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Blazing Speed: The Fastest Stuff In The Universe
Unfallversicherung writes "'If you're light, it's fairly easy to travel at your own speed -- that is to say 186,282 miles per second or 299,800 kilometers per second. But if you are matter, then it's another matter altogether.' Astronomers are now measuring matter that moves at 99.9 percent of light-speed. Jupiter-sized blobs of hot gas embedded in streams of material ejected from hyperactive galaxies known as blazars."
To get first post? ...probably not :(
This stuff is at rest. It's we who are moving at 99.9% the speed of light.
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How about linking to the original Space.com article?
Blazing Speed: The Fastest Stuff in the Universe.
I'm interested in how we can measure the speed of things that far away at that level of precision. Any measurement would rely on light from those gas balls reaching us at different times -- and as such, how can we tell that nothing is interfering with the light between there and here?
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I dont think relativity states you would go back in time if you traveled at c. Rather it predicts that time would pass slower for you relative to the rest of the universe, or things not going at c?
Maybe its possible to travel faster then light then
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The amount of energy required to move anything with any kind of mass to the speeds mentioned in the article would be prohibitive
Where oh where has my Underdog gone?
Thats impossible nothing can go faster than the speed of light.
Of Course Not! Thats why scientists increased the speed of light in 2208.
From TFA: "For us, the speed limit makes strange sense: Go faster than light, and you could return before you've left, become your own grandpa, or other perform other leaps of cosmic logic."
Someone's been watching too much Futurama.
Thanks...but I think those blazars are making random letters bold.
FWIW, the bold letters I found here were: gaakiketoday, in that order. I wonder what you/the article are trying to say. Something Japanese?
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Ah, how I love hillbilly journalists. Though the facts of the article itself are not incorrect, the way they are presented reeks of naiveté.
Gamma, the factor that in general relates quantities (time, mass, energy, momentum) in two reference frames in Special Relativity, is non-linear. Being within 0.1% of the speed of light does not place you any 'closer' to breaking it than being within 50% of it.
This is why instead of speaking of the speed of particles and objects travelling close to that of light, we refer to the kinetic energy they have, which gives a much more practical way of understanding these speeds.
My motorbike travels in Chile.
"Nothing we know of zips along more quickly than light. Einstein, nearly 100 years ago, said it's not possible."
Erm did'nt he say nothing(matter) can accelerate to the speed of light?
moo
1) Under the current physics, light-speed travel is impossible. As you approach the speed of light, the energy required to accelerate you further approaches infinity.
2) As you accelerate to 99.9% the speed of light, time slows down very significantly. Theoretically, at the speed of light, the passage of time stops, but since you cannot accelerate to the speed of light, that's a moot point.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Given this, I wonder how far light speed travel is off. To travel back in time you must accelerate to the speed of light, but what happens if you accelerate to 99.9% of the speed of light?
Light speed travel is no closer than it was before. Relativity allows for travel at speeds arbitrarily close to that of light, but not at. If you accelerate to 99.9999% of the speed of light you just get all of the normal relativistic effects, just to a more extreme degree. Time slows down (you see it as time slowing in the rest of the universe, they see it as time slowing for you.) Distances get shorter. Your mass (or from your POV, the mass of the rest of the universe) gets higher. Nothing to see here.
Why?
Dude, screw the asteroid detection. One of those things will only take out most of the world's costal area.
Whereas one of those blazar things could take out the whole solar system. Imagine the fireworks there, as a mass the size of Jupiter smacks into the sun.
Gentlemen... we cannot allow... a blazar detection gap!
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Have they comparable data on how fast an Outlook user clicks on [OK] to launch an attachment? That must be as fast as the speed of light, at least!
It said: "gasakikeday"
Gas a kike day. Lovely.
My buddy had a blazar and that piece of shit would be lucky to do 0 to 60 in 10 minutes.
AH HA get it? chevye blazar kekekekekeke kthxbye
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Theoretically. It would just go backwards in time. Nothing with mass can travel AT the speed of light.
I ain't a physics geek, but I did learn that much in college.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Why does light travel at that percise speed of 186,000 mph ? Why not 500,000 ?
What is special about 186,000 mph ?
Could it be that there is correlation between HiggBosons and lightwaves and fabric of space and strings ?
But what exactly is the speed of light? If I stand here and shine a laser, sure, it has a speed, but think about it: This planet is hurtling through space at breakneck speeds. Now add the speed of light from my laser to the speed the Earth is moving, and voila! You have a speed faster than the speed of light. Of course, you then have to take into account that the speed of the Earth is relative also. (To the other celestial bodies) When you really think about it, speed doesn't exist. So if speed doesn't really exist, then it should be easy to go however fast we want to go! Say hello to spacial folding and the Matrix! (As well as a headache from thinking too hard!)
...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
In modern accelerators electrons routinely have energies of a few GeV, meaning that their velocity differs from c by probably less than one part in a billion (I can't be bothered to do the calculation, but the rest mass of the electron is about 0.5 MeV).
They got players with names like, "laser", and "blazer", and all kindsa "-azers"!
Rimmer: "What the smeg is a blazar?"
That's not a soda... it's a caffeine delivery device!
Blade, Lazar, Blazar?? Astronomy consigliere timothy??
What if you just poof go faster, or something exists that's already going faster?
So what would it feel like to get hit by matter traveling at 99.9% of light speed? It would probably slice thru the body like a hot knife thru butter and you would not feel a thing, if it's not too big that is. :)
LOL. Talk about misinformation and hype. It's trivial to transmit an interference wave with a phase velocity faster than the speed of light. That doesn't imply that you can send a signal with information content faster than light - the group velocity (the information carrier or signal you actually control) can't go faster than light.
Either my calculations are wrong or I might be a bit rusty in understanding but with that speed on protons they would wigh approx 3 mg each... now that is a heck of a lot and with that speed they should do some damage even if they are small. Anyone care to elaborate on this?
