefore did not occur. If (lets pretend) that I could demonstrate to you that the earth was indeed only 6000 years old, and that therefore the history that the Bible presents is correct, would you consider this a proof for the existence of God? Or do you have another scientific explanation for how the earth could have been created so recently without God?
Consider also that God's miracles as recorded in the Bible do break the laws of physics, but they do not break all laws. The very fact that we can reason, argue, and understand logic I think is a testimony that there is a logical and rational explanation for everything. So when God performs a miracle, such as parting the red sea, even though it is not physically possible, it is still possible within the laws that God has defined in the universe - including the spiritual realm, to do. An example may be helpful. It is simply not physically possible for man to fly on his own. Yet we can devise wings, aeroplanes, etc, that allow us to apparently "break" this law. Yet we do not break a law, it all makes sense. So too the spiritual realm even though it appears to defy physics, if we could understand more of the laws of the physical and spiritual realms it would make sense, be logical and rational. See where I'm headed?
As for more proof - there is the evidence of the spiritual realm. Largely ignored in the western society, there are definately supernatural occurances. I do acknowledge that many/most supposedly supernatural/miraculous healings and other events today can be explained through the physical realm - hypnotism, suggestion, etc. Yet there are some things that are definately spiritual (supernatural is the common word, but that means above natural, while I think the spiritual is natural, but not physical obviously). For example, people in operating rooms who have been unconscious and floated above their bodies watching doctors operate on them. Then, when they return to their body and wake up they are able to describe to the doctor what was going on, things they couldn't have known through any physical means.
I am happy for you to be sceptical about these stories, it is worthwhile to be. But you may just find some spiritual events that are not explainable through the physical. Believing in the spiritual realm I think provides a very good evidence for God. So would it if I could demonstrate that the earth were only 6000 years old. Another excellent evidence is our sense of morals. Our sense of morality is simply not in line with what evolution would have required for the last 4.5 billion years.
Well, I spent an hour surfing the link that someone provided, and there seems to be other "creationists" around, that doesn't subscribe to your version of the theory...
There are, no doubt. Just like there are evolutionists that claim humans were created and formed by aliens...like that Canadian cult at the moment claiming to have the first human clone. The most widely acknowledged, recognised, and researched creationists ascribe to the same views I present - including an acceptance of natural selection. This includes icr.org answersingenesis.com and creationscience.com. If my views or opinions at any time differ with theirs then I submit myself to their superior understanding, since I am only laiety while they have dedicated their work to this topic.
So i'm curious to know if you would consider any of the above things proofs, or at least excellent evidence, of God's existence or not? I certainly think He can be proven to exist, or at least shown to fit the available evidence much better. Actually, perhaps one of the greatest proofs is when He came to earth as the man Jesus the Christ - and the resurrection. Another topic worth pursuing if you want evidence for God's existence. What better evidence than from when he walked among us, died and then rose from the dead? A good starting point that I would recommend to give you an idea of where to look if you are genuinely looking for evidence and the answers would be this book. It gives you an overview of the issues involved, and the answers given. Excellent resource, but also a great starting point if you want to look more in depth. It is the journey of one journalist who was an atheist as he goes to find out whether the things he believes about christianity are true or not - inspired to do so when his wife becomes a christian.
Re:You misunderstand completely
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Tyreth
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· Score: 1, Offtopic
As I said just before:
I'm used to being ridiculed as a believer of fairy tales when the people who say it obviously don't understand what I am saying.
I'm tired of arguing with people who like to ridicule and insult first, and then start the argument. So forget it, I'm not going to answer for you.
Re:You misunderstand completely
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swv3752
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· Score: 2
Well, random mutations do occur. Some random mutations can lead to specific survival traits. This was a large portion of what we studied in microbiology. We took strains of bacteria that were susceptible to a specific antibiotics. We cultured the bacteria in the prescence of chemical mutagens. (Easy to think of the stuff as carcinogenic.) We then tried to culture the bacteria in petri dishes with the antibiotic. Anything that grew was a mutant strain. Your whole basis of belief has been disproved by me personally a decade ago. And the original studies happened much earlier.
Evolutionary theory has been refined from Charles Darwin's model, but it has not been debunked. For anyone that is interested in this further, research "Punctuated Equilibrium" and "Cambrian Explosion".
-- Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
Tyreth
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· Score: 1, Offtopic
You have misunderstood the creationist position. We acknowledge mutations occur like this. There is plenty of creationist literature talking about this topic. If you are genuinely interested you can find it yourself. If you can't work it out then e-mail the crew at www.answersingenesis.com and ask them why this doesn't prove evolution. Needless to say, this experiment of yours does not confirm evolution or deny creation.
Re:You misunderstand completely
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Alphtoo
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· Score: 1
Exactly. We cannot further our knowledge until we recognize our ignorance.
Re:You misunderstand completely
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Alphtoo
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Evolution does not, in any way, invalidate the existance of God, or of His creation of life; it just attempts to explain how He did it. (I heard this from a Baptist Pastor some 35 years ago, and it made perfect sense so I wanted to pass it along. And no, I'm not a Baptist). It is perfectly rational to believe in evolution and in a Creator at the same time.
May our Creator bless you all for the new year, and may we all continue to evolve!
Ah, OK I misread you as subscribing to another form of creationism. One that claimed that while evolution has (and is) taken place, somone/something (god) set the events in motion. Now, that you go further to claim that the earth is only 6000 years, well, that's a different brand of creationism, one that was much closer to the one I found on the net earlier. And one that doesn't fit well with evolutionary theories. There simply isn't time for anything useful to have happened in that time. I would call these views irreconcilable.
With the rest of your post, I'm at a loss for where to start. Permit me a few observations: I've spoken of science here (rather natural science) and while logic (and mathematics and the rest of philosophy) indeed is an important tool in science. That science would fall, doesn't (by logical reason) imply that logic and philosophy would. So while scientifically proving the existence of god would kill most of physics/chemistry/geology etc, (I'm fairly certain they could never recover from the shock), that doesn't necessarily mean that reason would. 1+1 could well still equal 2. Even though a truly omnipotent god could change that to... Which brings us back to square one.
Much of the rest of your argument deal with philosophy, and while that is both interesting and important, it's not science. Or even the philosophy of science. I do still claim though that for your beliefs to hold from a scientific point of view (miracles, 6000 year old earth etc), so much of the method and findings of the natural sciences so far would have to be thrown out, that they would cease to exist. If the pieces could be picked up and something new built that would resemble science, I'm not sure (very sceptic in fact) but my career as a scientist would be over. The philosophers would have to try and save that one. I'm not a philosopher, and cannot even begin to imagine how they could go about that. (And I'd sooner put my faith in god than for the philosophers to save us...;-)
To be honest; I don't see a lot of common ground here on which to go further. I clearly don't know enough philosophy to even begin to argue many of your points. It's been interesting though. Nice talking to you.
-- Stefan Axelsson
Re:You misunderstand completely
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Spleenl3oy
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· Score: 0
The peppered moth story has been proven to be a hoax.
http://www.exchangedlife.com/Creation/pepper.sht ml
Re:You misunderstand completely
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
To be truly scientific, one must separate the two questions:
Did evolution occur?
And...
Can evolution occur?
No matter the answer, until someone invents a time machine and goes back in time, the answer to the first question MUST be an "argument from silence", which is a formal logical falacy. Since science must be able to reproduce its results, history will NEVER be scientifically "proven."
The second question is an entirely different matter. This is something that can be reproducable in a lab environment. Results can be inferred to account for historical events, but they will never prove anything to the extent that a logical or mathmatical proof proves a theory.
Re:You misunderstand completely
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the_2nd_coming
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· Score: 1
there was no disprooving, just a clarification of what actualy was going on....it was natural selection in action......and what we now know from genes today, you can say that if enough time goes by, the speicies of peppered moth in the dark forests will be diffrent than that of the ones ion the light forests as the frequency of dark genes becomes greater and greater in the dark forest and the frequency of the light gene will become more and more frequent in the light forest.
reguardless of that, god does not destroy an entire speicies of bacteria and then create a similar speicies that is now imune to the anti-biotic.....evolution creates the new ability....it is called micro evolution.
this paper discuses the fact that the peppered moth story is an example of micro not macro evolution.
--
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Re:You misunderstand completely
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gpinzone
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· Score: 2
"Now let me start by saying that I'm not really an expert on evolution, since I'm european I've never had to be. There are no creationists here to speak of, and hence I'm not well versed in their way of thinking. I am a "scientist" however, so I'm somewhat qualified to speak about that."
You might want to look around Italy in a place called "the Vatican." I hear there's a bunch of creationists living there and are...*gasp*...European!
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
Tyreth
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· Score: 1, Offtopic
I now understand that you really are very unfamiliar with the creationist position:) Mostly evidenced when you said "There simply isn't time for anything useful to have happened in that time." in reference to a 6000 year old earth. There is much you have to learn and understand about our position, but I am not surprised that you would say this.
As a summary then, trust me when I say that the acceptance of the creation model (6000 year old earth, etc) would not spell the end of science and physics as we know it. In fact there are many scientists who believe in creation as I do - a young earth. One recent example I was reading about is Richard Porter a human spine expert. He said that coming from a creationist position has helped him more than those coming from an evolutionary perspective. As he said:
Richard pointed out that evolutionary theory can be unproductive for research:
'For example, the curve of the lumbar spine towards the front - the lordosis - was thought by evolutionists to be a problem, the result of man having recently adopted an upright position. So, some researchers blamed back pain on this, saying the spine had not yet evolved satisfactorily. If therapists have the wrong starting assumption, then it's not surprising that treatments for lordosis are unhelpful. If a spine fracture causes a lumbar kyphosis (curvature in the opposite direction), that spine is significantly weakened.'
He added that the creationist perspective has always been foundational to his research:
'I start from quite a different position. From my understanding of human anatomy and physiology and my understanding of God, I say that the form of God's creation always matches its function. So you can be sure that the form of the spine is perfectly designed for its function. God has made a wonderful spine. If you start with that premise, it gives you a head start when trying to understand the mechanism of the spine.
When you start to examine the biomechanics of the curved spine, asking why it's that shape, and what's good about it, you find that the arch of the spine has a beautiful purpose. Like the arch of a bridge, it adds strength. Because of that arch in the lumbar spine, a person with a lumbar lordosis can lift proportionally more weight than a gorilla with its kyphotic (opposite curvature) spine! So it's not surprising that treating back pain with postures and exercises that restore the lordosis works exceedingly well'.
Couple of reasons I quoted this. First is to show you that the creationist position believes that all animals and humans were created complete and perfect only 6000 years ago. Since then genetic mutations have slowly entered the various creatures and caused each generation, slowly, to be weaker than its ancestors. So the first humans merely 6000 years ago were the strongest, most intelligent, and we are today the least intelligent and weakest (just because we discovered electricity and a few other things it may appear like we know more, but imagine that our ancestors could have achieved the same or more if they had discovered electricity too). So we do not believe that evolution from a single celled life to humans occurred in a short space of 6000 years. We beleive the creation was perfect at the first. There are thousands more words I could say on this, but instead I'll just encourage you to understand the creationist position properly if you are ever interested to know what we believe before you condemn it. Most people I argue with here know just enough of creationism to sound like they know what they are talking about but not enough to actually comprehend our position or successfully attack it.
The second reason why I wanted to mention this was to show you that coming from a creationist position makes science still possible - and even helps it make more sense. Consider that when you believe the universe is 4.5 billion years old and that evolution from a single cell to what we see today took place over that time - you have a view of the world you try to make the evidence fit. For example, you look at humans today as being superior to their ancestors, and inferior to the forms to come. This shapes your biases, where you look for answers, what sort of answers you expect to find. Just like Richard Porter said above, coming towards a problem from different positions results in different conclusions, sometimes harmful ones. Consider that if evolution is false that science will only be able to progress so far under that model.
I am of the view that discussions of origins - evolution, creation, etc are all philosophical. However, these philosophical arguments employ scientific evidence.
Just one thing to keep in mind, you certainly weren't lying I can tell when you said you haven't encountered the creationist position yet. It is clear that you don't know much about it. So my advice is that when you try to understand what we believe you may try to do it in the context of evolution, which is going to lead to confusion. I'll see if I can think of an analogy....I guess cultural differences are the best. When you go to a foreign country you may find it very very hard to fit in. Everything about this culture may be so foreign, and you will try to understand it in relation to your native culture - but this will only lead to confusion. Ok, maybe a bad example:) Either way, please understand our position first!
Go well.
(if you are interested about the spine expert, I read it in this magazine. - Standing upright for creation)
Re:You misunderstand completely
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DancingSword
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· Score: 1
If it is God, beyond Time and Space, then how come it is limited-to-within-male-gender, then??
Obviously non-infinite, any christian male 'god'...
I'm a buddhist tulku, so my take on all this is that.. much of it is ( at best ) idiocy:
1. Occam's razor is interpretive, as another ( above ) noted, so underlying assumptions define what is 'seen' as simpler/eleganter versus what is 'seen' as not-simpler/eleganter.
2. Some science can explain/predict, some can only describe-what-is, and our cultural chauvanism/make-believe is that descriptive science isn't as Important/Authoritative as explanatory science, so all sorts of BS goes on when from the observer's position no more than description is warranted.
3. According to scientism ( yes. it. is. a. religion. ) mind isn't really real ( my favourite form of it is
'it is ( scientifically ) known that.. knowing.. cannot be',
which is perfection-of-hypocrisy ), but Time and Space ( and particulate matter ) are real ( field-matter not counting, of course[tm] ), even though non-locality ( aka mind aka quantum-entanglement ) can be seen in quantum-stuff, in quantum-stuff-spread-over-hundreds-of-kilometres, in schools-of-fish ( non-local coherency that goes quicker than re-action allows but action implies knowing/mind, so therefore... ), in the famous electron ( or buckyball, now ) interfering with itself while it goes, simultaneously/non-locally through 2 physically-parallel slits... ( there's one, 'simplest/elegantest' by what standard? ), or a martial-artist's KI, or...
I've got a textbook on 'the hard problem of consciousness', and though it was written by ones of western culture ( I'm a tulku, western-body, eastern-deepmind ), even it admits that consciousness is only a 'hard problem' when one assumes that mind cannot be real... ( reductionism/mechanism/scientism is a reaction against us-possibly-being-not-god: fear-rooted prejudice, only. ).
Newtonian Mechanics didn't permit mind among universe: all is clockwork. Will, let-alone our-will, cannot be. That is Newtonian Mechanics' Law. This 'law' has been used as means of ignoring responsibility-for-action by many, against many.
Contrast that with cause/effect among mind, where the meaning this-soul's apparent-minds commit land on this-soul in future apparent-mind-manifestations ( or 'days' or 'lives' or 'incarnations' or 'someones', different words, same reality )...
Buddhism has the single-word for it 'karma', the Bible calls it one's 'robe', see here, or 'putting their deeds on their heads', or This Way... both extremely-different traditions hold it to be the case, yet the Bible assumes man-style-motivation of god so much that it isn't possible for universe to be instantiated to intrinsically include cause/effect itself, there has to be some authority doing it to all ( which shows god's limitation, 'he' couldn't get the universe to take care of itself or balance or express... )
Here's another one, the language the bible was written-in assumed that god-itself couldn't be gender-nugatory..., so wasn't that assumed simpler/eleganter than some non-men-centric reality?
Statistics also requires reality be mindless-in-nature, that reality be non-mind-holding.
If mind is, though, it is in universe, and that means it exists within universe ( baby-steps-here ), and that means universe-dimensions include enough depth for mind to be real in 'em ( just as they have to be N-dimensionally deep-enough to contain N-1 dimensional branes, according to Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe. ).
Buddhism holds that there isn't some Male Authority Patriarch God[tm], but buddhism does hold that shedding ego/false-mind, gaining deep-mind, is possible,
does hold that going-from-there shedding deep-mind gaining soul/very-subtle-mind/third-attention is possible,
and does hold that having shed bogus ( transient- ) minds it is possible to gain Awake! condition ( hence Buddha == Awake!-Soul == Enlightenment... Liberation is lesser ).
Buddhism's been using scientific-method for a couple of thousand years ( current cycle ), but it has been doing so assuming that mind is ( rather than is-not ), and knows that all is dependent on the observer ( Einstein et al re-discovered this ), and knows that there are different kinds of doubt, some valid and some not...
It is scientific analysis of mind allowing Universe.
It is effective, and THAT is the ultimate standard.
No I'm not going to claim most who label-theirselfs 'buddist' are scientific-method rather than religious, any more than I will allow that most who are among western 'science' ( which James Burke says is 'dragged, kicking and screaming' into the present ) are scientific-method rather than religious.
It is, to this-one, all-or-nothing ( if one values absolute truth ): one can commit, totally, to knowing universe's truth, on its terms, or one can commit to phony truth that at-least makes one seem important among one's belonging-group among human civilization/society. Choosing absolute truth means making oneself evolve ( that's right, evolution requires mind, or didn't the shocking difference between a living-body and a corpse, in-which entropic chemical process goes the way reductionism says it should.. was significant? ) and accepting the damage/hurt in unlearning one's ignosis and growing gnosis...
We can describe the early universe, but cannot get past that ourselfs. Scientism cannot deal-with being not-god, so it pretends otherwise. That is profoundly offensive.
The whole 'why did THE universe occur in some way that allowed Our Human Life?' question is tautological idiocy... rightly stated it is:
In a universe that can have us in it, us occurred.
Description, not Authority Explaining...
The most spectacular example of scientism ( the religion-nature ) is in Douglas R. Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern.
In two IIRC consecutive chapters, he
1. remaps male-female non-equality/rigged-suppression-of-validity to white/black, to shove-it-in-our-faces how default assumptions ( his term ) arrange that one cannot even question reality correctly, because default assumptions blind one's mind, and
2. attacks The Zetetic Scholar for openmindedly using scientific-method to test what Scientific Establishment already knows to be nugatory, and therefore non-worthy of considering/questioning/testing ( he even admits that it is their openmindedness that offends him )
Another spectacular example of this, is the Biblical use of the term 'day' in several senses ( the day of Isaiah, the day of Yeshua, as well as the conventional by-human-calendar-limit day ), and the assumption that The Third Day refers to calendar-day, rather than incarnation-day.. even though the Bible states clearly that there are two lesser days ( teachers who lay fallen for 3.5 days ), and one vast day ( the Alpha and Omega )... Does it matter what religion one is, if one won't see what is in front of one's face while one is 'knowing' one's world?
If one accepts the Bible as correct, and won't allow it to mean anything other than what makes one authoritative...
one is in the same boat as one is in with scientism ( not *scientific-method*! )...
Nothing I know of precludes there being a God(God), or, to phrase that otherly, a god-itself who is origin of livingness, origin of very-subtle-minds ( 'souls' or 'third-attentions', to use the terms familliar to other traditions ), origin-of-living-creation, AND ( simultaneously ) there being a god-of-our-Universe's-creator/god.
Why is that a problem?
Why is accepting the stark fact that mind is, a problem to scientism? ( answer? because it'd mean that scientism was within a Universal-Sea-of-mind, rather than ON universe, and our race won't know that our ASSUMED authority isn't centre-of-reality, that's all, and it is pathetic ).
Scientism can't accept/deal-with there being limits to scientism's authority, so scientism engages in weirdly contorted ignorings in order to maintain its sham.
If we're made-of substance-of-Universe, then we can't reach, with substance-of-Universe, beyond Universe ( where this-universe's laws-of-physics don't apply ).
Simple limit, ignored or non-accepted.
I don't care if that limit is macro-scale or micro-scale ( it may well be that if one goes fine-enough in scale one ceases-to-be-within-universe? ).
Having found means that change the substance of one's mind from lead to gold ( ignorance to wisdom, it's allegory, only, and if materialists won't-know that mind is real, then materialists can commit all reality to making reality obey materialism while some ones remove ourselves from the setting/context, thank-you-very-much ), I'm doing my damnedest to evolve me out so that this-one isn't again beaten-on by/in incarnate reality and its habitual ignorances.
Because effectiveness rules.