I find it really hard to believe that site actually has a real publication that people subscribe to.
It's easy to create signals with "phase velocities" faster than the speed of light, for example set up a series of identical oscillators such that the phase of oscillation is perfectly in sync (within a stationary observers frame). Such a system will have an infinite phase velocity, (or within the limits of experimental error it can easily be made greater than c). This phase velocity merely means the phase of the "wave" of the oscillation appears to travel infinitely fast from one oscillator to the next.
But the key point is that no information is transferred faster than the speed of light, and thus everything still adheres to the confines of special relativity. So the parent AC is correct that one can create an effective velocity larger than c, but one cannot do anything useful with it.
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how to add relativistic speeds
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If you're travelling at a very high speed (close to the speed of light) your time would, from an outsider's point of view, be slower (i.e. a second would last longer in your spaceship/whatever than on the outsider's watch,) given that the outsider moves slower than you. This means that if you flew off into space at a very high speed and turned around and flew back to earth after, let's say, 5 minutes (on a watch in your ship,) earth would have aged several thousand years (i.e. you would have travelled forth in time.)
If you wanted to go back in time you would have to move faster than the speed of light, which is impossible unless you use some sort of wormhole (which is completely theoretical.)
What, it actually went to 60? (But seriously, I get the joke.)
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
"If you're light, it's easy to travel..."
Did anyone else read this and think, "Well, I'm not overweight... so I can go really fast?"
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
As I recall from a late 1990s lecture by Hawking, some matter can exceed "the speed of light" and in doing so, escape a black hole. At an event horizon exactly, that border at which matter including light either escapes a black hole or not, the position of particles is known with complete precision. As such, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle dictates that the speed of the particles cannot be known as precisely. Photons at the event horizon of a black hole are allowed, by a tiny quantity, some Scotty Factor in their speed because their position is certain. In plain words, these are the mathematics of the matter :) Some leptonic matter, in only such a particular position, can be slightly faster than "the speed of light."
As theorized, Hawking's predictions that black holes might leak have, I understand, been observed as radiation from what are as-yet assumed to be black holes. Anyone knowing more than I do about this particular phenomenon is (un?)certainly welcome to add more. The explanation Hawking made was directed at interested and able nonprofessionals; he put forward some mathematics around but not specifically deriving the surprising conclusions. Made sense to me, anyhow. I believe the matter discussed here, blasers measured at .999999... of light's speed, is the fastest measured "directly." But I do not believe this is the fastest known matter, if you allow that "knowing" the speed of the matter Hawking discussed (observed as radiation) was theoretical and later indirectly measured.
BG
Observing particles moving at 99.9% c is not so amazing as it sounds. First of all we routinely accelerate matter to great speeds for use in particle physics experiments (in places such as CERN, SLAC, FermiLab, Brookhaven, etc.).
As an example, the LEP accelerator at CERN which was used in the period 1989-2000, acceleratod electrons to about 99.9999999977% c.
But even outside the laboratories we have previously observed even larger speeds. The UHECR (ultra high energy cosmic rays) whose origin is still a mystery seems to consist of protons moving at speeds of 1-1^(-22) = 0.9999999999999999999999 c.
Furthermore, it might seem like we need absurd accuracies in our measurements to discern the numbers from each other. But we don't really - the speed of the particle is practically the same when 0.99c and 0.99999c are compared, but things like the momentum of the particle will still differ wildly. For the curious, the formula is: momentum = m*v/sqrt(1-(v/c)^2).
I've always been intrigued by Feynmann's conjecture that there's only one electron, which moves so fast that it appears in all the times/places in the universe that appear to be individual electrons. That accounts for "every" electron having identical properties - it's the same electron. But I suppose that setting different quantum properties, like spin, to different states, without seeing that state "propagated" to "other" electrons, defies that model. Or does it? Maybe we just haven't tested enough electrons, or maybe our technique for setting state actually sets the state of the (moving) space in which we measure that persistent electron state. Or maybe Feynmann had even more clever subtleties in his model. Or maybe it was all just a bad idea.
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This is exactly what special relativity explains. It's a while since I learnt about it, but afaicr you cannot seperate space and time. And time slows down as you approach the speed of light, changing how you observe the space in the direction of the incoming object. You will never see it approach at 100.9..% the speed of light.
- These characters were randomly selected.
Wouldn't such large, fast masses thereby account for the majority of "stuff" (matter/energy) in the Universe? If they were previously unaccounted, wouldn't that reduce the amount of "dark matter/energy" postulated to be bending the observable universe, by showing another gravity sink instead?
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In fact, you can't go faster than light through spacetime because you can't go slower. Even when sitting on your ass reading /., you are moving through time.
This is why time slows as you travel nearer to the speed of light through space, as more of the speed is moving you through the space component of spacetime as opposed to the time component of spacetime.
Look up four-vectors in special relativity for more info.
E = m c^3 Don't drink and derive E = m c^3
"If you're light, it's fairly easy to travel at your own speed -- that is to say 186,282 miles per second or 299,800 kilometers per second."
:)
Light is faster with the metric system...
Doh!
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That sounds like a group of weed-smoking rappers.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
You should also read about the Oh My God particle (it's real and not a joke). This proton particle travels almost as fast as light. After traveling one light year, the particle would be only 0.15 femtoseconds--46 nanometres--behind a photon that left at the same time.
Banu
"approaches infinity"?
What nonsense is this? A value is either finite or it is infinite, NOTHING "approaches" infinity.
That was classic intercourse!
I suppose it must mean these gases travel at (nearly) the speed of light with reference to stationary objects. But of course, light itself still moves as fast compared to this stuff as it does compared to us.
You are right, unless you have particles like tachyons, which have imaginary rest mass. Such particles could travel only faster than light and will never slow down under the light speed.