Because inner-peace rules.
Buddhism holds that there are three major dimensions, Mind, Time, and Space ( each major-dimension can contain minor dimensions, like harmonics, fractally, so the 3-open space-dimensions and the 7-hidden space-dimensions are all part of the Space-dimension, and the slightly symmetrical 3-minds that arise and 7 subtle-mind-structures, or chakras, that arise are part of the Mind dimension, and doesn't hold prejudice/hatred opposing-that in order to make universe obey some established authority-assumption ).
'creation' is a device whose function is to be:
1. place ( for souls to manifest/arise/be ), and
2. process manufacturing realization ( realization that is unlimiting, or ignosis-erasing, souls )
Buddhism considers the question of the origin of this device to be partly idiocy, because from our perspective only partial answers can be, but if one sheds false-mind, and then sheds deep-mind, and then annihilates ignorance from one's soul, then one's mind/instrument/observer can know the nature-of-reality's-being.
Who of you could possibly value or care-about this writing?
You might want to look around Italy in a place called "the Vatican." I hear there's a bunch of creationists living there and are...*gasp*...European!
Well, I'm from northern europe, we threw out the catholics in the 1540:s, so I'm not expert on them (even though we've had religious freedom for quite some time, I think I may know one very secular catholic). But see my previous answer about Stephen Hawking and his consultation with the pope. There is even a quite famous astronomer who is a cardinal, though his name escapes me. There may be more, since the vatican has it's own observatory
Their form of creationism is wholly in line with scientific understanding, if their FAQ and other documents are to be belived. They do belive that there is a god that is everpresent and started it all, they are christians after all.
So, if that's the best you can come up with when it comes to european "creationists", it's still quite reasonable for me to say that there are no creationists here to speak of. Certainly none even beginning to come close to the view that has been presented here, and in the referenced links.
To be truly scientific, one must separate the two questions:
Did evolution occur?
And...
Can evolution occur?
No matter the answer, until someone invents a time machine and goes back in time, the answer to the first question MUST be an "argument from silence", which is a formal logical falacy. Since science must be able to reproduce its results, history will NEVER be scientifically "proven."
The second question is an entirely different matter. This is something that can be reproducable in a lab environment. Results can be inferred to account for historical events, but they will never prove anything to the extent that a logical or mathmatical proof proves a theory.
Well, you're not discussing science here (and by that I mean natural science), but the philosophy of science. And that's a related but different animal (or beast perhaps?).
Not that I concur with your deductions. If you say that given a heap of evidence of things past and a theory to explain them, no sound scientific conclusion can be drawn. By your reasoning we could never prove murder either. All we have are a number of clues to what happened after the fact, and we cannot have the same person killed again, to determine how he died the first time, now can we? (Sure, we can kill other people after the fact, but that's not the same thing, and actually closely parallels your argument with regards to evolution then and now).
The natural sciences are based on observation. Sure, if we observe some kind of experiment, that can often (but perhaps paradoxically not always) strengthen our argument, because the experiments can be repeated. But by your reasoning, plate techtonics, most of geology and cosmology would fall also, since they also deal with events that are too slow to observe directly. We don't have to observe the outcome of experiements, it's equally valid to observe the outcome of natural occurrences.
I don't know of any current theory of the philosophy of science that would exclude geology et al, on basis of logic. But again, I'm not a philosopher.
Now, the rub of your argument is the dual use of the word "proof" as it is employed in mathematics/logic (which are formal systems, not based on observation/experiements in the natural world), and the natural science use, where they mean something different. Now, of course, we may not ever be able to "prove" evolution, in the mathematical sense, but we're quite frankly not trying to. Proof means something else in the natural sciences. (And I don't include mathematics, though there are some who do, though there may be language problem here also, english isn't my native tongue).
Now, it's interesting to note, that in practice, in mathematics the meaning of "proof" has come to slide more and more into the natural science one, i.e. how many other reasonable, sceptic experts (scholars) of your peers can you persuade your arguments are sound. There are even a few "back to basics" schools of thought in mathematics these days, to try and counter this trend. But as interesting as that may be, I digress, it's the topic of another discussion.
.
-- Stefan Axelsson
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
gpinzone
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· Score: 2
"But see my previous answer about Stephen Hawking and his consultation with the pope."
Yeah. That was the meeting when the Catholic church said that studying the nature of the universe was okay...as long as it didn't disprove the "unmoved mover." You know...God. Little did they know Mr. Hawking was coming up with a theory that time breaks down at the beginning of the universe and thus doesn't require an unmoved mover...or "God" as some like to refer to him.
You mean those people? Yeah. They're called creationists.
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
jonadab
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· Score: 2
> There are many questions in human psychology that can be answered > scientifically, you just have to ask them right.
This is true to some extent, but generally accepted ethical standards prevent you from conducting most of the experiments that would really be interesting. Nobody complains very much about the unethical treatment of matter and energy, but you do one unethical thing to a human, and the rights groups are all over you.
-- Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
jonadab
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· Score: 2
> Evolutionary biology, as with archaeology, is an historical science.
Sometimes they are also called "soft" sciences. There are a number of such fields; my point is, none of them use the scientific method; they are called "sciences" because people don't understand science.
> The way to test theories in evolutionary biology is to continue > studying existing organisms and fossil specemins in ways that > determine their historical development.
That's not a valid way to test hypotheses. There are no predicted outcomes, no control groups, no doubleblindness... in short, there is no science in this method.
> With the tools of modern biochemistry, for instance, we can use > DNA sequencing to test whether organisms that we believe to be > related from previous studies actually share common DNA patterns > that are consistent with common descent.
Evolutionists _assume_ that common DNA means common descent because they believe that evolution has occurred, but there are at least three alternative explanations for common DNA. (In rough order of popularity, the three I can think of are common design, complete chance, or similar circumstances leading to similar development.) Meanwhile, the very basic idea of evolution (that one organism can evolve into another) has never been tested and cannot ever be tested in a scientific fashion.
> To find that the DNA sequences are incompatible or unrelated would > create a difficulty that must be resolved. If it can't be resolved > in the frame work of evolutionary theory, then that is disproof!
That's naive. Any number of unexpected things have been found over the years that have had to be resolved or explained, but regardless of how many such difficulties arrive, none of them ever disprove anything, because none of it has ever been tested in even a single experiment.
> As an extreme example, if the fossil record started showing (what > are currently belived to be) relatively recent forms (e.g. modern > humans) in much older sediments
That has happened repeatedly. It disproves nothing; the timetables are just adjusted, or the order in which various organisms evolved, or the age of the layer is changed, or gradualism passes out of vogue and is replaced by catastrophism. A few years later as the difficulties are forgotten and the difficulties with catastrophic evolution prove hard to explain, gradualism passes back into vogue, and a fresh crack is taken at explaining away its problems.
Evolutionism has much more in common with history than with physics.
-- Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
jonadab
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· Score: 2
> there are at least three alternative explanations for common DNA.
I thought of another. If you subscribe to Hume's epistemics, you can say you imagined the common DNA sequences. This is of course complete nonsense, but nobody can _prove_ that it's nonsense.
-- Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Yeah. That was the meeting when the Catholic church said that studying the nature of the universe was okay...as long as it didn't disprove the "unmoved mover." You know...God. Little did they know Mr. Hawking was coming up with a theory that time breaks down at the beginning of the universe and thus doesn't require an unmoved mover...or "God" as some like to refer to him.
You mean those people? Yeah. They're called creationists.
And yet, there's a world of difference, between a pope that says "Then that instance 'before' the big bang when the laws of physics as we know them is when God did his work", and the people here that says that "the earth is only six thousand years old (give or take) and evolution as we know it has not taken place."
Look, I realise that we're engaged in a semantic quible, and of course strictly speaking it's not illogical to define "creationist" as someone who belive god created the universe.
However, by grouping together two such extremes of view as those of the two groups of "creationists" as you do, something is irretrievably lost in the translation.
And to maintain that just because we Europeans have those "creationists" of the view of the pope (which has been considerably refined since Hawking's consultation, and Galileo's I might add) that it would be resonable to assume that we also were familiar with the arguments of "creationists" of the other kind is absurd.
And though I doubt that anyone really mistook my using "creationist" as a label solely refering to the latter version, let me state clearly that I did.
To reiterate, while there is no conflict between science and those that hold the (updated) view of the pope. I would say that there is an irreconcilable difference between the latter type "creationist" and the views of the natural sciences.
There, I've gone and defended the pope, it's wasnt 400 years ago that we started a 30 year war to try and kill him. That's progress;-)
-- Stefan Axelsson
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
jaoswald
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· Score: 2
I'm trained as a physicist, so I can sympathize with your feeling that evolutionary biology is a "soft" science, but claiming it isn't a science is just unfair. Softness is a continuum: psychology is softer than biology because psychological experiments are just so difficult to control. Who knows what slight effect might get picked up by the brain and change its response.
Experiments *can* be reproduced because nature is so abundant in species that similar situations arise in totally different, presumably independent groups. One person can research marine invertebrates where a population became separated by some natural event, and another can research mammals, yet another can research ants.
Your conception of the "scientific method" is so narrow that I suspect even hard scientists can't follow it. Experiments that unambiguously test a rigorously posed hypothesis is an ideal that really can't be achieved in practice, even in physics. Independent measurements of fundamental constants, for example, don't always overlap, and physicists assume that there was some systematic effect that threw the odd experiment off, we just don't know what it could be, despite a *great* amount of care that was taken to avoid just this situation. Yet, we continue to believe that the fine structure constant really is a constant.
As for DNA, we know (as much as anything can be known) that DNA gets passed and modified by descent. I can take a DNA test that proves that my mother is my mother, and that her mother is her mother (and, hence, my grandmother). Thats a real experiment, don't you think? Sure, my DNA could have been "designed" that way, without having actually been transmitted from my mother, and maybe my great-great-grandmother never existed. But is it really useful to claim that science has to be able to prove my great-great-grandmother existed through a controlled laboratory experiment (presumably, causing her to be reproducibly born in the multiple labs under controlled conditions...) in order to be scientific? I can always come up with a possible objection, but at some point it becomes a conspiracy theory, not a scientific objection.
Do you believe cosmology is not a science because we can't recreate the big bang?
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
jaoswald
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· Score: 1
Actually, that pepper moth probably wasn't a very good example. The classic photograph was staged, because the pepper moths don't naturally spend time on tree trunks.
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
AndrewRUK
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· Score: 1
Make your mind up. You stated that "What has not been demonstrated is that chance mutations can lead to the introduction of benefical genes that will later lead to a new species and a superior lifeform."
And yet, in response to a demonstration of chance mutations leading to the introduction of benefical genes, you state that "We acknowledge mutations occur like this." So, which is it? Do mutations occur like that or not?
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
Tyreth
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· Score: 2
I'm sorry, I don't see any contradiction in what I said. Some "beneficial" mutations have occurred. Example: Beetles losing wings on a windy island
That is the result of a loss of genes, but a genetic mutation nonetheless. In this case, this normal disadvantage becomes an advantage. The weakness is a strength. But its hardly evolutionary. I said that chance mutations can lead to the introduction of beneficial genes that will later lead to a new species and a superior lifeform. These kinds of mutations involve the changing of existing genes, or the loss of information. Never is new information added.
Basically, the example given was about bacteria that become immune to certain anti-biotics. This has been discussed by creationists - when some of these bacteria gain a specific immunity, they become weak somewhere else. Hardly evolutionary. Mutations occur, but they involve the loss or change of information - never the introduction of information required to reach a new species, for example from homo-erectus to homo-sapien, or from a single celled lifeform to humans, or from reptiles to birds. See where I'm heading? You have a string of genes, some of those values change. Almost always the change is harmful - but sometimes this turns out to be advantegous, such as the loss of wings. Not evolutionary, more like entropy.
Here is an article for your reference and further understanding: Superbugs
I'm quite sure that you have quite a lot to learn about the creationist position, and frankly its not worth my time explaining again because it is always misunderstood. Unless you are the exception amongst the rule (which would be refreshing).
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
jonadab
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· Score: 2
> Do you believe cosmology is not a science because we can't > recreate the big bang?
In a word, yes.
-- Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Comment removed
by
account_deleted
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· Score: 4, Informative
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Close...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
> from the close-only-counts-in-horseshoes dept....and sometimes nuclear weapons -- where missing by a mile is not too bad! (sorry, off-topic)
IN SOVIET RUSSIA
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
mc^2 = E
Old News?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Okay, now I didn't go and read the article, but I thought that this story broke a while ago...
As far as I'm concerned though it is definitely funny to see the way that physics keeps getting slammed on its own theories and laws.
First classical mechanics gets tossed out the window save for special cases, now this with the basis for much of quantum mechanics getting questioned.
Next thing you know they'll be questioning whether we're moving forward in time or backwards...
Why can Google News post a link to The New York Times without pulling up the subscriber page and Slashdot can't?
-- "Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
I'm sorry, but this is entirely incorrect.
by
kfg
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· Score: 4, Informative
The fact that light is in orbit has *no* effect on its speed. You're thinking of light as a Newtonian object getting "sucked into" the black hole. Light isn't "sucked in." The escape velocity of the black hole is simply higher than the speed of light and the light follows a ballistic trajectory. . . at * the speed of light.*
Light is not Newtonian. It dosn't "speed up" as it falls, or "slow down" as it rises. That's kind of the point. Try working some simple Lorentz Transformations to begin to get a feel for this.
KFG
Re:I'm sorry, but this is entirely incorrect.
by
jayed_99
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· Score: 3, Informative
Dude. I have to say it. I *have* to say it.
Lorentz transformations might be "normal math" to you, but to a lot of people (even the average slashdotter) they probably aren't. Think about it. If the poster that you're replying to could *do* Lorentz transformations then he wouldn't be having this mental roadblock...because by learning how to do them, he would have figured out the concepts involved.
It might be more helpful in the future to say something like "here is a cool little Java applet that visually (and interactively) explains a Lorentz transformation. It's not a thorough mathematical explanation, but it should give you some clues to what I'm talking about. Simple Lorentz transformations can be done easily with the skills that you (hopefully) learned in high school algebra. I know that most papers explaining Lorentz transformation are written in mathematicese, but, hey, it's just like learning Perl. Take it slowly, one step at a time, and work all of the examples out yourself. Good luck."
I see this story and then look down at the bottom of the page. Lo and behold, the QOTD has special meaning in this context:
186,000 Miles per Second. It's not just a good idea. IT'S THE LAW.
PLEASE torture me with that!
by
SHEENmaster
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· Score: 2
That's when tensor math starts to come in handy. Don't worry, I won't torture you with that.
I've heard the same damn "Just Because" explanations forever! I downloaded a quite lengthy explanation of Tensor Calculus to my Zaurus.
What I was really asking is if anyone knew the basis for these theories.
-- You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Re:PLEASE torture me with that!
by
Aleatoric
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· Score: 4, Informative
I'll let someone else torture you with tensors:o)
Here are three (of many) links that I've found in the past that deal with relativity and provide varying degrees of rigor and completeness in the explanations.
How stuff works! Talking about special relativity: http://www.howstuffworks.com/relativi ty.htm
A pretty interesting and more rigorous explanation: http://physics.syr.edu/courses/modul es/LIGHTCONE/
And finally, a question and answer format explanation:o) http://www.sciencenet.org.uk/database/Physics /List s/relativity.html
This should get you a good set of basic coverage about relativity.
--
Nunc Tutus Exitus Computarus.
Re:PLEASE torture me with that!
by
guybarr
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· Score: 2
I'll assume you're serious, and give a serious (though a bit caustic) reply:
I've heard the same damn "Just Because" explanations forever! I downloaded a quite lengthy explanation of Tensor Calculus to my Zaurus
What I was really asking is if anyone knew the basis for these theories.
There are many people who learned the theoretical, and some of the experimental basis of SR. They are commonly known as: "second year or above physics undergraduate students"
If you seriously want a layman's introduction to SR, don't study Tensors just yet, (do it sometime, though, its good for the soul), instead, go to the nearest library or book-store, open a copy of "Berkely's Physics Course" (Vol I, IIRC) and read relevant sections.
No pain, no gain.
-- Working for necessity's mother.
Re:PLEASE torture me with that!
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Emil Artin (a prominent algebraist) used to intone to his first-year calculus students that "integration was good for the soul"
Re:PLEASE torture me with that!
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rossifer
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· Score: 3, Insightful
What I was really asking is if anyone knew the basis for these theories.
Ah. I'm not going to be able to do more than point you in the right direction in one/. posting. For that direction: don't worry about tensor math yet, you won't need it until Special Relativity. In the short term, you should study a good "Modern Physics" text. Specifically, Maxwell's equations, the theoretical underpinnings of each equation and finally, their application to EM fields.
At that point, there's enough information to head over to the General Relativity chapter and take a gander. That ought to be enough to blow your mind for a little while as what you thought you knew about the universe resorts itself (don't worry, it happens to almost everyone).
After that, you can finish the book, develop some basic tensor math skills, then come back and explain Special Relativity to all of us! Actually, I do get Special Relativity, but it is mind bending. You really start thinking about the universe on a completely different scale.
I found it incredibly interesting stuff to learn, but because I went to a non-top-twenty school, there were only a few other people in my class with any interest. The hostility from the other undergrad students who hated learning (and especially hated having to rethink the universe) was a bit of a downer for the in-class exchange that the prof was so hoping for.
The graduate level classes were much more fun.:)
Regards, Ross
Re:PLEASE torture me with that!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Some advice, from another highschool student with an interest in learning more about physics: read Feynman's lectures. I read six easy pieces and six not-so-easy pieces; I recently discovered that my school has the entire collection (three volumes), so I've read some of those. Take a look at it sometime; Feynman explains things really well (including Tensors!).
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
but the real question is
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
What happens if you are on a train travelling the speed of light and you walk from the back to the front? And what if the train turns on the headlights?
SLASHDOT IS DOING IT AGAIN
by
unisol5
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· Score: 0, Redundant
Guys c'mon this is getting ridiculous now. This news has been posted before on another site. This is becoming a children's site and something something I can trust to read the news.
Re:SLASHDOT IS DOING IT AGAIN
by
unisol5
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· Score: 0, Redundant
Guys c'mon this is getting ridiculous now. This news has been posted before on another site. This is becoming a children's site and NOT something I can trust to read the news.
Re:SLASHDOT IS DOING IT AGAIN
by
CyberDong
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· Score: 0, Redundant
Guys c'mon this is getting ridiculous now. This complaint has been posted before on another level of nesting. This is becoming a children's site and NOT something I can trust to read the news.
No, what this is saying is that. . .
by
kfg
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· Score: 3, Informative
some physicists believe they may be seeing things at the macro level that are unexplainable by Relativitly theory, and then extrapolating that, without any apparent justification, that if such is the case *maybe* explaining this differece can open the bridge to the Theory of Everything.
Please note that most physicists are of a mind that the physicist who are seeing these things are, ummmmm, seeing things.
So far it's all still a lot of waving of hands in the air and ignoring the part where "a miracle happens."
Not to say that it might not all work out in the end, but to imply that Relativity has been disproven, or even that certain limits have been found, is, ummmmm, premature.
KFG
Re:No, what this is saying is that. . .
by
Aerog
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· Score: 3, Insightful
So far it's all still a lot of waving of hands in the air and ignoring the part where "a miracle happens."
Wow. You really have taken an advanced physics class! (not being sarcastic at all) In my brief experience with quantum mechanics, that's pretty much all it is. Sure, there's math to back up most of it, but a lot is just "classical parallels".
some physicists believe they may be seeing things at the macro level that are unexplainable by Relativitly theory
Something like when you examine a classical system of a partical moving in a one-dimensional region of definite length (the 1D infinite square well), you can see that it is equally probable to find the particle at any distance from the sides. However, quantum mechanically, the particle has a definite probability of being in the centre and said probability decreases like a gaussian distribution as it approaches either boundary. However, this is only for the ground state. As you get to higher and higher energy levels, you start to notice that the QM probability begins to resemble the classical one. But I'll leave with the best quote ever, which means my sig is finally applicable:
--
- Relativistic? That's barely Newtonian!