Wikipedia has something about that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyon
Dude, take a 1st year physics class.
Perhaps your cluelessness will inspire other impressionable minds to go look up the difference between veolicity in Newtonian mechanics and velocity in Einstein/Lorentz relativity.
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As is basic physics (E=MC^2) any matter approaching the speed of light will effectively have a greater mass.
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
What's amazing about this is how fast they are moving away from their source ... not the absolute speed which as the parent sais doesn't mean a lot
Not a bit. Relativity shows why it's not possible for anything with mass to move as fast as light, but doesn't prevent matter from moving at any lesser speed. As long as the blobs of gas aren't actually moving at the speed of light, there's no problem with relativity, general or special.
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"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
You are ignoring time dilation, and that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.
You cannot add relativistic velocities directly, it doesn't work.
The article said it didn't conflict with it assuming I read correctly.
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... maybe I should add that it was after slowing light down to a few m/s. People tend to forget that you cannot exceed the speed of light IN A VACUUM. If light travels in a medium, its speed is less than c. If make some neat atomic phisics tricks it is not too difficult to have a cell with a very high refractive index and where consequently light travels very slowly. Then it is trivial tu run faster than it.
The problem is the "travel" is ilusionary. It's that the same effect -appears- in different places at distance/time higher than light, but it's not traveling.
Imagine this:
A probe going to Moon drops 100 "beacons" every 1% of the route. The beacons have light receptors, precise clocks and flashlights. Send a flash from earth. Each beacon upon receiving it, starts the clock. The signal gets reflected from the Moon, gets back to Earth, the return signal puts an "end mark" on the clocks. The beacon by Earth has almost 3s between start and end signal. The one by the Moon, almost none.
Now all the beacons reset their clocks forward by half the period between the signals. Technically, non-relativistically speaking, they all run at the same time (though if you travelled from one to another with a clock in hand, they would be all different, because of relativistic effects on you and your clock...)
Now set the flashlight timers to blink the flashlights in order from Moon to Earth with delay of 0.001s from each other. Effect: Observed from Mars or somewhere else far, the flash "wanders" at 10x the speed of light from Moon to Earth.
The problem with it is that the flash doesn't really travel. One flash isn't caused by the previous one, but by a separate events that get synchronised at speed of light or slower, Information won't get from Moon to Earth at speed higher than light and in fact from Earth you will see the beacon just by Earth to blink before the one by the Moon - because its light reaches you faster, even though it fired later.
Broken speed of light? No. The fact that things occur in distinct places independently in very short time doesn't imply anything travelled between these places at any speed.
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According to Einstein, the faster you travel the time goes slower. If you accelerate to 99.9% of the speed of light, inside your "craft" it will pass one day while in Earth (or any other stationary object) ten years have gone by. There is an equation that govern this which is called time dilation. Theoreticaly if you achieve the speed of light the time will stop.
Here you make a Newtonian assumption - velocities in relativity cannot be added so simply. As someone posted before, velocities have to be added only with the help of the Gamma factor, which would basically adjust your answer such that it remained under 100%. It's still impossible ;)
In math, something is said to approach infinity when its value increases endlessly, without bound. It may always have a finite value, but that value will increase past any arbitrary limit you care to name, not matter how high.
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Actually that's a perfectly valid way to express what the graph looks like. C is a limit. As the speed approaches C, the mass approaches infinity.
Do you have a better way to describe this graph?
Actually I *think* that you have it wrong.
Ok, lets say there is a videocamera inside a spaceship filming the crew. There is also a videocamera back on earth filming.
The people in the spaceship are watching the broadcast from Earth, and the people on Earth are watching the broadcast from the spaceship.
As the Spaceship's speed approaches that of light, the people on earth will see that time has almost frozen on the spaceship.
However, for the people on the spaceship it will look like 100s or 1000s of years are going by in a matter of seconds on earth.
This is why pseudo-time travel (one way into the future) is possible with near-light speed travel.
I remember a SciAm article about cosmic matter (protons) actually going FASTER than light. The trick was that nothing goes faster than light in a vaccuum, but what about in air? When cosmic rays going .99c hit the interface of the upper atmosphere there are conditions where the refracted speed of light is less than the speed of those particles.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
I read this article earlier on space.com, and was thinking... Could such a feat be possible by us? Assuming we have infinite funds... :)
one thing that I've never really understood is, for whom does time slow down for? Since everything is relative, I am a bit confused.
My confusion lies in this example: we have object B accelerating away from object A, and as I understand it, time slows down for object A. I then extend this example and have an object C taking off from object B in the direction of object A.
I would understand that object C is in fact deccelerating, and time should speed up as a result. However, if object A never existed, then I wouldn't consider C deccelerating, but accelerating, in which case time should slow down for C, and not speed up. And what if A was already moving? It seems that to know whether time should increase or decrease requires prior knowledge about the object you're moving away from. (and this example is only operating 2 dimensionally -- I wonder if, in this example, if you introduce the third dimension, you could get into a recursive contradiction based on my misunderstanding how it all works)
I suppose my confusion is centered mainly on the idea that accelerating/decceleration is based on a frame of reference (ie: is C accelerating from B or is C deccelerating from A?), given that everything is relative and there is no center of the universe.
Make the beacons more dense. Make them infinitely dense. You get the same thing.
Actual conductor with two actual signals that have their local space-time properties that locally overlaying create some feature. Now the signals change in time that the feature appears continuously in different places at speed higher than light, but its appearing at one point of the conductor isn't result of it appearing at a different end of the signal.
Another lightspeed-exceeding experment. Simpler, faster and continuous.