News flash: Einstein story "too geeky" for /.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
The more I read the posts here, the more I see a bunch of peoeple who don't know physics too well commenting on the validity of the article and of the work of one of the greatest physicists of all time (based on material not even in a scientific publication), alongside a bunch of people saying "well, we all knew that Einstein was a rebel and modern science (which happens to have given you THESE COMPUTERS) was crap anyway."
I think we have leanred the/. absolute scale of geekiness:
Physics, Calculus story (i.e. > computer science story):
geek_comprehension = lim x --> (-infinity) of O(N^x)
(Witness all kinds of wacky shit being posted and people looking like fools or luddites!)
Computer Science story:
geek_comprehension = O(N)
(Endless commentary, much of it insightful, and meaningful discussion.)
Other story (i.e. < computer science story):
geek_comprehension = zero, because geek_boredom = O(e^N)
(Endless "Why is this news for nerds!?" posts)
Let's all discuss this E~mc^2 story as little as possible, it's making the/. crowd sound stupid as hell.
Re:News flash: Einstein story "too geeky" for /.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I FULLY agree with you:)
Assigning them a negligible geek_comprehension in science does not even allow *lots* of/.'ers to say something even remotely useful about the subject.
And it is such a shame seeing some posts moderated up as "interesting" or even "insightful". I can't believe real nerds are still having party.
Oh God! This is probably the reason why we will have buggy code running on QCs! (someday)
Einstein knew he was wrong
by
automatic_jack
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· Score: 5, Informative
Not more than a few year's after developing his theories of general and special relativity, Einstein realized that they weren't perfect. The simple reason behind his realization was that the theories of relativity didn't make sense when applied on a quantum scale, and the theories of quantum physics didn't make sense when applies of a relative scale. Einstein refused to believe that the universe worked in such a way that there had to be two mutually exclusive theories to explain physics on the very small and the very large scale.
Of course, the rest of the world was busy experimenting with his theories of relativity, but after he published them he quickly lost interest in their progress. He spent the rest of his life searching for what he referred to as the "unified field theory," a single theory that could properly explain quantum physics and relativity at the same time.
I'm not a physicist by any stretch of the imagination, but theoretical science does interest me. Brian Greene's book, The Elegant Universe does a great job of explaining the background on this. It's worth a look.
--
--
Have you ever noticed that at trade shows, Microsoft is always the company that is handing out stress balls?
Re:Einstein knew he was wrong
by
HiThere
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· Score: 3
Certainly he considered his work on the Unified Field Theory the most important thing he was doing. But he was up to lots of other stuff. Fequently he would mount challenges against some irrationality or other of quantum physics. (Usually the irrationality won, but not always.)
In fact, Einstein was one of the unwilling architects of modern quantum theory. Because his challenges to it shaped the developing theory. And THIS was probably the actually most important thing he was doing.
--
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Re:Einstein knew he was wrong
by
caller_number_six
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I know it's nitpicking, but isn't "wrong" kind of a misleading term here? I thought the whole idea of modern science rested on the notion that at best science asymptotically approaches "truth" as all the data comes in. "Wrong" to me implies that reaching "truth" is an option.
Re:Einstein knew he was wrong
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
So, it's impossible to find anything completely true? Is that completely true?
Re:Einstein knew he was wrong
by
John+Bayko
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· Score: 1
Einstein trusted relativity, because he understood it, and it was straightforward. He distrusted quantum theory (famous "God does not play dice with the universe" quote), considering it an approximation that would do until the underlying physics could be worked out. Most of his contribution to the development of quantum theory was coming up with situations where its predictions seemed wrong - "wrong" or not, quantum theory turned out to be consistant, which is what counted in the end.
Re:Einstein knew he was wrong
by
Wiltif
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· Score: 1
Thank you!
Division of labor
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
In physicvs there is a division of labor
1) Some physicists are therorists, they come up with theories and dont do experiments
2) Others are experimentalists, they do experiments and check the theories developed by theorists
Einstein, Willard Gibbs, Kirkwood, Feynmann, etc were thorists, what is the reason why they did not du experiments themselwes. They only suggested various experiments which were later carried out by experimentalists
So its wavelength is not an indication of speed as it is with every other type of wave?
So with light, velocity!=wavelength*frequency?
-- You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Re:only its wavelength?
by
Alsee
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· Score: 3, Informative
So with light, velocity!=wavelength*frequency?
For light velocity DOES wavelength*frequency.
But different people will see the same photon as having different wavelenths and different frequencies. When you travel very fast you get time dilation and time slows down for you. When your clock runs slow more "waves" will occure in one second. The frequency appears to increase. High speed also cause distortions in apparent distances.
EVERYONE will see the volocity as C. It doesn't matter if you are standing still or moving towards the light at 500 million miles per hour or moving away from the light at 500 million miles per hour. The light always looks to you like it is moving at speed C.
-
-- - - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
And just a stupid quibbling footnote
by
GMFTatsujin
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· Score: 3, Interesting
String Theory doesn't touch Ether with a ten-foot pole.
String Theory, in part, seeks to explain the structure of the universe in such a way as to accomodate both gravitation and quantum effects. It does this by shifting the understanding of particles from a family of points that all have different properties (protons, electrons, quarks, what have you) toward a *truly* fundamental form of matter - a string - that displays different properties depending on its orientation and motion in space. One (and ONLY one) type of string, many configurations, all leading up to families of particles.
It's elegant, unproven, pretty damn keen, and possibly wrong, but worth a look. The math involved makes *predictions* about the fundamental properties of matter, rather than being built off of measurements of those properties (as quantum theory and relativity are). That's an important step that cannot be underscored enough.
String Theory doesn't posit that there's a universal medium that everything travels through, as Ether theory does. Instead, it describes a configuration of space that strings wiggle around in to produce the world that we're used to looking at.
String Theory rocks. I hope it's right. GMFTatsujin
Re:And just a stupid quibbling footnote
by
Alsee
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· Score: 2
The math involved makes *predictions* about the fundamental properties of matter
Yeah, except we have basicly zero clue what the predictions are. Pretty interesting definition of "prediction":D
-
-- - - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Uh...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
the famous equation E=mc2 might not be entirely correct
-- You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
the universe is just a computer program...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
black holes are where some newbie programmer did a division by zero. The speed of light is fixed because the universal CPU hasn't been upgrade to the Pentium 10^10! series yet.
Seriously though, if CPUs double every 18 months, in about 50-100 years we should be able to model every atom on earth, provided memory density grows at the same rate. hmmm... something doesn't seem to be quite right there...
Re:the universe is just a computer program...
by
PhuCknuT
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· Score: 1
Moore's law doesn't go on forever, it'll hit the physical limits in much less than 50 years.
Happy new year
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I can barely type this but happy new year everyone. (wow I can still type pretty goood).
Re:And Dubya says
by
slickwillie
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
This story doesn't say anything interesting, just that there exist speculative theories which violate postulates of relativity. They have neither convincing experimental backing, nor strong theoretical reasons why they should be true. It's not news when someone says, "I have thought of a theory which violates Einstein's postulates." I can do that too, and chances are my theories will be worthless. If someone produces an experiment or observation which clearly violates relativity, or a self-consistent theory of quantum gravity with testable predictions, then it's time to get excited. Meanwhile, journalists' interpretations of theorists' speculations are not that interesting.
Re: Much ado about nothing
by
bcrowell
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· Score: 2
They have neither convincing experimental backing, nor strong theoretical reasons why they should be true.
Well, actually I think there are some pretty good theoretical motivations for what they're doing. The basic idea is that there's a certain distance scale, called the Planck scale, at which we need a theory of quantum gravity, which we don't have. At the Planck scale, space and time are probably granular, or foamlike, rather than smooth.
So what happens when a particle's wavelength gets so short that it's comparable to the Planck scale? One reasonable conjecture is that the wavelength can't get any shorter than that, because spacetime itself has a granularity at that scale. It would be like trying to move a rook on the chessboard by half a square.
The shorter a particle's wavelength is, the more momentum and energy it has. Therefore there might be an upper limit on the energy a particle can have. That's the physical content of the modified form of the equation.
Also, re
They have neither convincing experimental backing...
you might want to take another look at the article. It discusses some empirical observations of cosmic rays that helped to motivate this stuff.
Re:Hitler knew that
by
kingkade
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· Score: 1, Insightful
What's your point besides being OT? How can one's religion affect one's findings? How are his theories of relativity incompatible with Christianity -- a more appropriate statement: Christianity has never been compatible with anything that's been proven scientifically.
186,000 Miles per Second. It's not just a good idea. IT'S THE LAW
Well, I thought it was a funy coincidence.
Don't you recognize a troll?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Don't you recognize a troll when you see it? It is January 1, gimme a brake, I have the right to joke!
You a right I was off topic.
Wait a sec: Kinetic energy is relative too!
by
Theovon
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· Score: 2, Informative
>> It's (E^2) = (m^2)(c^4) + (p^2)(c^2).
Actually, it's E = m * c^2, where m is the rest mass times the Lorenz transform.
If you then subtract the rest energy from the energy when in motion (m*c^2 - m0*c^2), you get the kinetic energy, which at low speeds is approximately equal to 1/2*m*v^2, which we all recognize as the formula for kinetic energy in Newtonian physics.
That is to say, relativistic kinetic energy is not exactly equal to newtonian kinetic energy.
Does Dubya think thers's global cooling?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Cooling like in the Cold War
Hitler- Great Physicist?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Lenard got the Nober Prize for Physics but I dond understand about Hitler, what physical theories did Hitler come up with?
Re:Hitler- Great Physicist?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
It seems that everybory thinks that there was only one Hitler - the dictator. There was a 19th Century chemist named Gustav Hitler, he was a pioneer of biophysical chemistry.
Power Series Expansion
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
E=mc^2 comes from a power series expansion where the squared term is the highest power, so its approximated. Its just like.5mv^2 its just that v=c. The other terms drop out just like when you're talking about the complexity of an algorithm. If its complexity is n^3 + 2n^2 + 5n, then you just say its O(n^3).
Its been known that C is not always the same...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
through different mediums for quite some time. Through a vacuum (and pretty close through air), C~=3.10*10^8m/s, but not the same through a piece of glass. This is why there is diffraction, doesn't anyone here that's been through college take any physics?
Physics is nothing by a model
by
dracken
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· Score: 2
At this point, I would like to point out that physics is nothing by a model. Its a bunch of equations trying to create a model for what we observe so we can make predictions on the model. Now to explain an observation that is inconsistent with the model, we need to change the model. As it were - there are no "absolute thruths". Einstein's model and the theory based on it was astonishingly accurate and made amazing predictions. If our current observations are incosistent with the model - we need to revise it.
By the way are all the comment posters the one who answered "I would be reading slashdot" for what would be doing during the new year;)
Gustav Hitler- never heard of him
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
what did he do?
Re:Gustav Hitler- never heard of him
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
He found a better solvent for human parts?
Dubya - the scientist
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
If only he had good grades in school, then Dubya would have become a scientist.
Re:Dubya - the scientist
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
To tell the truth, grades aren't, or weren't, at least, all that important. I mean, look at all the attention Einstein himself gets... and his grades, quite frankly, sucked.
Lucky Dubya!
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Good hor him! Since his grades werent good enough for a scientist, then he became a good president.
"..[T]he famous equation E=mc2 might not be entirely correct..."
It isn't.
Time slows when you've smoked one too many doobs or when you're bored out of your mind.
-- anthony
I hate to say this...
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dasunt
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· Score: 4, Funny
But why do you think that your brain is capable of understanding the basic forces of the universe?
Your brain evolved to keep you away from things that want to eat you, find things you want to eat, and basically preserve you until you could insure that you have spread your genes. Last time I checked, understanding the basic rules of reality wasn't needed to ensure that you live long enough to breed.
Hell, we'er just lucky that the same math that works on our scale also seems to work when we look at how the universe works.
Even now, logic has begun to fail us when we ask the deep questions. Consider this: What made this reality? Oh sure, I know the theories that suggest that this universe might have been created by another universe, and at this level, cause and effect goes out the window, leading to the possibility that this universe can create the ancestor of the universe that created it, but what allowed this gestalt to exist?
There's an Heinleinian phrase that occasionally gets said on slashdot: There ain't no such thing as a free lunch (TANSTAAFL). Too bad that its wrong, since the universe is the biggest example of a free lunch in action.
[ Don't feel so bad - my brain also seems hellbent to make me survive long enough to ensure my genes are passed on. Damn thing is that my body agrees with it and is planning to expire in half a century in order to free up resources for my future offspring. Its a comspiracy, I tell you... ]
Just my $.02
Re:I hate to say this...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Isn't "ain't no such thing" a double negative? Which would mean that there is such thing as a free lunch.
But why do you think that your brain is capable of understanding the basic forces of the universe?
Empirical evidence. We have been doing exactly that for hundreds of years and making constant progress. You may as well have asked that question of Issac Newton when we was working out the laws of motion and gravity. Yet he did it.
Your brain evolved to [survive]... Last time I checked, understanding the basic rules of reality wasn't needed to ensure that you live long enough to breed.
Same goes for calculating the orbits of planets and predicting eclipses. We don't need to be able to do that in order to breed, but we can. Everywhere we look the universe is precisely ruled by mathematics. If the universe was created by a god then one can only conclude that that god was a mathematician.
If you aren't a scientist or mathematician then perhaps you haven't seen how the universe is built upon and ruled by math, but it is. And that math often has a rich beauty of its own. The fact that the universe is built on math means that we can understand it.
Even now, logic has begun to fail us when we ask the deep questions. Consider this: What made this reality?
It is NOT a failure of logic to say that we don't know the answer to that question yet. There are some half-baked theories about it floating around, but they are exactly that - half-baked. We have other things we need to finish figuring out first.
They say that the phrase "I don't know" is the beginning of wisdom. I'd say the phrase "I don't know yet" is the beginning of science. Will we ever hit a brick wall in trying to understand the universe? Maybe, but not today.
-
-- - - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
holy hell, I never thought of that! Heinlein would have known that implication. I'm not kidding. Did Heinlein intend this double meaning?
--
-pyrrho
Re:I hate to say this...
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Rik+van+Riel
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· Score: 2
Last time I checked, understanding the basic rules of reality wasn't needed to ensure that you live long enough to breed.
It is needed for long term survival, though. One day this planet will be hit by a huge asteroid again, some day way into the future the sun will stop burning. If we want to survive beyond those hurdles we'll need to understand a lot about the universe; this means that physics is important to our survival.
OTOH, if all that mattered to us was getting away from the things that want to eat us and finding the next thing to eat, then I guess we don't really deserve long-time survival. Or do we ?
There's an Heinleinian phrase that occasionally gets said on slashdot: There ain't no such thing as a free lunch (TANSTAAFL). Too bad that its wrong, since the universe is the biggest example of a free lunch in action.
If my memory serves me right, there are theories to explain this. Concepts such as anti-particles (having negative mass) and anti-universe have been put forward. According to such theories total energy and mass of the combined universe and anti-universe is zero.
I think I read about this in Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time"
Re:I hate to say this...
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canadian_right
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The universe is not ruled by math. Math is an excellent TOOL used to describe the universe.
You can write down music, but the written music is just a description, not the actual music. In the same way, math is a handy, concise, notation used to write down descriptions of the universe.
What makes you think reality had to be made in the first place? Why did the gestalt need to be "allowed" to exist? Even if you "answered" your question, you'd simply regress to "Okay, what made that?" There is no valid Origin of Existence Question, because, whatever the origin is (an ultimate cause, an infinite regression of causes with no begining, a closed causality loop where everything exists because everything else exists) it had to have existence without making.
Whether there's a truly infinite regress of causes, or there is an ultimate cause, or existience is a closed causality loop, at some point the answer is "It just is. It needed no creation. The whole gestalt exists because it exists." The only question is "what exists?"
"Why" can only have proximate answers, not ultimate ones -- and the reason you ask why is because you're misapplying a evolved instinct to seek proximate causes to the existence of the universe. The only thing you need to understand on the origin question is, ultimately, there's no "why" to understand.
Re:I hate to say this...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Combining your post and your sig is amusing:
The universe is not ruled by math. Anarchists never rule.
Re:I hate to say this...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Don't be an idiot. Double negatives are grammatically awkward, but unlike what your grade 9 English teacher said, they don't always change the meaning of a phrase. Besides, "ain't no such thing" is a figure of speech.
Particles of antimatter have positive mass- this has been experimentally verified and matched all the popular theories. Negative matter is a different thing, and has been theorized, but would not be called anti-particles. (Well, I suppose one could theorize negative matter anti-particles to complement theoretical 'normal' negative matter particles, but that's not what you appear to be talking about.)
Gosh that reminds me of a theology discussion that I over heard between a mother and her son:
Son: What's created the universe? Mom: God created the universe. Son: Who created God? Mom: God has always existed. Son: Why can't the universe have always existed?
Mom: Shhhh...
-- "Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
Great, let's get our science from the New York Times again, a publication that predicted that Goddard's idea of spaceflight could never work because in space there's nothing to push against! Duh!
A word of advice: Don't get our science news reporting from popular magazines and newspapers. They have a knack for not only getting things mixed up, but getting them exactly wrong.
What's being discussed is yet another crackpot theory that very few scientists take seriously. Saying "Whoo hoo, Einstein may be wrong!" sells papers, but a scientific analysis of the situation is a whole different story.
That's not exactly true...
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jpmorgan
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· Score: 4, Informative
It's not exactly true that we have no clue what string theory's predictions are.
On one hand, the formulations of string theory are Very Hard (TM). I'm sure you think youv'e seen hard math, but there's hard math and there's string theory math. Classic standard model quantum mechanics and general relativity is hard math, nice hard partial differential equations to solve. String theory math makes this look easy though. It's so hard that nobody has yet even formulated the exact equations - everybody's working with approximations. So the predictions that people are making with string theory may not be completely accurate, as they aren't working from the real threory, just an approximation of it. Nice, eh?
On the other hand, most of the quantitative predictions that string theory does generate are mindboggling hard to test anyway, since in almost all respects string theory agrees with classic quantum mechanics (there's an oxymoron...) until you get to some pretty insane energies (think plank energy).
Fortunately, recently a few physicists have come up with some more subtle qualitative predictions that should prove feasible to test (for example, string theory predicts that cosmic microwave background radiation should be pixelated - the big bang didn't do antialiasing:).
Re:That's not exactly true...
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Alsee
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· Score: 2
I was just noting with amusment that while the theory makes absolute and inflexible predictions, almost without exception we can't tell what they are.
About the pixelation - I'm about to get in over my head, but what the hell. It seems like scientists are pretty sceptical about being about to detect the effect, and it doesn't seem to be particular to string theory. If I understand it right, the effect would be common to a variety of unified quantum theories.
It will be interesting to see what happens when someone figures out what the testable predictions actually are.
-
-- - - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Re:That's not exactly true...
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Brand+X
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· Score: 2
I spent about 18 months trying to wrap my brain around the string theory math. At that point, I'd already gotten to the point that I could do QM and GR with very little difficulty (even occasionally coming up with tricks to shave pages off of the solutions my fellow physics grads came up with, thanks in large part to an extensive background in transform methods), and was writing very good multipass prediction software for cluster-scale orbitals (essentially, how likely is it that there will be an electron interaction at point x if the energy level of the cluster is in range y, with permutations i and j from outside electromagnetic fields; and what does the field look like; and how does it permute the said outside fields? - The whole point of this was computational analysis of nerve signal induction solutions...) and string theory was creating tangles in my gray matter comporable to what happens to those strings of colored lights people store in their attics. And this, even though my transform background made the multidimensional tensor analysis part of it trivial...
-- --
Still waiting for the Nike endorsement
What is C relative to?
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DesScorp
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· Score: 4, Funny
Dude......C is relative to B. It's C++ and Java that's relative to C. Cobol is a different species altogether.....