Take two lasers. Point them almost-paralell at the moon, so they meet on its surface in a single point. Now turn them towards each other so the point of intersection travels towards Earth. If you turn them fast enough, the intersection will travel much faster than light. It's definitely a distinguished feature (do the same with 1000 lasers of medium power and anything in the "traveling point" will get burned while things in single rays remain unharmed! Definitely a specific point!) and it "travels" faster than light. Still, you only "squeeze separate events together", you don't make one continuous transfer.
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In my experience, most blazars are really toasted and just THINK they're going at some large fraction of c, when in fact they are going 12 miles an hour in the fast lane.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
You couldn't do such a trip in just 10 minutes because our solar system would have moved a significant distance in 1000 years. If you simply shot out at 99.99% of the speed of light and then back again you could possibly be a light year or more away from the then current location of Earth.
Yes, well stated! Joe Haldeman incorporated this phenomenon in his Sci-Fi novel The Forever War.
It's such a fine line between stupid and clever.
First off, IAAAP (and I don't even play one on TV).
I understand this is true if the energy or gravity providing the acceleration is in a different frame of reference than the mass being accelerated (think particle accelerator or plasma blob).
But my layman's question is .. what about a rocket?
In a rocket, the energy to accelerate the rocket is in the same frame of reference as the rocket itself. The rocket converts mass into energy which accelerates mass and sends it out the nozzle to provide thrust. As the rocket approaches the speed of light (from Earth's reference, for instance) it becomes heavier and harder to accelerate, but so does the mass upon which it relies to convert into energy to provide thrust. The propellent is also heavier. My guess is that this would all cancel out in such a way that an astronaut travelling inside the rocket would have no way of knowing how close to c he is travelling at without looking out the window.
Now my understanding is that from Earth's perspective the rocket could only reach c at the end of time, but my question is this: given a sufficiently efficient rocket engine, is this the case for the rocket and the astronaut? If the rocket were capable of constant acceleration (for the comfort of the astronaut, lets say an acceleration of G) how long, from the astronauts perspective, would it take for him to reach c?
And once he got there (and he could only know if he looked out the window or kept track of time) what's to stop him from going further? It may be the end of time on earth, but how old is the astronaut?
Error:
Even so, I don't think you'd be able to notice being hit by it: @ least my neurons operate at waaay slower speeds than 99.9% c, therefore the transition from an organized bag of water to a random sprinkling of atoms in a nanosecond should be actually quite painless (or your money back ;-)).
What if you just had a really long bit of string, with you at one end and a friend at the other? You tug your end of it at the same time as sending off a radio wave, and the tug will be felt before the radio wave gets there. Bingo, you've sent information faster than the speed of light.
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As the Spaceship's speed approaches that of light, the people on earth will see that time has almost frozen on the spaceship.
However, for the people on the spaceship it will look like 100s or 1000s of years are going by in a matter of seconds on earth.
This is why pseudo-time travel (one way into the future) is possible with near-light speed travel.
Nope. :) If that were the case, things wouldn't be relative. The Earth would be definitely stationary and the ship would be definitely moving. The two frames of reference would not be equal.
In your example, the people on the SpaceShip and the people on Earth would both see each other moving slowly. The situation is totally symmetric - Both sides see the other moving slowly, there is no preferred frame of reference allowing you to say "This person is moving" and "This person is stationary". It's only when the spaceship accelerates back in the direction of Earth (and only during that acceleration) that the symmetry is broken and time on Earth seems to "Speed up" from the POV of the space ship crew.
This is also the point at which we become able to differentiate between frames of reference. While there is no way the differentiate between "Stationary" and "In motion" differeniating between "Accelerated" and "Non-Accelerated" is a simple matter of which object is having a force exerted on it.
As a reference, see the Wikipedia Entry on the Twins Paradox
Why?
"Jupiter-sized blobs of hot gas embedded in streams of material ejected ..."
Regards,
John
Falling You - beautiful
But then, so are you. OTOH, I'm not - I'm a Perl script.
And by doing this, you just proved that the point of theory of relativity is not the relative part, but rather the absolute part. It's spelled c.
To me, the sig somehow seems to be more related to the topic. At what speed does Hell travel, relatively to Earth? ;-)
If you're light, it's fairly easy to travel at your own speed -- that is to say 186,282 miles per second or 299,800 kilometers per second. But if you are matter, then it's another matter altogether.
Right, well, uh.. How exactly would you distinguish light from matter if it's moving at the speed of light? Aside from when it hits you, that is.
There's an easy way to make matter move at the speed of light.. set it on fire. It's converting it back to it's original form that's the tough part. And of course the leftover parts that didn't quite make the jump to lightspeed.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Not only it doesn't "mess" with general relativity, but it is completely obvious from any study of cosmology. Every particle or aggregate of matter in the universe is moving at close to the speed of life relative to some other appropriately chosen bit of matter. This article is just a load of sensationalism interbred with some vague notions of science that the author gathered together after a chat with someone who actually knows what they're talking about.
Daniel
Carpe Diem
Every force has an equal and opposite reaction. The force applied on it had an exactly opposite force applied on us . . .
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As an example, the LEP accelerator at CERN which was used in the period 1989-2000, acceleratod electrons to about 99.9999999977% c.
right, sure, but, an electron is one thing, a ball of gas the size of jupiter is another... on earth we accellerate tiny little masses to high speed... what they're measuring is something more massive than our own planet
LOL. Talk about misinformation and hype.
The group velocity exceeds c. The phase velocity does not. I'll refer you back to the modern research that started this public interest in superluminal motion:
Wang, et al. Gain Assisted Superluminal Light Propagation, Nature 406, 277 - 279 (20 July 2000); doi:10.1038/35018520
Good Link to nice, clear summaries. Thanks.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
If you have a pole that is the length of the milky way, and pushed from one end, would the other end move simultaneously? If so, doesn't that data, the data of you pushing, travel faster than the speed of light?