-- Life is hard, and the world is cruel
-1, Disbeliever
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murky.waters
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· Score: 3, Informative
Actually not quite, I do find this issue extremely fascinating and I had thought of submitting this story earlier today, but I felt that there wasn't any actual news here. The thing is, currently, there is no evidence whatsoever that supports VSL (Varying Speed of Light) theories in any appreciable way, as the NYT writes, Superstring theorist super-star (as far as physics goes:) Edward Witten calls the whole thing "unimpressive". VSL is basically a product of physicists brainstorming to somehow come up with an answer to that most pressing question: just how to consolidate quantum mechanics (Bohr, Heisenberg, et al., about the really really small stuff) with Einstein's general relativity (mainly about gravity, big'n'fast stuff).
It is actually not that much of a stretch. After all, when Einstein published his findings about ninety-eight years ago (I think), physicists abandoned the notion of absolute time (you have to spend a moment sometime to really appreciate what that means, most of the time, we really are Newtonians through and through). Today, some theoreticians and experimenters are considering to do the same with c, the speed of light.
The idea that c varies, however, is not all that new, it has already been conjectured to be a function of time, c -> c(t), to make sense of some odd stuff in cosmology. What's new in Dr. Magueijo and other's work is that they play with the idea of c varying in much more complex scenarios, having to do with with position, wavelength, momentum, etc.
It's worth mentioning that the latest shift in the literature tends to go to a varying alpha, the fine structure "constant", from which c can be seen to be derived from. For more info, check out this article, co-authored by Magueijo (full text in pdf, on windows you have to add ".pdf" to the filename).
Needlessly to say, there's dozens of scientific articles about this issue, some quite readable (I have a couple of links at home, writing this from a party I'm supposed to enjoy).
The real news in all of this, it seems to me, is how almost esoteric science (in a good sense) has made its way into mainstream journalism. And with the publishing of Magueijo's book, which will be among the more readable ones of its kind, being scheduled for 2003, there's certainly a hot issue to watch as it unfolds. Last, unlike with superstring theory (you know, the little elastics swinging in 10 or so dimensions, and whose detection is so many orders of magnitude away from current technology, it ain't funny anymore), VSL is going to get some experimental underpinnings in 2006 from NASA's GLAST (Gamma Ray Large Area Space Telescope) satellite.
Hey, with a little luck, who knows what the limit is going to be. It would be fucking amazing if we arrived at a correct Theory Of Everything within our lifetimes. Boy, what better issue for today.
-- Imagine the Creator as a stand up commedian - and at once the world becomes explicable. -Mencken
When a man
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
has gaysexwithdogs, he better move at the speed of light because E=mc^2 or verbosely E=chances of cumming, M=# of strokes, C=average tightness of a dog's anal cavity.
In Soviet Russia...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
New Year's have a happy YOU!
Of course E != MC^2
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
When NYT reports something, can't the poster provide a non-registration-required link? Call me prude, but I don't like having to register, and I don't like faking a registration. Either link to another news source or just don't report the damn news item if you have to register to read the article. Leave NYT alone.
First off let me just say that i think we already have the answer to the question does e=mc^2. Let me demonstrate, first we need alot of pimply faced geeks sitting around their computers on new years eve/day talking about relativity. Most discussion about this topic tend to descend into inane dribble about which formula is correct and oh you forgot a denominator here or why don't you account for gamma that. But if just for 1 day we would take precise measurements, and gather all these formulas into one place and use some kind of idle processor usage way of trying to brute force the universe we might actually succeed in turning theory into law.
But no we must post and repost and comment to no end. We have all the info we need, we just need to stop arguing like 19 century scientific idiots about whether or not a theory is unpopular or just can't work and either prove or disprove a single or multiple theories once and for all.
I know this will probally get modded down to like -1 as flamebait, but it is not, it is a genuine challenge. What use is it that microsoft has a "monopoly" on the desktop market if we are unwilling or unable to prove or disprove scientific theory (central to our understanding of the universe), that has stood for almost a hundred years, and has not been unified into a single all encompasing theory of the universe, or cast aside as inaccurate.
-- A Fatal OE Exception has occurred, Sig will now reboot.
Measure a photon? I'd like to see that one...
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DAQ42
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· Score: 1
considering a photon is a poor mans explination for something that behaves like a particle and a wave at the same time. I learned in first year physics that the only way to measure something is to stop is. But since you can't exactly stop light, only measure it's reflection or absorbtion, it makes it rather difficult to accurately gauge it's speed (distance over time). There is also the fact that the speed of light is a mathematical calculation based on measurable observations. The only issue with such calculations is that it is subject to the hypothesis that light can be measured in the same way as a particle. Now the next incongruous statement I shall make devolves to the actual question of energy. Einstien's theory of relativity is actually the equation for measuring the energy of a particle in relation to object mass. This is actually an attempt at as close to a grand unification theory as has been widely accepted in this civilization (of course, religion is the other one, but that's another topic not to be breached today). There's also the wonderful coinsidence that Einstein's theory is called the theory of relativity, not the theory of constants, so every variable in the equation is relative to the application of the theory. It's freakin New Year's Eve (actually 4AM) and I'm posting a stupid reply to a way too intellectual discussion on Slashdot. I have no life. Screw it, I'm going to bed.
Someone please explain to me why I have no legs?
-- Don't Ask Questions. I don't know the answers and even if I did I wouldn't tell you.
Finally, something to talk about...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I get so tired of discussing Seinfeld at work.
all: 'Yada, Yada'(continue at yout own pace)
This will finally provide a topic for intelligent conversation.
Also, I had something else about faucets. It was going to be funny, but I sort of lost my momentum.
Priority list:
1. Create list
Does this mean black holes have color?
by
shess
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· Score: 1
They mention a couple times that one possible result would be that light of different frequencies would have slightly different speeds. If that is the case, it would seem that black holes would have a "color", due to the fact that the event horizon would be at a different radius for different frequencies of light.
Err, well, it would be more like a four dimensional rainbow, I suppose. Come to think of it, this would also imply that gravitational lensing should also affect different frequencies differently, which should also be detectable.
Boy, all of that makes me wonder if I'm missing something. Maybe NYT isn't the deep science reference I imagined it to be...
"YHBT" is just a silly backdoor should your arguments fail.
f=ma only an "aproximation" too.
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Please, everyone always tries to stand on Einstein's shoulders, discredit his work, or "embrace and extend" it, and thus etch their place in science history by being an equal or better to such an influential man. Every time they try this it eventually is discovered that Einstein was right (again), and these people were caught not doing their homework, or cutting corners.
Lets compare this to another famous, simple, theory. F=ma. One might say that is an aproximation (and it is). Especially on Earth. If you ever tried to measure that you would fail. Things like friction, rotation of the earth, instrument error would make you believe that there are 1,001 different variables. You'd be right.. and wrong. The beauty, the GENIUS of Isaac Newton and Einstein is that they saw beyond all of the complications and boiled the equation down to its roots. Of course any real world use of it is going to deviate from it. The alternative is to have a system more akin to the motion of the planets prior to the gallileo; with cycles and epicycles... a Fourier transform of the universe, where we keep adding on terms to equations to desctibe each new experiement, and cloud ourselves from the larger, more accurate, picture (oh wait, we do that too, its called quantum)
FTL == Time Travel ?
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steveha
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I'd like to understand why theory says faster-than-light travel is impossible.
I do understand why you cannot ever reach or exceed the speed of light through normal acceleration. The closer you get to the speed of light, the more aparrent mass you get, and thus the more energy it takes to accelerate you. To hit the speed of light would take infinite energy (and you would have infinite mass when you hit it). Infinite energy and mass aren't really available, so you can't have a speeed >= C by accelerating, no matter how hard you try.
The part I don't understand:
I have been told that theory forbids any travel faster than light, no matter what the means ("warp drive", "hyperspace", "teleporter", whatever). My understanding is that if you could, some observers would see you traveling back in time, and this is forbidden.
I would appreciate any explanation of this, or even just a pointer to a reference I can understand. Thanks.
steveha
-- lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Re:FTL == Time Travel ?
by
Soft
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I have been told that theory forbids any travel faster than light, no matter what the means ("warp drive", "hyperspace", "teleporter", whatever). My understanding is that if you could, some observers would see you traveling back in time, and this is forbidden.
Yes. One of the hypotheses of relativity is causality, that is, one event can possibly cause another only if the latter occurs at a later time than the former, and this must hold true for all possible observers whatever their frame of reference.
Now, as you know, the passing of time for an observer varies with his frame of reference (his speed, to put it simply). Hence, given two events, the interval of time from one to the other will not be the same for all observers. But if one is to cause another, it must always remain in its past; the sign of the time difference "t2-t1" must not change whatever the observer.
Unfortunately, my memories of relativity are too scarce to put this into equations, but if you could travel faster than light, you could, say, watch an asteroid smash into the Earth and warn your friend on the Centauri stock market to sell shares of all Terran businesses before anyone could "see" the flash of the impact.
And in a given frame of reference (maybe that of a traveler aboard a STL ship in-between), it would look as if you knew about it before it happened; stretching it further, it would be possible for the traveler (maybe through another FTL "jump") to warn Earth before the impact. Bye-bye causality.
If these situations are not to happen, information must not travel FTL.
Re:FTL == Time Travel ?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
It is possible to travel faster than light, and backwards through time. It's all "explained" (not really explained, but "taken into account") by quantum electrodynamics. But a particle that is created at a speed below the speed of light cannot accelerate past the speed of light. Before we can use a Warp drive we must invent a Mr. Sulu.
I have been told that theory forbids any travel faster than light, no matter what the means ("warp drive", "hyperspace", "teleporter", whatever). My understanding is that if you could, some observers would see you traveling back in time, and this is forbidden.
Re:FTL == Time Travel ?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Interesting
Hm. That's assuming that what the law of causality describes as an 'observer' always uses his/her/its physical vision, which uses a speed-limited medium (light), and thus Causality's chain of events is defined by vision...
I don't think that Causality cares much about who's there watching, when things happens. I always figured an 'observer' as something close enough, or able, to be in the same space _and_ time referential as the event, and above all _remain in the same referential_. That is, the observer's time arrow doesn't make loops and knots and other not-fun thingies like trajectories using complexes (as in z=xi+y where sqr(i)=-1, what's the English term for those?), or if it _does_, then the event's has the _same_ loopies.
About FTL itself, the whole point is making the travel's duration approach zero. An ideal FTL travel would make us go from one side of the universe to the other in no time flat, whatever size the universe is. No time travel involved. You wouldn't be 15+ billions years in the past, or future, or whatever, but exactly at the same time than anyone who didn't travel. When you think about it, it's the same thing as supersonic vs. subsonic planes, only with a lot more numbers and funny characters, and a _lot_ higher speed limit.
So your exemple, while amusing, has no real effect on Causality; the 'flash' is just a by-product of the event, and not the event itself. Observing the flash is not really observing the event, since by the time you see it, the event could be over and done for billions of years, thus _quite_ leaving a human's referential. Exemple: we observed, not long ago, two galaxies colliding. Were we to be _there_, _now_, using FTL, what would we see? The billion-year old result of two galaxies colliding.
'Stretching it further' wouldn't change anything: the 'observer' (the FTL traveller) still doesn't stay in the same referential as the event during the whole incident (his time is 'compressed', while the event's is not). If he actually managed to find an intact Earth _after_ it blew up, then A) it's the same Earth, when warning authorities hadn't worked, or B) it's a parallel earth, so the original event wouldn't have any impact (so to speak) to that universe's Causality.
(Yes, I find it easier to believe in parallel universes, of which you can draw neat and simple mathematical representations, than time-travelling in a single timeline; not impossible, but not as simple nor realistic as//Us...)
Well, all that is only my opinion, anyways. I only write about that stuff, don't ask me to actually _build_ the ship ^_^;
Nicolas Briche nbriche@free.fr ============ "If you try to stay sane in life, it'll just drive you crazy. So, you may as well go crazy now and have fun with life." --MegaZone, of Eyrie Productions =========== "Outside! What's it like?" "Well... It's sort of big" --Terry Pratchett
Hm. That's assuming that what the law of causality describes as an 'observer' always uses his/her/its physical vision, which uses a speed-limited medium (light), and thus Causality's chain of events is defined by vision...
No. See my other reply, which is the one that should have been moderated up, not the one you are replying to.
I don't think that Causality cares much about who's there watching, when things happens. I always figured an 'observer' as something close enough, or able, to be in the same space _and_ time referential as the event, and above all _remain in the same referential_.
But you can't make that assumption; if a ship coming from Earth at high (but still sublight) speed crosses the Centauri system as you break the news, they will get the message although in their frame of reference the event really has not occurred yet. And if they also have FTL capability, they can send a message to Earth in time, effectively preventing an impact from happening thanks to the impact actually happening. Thus creating a time-travel-like paradox, which must be prevented, possibly by such means as you suggested.
About FTL itself, the whole point is making the travel's duration approach zero. An ideal FTL travel would make us go from one side of the universe to the other in no time flat, whatever size the universe is. No time travel involved. You wouldn't be 15+ billions years in the past, or future, or whatever, but exactly at the same time than anyone who didn't travel.
Anyone where? At what speed? In which gravity field?
Since, ideally, the events "departure" and "arrival" are in different places, they cannot be simultaneous in all frames of references; otherwise, you are implicitly supposing the existence of an "absolute" time, shared by everyone at every place in the Universe; this is exactly the hypothesis Relativity drops in favor of lightspeed being constant.
'Stretching it further' wouldn't change anything: the 'observer' (the FTL traveller) still doesn't stay in the same referential as the event during the whole incident (his time is 'compressed', while the event's is not).
Without knowing what kind of mechanism would produce FTL travel, one can't really argue about this, but the end result is the same. I really suggest looking at the FTL causality problem FAQ I pointed to in my other post.
If he actually managed to find an intact Earth _after_ it blew up, then A) it's the same Earth, when warning authorities hadn't worked, or B) it's a parallel earth, so the original event wouldn't have any impact (so to speak) to that universe's Causality.
Now that's another matter, and one which is, rightfully, just like time travel. And with such special provisions, then you can have FTL travel or communication, albeit restricted insofar as either some journeys or messages can be prevented in some circumstances (possibly including events which have not happened yet in your timeframe), or you may drop out into another Universe altogether. And then FTL travel isn't really fun, any more than time-travel in which you can't return to your particular time after killing your own grandfather...
Re:FTL == Time Travel ?
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JeremyALogan
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· Score: 0
Well... this is slightly incorrect...
Warp travel could still work (at least the way it's explained in "The Physics of Star Trek"). Warp engines do just that, warp space. You aren't really traveling at speeds greater than light, you're just getting from Point A to Point B faster than light could. The engines literally warp the "fabric" of space so that you just have to step across. You can demonstrate this by looking at a peice of paper. To get from one edge to the other an ant would have to walk 11 inches, but if the ant could bend the paper so that the two edges were touching he'd only have to take one step. Also see the explanation of a Tesseract in "A Wrinkle in Time" (pages 75-78) by Madeleine L'Engle as it works in a similar way.
See my other reply [slashdot.org], which is the one that should have been moderated up, not the one you are replying to.
Interesting material; I'm going to have to read it entirely (and find a way to keep the diagrams from displaying over the text... damn.)
But you can't make that assumption; if a ship coming from Earth at high (but still sublight) speed crosses the Centauri system as you break the news, they will get the message although in their frame of reference the event really has not occurred yet.
Hm; that's the part I don't get. Why wouldn't the event have occured yet? Sure, the flash hasn't reached them yet, and that would be the only way for them to know that anything happened. But that doesn't mean anything about the Earth being totalled. Just because they can't yet observe an event, doesn't mean that the event didn't already happen. This sounds like if you move at vY takes zero time, and finally moving at v>c allows negative distances(!) and X->Y takes negative time (thus travelling in the past). This is... weird. (But a somehow interesting concept. Hm. I can use that. ^_^)
Did I miss something in your exemple? Could you describe the chain of events in more details?
About FTL itself, the whole point is making the travel's duration approach zero. An ideal FTL travel would make us go from one side of the universe to the other in no time flat, whatever size the universe is. No time travel involved. You wouldn't be 15+ billions years in the past, or future, or whatever, but exactly at the same time than anyone who didn't travel.
Anyone where? At what speed? In which gravity field?
Sorry. Let's say that:
point X: point of departure, an Earth-like body orbiting a Sol-like star at one end of the universe (well, supposing the universe _has_ an end, of course)
point Y: point of arrival, similar to X, on the other side of the universe.
Guy G decides to travel to Y, say to visit his girlfriend L, using an ideal FTL device ID (ship, stargate...)
t0, X: G enters ID
t0, Y: L is waiting whereever G is supposed to arrive.
t1, X: ID activates, does its stuff.
t2, Y: ID arrives, stuff is done.
t3, Y: G leaves ID, sees L, much happiness ensues (well, I like happy endings. Sue me. ^_^).
In this case, t2-t1 approaches zero.
As for speed, I don't think that a FTL device should be concerned about how fast it goes but how long it can go over c. Depending of the drive it uses, a FTL device may have some problems surviving a shift under the light barrier. If you think speed, you also have to think acceleration and deceleration, and I don't think a FTL can do that around the light barrier.
Since, ideally, the events "departure" and "arrival" are in different places, they cannot be simultaneous in all frames of references; otherwise, you are implicitly supposing the existence of an "absolute" time, shared by everyone at every place in the Universe; this is exactly the hypothesis Relativity drops in favor of lightspeed being constant.
They're not actually simultaneous, or we'd have two travellers while the travel physically occurs. We'd then say goodbye to sanity while we try to determine where general relativity ends and quantum physics begins (that's the best case scenario; we also could end up with an infinity of travellers between the two points, or one traveller the size of the universe -- see the book Spirit of Wonder for that last one). A FTL can't have a delta of zero, for the same reason a STL can't go to c: if it did, it probably would degenerate into energy. It can only hope to approach it.
As for the 'absolute' time, it would be convenient (like in my previous post), but not necessary. t2-t0X can be positive, negative or, by a randomness so random it can't possibly be random, null, t2-t1 will _still_ be positive approaching zero. The only way to notice any difference would be to isolate one's time from the rest of the universe's. If there was a way to do _that_, then there wouldn't be a _point_ to a FTL device. That, and one would effectively leave the space-time continuum, which isn't a smart thing to do unless one know a way to come _back_. This hasn't happened yet (we haven't seen any conqueror-wannabes from the far future/past), or, if it happened, it's obviously not enough of a paradox for the universe to go boom.
That said... I don't really think that the 'absolute time' theory nullifies Relativity... After all, we're still stuck with one time dimension for three physical ones plus the superstrings (also considered physical). Although I never discussed this on the I-net at large, I usually think of time as three-dimensional at the very least (we have to put those parallel universes _somewhere_ after all).
Okay, now to retrieve that FAQ you mentioned for a nice offline reading. Where's a tarball...
Nicolas Briche nbriche@free.fr ============ "If you try to stay sane in life, it'll just drive you crazy. So, you may as well go crazy now and have fun with life." --MegaZone, of Eyrie Productions =========== "Outside! What's it like?" "Well... It's sort of big" --Terry Pratchett
-- "If you try to stay sane in life, it'll just drive you crazy. So, you may as well go crazy now and have fun with life."
This sounds like if you move at vY takes zero time, and finally moving at v>c allows negative distances(!) and X->Y takes negative time (thus travelling in the past).
Oops, something got munched. That should have read:
This sounds like if you move at v<c, distances are positive and moving from X to Y takes a positive time, moving at v=c effectively makes distances moot and X->Y takes zero time, and finally moving at v>c allows negative distances(!) and X->Y takes negative time (thus travelling in the past).
I blame HTML, as always. ^_^
Sorry 'bout that.
Nicolas Briche nbriche@free.fr ============ "If you try to stay sane in life, it'll just drive you crazy. So, you may as well go crazy now and have fun with life." --MegaZone, of Eyrie Productions =========== "Outside! What's it like?" "Well... It's sort of big" --Terry Pratchett
-- "If you try to stay sane in life, it'll just drive you crazy. So, you may as well go crazy now and have fun with life."
Re:FTL == Time Travel ?
by
valkraider
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· Score: 1
My understanding is that if you could, some observers would see you traveling back in time, and this is forbidden.
Well maybe in YOUR home. In my home I expressly allow travelling back in time, AND the observation thereof. Don't go trying to push your morals... er... physics on me buster.
Re:FTL == Time Travel ?
by
Soft
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· Score: 3, Informative
Interesting material; I'm going to have to read it entirely (and find a way to keep the diagrams from displaying over the text... damn.)
The PostScript version might be more comfortable.
In your example, if X and Y share the same frame of reference, G and L may not be aware of anything, but the problem is that you don't take into account the point of view of someone traveling between X and Y, who will effectively see G going back in time, even if he takes the information travel time into account. (I shouldn't have mentioned seeing a "flash" in my previous message, it sent you off the wrong path...)
Did I miss something in your exemple? Could you describe the chain of events in more details?
The document will have told you all about it, but let's try. X is Earth, Y is Alpha Centauri, four light-years away and at rest relative to X. S is a ship traveling along the (XY) line at 0.866c, which yields a gamma-factor of 2. Times are measured in years, distances in light-years. t, t', t" are the times for X, Y and S.
Here are the events of interest in Earth's and Centauri's timeframe:
S passes X: t=t'=0, t"=0.
X sends a distress call to Y thanks to a "10c" device (so that it is not instantaneous): t=t'=4 (t"=2).
Y receives call: t=t'=4.4 (t"=2.2).
S passes Y: t=t'=4.6, t"=2.3; it is after Y got the message, so Y breaks the news.
Now, in the timeframe of S, things are slightly different; X and Y are seen as moving at 0.866c, and the distance between the two is only two light-years due to length contraction.
Two events are easy:
S passes X: t"=0, t=0 (t'=4.45).
S passes Y: t"=2.3, t=1.15 (t'=4.6 because they say so).
See? From the point of view of S, not only you cannot consider that the time is the same at X and Y, but if a message from X bears the date t=4 but has already arrived at Y at t=1.15, it looks like it has come from the future.
Now, to understand that it does not merely look like time-travel, suppose
Y tells S that X sent a distress call; S has the same kind of FTL device, which can reach X in
about 0.22 years (it is two light-years away in the timeframe of S, and receding at 0.866c). In the timeframe of S:
S sends inquiry to X: t"=2.3, t=1.15.
X receives inquiry: t"=2.52, t=1.26.
so X receives a message at t=1.26 which contains information about something about to happen at t=4, time enough to send Bruce Willis.
As you can see, there really is a paradox, which never appears without FTL devices.
Now, if you are not convinced, then I think you're thinking either:
S is moving but not X or Y, so the FTL device won't work the same, or:
when S passes Y and learns about X, it merely thinks that t=1.15, whereas it really is 4.6, or:
X does not move with respect to Y, whereas S is moving with respect to X, so the FTL communications won't work the same.
Item 3 could be valid, but you can always suppose that another ship S2 follows S and passes Earth at the right time; it won't be moving with respect to S, so FTL communications must work. For the other cases, you have to violate relativity in some way.
To settle it down, try to reverse the situation: A is Earth (time t), and two spaceships B and C (time t',t") are coming up on it at 0.866c, two light-years apart. In Earth's timeframe:
B passes A: t=t'=0.
C passes A: t=2.3, t'=1.15.
and in B's timeframe:
B passes A: t'=t"=t=0.
B sends out a distress call to C: t'=t"=4 (t=2).
C is four light-years away in this timeframe, the message will reach it at t'=t"=4.4 if it travels at 10c.
At t'=t"=4.6, C passes A (four light-years distance, still 0.866c) and tells them about B's problem.
When C passes A, in A's timeframe, t=2.3, t'=1.15; A sends a message to B at 10c, which arrives at t=2.52, t'=1.26...
If you object, remember, the situation has to be the same when you exchange A, B, C for S, X, Y, if no single frame of reference is to be privileged, so the objection has to work both ways.
If you single out a given frame of reference, however, and state that you believe that causality must only hold there, then you can build a consistent theory of FTL travel - the FAQ I pointed to does just that, by the way, when trying to reconcile Star Trek with relativity in part four. But I'm not too convinced by the postulated physics of subspace, and not sure that time-travel-like paradoxes are eliminated altogether.
Another way to look at it is to consider you did have a FTL car and you cross a starting line at the exact same time as a photon. To an observer watching, they would see you go AHEAD of the photon after crossing the line. However, in your frame of reference inside the car, the photon PASSES you at 300,000 Km/s - there is no point at which the photon is actually behind you (unless you consider before you actually crossed the line). Either way it's just one paradox that FTL travel throws up.
There are similar thought experiments that show FTL communication can lead to you being able to tell someone they're about to do something before they've actually done it!
-- qaopm
Re:FTL == Time Travel ?
by
ChaoticLimbs
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· Score: 1
Well, you can't just speed up. You have to go through a wormhole where one end is anchored in spacetime and the other is free to move. (not easy). you simply pop in and back and you appear to come out before you entered.
It is too bad many do not how to achieve the speed of light. The speed of light is a *Velocity* component of motion. *Acceleration* is not velocity and NEVER ever say you cannot reach the speed of light because of a lack of acceleration. The speed of light IS achievable with the use of a propulsion system that is acceleration based *AND* not matter based. Shoving matter out the rear end of a rocket isn't the way to do it!
The speed of light IS achievable with the use of a propulsion system that is acceleration based *AND* not matter based.
I look forward to seeing you test your working prototype. Every physics textbook I have ever seen says you are wrong, so it will be a triumph when you prove you are right.
You will need a catchy name for your amazing new space drive. I suggest you call it "impulse drive".
steveha
-- lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Relativity theory is not that easy
by
Inf0phreak
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· Score: 1
Nothing is ever as easy as they tell you in High School, now is it?
That E != mc^2 in all circumstances would certainly come as a surprise to those who havent't studied physics (caveat: I haven't, but I happen to sit with a book written by one of the best Danish authors on physics of all time. The now diseased (sp?) Ove Nathan).
The correct formula is E^2 - p^2c^2 = m^2c^4, where "p" is the linear momentum of the particle and it is by definition equal to the product of its mass and its velocity. The reason I write the formula in this way and not with the energy alone on the left of the equality sign is because the special theory of relativity states that E^2 - p^2c^2 must be constant in all inertial systems (do not make me try to explain this concept - I would probably fail in making it understandable).
-- ________
Entranced by anime since late summer 2001 and loving it ^_^
Re:FP
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
time to buy that 56k
Real scientists will not frown at good questions
by
Morgaine
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· Score: 2
It isn't frowned upon by scientists to question evolution. Only non-scientists think that science seeks out the truth about reality, and most of them are quite unaware that science only creates models and correlates them with the observed behaviour of reality, and thus has no means to determine the actual structure of reality at all.
Admittedly, scientists occasionally get a mental lapse, forget their own principles, and start pontificating as if they knew The Truth, but it's not all that common except when they're acting defensively for some reason. Of course, they lose their science hat when they do that, despite protesting that it's still firmly on their heads.
It should be said though that the questioning has to be based on sound prior research and must use the language and logical tools and methods of science, because otherwise it merely wastes the scientist's time to have to provide the questioner with remedial education --- a very good reason for "frowning". That's the main reason why non-scientists sometimes get what they consider to be an unsatisfactory response to their questions: their points are usually just empty handwaving to a scientist, simply because they lack the scientific training to do better.
-- "The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
They claimed that Einstein was wrong and ws the communist menance..
IN Communist Russia they claimed that Einstein was a Facist menance..
Both reigemes we wrong..Einstein;s theory stil holds..
Someoen should really fact check their Physics assumptions beofre writing in a big time news medium..
-- Don't Tread on OpenSource
Only two things are infinite
by
mraymer
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· Score: 2
The universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the first one. - Einstein:)
Anyone else know that, for all his genius, Einstein was kind of loosely wrapped? He couldn't tie his shoes, and would often forget where he lived. His college professors didn't think he'd amount to very much, and he often copied the work of his classmates. It just goes to show you that anyone can have something important to contribute to the world...
--
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
Re:Only two things are infinite
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Interesting
Yes, Einstein copied his classmates. But only because he never attended classes. Why not? Because he was always "playing" in a laboratory. Do check out a biography on him.
Re: speed of light can vary
by
hburch
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· Score: 1
Through water it's about c/1.335.
Hmm...This comment made me consider the speed of light through a moving medium. If the water was flowing at some high speed (relative to the observer, of course) while light was traveling through the medium, I believe that this would actually cause the propogation speed of light non-constant between inertial frames.
Relativity and clocks - can someone explain?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I've read that, to test relativity, scientists put one atomic clock inside a saceship, made it go around the Earth at a very high speed a few times, brought it back to Earth, and when they compared it with another clock, it was running behind, showing that its time had slowed down.
Now, according to relativity, can't you see the experiemnt exactly the other way around? I mean, from the point of view of the spaceship, it was the Earth that moved very fast, and therefore it's the clock that stayed on Earth that should have slowed down, right?
Does this mean that, if a human had gone in the spaceship, when the got back to Earth he would have seen the clocks the other way around?
Actually...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
it is C_2H_5OH = mc^2
as my physics teacher used to say;-)
Link to open-minded scientific position
by
Morgaine
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· Score: 2
If you've been trying to obtain more than a "frown" from scientists on questioning evolution then you'll know about some of the slightly better than normal critiques, like that made by creationist Timothy Wallace countering a representative article written by evolutionist Mark Isaak on the talk.origins website.
Those criticisms were then countered in turn by (open-minded evolutionist) Wayne Duck, and throughout his response you can see his open-minded scientific position quite clearly. Where Wallace makes a point using clear logic, he accepts it, rather than simply rubbishing the criticisms with more rhetoric. Note in particular the final page, in which Duck could not be more clear as to the status of evolution as a scientific theory: ultimately, while the huge weight of supporting evidence for evolution is still entire universes away from being a complete picture, it is believed by scientists to be reliable only because there is currently no other theory that comes anywhere even remotely near to providing as scientifically complete a model with substantiating evidence as does evolution. But, as he says, that could change tomorrow. It's unlikely.
-- "The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I must be a doofus...
by
JCMay
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· Score: 1, Offtopic
Always read the links before you include them, and don't depend on Google to give you What You Meant, just What You Asked For.
Thanks for a good post. --I offer the following not as a criticism in any way, but just as a thought which has been bouncing around in my mind looking for an excuse to be expressed.
First off, I'm not a creationist. Indeed, I find that whole debate to be entirely infernal, as both sides seem to me quite flawed in their own ways. That being said. ..
Occam's Razor bugs me. As a deductive tool, it is a pretty good one; it works for the most part. What I find unsettling, however, is that it seems to have become, thanks to its presentation and treatment in popular media, understood and accepted by many as a de facto scientific law when it is not.
It is a rule of thumb, and only a rule of thumb. --It is only a rule of thumb, because it is not always right. Every time something unexpectedly complex turns out to be the reality behind a phenomenon which might otherwise have been explained through simple means, Occam's Razor is blunted.
Example:
When Alexandre Graham Bell first announced to the world that he had discovered a way to send a voice signal over a wire, the world erupted with both excitement and disbelief. One major newspaper even ran a story written by experts which attempted to debunk Bell's claim. They used diagrams demonstrating that sound waves sent down thin metal tubes of the diameter Bell was using for wires, could not possibly travel the kinds of distances he claimed. The experts were engineers well versed in the science and dynamics of sound as employed in the kinds of voice communication pipe systems once used large ocean going vessels. To the writers of the article, they were being entirely reasonable.
"Which is more likely?" they must have asked themselves, "That Bell has created some magical new invention to send sound along miles of very thin tubes? Or that he is lying?"
Occam's Razor is deeply rooted in how one perceives, how much information there is available to work with, and what has been previously accepted by culture as normal and/or outlandish.
-Now Bell was, of course, proven to be right. When words crackled out from crude speakers for all to hear, the enthusiastic debunkers, (and there is never any shortage of enthusiastic debunkers or respected, conservative media outlets to give them a voice and print their diagrams), had to quietly go mum and withdraw their objections. But that was in part due to large forces which wanted and allowed Bell to be proven right. If you don't advertise a fact or discovery, facts and discoveries can easily vanish. People have short memories. People have short lives. Without active perseverance, knowledge is a self-burying commodity until it becomes large enough to self-sustain, and even then, it is not so very difficult to forget important turns of history after only a few fickle generations have passed.
Science as a concept, is a pure, wonderful thing, but it does not know everything. Indeed, many institutions are not so pure as the science which they employ; it is well known that individuals with weak morals, and corrupt institution will suppress data, twist data and even make up data on a basis regular enough that the public pool of knowledge has been polluted to the point that the employment of Occam's Razor is by no means reliable in today's arena of public thought.
Just something to consider next time you feel the need to slam a new idea. Remember that Occam gave us a deductive tool, not an irrefutable law.
"Which is more likely?" they must have asked themselves, "That Bell has created some magical new invention to send sound along miles of very thin tubes? Or that he is lying?"
So, basically, these scientists set up a strawman (thin tubes) and knocked it over. I don't see how this affects Occam's razor, as it is primarily applicable to natural phenomena, whereas Bell's invention is an act of engineering.
-- "We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala,
it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
It is a rule of thumb, and only a rule of thumb. --It is only a rule of thumb, because it is not always right. Every time something unexpectedly complex turns out to be the reality behind a phenomenon which might otherwise have been explained through simple means, Occam's Razor is blunted.
Well, I'm not sure I agree that your example invalidates Occams razor. In my version of it, it says something along the lines of: given two explanations that adequately explain a phenomenon, the simpler one is the correct (or at least preferrable). Now, I'm not comfortable with that being interpreted as: given that Bells telephone cannot work given our flawed assumptions about it's principles of operation, the simpler explanation is that Bell is wrong or lying or both. I wouldn't call that an application of Occam's razor.
In my view it's not an application of Occam's razor until you've at least agreed on the observations. "There is obviously sound coming out of the other end of the telephone". Then you can start and build theories as to why that is happening. And given competing theories Occam can help you chose.
what is more likely, that an unseen force takes 100,000 years to pull hydrogen togetherinto a dence ball and then is ignighted by internal heat.....OR god just put a hot ball of fire there.
see, that is why Occam's Razor is a rule of thumb and should only be used to help deduce but not used as a litmus test for the plausability of theories phenomina. God creating something is always more simple to the faithful than are the tested theories of scientists.
what is more likely, that an unseen force takes 100,000 years to pull hydrogen togetherinto a dence ball and then is ignighted by internal heat.....OR god just put a hot ball of fire there.
see, that is why Occam's Razor is a rule of thumb and should only be used to help deduce but not used as a litmus test for the plausability of theories phenomina. God creating something is always more simple to the faithful than are the tested theories of scientists.
Well, a scientist would answer a), that an unseen force, etc. Since that is a theory that can be tested, and that has predictive and explanatory power. God figuratively pulling stuff out of his cosmic hat, hasn't. It fails the "adequatly explains" of the "two theories that adequatly explains...".
If you're saying that, there's no convincing the irrational with rational arguments, I couldn't agree more. And if you're saying that there's nothing special about Occam's razor, other than as an esthetic argument, sure. Though there's no need for a more complex theory than absolutely necessary.
Well, a scientist would answer a), that an unseen force, etc. Since that is a theory that can be tested, and that has predictive and explanatory power. God figuratively pulling stuff out of his cosmic hat, hasn't. It fails the "adequatly explains" of the "two theories that adequatly explains...".
As a science student (well, computer science... ) *and* a Christian (yes, I *can* be both... read on), I prefer to see it as a combination answer between a) and b):
God set the rules that the Universe plays by and the Universe went and played by those rules... if God did not set the rules, who/what did? And since something must have set those rules, then couldn't that something be considered to be God?
Right, so making a leap in assumption that the "dense ball of matter" was put there somehow by a humaniform deity of unknown origin using unknown techniques is a simple explaination. Wow, sorry we clearly have differing views of what constitutes "simple". At least the big bang theory is internally consistent, actually it explains itself quite nicely using simple physical laws originating from within itself.
In my view it's not an application of Occam's razor until you've at least agreed on the observations. "There is obviously sound coming out of the other end of the telephone". Then you can start and build theories as to why that is happening. And given competing theories Occam can help you chose.
Precisely my point. The problem is that Occam's Razor is not always used correctly, or with the level of responsibility you describe.
The problem with people standing on the shoulders of giants is that eroneous nonsense can find endorsement in at best, foolish ways, and at worst, dangerous ways. --Though twisted, (like the Bell example), such paths of logic might sound reasonable enough to the lay person.
It bothers me to see Occam quoted so frequently, largely, I think, thanks to the film, 'Contact'. --Which, incidentally, even touched on this very issue. Jodi Foster's character used it to help deal with the question of whether or not it was reasonable to expect the existence of alien life in the cosmos. But, as demonstrated, that very thinking was easily and convincingly used in the other direction. "Is it more likely that a fantastic thing has happened, or that somebody perpetrated a hoax?" Occam's Razor, because it is so interpretive, opens itself up to annoying circles of semantic debate. This is why I remain wary of the lay person who uses it as their primary line of argument. When used properly, it is a powerful tool. But so is a chainsaw. Powerful tools should be treated with care.
As a science student (well, computer science... ) *and* a Christian (yes, I *can* be both... read on), I prefer to see it as a combination answer between a) and b):
God set the rules that the Universe plays by and the Universe went and played by those rules... if God did not set the rules, who/what did? And since something must have set those rules, then couldn't that something be considered to be God?
Sure, I was mainly answering the "smaller" argument about the origin of the sun. Natural scientists does not (at least yet) have an answer to "how it all began", there may still be a vacant spot there for a creator. It could become occupied though, which is always problematic. Comapare Galileo.
According to Hawkings, that was the position of the pope when he sought consultation on the origin of the universe. Hawking then goes on with a more "advanced" theory that doesn't leave any room for a creator. I read it in "A brief history of time", his exact words (if memory serves) were "what place then for a creator?" It's in the very last chapter of the book, I think.
Now, that reference is getting long in the tooth, and I don't know where the scientific community stands on this issue today (and don't really have the inclination to dig much deeper) but it's a reference to go look for at least, should you be interested.
As I've said earlier, I don't really see the need for finding a place for a creator, in the strictest scientific sense. We're only trying to answer the "how", not the "why" or "What's the point of it all." Equally valid (some would say more valid) questions.
Occam's Razor, because it is so interpretive, opens itself up to annoying circles of semantic debate. This is why I remain wary of the lay person who uses it as their primary line of argument. When used properly, it is a powerful tool. But so is a chainsaw. Powerful tools should be treated with care.
Well, OK, I see your point. And couldn't agree more. Science is hard, there's no getting around that.
Though I cannot help but to observe, that yes, any proof of (i.e. anyone claiming to have made observations pertaining to) the existence of other intelligent beings in the universe has to be considered with the utmost scrutiny. Thus far the smart money is on mistake (remember quasars producing 1+1=2?) or hoax. It wouldn't be until those sources of errors had been dealt with, that a scientist would be satisfied.
I realise we've forgotten an important principle to go with Occam, and that's "disciplined, sceptic enquiery" (my own translation).
God set the rules that the Universe plays by and the Universe went and played by those rules... if God did not set the rules, who/what did? And since something must have set those rules, then couldn't that something be considered to be God?
Two points. The argument above condense into a tautology. God must have set conditions because there are conditions set by God (as you say, the setter of conditions can be considered being God). This is a very elegant statement since it uses itself to prove itself. This of course also make it totally worthless.
And, if we consider the above statement as being true. Isn't the "setter of conditions" quite far from the Christian or the biblical god. This to me seems to be more of the old Theist belief than anything else.
... I think the christian god is incompatible with modern science, but that is what I think, and as I can't prove it, I might very well be wrong...
God set the rules that the Universe plays by and the Universe went and played by those rules...
Ah, the Intelligent Design hypothesis. Wonderful. And if God was so powerful he could lay down those rules, then whatever created God must have been even mightier...
if God did not set the rules, who/what did?