Philosophistry
That's our current understanding, but it could always be wrong. When supersonic flight was first being developed, many enginneers believed that the energy required to exceed the speed of sound approached infinity because that's what an equation said. As they did more experiments however, they realized that equation wasn't valid for supersonic speeds. Who's to say that couldn't be the case here as well? (i.e. that E=mc^2 might not hold for speeds very close to c)
No one (especially a scientist) should ever be afraid to reexamine widely held hypotheses when new evidence is presented that seems to contradict them. If no one was willing to do that we would still be ignorantly living in a geocentric universe.
I understand the twin's paradox... I dont see how what I said contradicts it. the twin's paradox basically agrees with what I said. "This is why pseudo-time travel (one way into the future) is possible with near-light speed travel." "The Twin paradox is a thought experiment in special relativity. Of two twin brothers one undertakes a long space journey with a very high-speed rocket at almost the speed of light, while the other remains on Earth. When the traveler finally returns to Earth, it is observed that he is younger than the twin who stayed put." This is what I meant by one-way time travel. A cryo-suspension would have the same affect.
It seems to me that at least some black holes will rotate. A shrinking object of a constant mass should spin faster and faster. Since the black hole is extremely rigid and probably shrinks a lot, I would guess the surface at the equator would regularly approach the speed of light.
When the surface approaches/reaches the speed of light, the only way to not exceed the speed of light is to leave the black hole. Quickly.
Very quickly.
Reaching the speed of light probably does weird things to space and time making it possible for matter to leave the black hole.
OK I think I understand what you are saying, and the pic on wikipedia helped... It is only on the return trip that the traveling twin "jumps" inertial frames. But what would it look like on the trip back? Would the traveling twin see the other twin on earth aging more quickly? I dont understand how the OP can be correct about both seeing time slow on the way out AND the way back.
excuse my ignorance in physics, but i always wondered: if light has no mass then it has no speed or energy because E=MC^2, right ? if you insert a 0 in M, then 0 times C^2 is 0, thus E = 0
assuming that photons have mass ( or we would live in a very strange universe ) than at least is possible for some kind of mass to travel at the speed of light ( because light have mass and is mass because has energy and velocity )
so why would be impossible for other kinds of mass to travel at the speed of light ?
Nevermind lol I finally get it. Thanks for the explanation
Couldn't we just as accurately say we're travelling at 99.9% the speed of light and these hot gas blobs are stationary?
And then, at least in relation to the hot gas blobs, our time is almost stopped?
Relativity always confuses me.
Apparently there are a few more bugs in it that need to be fixed before it can be officially downloaded from God.
Some examples:
- Due to reorganization of some of the code in areas of the L.I.F.E. program to accommodate changes in the laws of physics that make light-travel possible, some of the pre-existing code was lost. We are in the process of comparing code bases, but currently we know that no-one is able to go in the direction west at all. This is a rather odd situation, but will be fixed.
- Bodily excretion exit points have been erroneously reversed. This will be fixed in Beta 5.
- It is currently not possible to see the color green.
- Until a fix is released, you will be unable to break any bones; unfortunately people have been exploiting this bug though we are taking disciplinary action where appropriate.
- Hair no longer exists
- Due to a practical joke gone out of hand, one of our now ex-developers secretly inserted "Spock" ears onto every living mammal in the universe. He has been sacked.
- Also due to a practical joke gone out of hand, the supervisor of the now-ex developer who inserted the "Spock" code himself secretly inserted code that adds a standard 1.0 helium effect to all voices produced organically in the universe. He has also been sacked.
All your base are belong to Google.
When people say that light is massless, they are referring to its invariant mass (sometimes incorrectly referred to as its "rest mass"); the full relativistic equation is,
E^2 = (mc^2)^2 + (pc)^2
where p is relativistic momentum. For light, m=0, and this reduces to E=pc (the energy of a photon is directly proportional to its momentum).
Likewise, when people say that objects with mass can't travel at the speed of light, they are referring to objects with nonzero invariant mass.
There is a lot of talk and a lot of debate going on here with regards to the effects of near-light speed travel. A theory that seems to fit General Relativity and recent expeditions to measure a phenomenon called "Frame Grabbing" should provide some insight:
1- Any object that travels through space-time has an effect on space time. Think, for a second, of space-time as a gas. When you accelerate an object through this gas, much of the surrounding gas is pulled along with the craft due to drag. Any object/material traveling through space-time will pull along with it "Frames" of space-time. This, in theory, is the cause of Time Dilation, as predicted by General Relativity.
2- As you approach c, you are dragging more "Frames" with you. Hence the reason Time Dilation is more evident and further exagerated the closer you get to c.
3- To achieve speeds faster than that of c, the material must be "invisible" to space-time itself. Any drag on space-time, produced by a craft or any sort of matter will render any attempt to break the limit c impossible. Current linear motion produces an almost cavitational effect, where frames are, in essence, skipped while older frames are continually dragged by the mass causing clock skew and a need for even more energy to achieve acceleration. This is not dissimilar to the effect of breaking the sound barrier, only we are describing a completely different medium, space-time, not gas.
4- By skipping over current frames and dragging older ones with you, the time lapse occuring on or within that particular body will appear slower to the observer than said observer's time lapse. It is because of this that it is theoretically impossible to travel backwards in time and only possible to travel forward at different rates.
If anyone has any objections to this, let me know. IANAP (I am not a physicist) so I could be dead wrong. It is just that, this makes the most sense to me and seems to fit the facts best.
No. That equation has nothing to do with the speed or energy of a photon. It's only used to calculate the energy equivalent of mass, or the mass equivalent of energy. Just because a photon has no mass doesn't mean it can't have energy or velocity.
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I was thinking: "How many bags of pork rinds do we have in the kitchen?"
ZERO
"My eyes...The goggles do nothing!"
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
So if I'm zipping through space at this speed, and you're passing by me traveling at the same speed but in the opposite direction, will I perceive your speed as nearly twice the speed of light?
bort.
Free, Anonymous surfing: Pagewash.com.
So now we can guess that an evolved gasseous life form drives blazers?
Okay, basic rocket physics:
:)
dV = Ve * Me / Mr, where dV is the change in velocity of the rocket, Ve is the velocity of the exhaust, and Mr is the mass of the rocket.
Now, basic relativity:
S = sqrt(1 - V^2/C^2) -> A scaling factor
M' = M / S -> Mass increases as V increases.
T' = T / S -> Time slows down as V increases.
L' = L * S -> Lengths decrease as V increases.
Now, if you just consider M, you're right. Me' / Mr' = (Me / S) / (Mr / S) = Me / Mr. Thus, dV remains constant, because the increases cancel out.
However, you have to consider that Ve is measured relative to an observer. Further, you have to remember that lengths and times measured by the observer are not the same as those measured on the rocket. Consider that a rocket is moving at Vr relative to a stationary observer. The observer can measure the velocity of the exhaust, Ve, by measuring how far the exhaust travels in a given unit of time.
Ve = L / T.
However, that "L" and "T" are actually L' and T', because the rocket (and it's exhaust) are moving relative to the observer. So:
Ve = L' / T' = S^2 * L / T.
Since S is always less than one (eg: S at 0.99c is about 1/7), Ve measured by the observer will be less than Ve measured by the rocket by a factor of S^2. That means, as the rocket accelerates closer to the speed of light, Ve measured relative to the observer approaches zero. As a result, the rocket cannot ever accelerate to the speed of light.
My numbers could be completely wrong, but hopefully I remember my rocket physics well enough from class that the results are correct
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
How many sig figs does the article use in the .999999c figure? I remember seeing a proof somewhere that due to an inherent flaw in the decimal system, .999999_ == 1. So hopefully they are not implying infinite precision.
I just realized that it's much simpler to just use the second part of the derived result. Don't even consider a rocket. Just consider a mass traveling at V relative to an observer. It then accelerates by dV. That dV measured from the observer is less than the dV measured by the rocket by a factor of S^2. If the rocket accelerates at a constant rate from the perspective of the rocket (which is true, assuming that Mr is much greater than Me, and Ve is constant), then dV approaches zero as V approaches C.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
To nitpick: a given value, presuming it exists, cannot be infinite. All values that exist are finite.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
+Infinity is at the upper end of the number line. -Infinity is at the lower end of the number line.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I've always been curious about that though, since we do know that gravity does have some effect on light.
Assuming gravity is a wave, then it's possible that gravity waves do have an impact on light for that reason alone, but as I understand it "Gravity Waves" are still just a theory.
Unless I'm mistaken, there have been experiments suggesting that photons can in the right situations exhibit other properties of having mass, though I'm certainly no expert on this subject.
In the end I've always just been willing to entertain the possibility that photons practically have no mass, but actually probably have some tiny (almost insignificant) amount.
Please correct me if I'm dead wrong.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
>> Someone's been watching too much Futurama.
They only travelled back through time after putting metal into the microwave. Duh!
Actually that's even worse - the best you'll manage is to send information at the speed of sound in the string.
"Studies have shown that people who eat peanuts live longer than those who do not eat."
Now mass, weight.
Mass never changes.
You learned to be a comic from a Chevy, right?
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
It's not easy, but if you find *all* of the letters in bold, you get "GASAKIKETODAY". Gas a kike today -- as in Auschwitz.
I move to drown this bastard in sewage.
Okay, allow me to restate. The information and energy content propagates at c. In most cases, this corresponds to a group velocity of c. In the case of X-waves and certain other weird situations, the peak exhibits interference effects causing it to transitorily appear to move faster than c. No information is transmitted faster than c, and the energy doesn't propagate faster than c.
Normally group velocity *is* the velocity at which energy and information propagates in a wavefront. So this is a bizarre exception resulting from the formal definition of group velocity and anomolous dispersion effects. But there is no superluminal information transmission which (back when I was studying physics) was considered one and the same as superluminal group velocity.
...what if we find another object moving at, say, 5% C in the opposite direction?
.99C object, the .05C object would be going faster than the speed of light?
Would that mean that relative to
I know that relativity says that one must slow down, but how would WE observe it?
We can try using the Red shift process if the gases are really hot.
...the idea that if the astronomers had simply got the distance to the host galaxy wrong? Say the gas is moving towards us a little, thus appearing hotter/faster in addition to the putative distance error, and the host galaxy is exhibiting a genuine doppler redshift in reaction to this, thus appearing further away?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Just remember, if you're travelling with that blob, then you're not the one going so fast, instead it's the rest of the nearby universe that seems to be tearing up the turf.
...my wife's charge card on payday!
(Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week!)
Interesting theory, but whouldn't its transferance from atom to atom create some sort of electric 'jetstream' as it takes the path of least resitance over and over again in order to be everythings electron? Still, nice to learn a new theory on /. that doesnt have anything to do with computers.
Like the saying goes, never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes. -Pyrotic
There are serious issues with equating redshift with velocity. Some items with significantly different redshifts may be close in space. I've looked through a number of papers myself, some of which indicate that there is an extra redshift that corresponds roughly to the type of object being looked at. Otherwise, we're left in the uncomfortable position of having younger galaxies in clusters facing away from us, and older galaxies facing towards us. Anything that points to us as occupying a special position in the universe is... somewhat suspect :)
As to what the phenomenon actually is that causes the high redshifts, I don't think we know yet.