Does someone/something need to have set them? And which of the many gods people have believed in did? The Christian God is a late-comer to the "party", and seems to be a derivate of older faiths anyway. In fact, shouldn't you be a Hindu instead? They had a creation myth for centuries before you guys.
ummm....I was pointing out the problems with Occam's Razor for use in a debate (it is very subjective) I was not at any time trying to proove one way or the other how a star is formed.
what if God is a computer programming student at a terminal in some larger universe? what if our universe is like the BSD project and early in its creation many students could enter it and do stuff to it.....and now that the universe is mature, we are just sitting in the corner of some basement collecting dust while we are being monitored to see what will actualy happen if the universe is set at a highly accelerated time so in a few days they will see what happenes to their universe?
In my first year at uni back in the early 80's, we were learning the basics of relativity and we got around to the equation E=mc^2/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2). As I was just learning about complex numbers in the Maths and Electric Power courses at the same time I recognised that while the mass and energy tend exponentially towards infinity as v aproaches c, it becomes a complex number when v is geater than c. Being a total science fiction nut I asked my prof what this meant. He was just irritated and basically told me to bugger off. I was dissapointed, being convinced that I had discovered the key to FTL travel and read up as much as I could about Tachyons (theoreticals particles that always move FTL) because as I saw it, complex or irrational numbers do not mean that time goes backward.
At the time I thought that this in some way correlated with some sort of "hyperspace", "subspace", "foldspace" or any of those science fiction terms used to make it quicker to get to B from A by transitioning to some special state of space.
With time I forgot about it (discovered girls and booze) but I have never found anything anywhere that goes into the mathematical problems created by v>c in that equation.
Why is it that it is always just dissed off as childs play, while physicists grapple with complex notions of 10-dimensional strings etc?
Re:Complex numbers
by
IainHere
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· Score: 0, Troll
Bugger Off.
Re:Complex numbers
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Moderator of this comment: did you even read the parent post? It is a joke! It's not a troll!
Re:Hitler knew that
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Christianity has never been compatible with anything that's been proven scientifically.
That has to be the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
If things don't even talk about the same subject, how can they be "incompatible"? What part of Christianity "disproves" the theory of relativity, or anything else for that matter?
I had a friend that had a degree in physics, and I tried to explain to him why the speed of light had to be relative. He couldn't comprehend what I was trying to explain and just discounted it. I guess that's why he was working at Pizza Hut.
And since that's precisely the sort of overly subtle humor that often gets me in trouble I feel a bit foolish over not catching it.:)
The problem is, I've actually encountered that very response in "real life" with distressing frequency.
KFG
Re:I think you're right
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Hektor_Troy
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· Score: 2
In a word:
0wn3d:-D
But - don't worry about that. You're not the only one who's fallen for it - both my physics and chemistry theachers fell for it. Unfortunately I can't claim originality points for it - I stole it off the web somewhere.
As far as I remember, a bronze plaque next to the main door to a University or some such place (The Niels Bohr Institute) said:
Question everything!
Underneath it was a graphiti: why?
-- We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
YOU FAIL IT
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Go eat a dick
Examine your assumptions
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naasking
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· Score: 4, Interesting
What makes you think there even was a beginning? Keep in mind that we have never actually seen the beginning of an event and the end; those boundaries are imposed by us. Reality is really a continuous cascade of effects which themselves become causes. How do we know there even is a beginning to the universe?
Re:Examine your assumptions
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Dannon
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· Score: 2
As you say, everything can be broken down into causes and effects, and effects themselves become causes. This does lead us into a sort of chicken-and-egg question with the universe: Was there ever a first cause which was not itself the effect of something else?
I would say, yes. How do we know? Because we are here. We exist. And for things to exist, they had to begin existing at some point.
Beginnings and endings are not all imposed by our minds. That I first breathed air at a certain point in time measurable as the equivalent of just over twenty-five orbits of the Earth about the sun is fact, not opinion. The end of the Roman Empire centuries ago was a fact, not a point of view. We can't point at the exact time and place, but we do know that there was a first culture ever to use writing, or currency, or the wheel, or even fire.
I can only rationalize one temporal view of the universe in which there is no such thing as an independent cause, and that would be an infinite loop of the universe going through the same motions of creation and destruction... which still begs the eternal question, how did that loop get there?
Your assertion is that the universe is causes 'all the way back' to infinity. I can't help but think of the old woman in the science lecture who believed that the world was flat, on the back of a tortoise. When asked what the tortoise stood on, her reply was, "You can't fool me, it's tortoises all the way down."
Down to what?
-- Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.
Re:Examine your assumptions
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naasking
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· Score: 2
And for things to exist, they had to begin existing at some point.
This is exactly the assumption I would have you question. Do not take human perceptions for granted, for they can easily decieve you.
Beginnings and endings are not all imposed by our minds.
There exist one possible source of beginnings: true random events. Since we have not conclusively determined that true randomness exists or is even possible, I stand by my statement that no human has ever witnessed a true beginning. So how can we know they exist?
That I first breathed air at a certain point in time measurable as the equivalent of just over twenty-five orbits of the Earth about the sun is fact, not opinion.
The fact that you percieve this as a beginning of something new is just that: your perception. It is nothing new but the result of your development and birth. Your atoms know little difference between the time they were ejected from a star to the time they formed part of your lungs. It was merely a continuous ride from creation (if it happened) to now. The fact that there is something meaningful to "breathing" are values we impose. A "breath" is not inherently significant, it is not an event in spacetime except that you label it so.
Down to what?
An amusing anecdote, but it merely emphasises my point about the underlying assumptions inherent in human perceptions. Humans think in limited terms because we are limited creatures; volumes, spaces, here to there, all concepts expressed in terms of limitations and the thought of infinity thus seems nonsensical. But simply because we cannot conceive of it, does not mean it does not exist.
In fact, there are physicists working with theories of "infinite time"/no creation. They do not see time as existing as such; existence is merely a relative spatial configuration that sort of morphs into the next moment. There is no past to speak of, no future, only the evolving present, the eternal NOW. Pretty Neat (TM).
At issue is the devisive understanding of the nature of light. We attribute both particle and wave to light as we see fit, when it can be either or both.
Special relativity for the masses is an absurd generalization. There is no doubt that mathematical abstractions of nature are limited to what can be seen, touched and measured. So, let us not forget that the measurement of the "real world" may be limited by the understandings of multi-dimensional mathematics, not just the portion of the universe that we touch.
Re:gravity effects are instantaneous-Time
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Hmmm...so does Time have a speed? How fast is Time?
The article was informative and a wrap up of the current state I would say. But really, it isn't saying much.
Just another one of those articles that dances in a circle and ends up where it started. It gathers readers by pretending it might have some proof to disclose, but that never happens. And in the end, they talk about how "they're still a long way" or "maybe next year" or whatever.
Reminds me of those UFO specials on TV.
Complex numbers-Other side of Schroedingers cat.
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
"Why is it that it is always just dissed off as childs play, while physicists grapple with complex notions of 10-dimensional strings etc?"
Yes, my child. You have grasped one of the "keys" to a GUFT, but alas most are too buried into what is, rather than what might be.
That is why it is called the THEORY of relativity.
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Lord+Kano
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· Score: 1
It is still a theory, it is not a law. In fact it will likely never become the law of relativity. At extremely small scale, general relativity breaks down. This is why quantum mechanics came about. One day, someone will hopefully develop a unified theory that will make general relativity, special relativity and quantum mechanics obsolete.
LK
-- "Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Is doubly special relativity
by
multiplexo
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· Score: 1
anything like double special probation?
-- cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
the USSR IN THE BACK paradox
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
If you were in Soviet Russia, then you wouldn't be in Soviet Russia.
Soviet Russia would be in you.
Happy trolling, all.
Just a big number to get you by 100 years
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
He knew it would take a few generations to figure this out, so he "kludged" in a big number to get by till we really figure it out. What is so funny is these big math professors never figured that out to begin with, so ha ha on you educated types carrying those papers that tell us how smart you are.
Here's for the people that don't know...
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ripewithdecay
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· Score: 1
E=mc^2 is actually a simplified form of the real equation, E=mc^2/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2).
Please don't forget your subscripts! As everyone learns in basic special relativity, total energy, which is kinetic + potential, is
E = m0 * c^2 * gamma,
where gamma = 1 / sqrt( 1-v^2/c^2 ) and m0 is the rest mass.
At v = 0, gamma = 1 and E = m0 c^2, Einstein's famous formula for rest energy. Kinetic energy is given by KE = E - m0 c^2, or
KE = m0 c^2 ( gamma - 1 ).
To see any appreciable effect of velocity, consider the situation where you are going fast enough to double your effective mass (gamma = 2). Solving for velocity gives v = c sqrt(3/4) = 86.6% of the speed of light. Not gonna happen with current technology (outside of atom smashers).
As v -> c, gamma -> infinity and this is Einstein's rationale for saying it's impossible to accelerate any matter up to the speed of light, since doing so would require an infinite amount of kinetic energy. On the other hand, the formula for photons is
E = p c = h c / lambda = h nu,
where p is momentum, h is Planck's constant, lambda is wavelength, and c / lambda = nu is the frequency. Since photons are never at rest (remember the constant speed of light?), you won't see any m's make an appearance here. And just for the record, this last formula explains the photoelectric effect, which is what won Einstein his Nobel, not E = m c^2.
-- This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
Lars the patient
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
'nuff said.
E=mc^2 is actually an approximation...
by
Anonymous Coward
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E=mc^2 is actually an approximation as any high school calculus student can tell you. Einstein dropped the additional terms from the converging series 1 + ab + 1/2 (a^2+a)b^2.... for simplicity (a common step in mathematics). They are more signifigant at high speeds obviously.
I use the real (http://www.tcpalaw.com/emcsqd.pdf) derivation of E=mc^2 when trying to convince people that genius is nothing sepcial - just insight.
Parent NOT insightful
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
The whole point of relativity is that the speed of light is constant! Since it is the same even when measured from different frames of reference the only explanation is the warping of space and time. That's what creates all those "funky" relativistic effects.
We already know its wrong
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Plus, we already know it's "wrong" because it doesn't account for any force except gravity.
Wrong
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Ever hear of:
gravity: gravity waves magnetism: photons
??
Alternate quantum interpretation
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John+Bayko
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· Score: 1
To follow up, quantum theory usually refers to the "Copenhagen interpretation", in which particles "act like waves" in the sense that the location is tied to a probability which propogates like a wave. Strange things happen when the wave is split into two peaks - the particle ultimately ("when observed" is the term used, but you can also use the phrase "when it matters") can only exist at a point. This means when you measure one probability peak, if you don't find the particle that means you've just changed one peak to zero, and the other peak spontaneously increases - an interaction that happens instantly (faster than light).
This is the type of thing that Einstein didn't like.
An alternate is known as the "pilot wave" (pdf) interpretation. It suggests that the wave and the particle are separate - the wave is actually a force, and the particle remains a discrete thing that's pulled by that force. When that force is split, the particle follows one force wave, and the other is empty - when you eventually measure it, you've really changed nothing.
What the nature of this force is, is left unclear, but it goes get rid of the dice-throwing god. Einstein didn't like this much either.
It's old news, really (for some at least)
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pneumaticus
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· Score: 1
In 1964, a Christian theologian and philosopher Gordon H. Clark, has published a book titled THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE AND BELIEF IN GOD where he attempted, successfully I might add, to highlight the most fundamental problem of secular science, that is the problem of epistemology. The issues raised by the NYT article have been addressed and answered in the 60-s by the above mentioned philosopher, of course not to everybody's satisfaction. Some of Clark's points, relevant to the NYT article, he more fully discusses in his books can be assessed by following this URL to an article titled "Science and Truth":
http://pneumaticus.com/pneumaticus/publications/ep istemology/clark/clark_ep_002.php
--
How do you know? pneumaticus.com
Re:Hitler knew that
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Slashdot Mirror
My world is falling apart.
Just A good idea. Not the law. ?
"If, therefore, any be unhappy, let him remember that he is unhappy by reason of himself alone."
~Epictetus
the less it seems that we know. I'm not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination; but considering how much of our science is based on this kind of thing I do find it amazing that that at this point in time we're now questioning the e=mc^2....
It still answered some questions and anomolies about the universe and changed the way we think about the world.
- tristan
I thought this was obviouse. If a blackhole can suck light into it then it will be affecting the speed at which it travels, all celestial bodies will, its just the magnitude that differs.
Granted I am not a physics expert, but isn't this pretty old news? There have been good theories around for a long while that require either ammendments or nullification of Einstein's E=MC^2 to exist.
I think he left enough loop holes in his theories, that even if we did find evidence that the theory of relativity is incorrect, quantum physics makes it so that he's wrong and right at the same time! :)
And why did you staple the trout to the RAM?
You mean a scientific hypothesis could be wrong?!
Holy moly, who'd have thought that science could have taken a hypothesis as fact, without testing it first?
Really, did anyone think that we wouldn't ever improve our understanding of science to think of "constants" in a different way?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
The New York Times Sponsored by Starbucks
.," he writes in one passage. In others he describes the editor at a prominent journal as a moron, his bosses at Imperial as pimps and the rival quantum gravity camps as cults.
December 31, 2002
E and mc2: Equality, It Seems, Is Relative
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Roll over, Einstein.
In science, no truth is forever, not even perhaps Einstein's theory of relativity, the pillar of modernity that gave us E=mc2.
As propounded by Einstein as an audaciously confident young patent clerk in 1905, relativity declares that the laws of physics, and in particular the speed of light -- 186,000 miles per second -- are the same no matter where you are or how fast you are moving.
Generations of students and philosophers have struggled with the paradoxical consequences of Einstein's deceptively simple notion, which underlies all of modern physics and technology, wrestling with clocks that speed up and slow down, yardsticks that contract and expand and bad jokes using the word "relative."
Guided by ambiguous signals from the heavens, and by the beauty of their equations, a few brave -- or perhaps foolhardy -- physicists now say that relativity may have limits and will someday have to be revised.
Some suggest, for example, the rate of the passage of time could depend on a clock's orientation in space, an effect that physicists hope to test on the space station. Or the speed of a light wave could depend slightly on its color, an effect, astronomers say, that could be detected by future observations of gamma ray bursters, enormous explosions on the far side of the universe.
"What makes this worth talking about is the possibility of near-term experimental implications," said Dr. Lee Smolin, a gravitational theorist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario.
Any hint of breakage of relativity, scientists say, could yield a clue to finding the holy grail of contemporary physics -- a "theory of everything" that would marry Einstein's general theory of relativity, which describes how gravity shapes the universe, to quantum mechanics, the strange rules that govern energy and matter on subatomic scales.
Even Einstein was stumped by this so-called quantum gravity.
For now, any clue would be welcome. There is very little agreement and much confusion about the possible end of relativity. "These are times when theorists are being very adventurous," said Dr. Andreas Albrecht, a physicist at the University of California at Davis. "It's hard to tell where things will go."
The avatars of new relativity have been encouraged by hints that some cosmic rays hitting Earth from outer space have more energy than normal physics can explain. But some scientists doubt that these rays exist or, if they do, that a violation of relativity is the only way to explain them.
The cosmic ray hints are not the only signs making physicists wonder about relativity. They have also been tantalized by evidence, as yet unconfirmed, from distant quasars that a fundamental constant of nature, a measure of the strength of electromagnetism known as the fine-structure constant, might have changed ever so slightly over billions of years, shifting the wavelengths of light emitted by the quasars.
The result has been a minor explosion of interest in strange relativity, with some 70 papers being published this year, said Dr. Giovanni Amelino-Camelia, a theorist at the University of Rome.
The field, while still small, is destined for at least 15 minutes of fame next year with the publication in February of "Faster Than the Speed of Light," by Dr. João Magueijo, a cosmologist at Imperial College London. The book is a racy account of Dr. Magueijo's seemingly heretical effort to modify relativity so that the speed of light is not constant, and he will promote it on a long lecture tour.
"Ruling out special relativity by 2005 is a bit extreme," Dr. Magueijo said in a recent e-mail message, referring to the coming centennial of Einstein's famous paper, "although I would be very surprised if by 2050 nothing beyond relativity has been found."
Most physicists have yet to buy into this presumed revolution. Dr. Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, called recent arguments that some versions of quantum gravity would violate relativity "unimpressive."
Dr. Juan Maldacena of Harvard said he doubted relativity was violated in string theory -- the leading candidate for a theory of everything. "But of course," he noted, "we should always test our theories."
Dr. Carlo Rovelli, a gravitational theorist at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille, said it was a "risky" hypothesis, "but the prize if it happened to be true is so great that it is worthwhile taking the risk of exploring it in detail."
Dr. Andrew Strominger of Harvard pointed out that Einstein himself modified relativity in 1915, when he brought gravity into the picture with his general theory of relativity. Special relativity, as the 1905 theory became known, is only strictly valid in flat space without gravity, Dr. Strominger said.
He added, "It is natural to think that Einstein's relativity will in some sense be violated by small corrections, just as Newton's theory of gravity has small corrections." These corrections did not make Newton wrong, he said, they just meant his theory was not always perfectly applicable. Likewise, relativity may give way to a more complete and accurate theory.
How relativity could break down, if it does, depends on how physics might accomplish its grand dream of quantum gravity.
Many physicists are placing their bets on string theory's mathematically imposing edifice in which nature comprises tiny strings vibrating in 10 dimensions of space-time. But this theory may play out in billions of ways, and some physicists complain that it can be made to predict almost anything.
In the late 1980's, Dr. V. Alan Kostelecky, a particle physicist at Indiana University, and his colleagues pointed out that in some of these solutions, the spins of the strings could impart an orientation to empty space, like the lines left by the weave in a fine cloth. In that case, they say, a clock oriented in one direction could tick slightly faster or slower than one oriented differently, in violation of the rules of relativity. That is something Dr. Kostelecky and his colleagues have proposed to test using ultraprecise clocks on the space station.
Dr. Kostelecky and his colleagues have constructed an extension to the standard model of particle physics that catalogs all the possible ways that relativity can be violated. Others, including Dr. Amelino-Camelia, Dr. John Ellis of CERN, Dr. Tsvi Piran of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the Harvard theorists Dr. Sheldon Glashow and Dr. Sidney Coleman, have attempted to study the ways that relativity can be violated by quantum gravity or in the high-energy cosmic rays.
Violation is not inevitable, Dr. Kostelecky said. "Is it plausible? Yes. Is it likely? Enough so that I've invested years of my life."
Few physicists would seem to have as much invested in revising relativity as Dr. Magueijo. In his book he describes how beginning in 1996 he cajoled Dr. Albrecht, then at Imperial, into pursuing with him the heretical notion that the speed of light had been much higher in the dim cosmic past as a solution to various cosmological puzzles. Cosmologists did not rally to the idea, which even Dr. Magueijo admitted violated relativity. His co-author, Dr. Albrecht, himself called it an idea that is "not even properly born yet," and said it needed to find roots "in some convincing physics."
In the intervening years, as a sideline to his day job as a conventional cosmologist, he and a growing number of comrades have continued to tinker with modifying relativity in a variety of ways that go under the umbrella name of V.S.L., for variable speed of light theories.
In the science world, the book might attract attention for its jaunty and irreverent style as well as for its content. "What the hell, it's only Einstein going out of the window . .
Asked how he expected his colleagues to react to the book, he answered, "It wasn't written for them; it was written for the public." He called it "a very honest view of how scientists feel," adding, "It's the language I use normally."
The main motivation for considering V.S.L. theories, Dr. Magueijo explained, comes from the as-yet undiscovered quantum gravity. In relativity there is only one special number, the speed of light, but in quantum gravity, he explained, there is another special number, known as the Planck energy, equivalent to 1019 billion electron volts. According to quantum gravity thinking, an elementary particle accelerated to that energy will behave as if space and time themselves are lumpy and discontinuous and all the forces of nature are unified.
According to relativity, however, Dr. Magueijo explained, differently moving observers could disagree on how much energy the particle had and thus whether it was displaying quantum gravity effects or not. In short, they would disagree on what the laws of physics were.
"Perhaps relativity is too restrictive for what we need in quantum gravity," Dr. Magueijo said. "We need to drop a postulate, perhaps the constancy of the speed of light."
The most recent buzz in V.S.L. circles is about something called "doubly special relativity." In 2000, hoping to fix the cosmic ray problem, Dr. Amelino-Camelia proposed modifying the rules of relativity so that there would be a limit to the momentum that any particle could have, just as now there is a limit to the velocity.
Subsequently Dr. Magueijo and Dr. Smolin of the Perimeter Institute proposed their own doubly special version in which there is a limit to the amount of energy that an elementary particle can attain, namely the so-called Planck energy, at which the forces are unified and quantum gravity effects dominate.
One casualty of this tinkering, the V.S.L. scientists agree, will be everyone's favorite formula, E=mc2, to be replaced by a more complicated, cumbersome equation that Dr. Magueijo reproduces in his book.
A mark of all the doubly special theories, Dr. Magueijo said, is that the speed of light will vary with its color, with higher frequencies and energies going slightly faster than lower ones. That might manifest itself in observations of gamma ray bursters, distant gargantuan outbursts by an upcoming NASA satellite called Glast (gamma ray large area space telescope), scheduled for launching in 2006.
The theory also predicts that light should slow down near massive objects and actually come to a stop at the end of a black hole, preventing anything from entering that dark gate, Dr. Magueijo said in his book. In principle the effect, he said, could be tested by spectroscopic measurements of the light emitted from dense objects like neutron stars.
To some physicists, however, the very idea of variations in the speed of light in a vacuum -- the c in E=mc2 -- is meaningless. The miles and seconds by which speed is measured are human inventions, they point out, defined in fact in terms of lightwaves, so the whole notion of the speed of light varying is circular. In the last analysis, they point out, all physical measurements boil down to a few dimensionless constants like the fine structure constant, alpha. "What we measure objectively is whether alpha varies," said Dr. Michael Duff of the University of Michigan in an e-mail message.
Dr. Magueijo said those criticisms were technically correct but said the speed of light was one factor of several in the formula for alpha. So if alpha varied, as some astronomical measurements have suggested, one could choose to think of it as a variation in the speed of light, of electric charge, or even a variation in another number known as Planck's constant -- or all three -- if that made the math simpler. "It's a matter of convention," he said, adding, "you make the simplest choice."
Despite all the activity, scientists agree that they are mostly in the dark about the deeper consequences of these conjectures. "Some may eventually be developed to the point of being a credible alternative to relativity," conceded Dr. Kostelecky, saying that he suspected that others might not really change relativity or might have already been excluded by existing experiments. Without a systematic analysis it was impossible to know.
Dr. Amelino-Camelia said that the doubly special theories preserve Einstein's principle that all motion is relative, but at an unknown cost to the rest of physics."We paid a dramatic price for relativity: the notion of absolute time," he said. "This time it is not completely sure what is the axiomatic principle we have to give up."
Dr. Albrecht urged caution and said physicists needed guidance from experiments before tossing out beloved principles like relativity. "The most dignified way forward," he said, "is to be forced kicking and screaming to toss them out."
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company | Permissions | Privacy Policy
E = MC Hawking. :DDD
sorry.
I think this is basically a rephrasing of a long-known fact, that is, that relativity doesn't have much to say at the sub-atomic level -- in other words, this equasion just says, yeah, E=mc2 as long as you're dealing with sufficient scales for quantum weirdness to even out. Can someone elaborate on this, or correct me?
It's (E^2) = (m^2)(c^4) + (p^2)(c^2).
:)
Unless everything in the universe has zero momentum, that is.
NYT article
...the New York Times wakes up and discovers quantum physics.
How is this news?
When scientists slowed a beam of light down to a few meters a second?
Sheesshhh... Even my car *CAN* travel faster than the speed of light! Who needs warp drive?!?!?
(warning: Its new years, I am drunk.) E=mc^2 is the non-relitivistic version of the equation. Yes its only accurate when lambda is about one. When it is not the equation is E= lambda *mc^2 where lambda is like squroot(1/(1+ (V/c)^2) or something. But anyway, its silly to talk about things in physics not being absolutly correct. Nothing in physics is absolutly correct. Everything is an approximation, even the speed of light. Its just a matter of how accurate an approximation it is, and is it accurate enough for what you want to know. For most of us E=mc^2 is good enough, but for those folks who like to know the energy of particles moving really damm fast, well, they add the lambda. So that basicly is how it works.
What c is relative to? When we say that a car is moving at 60mph we meann relative to the ground, but what is c relative to?
If it's relative to a "given thing" then doesn't that hint toward Ether theory? The further we go in AP Physics the more I realise that my school is imprepared to answer anything that comes up and that modern theories (String theory and the like) seem reminescant of the old ones like Ether theory.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
There is an excellent book called "Concepts of Mass in contemporary physics and philosophy" that is worth reading. In it, they explain that Einstein was never able to be satisfied with his derivation; he was never able to establish a general proof of the relation. Chapter 3 discusses this.
Here's wishing you and yours the best in 2003.
Your Pal,
Anonymous Coward
FP! And Einstein could never suck his own cock, so I don't know what all the fuss is about.
like if the earth suddenly teleported to twice the distance away from the sun that it is now, the change in the effect of gravity would happen right away, rather than at the speed of light. I think magnetism is the same way. If nothing can go faster than the speed of light... still might there be a way to communicate faster than the speed of light using gravitational or magnetic fluctuations? Is there anything else that would effect instantly?
...and the beauty of special relativity.
They key thing is that the speed of light is fixed relative to *everything*. This means that if I'm standing by the highway and measure it, I get the same speed as a person in a car going 60 mph away from me. And since the speed of light is fixed, everything ELSE distorts to make up for it. That includes time (time dilation) and space (Lorentz contraction). It leads to some pretty freaky and amazing consequences.
E=mc^2 is actually a simplified form of the real equation, E=mc^2/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2). A convenient graphical depiction can be found in a few seconds with google, or here: http://www.btinternet.com/~j.doyle/SR/Emc2/Derive. htm.
Anyone else read this and get a flashback to an exam, say in college were you got the answer right but the prof. took off points because there was some slight flaws in your work or thinking. You were not wrong you just had a few things sketchy or didn't explain it well enough. One of those deals you just want to go insane on the prof on. Your right enough and nothing bad will happen with your result. Can just see a prof. pulling one of those on Albert.
186,000 Miles per Second. It's not just a good idea. IT'S THE LAW.
The gulags would be sent to people like YOU
IN SOVIET RUSSIA,
mc**2 = e
Heheee. +5 FUnny,.
point at c/2 from opposite directions they both gain infinite mass!?
By that same argument if I am traveling at c toward Earth, Earth gains infinite mass and the gravitational pull drags me toward it even faster!
No offense, but this makes no sense. Either none of us understand it, or the emporor has no theory.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
the 'Theory of Relativity?
He will still be a great physicist that helped bring us to where we're at in science today.
I dont see the big deal in "disproving" him. It's sad that people will take some sort of glee in thinking "Ha! Einstein was wrong!" Einstein himself would be glad to see people come closer in figuring out the natuer of the universe.
Given the knowledge and tools available to him at the time, its amazing he came up with something in 1904 that people nearly 100 years later are still trying to figure out how to improve or disprove. Today we have the advantage of knowing how to look at things the way he did.
Einstein's abilities, creativity, and ideas will have a permanent influence on humanity's acheivements.
Ep is a very big value so mc^2/Ep is approximately 0 which give E ~= (mc^2)/(1+0) ~= mc^2.
There are 2 kinds of people in this world: Those who write in decimal and those who don't
All these posts should probably be prefixed with "IANAP" (I am not a physicist). Of course modern physics is so strange that even real physicists can't seem to agree on much. Not the newest stuff, anyway. Maybe one day all this crazy theorizing will actually lead to something practical. Here's hoping. ;')
if(!cool) exit(-1);
The more we learn where our knowledge is incorrect the more *correct* it becomes. The job of the scientist is thus to question *everything.*
The very thing that shakes your faith in our knowledge is the very thing that *strengthens* our knowledge.
Think about it.
KFG
Comment removed based on user account deletion
> from the close-only-counts-in-horseshoes dept. ...and sometimes nuclear weapons -- where missing by a mile is not too bad!
(sorry, off-topic)
mc^2 = E
Okay, now I didn't go and read the article, but I thought that this story broke a while ago...
As far as I'm concerned though it is definitely funny to see the way that physics keeps getting slammed on its own theories and laws.
First classical mechanics gets tossed out the window save for special cases, now this with the basis for much of quantum mechanics getting questioned.
Next thing you know they'll be questioning whether we're moving forward in time or backwards...
Why can Google News post a link to The New York Times without pulling up the subscriber page and Slashdot can't?
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
The fact that light is in orbit has *no* effect on its speed. You're thinking of light as a Newtonian object getting "sucked into" the black hole. Light isn't "sucked in." The escape velocity of the black hole is simply higher than the speed of light and the light follows a ballistic trajectory. . . at * the speed of light.*
Light is not Newtonian. It dosn't "speed up" as it falls, or "slow down" as it rises. That's kind of the point. Try working some simple Lorentz Transformations to begin to get a feel for this.
KFG
negative
186,000 Miles per Second. It's not just a good idea. IT'S THE LAW.
That's when tensor math starts to come in handy. Don't worry, I won't torture you with that.
I've heard the same damn "Just Because" explanations forever! I downloaded a quite lengthy explanation of Tensor Calculus to my Zaurus.
What I was really asking is if anyone knew the basis for these theories.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
It's kinda funny that when I viewed this story I saw this at the bottom of the page:
186,000 Miles per Second. It's not just a good idea. IT'S THE LAW.
"liberty and justice for all those who can afford it"
E != mc^2
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
What happens if you are on a train travelling the speed of light and you walk from the back to the front? And what if the train turns on the headlights?
Guys c'mon this is getting ridiculous now. This news has been posted before on another site. This is becoming a children's site and something something I can trust to read the news.
some physicists believe they may be seeing things at the macro level that are unexplainable by Relativitly theory, and then extrapolating that, without any apparent justification, that if such is the case *maybe* explaining this differece can open the bridge to the Theory of Everything.
Please note that most physicists are of a mind that the physicist who are seeing these things are, ummmmm, seeing things.
So far it's all still a lot of waving of hands in the air and ignoring the part where "a miracle happens."
Not to say that it might not all work out in the end, but to imply that Relativity has been disproven, or even that certain limits have been found, is, ummmmm, premature.
KFG
I think we have leanred the
Physics, Calculus story (i.e. > computer science story):
Computer Science story:
Other story (i.e. < computer science story):
Let's all discuss this E~mc^2 story as little as possible, it's making the
Not more than a few year's after developing his theories of general and special relativity, Einstein realized that they weren't perfect. The simple reason behind his realization was that the theories of relativity didn't make sense when applied on a quantum scale, and the theories of quantum physics didn't make sense when applies of a relative scale. Einstein refused to believe that the universe worked in such a way that there had to be two mutually exclusive theories to explain physics on the very small and the very large scale.
Of course, the rest of the world was busy experimenting with his theories of relativity, but after he published them he quickly lost interest in their progress. He spent the rest of his life searching for what he referred to as the "unified field theory," a single theory that could properly explain quantum physics and relativity at the same time.
I'm not a physicist by any stretch of the imagination, but theoretical science does interest me. Brian Greene's book, The Elegant Universe does a great job of explaining the background on this. It's worth a look.
-- Have you ever noticed that at trade shows, Microsoft is always the company that is handing out stress balls?
In physicvs there is a division of labor
1) Some physicists are therorists, they come up with theories and dont do experiments
2) Others are experimentalists, they do experiments and check the theories developed by theorists
Einstein, Willard Gibbs, Kirkwood, Feynmann, etc were thorists, what is the reason why they did not du experiments themselwes. They only suggested various experiments which were later carried out by experimentalists
So its wavelength is not an indication of speed as it is with every other type of wave?
So with light, velocity!=wavelength*frequency?
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
String Theory doesn't touch Ether with a ten-foot pole.
String Theory, in part, seeks to explain the structure of the universe in such a way as to accomodate both gravitation and quantum effects. It does this by shifting the understanding of particles from a family of points that all have different properties (protons, electrons, quarks, what have you) toward a *truly* fundamental form of matter - a string - that displays different properties depending on its orientation and motion in space. One (and ONLY one) type of string, many configurations, all leading up to families of particles.
It's elegant, unproven, pretty damn keen, and possibly wrong, but worth a look. The math involved makes *predictions* about the fundamental properties of matter, rather than being built off of measurements of those properties (as quantum theory and relativity are). That's an important step that cannot be underscored enough.
String Theory doesn't posit that there's a universal medium that everything travels through, as Ether theory does. Instead, it describes a configuration of space that strings wiggle around in to produce the world that we're used to looking at.
String Theory rocks. I hope it's right.
GMFTatsujin
the famous equation E=mc2 might not be entirely correct
You think?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Google has several good html tutorials. The tag should be enough.
Seriously though, thanks for them.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
black holes are where some newbie programmer did a division by zero. The speed of light is fixed because the universal CPU hasn't been upgrade to the Pentium 10^10! series yet.
Seriously though, if CPUs double every 18 months, in about 50-100 years we should be able to model every atom on earth, provided memory density grows at the same rate. hmmm... something doesn't seem to be quite right there...
I can barely type this but happy new year everyone. (wow I can still type pretty goood).
there is no global warming.
Go figure.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This story doesn't say anything interesting, just that there exist speculative theories which violate postulates of relativity. They have neither convincing experimental backing, nor strong theoretical reasons why they should be true. It's not news when someone says, "I have thought of a theory which violates Einstein's postulates." I can do that too, and chances are my theories will be worthless. If someone produces an experiment or observation which clearly violates relativity, or a self-consistent theory of quantum gravity with testable predictions, then it's time to get excited. Meanwhile, journalists' interpretations of theorists' speculations are not that interesting.
What's your point besides being OT? How can one's religion affect one's findings? How are his theories of relativity incompatible with Christianity -- a more appropriate statement: Christianity has never been compatible with anything that's been proven scientifically.
why run from Vincenzo?
Well, I thought it was a funy coincidence.
Don't you recognize a troll when you see it?
It is January 1, gimme a brake, I have the right to joke!
You a right I was off topic.
>> It's (E^2) = (m^2)(c^4) + (p^2)(c^2).
Actually, it's E = m * c^2, where m is the rest mass times the Lorenz transform.
If you then subtract the rest energy from the energy when in motion (m*c^2 - m0*c^2), you get the kinetic energy, which at low speeds is approximately equal to 1/2*m*v^2, which we all recognize as the formula for kinetic energy in Newtonian physics.
That is to say, relativistic kinetic energy is not exactly equal to newtonian kinetic energy.
Cooling like in the Cold War
Lenard got the Nober Prize for Physics but I dond understand about Hitler, what physical theories did Hitler come up with?
E=mc^2 comes from a power series expansion where the squared term is the highest power, so its approximated. Its just like .5mv^2 its just that v=c. The other terms drop out just like when you're talking about the complexity of an algorithm. If its complexity is n^3 + 2n^2 + 5n, then you just say its O(n^3).
through different mediums for quite some time. Through a vacuum (and pretty close through air), C~=3.10*10^8m/s, but not the same through a piece of glass. This is why there is diffraction, doesn't anyone here that's been through college take any physics?
At this point, I would like to point out that physics is nothing by a model. Its a bunch of equations trying to create a model for what we observe so we can make predictions on the model. Now to explain an observation that is inconsistent with the model, we need to change the model. As it were - there are no "absolute thruths". Einstein's model and the theory based on it was astonishingly accurate and made amazing predictions. If our current observations are incosistent with the model - we need to revise it.
;)
By the way are all the comment posters the one who answered "I would be reading slashdot" for what would be doing during the new year
what did he do?
If only he had good grades in school, then Dubya would have become a scientist.
Good hor him! Since his grades werent good enough for a scientist, then he became a good president.
"..[T]he famous equation E=mc2 might not be entirely correct..."
It isn't.
Time slows when you've smoked one too many doobs or when you're bored out of your mind.
-- anthony
But why do you think that your brain is capable of understanding the basic forces of the universe?
Your brain evolved to keep you away from things that want to eat you, find things you want to eat, and basically preserve you until you could insure that you have spread your genes. Last time I checked, understanding the basic rules of reality wasn't needed to ensure that you live long enough to breed.
Hell, we'er just lucky that the same math that works on our scale also seems to work when we look at how the universe works.
Even now, logic has begun to fail us when we ask the deep questions. Consider this: What made this reality? Oh sure, I know the theories that suggest that this universe might have been created by another universe, and at this level, cause and effect goes out the window, leading to the possibility that this universe can create the ancestor of the universe that created it, but what allowed this gestalt to exist?
There's an Heinleinian phrase that occasionally gets said on slashdot: There ain't no such thing as a free lunch (TANSTAAFL). Too bad that its wrong, since the universe is the biggest example of a free lunch in action.
[ Don't feel so bad - my brain also seems hellbent to make me survive long enough to ensure my genes are passed on. Damn thing is that my body agrees with it and is planning to expire in half a century in order to free up resources for my future offspring. Its a comspiracy, I tell you... ]
Just my $.02
Great, let's get our science from the New York Times again, a publication that predicted that Goddard's idea of spaceflight could never work because in space there's nothing to push against! Duh!
A word of advice: Don't get our science news reporting from popular magazines and newspapers. They have a knack for not only getting things mixed up, but getting them exactly wrong.
What's being discussed is yet another crackpot theory that very few scientists take seriously. Saying "Whoo hoo, Einstein may be wrong!" sells papers, but a scientific analysis of the situation is a whole different story.
On one hand, the formulations of string theory are Very Hard (TM). I'm sure you think youv'e seen hard math, but there's hard math and there's string theory math. Classic standard model quantum mechanics and general relativity is hard math, nice hard partial differential equations to solve. String theory math makes this look easy though. It's so hard that nobody has yet even formulated the exact equations - everybody's working with approximations. So the predictions that people are making with string theory may not be completely accurate, as they aren't working from the real threory, just an approximation of it. Nice, eh?
On the other hand, most of the quantitative predictions that string theory does generate are mindboggling hard to test anyway, since in almost all respects string theory agrees with classic quantum mechanics (there's an oxymoron...) until you get to some pretty insane energies (think plank energy).
Fortunately, recently a few physicists have come up with some more subtle qualitative predictions that should prove feasible to test (for example, string theory predicts that cosmic microwave background radiation should be pixelated - the big bang didn't do antialiasing:).
Dude......C is relative to B. It's C++ and Java that's relative to C. Cobol is a different species altogether.....
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Actually not quite, I do find this issue extremely fascinating and I had thought of submitting this story earlier today, but I felt that there wasn't any actual news here. The thing is, currently, there is no evidence whatsoever that supports VSL (Varying Speed of Light) theories in any appreciable way, as the NYT writes, Superstring theorist super-star (as far as physics goes :) Edward Witten calls the whole thing "unimpressive". VSL is basically a product of physicists brainstorming to somehow come up with an answer to that most pressing question: just how to consolidate quantum mechanics (Bohr, Heisenberg, et al., about the really really small stuff) with Einstein's general relativity (mainly about gravity, big'n'fast stuff).
It is actually not that much of a stretch. After all, when Einstein published his findings about ninety-eight years ago (I think), physicists abandoned the notion of absolute time (you have to spend a moment sometime to really appreciate what that means, most of the time, we really are Newtonians through and through). Today, some theoreticians and experimenters are considering to do the same with c, the speed of light.
The idea that c varies, however, is not all that new, it has already been conjectured to be a function of time, c -> c(t), to make sense of some odd stuff in cosmology. What's new in Dr. Magueijo and other's work is that they play with the idea of c varying in much more complex scenarios, having to do with with position, wavelength, momentum, etc.
It's worth mentioning that the latest shift in the literature tends to go to a varying alpha, the fine structure "constant", from which c can be seen to be derived from. For more info, check out this article, co-authored by Magueijo (full text in pdf, on windows you have to add ".pdf" to the filename).