Binary geeks can count to 1,023 on their fingers
excuse my ignorance in physics, but i always wondered: if light has no mass then it has no speed or energy because E=MC^2, right ? if you insert a 0 in M, then 0 times C^2 is 0, thus E = 0
That's a good question, and the answer is very simple. The equation E=MC^2 is a simplification. The actual equation is E^2=M^2*C^4 + P^2*C^2, where P is momentum. For particles at rest, momentum P is zero, so the equation simplifies to E=MC^2. For photons, rest mass M is zero, but they are always in motion, and the equation is E=PC. (Photons do have momentum even though their rest mass is zero.)
you're thinking to far into this... if the universe is finite, there's got to be a central point in it... whether it's a glob of stars or something i have no clue. and with the relative thing: if you're moving faster than another object, time moves slower for you than it does for the other object.
Nothing we know of zips along more quickly than light. Einstein, nearly 100 years ago, said it's not possible. For us, the speed limit makes strange sense: Go faster than light, and you could return before you've left, become your own grandpa, or other perform other leaps of cosmic logic.
Why is it that an object would go back in time if it travelled faster than c? It sounds like light is this all-powerful substance that dictates time. Why is c the fasted known speed?
Thanks for pointing that out. I feel stupid now.
Realizing my stupidity, I second the drowning. If [s]he's still alive can then chain him|her to a chair and play him|her the Windows 1.0 promo. Repeatedly. In Windows. On Windows Media Player.
Or let's punish him|her more...a Windows Media Player control. In Internet Explorer. With even lower security settings so adware and spyware pops up from nowhere (triple rhyme not intended) and [s]he's forced to see Steve Ballmer and meaningless popups. And his|her personal info gets sold to spammers...from Moscow. Or Hoboken.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
You obviously don't watch Monster Garage.
"Astronomers are now measuring stuff -- material, matter, things -- that moves at so close to the speed of light you might think it'd make Einstein a bit nervous."
Popular science writers suck. And can't CNN afford an editor?
"Among thee speed demons of the universe are [...]"
But at least the space.com link popped up multiple ads.
Faster than light travel simply introduces i...
Introduces i? You must be imagining things.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
what i'm really curious about is the time delay if these things are going so incredibly fast, they are experiencing time at a small fraction of what we are (not sure of the %- don't have the equation on hand). Anyway, because of this high speed, is it logical to say that they have experienced very little time passage since they attained that velocity? in other words, are they almost 'frozen' in time?
I just found the box to change my sig. Um.... [timeless witticism].
No, it can't have any mass or it wouldn't be able to travel at c. It has energy, of course, and that energy can be considered to be equivalent to a certain mass, but that's different.
There are two ways you can think about gravity affecting light. One way is to think of it affecting the mass-equivalence of the photon's energy. The other way is to think of gravity as bending space so that the light travels in the straightest line possible in warped space.
Remember that any effect you can get from gravity you can duplicate with acceleration and the other way around. It's easy to show that if you accelerate at right angles to the path of a light beam the beam will appear to bend, so the same thing must happen when the light passes through a gravity well.
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Not to mention the infinite amount of energy you would need to reach the speed of light in the first place. If you solve that bit, please do go on and figure out the imaginary numbers in your energy-equations.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
For a better explanation try "The ABC of Relativity" from Bertrand Russell.
Every particle or aggregate of matter in the universe is moving at close to the speed of life
Glad to hear I have superpowers, in that I can affect the speed of matter in the whole universe based on whether I actually get a life.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Actually the blobs are moving at the speed of light relative to their source. That requires a bit of power
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
There is no evidence of tachyons, I agree. But, Special Relativity says that you can have them! This says nothing about whether or not the actually exist.
This is real live physics speak, folks. "Does X exist?" "Not that I know of. It can exist, but we haven't discovered any yet."
I remember the one article about how the new supercollider could create tiny blackholes that could potentially destroy our planet. One of the lead scientists responded to the worried reporter: "Yes, it can happen. It is possible."
He should've said, "As far as you care, no, it won't happen. As far as my peers care, yes, the possibility is non-zero. Very small, but non-zero."
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
It does the Kessel run in under 12 Parsecs?
[]'s Carlos Cardoso - Becoming a brazilian ProBlogger, typo by typo
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And if m is not equal to zero, but p is (i.e. we have a particle with non-zero mass at rest), then this equation reduces to E=mc^2.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
whenever i read one of these fantastical articles i am always a little thrilled, but then as usual it turns out that the black hole did it - again. so predictable.
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it
Say I had a hose.
Say it was 2 lightyears long.
Say I filled it with marbles...all the way along.
Now, if I push the first marbe in the hose, surely the one at the other end will fall out no?
So couldn't information be transmitted at faster than the speed of light?
Sure the matter isn't moving faster than the speed of light, but when i push one marble in at this end, (assuming it is full) on will instantly fall out the other end. No?
-={ Security does not exist - give up }=-
That's strange. I don't know what other astronmers are smoking but when I'm blazin' "hot gas embeeded in streams of material", I'm going much slower than normal. I guess that's the basis for the theory of relativity? Carl Sagan can vouch for me.
Jupiter-sized blobs of hot gas reached speeds of 0.99 speed of light, later tested positive for nandrolone
Draw yourself a trigonometric circle. Now, the unit vector is c and it is constant in magnitude, but has different projections on x and y axia for every different point on circle. Note that x-projection is time component of the speed, while y-projection is spatial or "ordinary" speed. (In reality, there are three instead of one x but for the sake of easy drawing...).
You see, in first quadrant of the circle, when at rest, an object observed from our reference frame travels to our future (it and we age together...) at maximum speed, c.
If we accelerate it toward v == c point, time speed it has (aging) deaccelearates according to Lorenz transforms
(substitute v/c = cos(G), letter G picked for no particular reason, then note that:
cos(G)^2 + sin(G)^2 = 1, therefore
sin(G) = sqrt(1-cos(G)^2) and
sin(G) = sqrt( 1 - ((v^2)/(c^2)) ), which I am sure must be familiar to you. ).