Needlessly to say, there's dozens of scientific articles about this issue, some quite readable (I have a couple of links at home, writing this from a party I'm supposed to enjoy).
The real news in all of this, it seems to me, is how almost esoteric science (in a good sense) has made its way into mainstream journalism. And with the publishing of Magueijo's book, which will be among the more readable ones of its kind, being scheduled for 2003, there's certainly a hot issue to watch as it unfolds. Last, unlike with superstring theory (you know, the little elastics swinging in 10 or so dimensions, and whose detection is so many orders of magnitude away from current technology, it ain't funny anymore), VSL is going to get some experimental underpinnings in 2006 from NASA's GLAST (Gamma Ray Large Area Space Telescope) satellite.
Hey, with a little luck, who knows what the limit is going to be. It would be fucking amazing if we arrived at a correct Theory Of Everything within our lifetimes. Boy, what better issue for today.
Imagine the Creator as a stand up commedian - and at once the world becomes explicable. -Mencken
has gaysexwithdogs, he better move at the speed of light because E=mc^2 or verbosely E=chances of cumming, M=# of strokes, C=average tightness of a dog's anal cavity.
New Year's have a happy YOU!
Everyone knows E = MC Hawking.
When NYT reports something, can't the poster provide a non-registration-required link? Call me prude, but I don't like having to register, and I don't like faking a registration. Either link to another news source or just don't report the damn news item if you have to register to read the article. Leave NYT alone.
But no we must post and repost and comment to no end. We have all the info we need, we just need to stop arguing like 19 century scientific idiots about whether or not a theory is unpopular or just can't work and either prove or disprove a single or multiple theories once and for all.
I know this will probally get modded down to like -1 as flamebait, but it is not, it is a genuine challenge. What use is it that microsoft has a "monopoly" on the desktop market if we are unwilling or unable to prove or disprove scientific theory (central to our understanding of the universe), that has stood for almost a hundred years, and has not been unified into a single all encompasing theory of the universe, or cast aside as inaccurate.
A Fatal OE Exception has occurred, Sig will now reboot.
considering a photon is a poor mans explination for something that behaves like a particle and a wave at the same time.
I learned in first year physics that the only way to measure something is to stop is. But since you can't exactly stop light, only measure it's reflection or absorbtion, it makes it rather difficult to accurately gauge it's speed (distance over time). There is also the fact that the speed of light is a mathematical calculation based on measurable observations. The only issue with such calculations is that it is subject to the hypothesis that light can be measured in the same way as a particle.
Now the next incongruous statement I shall make devolves to the actual question of energy. Einstien's theory of relativity is actually the equation for measuring the energy of a particle in relation to object mass. This is actually an attempt at as close to a grand unification theory as has been widely accepted in this civilization (of course, religion is the other one, but that's another topic not to be breached today).
There's also the wonderful coinsidence that Einstein's theory is called the theory of relativity, not the theory of constants, so every variable in the equation is relative to the application of the theory.
It's freakin New Year's Eve (actually 4AM) and I'm posting a stupid reply to a way too intellectual discussion on Slashdot. I have no life.
Screw it, I'm going to bed.
Someone please explain to me why I have no legs?
Don't Ask Questions. I don't know the answers and even if I did I wouldn't tell you.
all: 'Yada, Yada'(continue at yout own pace)
This will finally provide a topic for intelligent conversation.
Also, I had something else about faucets. It was going to be funny, but I sort of lost my momentum.
Priority list:
1. Create list
They mention a couple times that one possible result would be that light of different frequencies would have slightly different speeds. If that is the case, it would seem that black holes would have a "color", due to the fact that the event horizon would be at a different radius for different frequencies of light.
Err, well, it would be more like a four dimensional rainbow, I suppose. Come to think of it, this would also imply that gravitational lensing should also affect different frequencies differently, which should also be detectable.
Boy, all of that makes me wonder if I'm missing something. Maybe NYT isn't the deep science reference I imagined it to be...
Top 5 Rejected names for the new formula:
(read the article before modding)
Extra Special Relativity
Relatively Special Relativity
Double Secret Relativity
Not Ready for Prime Time Relativity
Britney Spears Nude !!!
But
E=mc^1.99999923850927642081748272
is just not quite as catchy. Harder to fit on T-shirts also.
Table-ized A.I.
E=mc2 but only for large values of E
Relatively Special Relativity
Double Secret Relativity
In fact, physicists call a related theory Doubly Special Relativity, which also attempts to revise Einstein's work.
Imagine the Creator as a stand up commedian - and at once the world becomes explicable. -Mencken
umm.. You don't mean infinitesimal in the strictly mathematical sense, do you?
Actually it's kinda a fun thought: What if energy IS undefined in some circumstances?
Yep. It's true: You Have Been Trolled.
Please, everyone always tries to stand on Einstein's shoulders, discredit his work, or "embrace and extend" it, and thus etch their place in science history by being an equal or better to such an influential man. Every time they try this it eventually is discovered that Einstein was right (again), and these people were caught not doing their homework, or cutting corners.
Lets compare this to another famous, simple, theory. F=ma. One might say that is an aproximation (and it is). Especially on Earth. If you ever tried to measure that you would fail. Things like friction, rotation of the earth, instrument error would make you believe that there are 1,001 different variables. You'd be right.. and wrong. The beauty, the GENIUS of Isaac Newton and Einstein is that they saw beyond all of the complications and boiled the equation down to its roots. Of course any real world use of it is going to deviate from it. The alternative is to have a system more akin to the motion of the planets prior to the gallileo; with cycles and epicycles... a Fourier transform of the universe, where we keep adding on terms to equations to desctibe each new experiement, and cloud ourselves from the larger, more accurate, picture (oh wait, we do that too, its called quantum)
I'd like to understand why theory says faster-than-light travel is impossible.
I do understand why you cannot ever reach or exceed the speed of light through normal acceleration. The closer you get to the speed of light, the more aparrent mass you get, and thus the more energy it takes to accelerate you. To hit the speed of light would take infinite energy (and you would have infinite mass when you hit it). Infinite energy and mass aren't really available, so you can't have a speeed >= C by accelerating, no matter how hard you try.
The part I don't understand:
I have been told that theory forbids any travel faster than light, no matter what the means ("warp drive", "hyperspace", "teleporter", whatever). My understanding is that if you could, some observers would see you traveling back in time, and this is forbidden.
I would appreciate any explanation of this, or even just a pointer to a reference I can understand. Thanks.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Nothing is ever as easy as they tell you in High School, now is it?
That E != mc^2 in all circumstances would certainly come as a surprise to those who havent't studied physics (caveat: I haven't, but I happen to sit with a book written by one of the best Danish authors on physics of all time. The now diseased (sp?) Ove Nathan).
The correct formula is E^2 - p^2c^2 = m^2c^4, where "p" is the linear momentum of the particle and it is by definition equal to the product of its mass and its velocity. The reason I write the formula in this way and not with the energy alone on the left of the equality sign is because the special theory of relativity states that E^2 - p^2c^2 must be constant in all inertial systems (do not make me try to explain this concept - I would probably fail in making it understandable).
________
Entranced by anime since late summer 2001 and loving it ^_^
time to buy that 56k
It isn't frowned upon by scientists to question evolution. Only non-scientists think that science seeks out the truth about reality, and most of them are quite unaware that science only creates models and correlates them with the observed behaviour of reality, and thus has no means to determine the actual structure of reality at all.
Admittedly, scientists occasionally get a mental lapse, forget their own principles, and start pontificating as if they knew The Truth, but it's not all that common except when they're acting defensively for some reason. Of course, they lose their science hat when they do that, despite protesting that it's still firmly on their heads.
It should be said though that the questioning has to be based on sound prior research and must use the language and logical tools and methods of science, because otherwise it merely wastes the scientist's time to have to provide the questioner with remedial education --- a very good reason for "frowning". That's the main reason why non-scientists sometimes get what they consider to be an unsatisfactory response to their questions: their points are usually just empty handwaving to a scientist, simply because they lack the scientific training to do better.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
my school is imprepared to answer anything that comes up
Your school is imprepared? That's unpossible!
They claimed that Einstein was wrong and ws the communist menance..
IN Communist Russia they claimed that Einstein was a Facist menance..
Both reigemes we wrong..Einstein;s theory stil holds..
Someoen should really fact check their Physics assumptions beofre writing in a big time news medium..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Anyone else know that, for all his genius, Einstein was kind of loosely wrapped? He couldn't tie his shoes, and would often forget where he lived. His college professors didn't think he'd amount to very much, and he often copied the work of his classmates. It just goes to show you that anyone can have something important to contribute to the world...
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
Through water it's about c/1.335.
Hmm...This comment made me consider the speed of light through a moving medium. If the water was flowing at some high speed (relative to the observer, of course) while light was traveling through the medium, I believe that this would actually cause the propogation speed of light non-constant between inertial frames.
I had not noticed that before.
because that's how science is *defined.*
KFG
...but Uri Geller bent it.
RMN
~~~
bliss in the air tonight, isn't there?
KFG
I've read that, to test relativity, scientists put one atomic clock inside a saceship, made it go around the Earth at a very high speed a few times, brought it back to Earth, and when they compared it with another clock, it was running behind, showing that its time had slowed down.
Now, according to relativity, can't you see the experiemnt exactly the other way around? I mean, from the point of view of the spaceship, it was the Earth that moved very fast, and therefore it's the clock that stayed on Earth that should have slowed down, right?
Does this mean that, if a human had gone in the spaceship, when the got back to Earth he would have seen the clocks the other way around?
it is
;-)
C_2H_5OH = mc^2
as my physics teacher used to say
If you've been trying to obtain more than a "frown" from scientists on questioning evolution then you'll know about some of the slightly better than normal critiques, like that made by creationist Timothy Wallace countering a representative article written by evolutionist Mark Isaak on the talk.origins website.
Those criticisms were then countered in turn by (open-minded evolutionist) Wayne Duck, and throughout his response you can see his open-minded scientific position quite clearly. Where Wallace makes a point using clear logic, he accepts it, rather than simply rubbishing the criticisms with more rhetoric. Note in particular the final page, in which Duck could not be more clear as to the status of evolution as a scientific theory: ultimately, while the huge weight of supporting evidence for evolution is still entire universes away from being a complete picture, it is believed by scientists to be reliable only because there is currently no other theory that comes anywhere even remotely near to providing as scientifically complete a model with substantiating evidence as does evolution. But, as he says, that could change tomorrow. It's unlikely.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Always read the links before you include them, and don't depend on Google to give you What You Meant, just What You Asked For.
Jeff
First off, I'm not a creationist. Indeed, I find that whole debate to be entirely infernal, as both sides seem to me quite flawed in their own ways. That being said. .
Occam's Razor bugs me. As a deductive tool, it is a pretty good one; it works for the most part. What I find unsettling, however, is that it seems to have become, thanks to its presentation and treatment in popular media, understood and accepted by many as a de facto scientific law when it is not.
It is a rule of thumb, and only a rule of thumb. --It is only a rule of thumb, because it is not always right. Every time something unexpectedly complex turns out to be the reality behind a phenomenon which might otherwise have been explained through simple means, Occam's Razor is blunted.
Example:
When Alexandre Graham Bell first announced to the world that he had discovered a way to send a voice signal over a wire, the world erupted with both excitement and disbelief. One major newspaper even ran a story written by experts which attempted to debunk Bell's claim. They used diagrams demonstrating that sound waves sent down thin metal tubes of the diameter Bell was using for wires, could not possibly travel the kinds of distances he claimed. The experts were engineers well versed in the science and dynamics of sound as employed in the kinds of voice communication pipe systems once used large ocean going vessels. To the writers of the article, they were being entirely reasonable.
"Which is more likely?" they must have asked themselves, "That Bell has created some magical new invention to send sound along miles of very thin tubes? Or that he is lying?"
Occam's Razor is deeply rooted in how one perceives, how much information there is available to work with, and what has been previously accepted by culture as normal and/or outlandish.
-Now Bell was, of course, proven to be right. When words crackled out from crude speakers for all to hear, the enthusiastic debunkers, (and there is never any shortage of enthusiastic debunkers or respected, conservative media outlets to give them a voice and print their diagrams), had to quietly go mum and withdraw their objections. But that was in part due to large forces which wanted and allowed Bell to be proven right. If you don't advertise a fact or discovery, facts and discoveries can easily vanish. People have short memories. People have short lives. Without active perseverance, knowledge is a self-burying commodity until it becomes large enough to self-sustain, and even then, it is not so very difficult to forget important turns of history after only a few fickle generations have passed.
Science as a concept, is a pure, wonderful thing, but it does not know everything. Indeed, many institutions are not so pure as the science which they employ; it is well known that individuals with weak morals, and corrupt institution will suppress data, twist data and even make up data on a basis regular enough that the public pool of knowledge has been polluted to the point that the employment of Occam's Razor is by no means reliable in today's arena of public thought.
Just something to consider next time you feel the need to slam a new idea. Remember that Occam gave us a deductive tool, not an irrefutable law.
-Fantastic Lad
In my first year at uni back in the early 80's, we were learning the basics of relativity and we got around to the equation E=mc^2/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2). As I was just learning about complex numbers in the Maths and Electric Power courses at the same time I recognised that while the mass and energy tend exponentially towards infinity as v aproaches c, it becomes a complex number when v is geater than c. Being a total science fiction nut I asked my prof what this meant. He was just irritated and basically told me to bugger off. I was dissapointed, being convinced that I had discovered the key to FTL travel and read up as much as I could about Tachyons (theoreticals particles that always move FTL) because as I saw it, complex or irrational numbers do not mean that time goes backward.
At the time I thought that this in some way correlated with some sort of "hyperspace", "subspace", "foldspace" or any of those science fiction terms used to make it quicker to get to B from A by transitioning to some special state of space.
With time I forgot about it (discovered girls and booze) but I have never found anything anywhere that goes into the mathematical problems created by v>c in that equation.
Why is it that it is always just dissed off as childs play, while physicists grapple with complex notions of 10-dimensional strings etc?
If things don't even talk about the same subject, how can they be "incompatible"? What part of Christianity "disproves" the theory of relativity, or anything else for that matter?
I had a friend that had a degree in physics, and I tried to explain to him why the speed of light had to be relative. He couldn't comprehend what I was trying to explain and just discounted it. I guess that's why he was working at Pizza Hut.
And since that's precisely the sort of overly subtle humor that often gets me in trouble I feel a bit foolish over not catching it. :)
The problem is, I've actually encountered that very response in "real life" with distressing frequency.
KFG
Go eat a dick
What makes you think there even was a beginning? Keep in mind that we have never actually seen the beginning of an event and the end; those boundaries are imposed by us. Reality is really a continuous cascade of effects which themselves become causes. How do we know there even is a beginning to the universe?
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/bombardier.html
Please, dear /. posters and readers, listen and heed this.
Don't EVER post a story with a bad link, i.e. the link to New York Times article.
It is extremly aggrevating to find out that you have to register in order to follow the story. I'd rather see that such stories are not posted at all.
A tip... use mirrors if you really need to post a story such as this one.
Thank you all for you attention.
the answer to Santayana's infamous final exam which posed that very question.
:)
Because.
As for your sig, why do you think that guns are long, skinny, and have holes down the middle of their barrels?
KFG
...the last time I checked, the sun wasn't burning. Should we be worried?
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
At issue is the devisive understanding of the nature of light. We attribute both particle and wave to light as we see fit, when it can be either or both. Special relativity for the masses is an absurd generalization. There is no doubt that mathematical abstractions of nature are limited to what can be seen, touched and measured. So, let us not forget that the measurement of the "real world" may be limited by the understandings of multi-dimensional mathematics, not just the portion of the universe that we touch.
Hmmm...so does Time have a speed? How fast is Time?
E=mc2 might not be entirely correct
Why, of course it *might*. That is not news.
The article was informative and a wrap up of the current state I would say. But really, it isn't saying much.
Just another one of those articles that dances in a circle and ends up where it started. It gathers readers by pretending it might have some proof to disclose, but that never happens. And in the end, they talk about how "they're still a long way" or "maybe next year" or whatever.
Reminds me of those UFO specials on TV.
"Why is it that it is always just dissed off as childs play, while physicists grapple with complex notions of 10-dimensional strings etc?"
Yes, my child. You have grasped one of the "keys" to a GUFT, but alas most are too buried into what is, rather than what might be.
It is still a theory, it is not a law. In fact it will likely never become the law of relativity. At extremely small scale, general relativity breaks down. This is why quantum mechanics came about. One day, someone will hopefully develop a unified theory that will make general relativity, special relativity and quantum mechanics obsolete.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
anything like double special probation?
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
If you were in Soviet Russia, then you wouldn't be in Soviet Russia.
Soviet Russia would be in you.
Happy trolling, all.
He knew it would take a few generations to figure
this out, so he "kludged" in a big number to get
by till we really figure it out.
What is so funny is these big math professors
never figured that out to begin with, so ha ha
on you educated types carrying those papers that tell us how smart you are.
...what the relativity theory is...
Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity in Words of Four Letters or Less
Enjoy.
Please don't forget your subscripts! As everyone learns in basic special relativity, total energy, which is kinetic + potential, is
where gamma = 1 / sqrt( 1-v^2/c^2 ) and m0 is the rest mass.At v = 0, gamma = 1 and E = m0 c^2, Einstein's famous formula for rest energy. Kinetic energy is given by KE = E - m0 c^2, or
To see any appreciable effect of velocity, consider the situation where you are going fast enough to double your effective mass (gamma = 2). Solving for velocity gives v = c sqrt(3/4) = 86.6% of the speed of light. Not gonna happen with current technology (outside of atom smashers).As v -> c, gamma -> infinity and this is Einstein's rationale for saying it's impossible to accelerate any matter up to the speed of light, since doing so would require an infinite amount of kinetic energy. On the other hand, the formula for photons is
where p is momentum, h is Planck's constant, lambda is wavelength, and c / lambda = nu is the frequency. Since photons are never at rest (remember the constant speed of light?), you won't see any m's make an appearance here. And just for the record, this last formula explains the photoelectric effect, which is what won Einstein his Nobel, not E = m c^2.This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
'nuff said.
E=mc^2 is actually an approximation as any high school calculus student can tell you. Einstein dropped the additional terms from the converging series 1 + ab + 1/2 (a^2+a)b^2 .... for simplicity (a common step in mathematics). They are more signifigant at high speeds obviously.
I use the real (http://www.tcpalaw.com/emcsqd.pdf) derivation of E=mc^2 when trying to convince people that genius is nothing sepcial - just insight.
The whole point of relativity is that the speed of light is constant! Since it is the same even when measured from different frames of reference the only explanation is the warping of space and time. That's what creates all those "funky" relativistic effects.
Plus, we already know it's "wrong" because it doesn't account for any force except gravity.
Ever hear of:
gravity: gravity waves
magnetism: photons
??
This is the type of thing that Einstein didn't like.
An alternate is known as the "pilot wave" (pdf) interpretation. It suggests that the wave and the particle are separate - the wave is actually a force, and the particle remains a discrete thing that's pulled by that force. When that force is split, the particle follows one force wave, and the other is empty - when you eventually measure it, you've really changed nothing.
What the nature of this force is, is left unclear, but it goes get rid of the dice-throwing god. Einstein didn't like this much either.
In 1964, a Christian theologian and philosopher Gordon H. Clark, has published a book titled THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE AND BELIEF IN GOD where he attempted, successfully I might add, to highlight the most fundamental problem of secular science, that is the problem of epistemology. The issues raised by the NYT article have been addressed and answered in the 60-s by the above mentioned philosopher, of course not to everybody's satisfaction. Some of Clark's points, relevant to the NYT article, he more fully discusses in his books can be assessed by following this URL to an article titled "Science and Truth": http://pneumaticus.com/pneumaticus/publications/ep istemology/clark/clark_ep_002.php
How do you know?
pneumaticus.com
the world is flat, now, go back in your cave...