If, by any chance, an object would pop up with own speed positioned in the second quadrant, acceleration (which obviously is "own speed vector" rotation counterclockwise) would bring it to the point where it would have 180 degrees angle with our own speed vector, effectivelly "at rest" (spatialy, v==0) but with own "time arrow" pointing exactly reverse.
So, you see, some tachyions just MAY be here around us and even very familiar under any other particle name (such as anti-something-on), having "nice", easy-to-handle (spatial) speeds and all we need to do is recognize the time-backward pattern in their behaviour.
Actually, this conjecture was superseded by the Feynman-Tolkien Conjecture that said there was only one ring...
My Sig fried. Don't leave your Sig in the sun too long.
Damn typos!!! :-P
Re: source, yeah, of course it does, but that's what's worthy of note, not the fact that they're moving "at the speed of light" (which in and of itself means nothing).
Daniel
Carpe Diem
Well, you can apply the physics-2.6.11-st (Star Trek/Space Warp) patch, or the physics-2.6.11-sw (Star Wars/Hyperspace Jump) patch, or avoid stars entirely and apply the physics-2.6.11-b5 (Babylon 5/Hyperspace Gateway) patch, or a myriad of other alternative patches.
/plotholes/speed/warp-factor-adjust" to increase speeds!
If you want to run a vanilla physics kernel, however, you are out of luck for now.
Some highlights of the major Star* patches:
Star Trek:
- Later versions of the patch allow you to make up particles to overcome problems and rewrite physics entirely!
- Most versions of the patch allow you to adjust speed to a desirable setting. Need to go to the center of the galaxy in one movie, when it would otherwise take about thirty years in a series? Do "echo 9999.9 >
- Early versions allow you to save the galaxy (well, the Federation) without huge armadas of ships - just get into a fistfight! (Warning: your Captain's shirt might get torn)
- And much more!
Star Wars:
- Allows you to convert distance into time and vice versa! (supplemental patch allows you to make up all sorts of weird explanations for it too; see first point for Star Trek patch)
- Makes light a lot faster for ships, and slower for lasers! ("Jump to lightspeed!")
- And much more!
Anyways, gotta run, tah tah~
If these things have huge mass they must have huge gravitational pull, if we found one close by (relatively speaking) could we use it to tow us along at near light speed?
That is not the "reason". That just means that the equation breaks down there. That happens lots in physics.
The "real reason" for not allowing FTL is a philosophical one. If you can go faster than the speed of light (or send something that fast) then you can send signals into the past (do the math). Some of those could change the past, therfore something must prevent you from sending those particular ones.
So either we have free will (in the sense of being able to perform any experiement we want) but we can't "go faster than light", or we don't and then maybe we can do FTL.
If we don't have free will, then all of physics is placed in doubt, since it relies on the assumption that we can do those experiments.
Electronic circuits would be out of the question. Analogue parts only, I would imagine ...
I'll go and make one now ...: )
Parent got mod'ed insightfull? Either it was a attempt at being funny, and if not it should be mod'ed -1, stupid guy doesn't know relativity.
In the latter case the mods should be lose all future mod-privilegies.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
First off, IAAAP
"I am an armchair physicist"???
I'm not really up on this stuff anymore, but doesn't it have something to due with mass-energy conversion?
For matter transmission, how about if the matter would to become pure energy, and reverse to a material form upon reaching the destination?
No, that's not what you're saying. Okay, let me put it this way. It is possible for limits to be infinite. For example, the limit of 1/x as x goes to 0+ is +infinity. Now, the phrase "X approaches Y when Z" is a well-established short-hand for "the limit of X when Z is equal to Y". Well, the limit here is +infinity, so the phrase "m approaches +infinity when v approaches c" is a perfectly acceptable substitution.
For this reason, the phrase "X approaches infinity" is a very common shorthand in science, mathematics, and engineering. You see it all the time.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Physicists are unfairly stereotyped but maybe if they'd stop explaining things in terms of nailing your grandmother they'd get a bit more sympathy.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
"Jupiter-sized blobs of hot gas embedded in streams of material ejected from hyperactive galaxies known as blazars."
however you read it, you probably don't want to get any on yourself... ug. ;-)
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A limit can be infinity, yes. Wolfram's MathWorld shows that the limit of 1/x as x approaches 0 equals +infinity.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Honest mistake on my part. Just a bit tired over here. Ignore parent.
E = m c^3 Don't drink and derive E = m c^3
Now think carefully about the huge number assumptions and magic constants behind expansion redshift, most of them barely tested, and then think about this quasar as a classic example of its class.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Have they all been confirmed relative to other postulates, or confirmed absolutely? Or IOW, are the confirmations the only possible explanation, or is there another? Or many others?
Forex, dark mass and dark energy suddenly become superfluous if certain types of turbulence are taken into account. For another example, Big Bang predicted no quantum redshifts, and yet not only are they there, but their systematic imperfections give them a centre a little way from the Milky Way. Big Bang predicts no centre, either. These are direct contradictions of Big Bang by observation.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...and I'll bother posting links.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Update your info on the observations of Arp and others (thanks also for the ad hominem argument), which info was IPOF not cribbed from AiG, and against principle I'll also point out to an AC that it was not cribbed from ICR, GRI etc either. However, since you don't want the link...
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
If you wanted to go back in time you would have to move faster than the speed of light, which is impossible unless you use some sort of wormhole (which is completely theoretical.)
Cosmic strings also present an interesting possibility for backwards time travel. Basically, they are so dense that they warp the space around them.
Think of a pizza with a slice cut out. Connect the two inner edges. The conical shape of the pizza represents space. For each slice you remove from the pizza, the more you distort space. Eventually you pass a threshhold where you can take a shortcut through the warped space and arrive at your destination before the light that you emitted from your point of origin does.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
The link shows that the limit of 1/x as x approaches 0 is +infinity. Thus, +infinity (and - infinity) can indeed be a limit.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...