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Speed of Light Exceeded?
PreacherTom writes "Scientists at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, NJ are reporting that they have broken the speed of light. For the experiment, the researchers manipulated a vapor of laser-irradiated atoms, causing a pulse that propagates about 300 times faster than light would travel in a vacuum. The pulse seemed to exit the chamber even before entering it." This research was published in Nature, so presumably it was peer-reviewed. It's impossible from the CBC story to determine what is being claimed. First of all they get the physics wrong by asserting that Einstein's special relativity only decrees that matter cannot exceed the speed of light. Wrong. Matter cannot touch the speed of light in vacuum; energy (e.g. light) cannot exceed it; and information cannot be transferred faster than this limit. What exactly the researchers achieved, and what they claim, can only be determined at this point by subscribers to Nature.
I wrote this yesterday.
This story is from November 2000. If Princeton scientists *did* exceed the light-speed barrier, then it the evidence would only naturally show up in the past. Interesting!
I think we've heard about this before. Something about atoms reacting in this big wave faster than light would travel, without anything actually moving faster than light.
Anyone got a name for that? I'm lost on it.
99% chance it's this again:
You're stuck in traffic, behind an accident. They clear the accident. Slowly, every car speeds up now that the blockage is gone. If you're looking from above, you'll see a "wave" move through the line of cars, as each takes a few seconds to realize he can accelerate.
This wave is the group velocity, and very much has nothing to do with the speed of each individual car.
Suppose all the cars were wired electronically to know that they could all accelerate at once. That knowledge would move at nearly the speed of light.
No car would be moving at the speed of light. Everyone would just hit their gas pedal at almost the same time.
Almost every time we see these stories, this is the type of speed they're talking about.
So, was any information transmitted? Then it's big news I suppose, otherwise not? From the sound of it, a "pulse" make me suspicious, but I lack the full physics geekdom to completely dismiss the story. Anyway, speed of light only applies to transmission of information, not group velocity.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
You can beat the speed of light in vacuum if it goes in a material with an N less than 1. A few already exist.It's the same trick as slowing the speed of light in a material with a huge N.
I'd say more, but my guild is raiding.
Everything is faster during a leap second.
The poster can't figure out exactly what their news item is about. What the author of TFA claiming, or what conclusions we should reach. Sounds like just another day on Slashdot.
WTF, PreacherTom? Why would you submit a link to an article over six years old?? In any case, I too certainly would expect that this article was peer reviewed. If I remember correctly, this research presented a method whereby the group velocity of a light pulse was impressively high but the signal velocity still remained less than the speed of light in a vacuum.
"Good. No, the answer is an orange and two lemons."
"Lemons?"
"If I have three lemons and three oranges and I lose two oranges and a lemon, what do I have left?"
"Huh?"
"Okay, so you think that time flows that way, do you?"
-Mostly Harmless
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Come on Eds! We have seen this happen way too much lately, its at the top of the page!
at least back in time.
a -search&q=Gain-assisted+superluminal+light+propaga tion
"This week" (when the Nature article was published) was 7 years ago: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?sourceid=Mozill
--
Binaries may die but source code lives forever
everything else we know of could potentially have flaws, enough to cause the fundamentals we rely upon to also potentially be wrong.
I was only a matter of time (forgive the pun) until we found a way to do it. Light is potentially the lowest form of energy that we can detect. What if there is some form of energy higher that we can't detect which has properties beyond that of light.
Who knows what additional properties the universe has that we could one day tap into!
Here's hoping q:)
http://www.gibby.net.au
This is going to make /. dupe identification pretty hard!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
kdawson: You said, and I quote: "What exactly the researchers achieved, and what they claim, can only be determined at this point by subscribers to Nature."
The linked article says, and I quote: "Last Updated: Friday, November 10, 2000 | 11:57 PM ET" (My emphasis.)
Please consider that Slashdot is not the proper forum for speculation about Physics, especially when it is not clear what happened, and the article is over 6 YEARS old.
Please consider that perhaps you should not be a Slashdot editor. It amazes me that Slashdot editors are still, after all these years, not very good at what they do. What social processes prevented even the most simple learning?
--
Is U.S. government violence a good in the world, or does violence just cause more violence?
If x travels forward in time isn't that equivalent to (universe - x) travelling back in time?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
blastfromthepast.
Spam removed for the Internet's pleasure
Farnsworth: These are the dark matter engines I invented. They allow my starship to travel between galaxies in mere hours.
Cubert: That's impossible. You can't go faster than the speed of light.
Farnsworth: Of course not. That's why scientists increased the speed of light in 2208.
Summation 2
I've been hearing group velocity. I understand nothing, but I remember from a class, no idea which one now, that you can seem to exceed the speed of light, but you're not really doing it. For example take a tube of balls, packed end to end. There is no more room for any of the balls, so the moment you put one in on one end, the other one immediatly pops out. Now, if that tube of balls was empty, then it would take n amount of time for that ball to roll the length of the tube. Is this the same conceptionally or is it different?
This is old news.
If you shined a flashlight or a laser beam at a wall very far away and quickly turned the angle of the beam, the lit spot on the wall might move faster than the speed of light. It doesn't mean you can transmit information faster than the speed of light in a vacuum.
I just don't understand the following: the pulse/no pulse thing is itself a bit of information.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Last Updated: Friday, November 10, 2000 | 11:57 PM ET
and i didn't read the article, but if group movement works like cars, or electrons in a curcuit (the pulse being the electricity and the cars being the electrons) couldn't you send a steady laser beam somewhere (assuming you could keep it perfectly targeted) and use this to send a pulse faster than light along the photons or somesort?
Or not.
On my google startpage I have the 'quotes of the day'. Just now I noticed there was a quote from Woody Allen : "It is impossible to travel faster than the speed of light, and certainly not desirable, as one's hat keeps blowing off."
I have mod points, but I can't figure out how to dole out some negative karma to either the person sending in a link for an over six year old story, or the editor who approved it. >:(
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
I seem to remember reading about the following hypothetical experiment:
/F
Let 2 enormously rigid "rods" of astronomical length be parallel. Let the one set of endpoints be fixed, and accelerate the other ends towards each other until crossing, and let them continue moving, now apart, with the rods intersecting. Even if the individual endpoints are moving at sub-c, one could easily imagine having the intersection point moving faster than c, however the intersection point is a logical construct, carrying neither mass nor information, and thus would this setup not contradict relativity, but merely present a challenge of engineering for anyone interested in carrying it out.
"The number you have dialed is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again."
You moron! Can't you see that the information contained in the article appeared back in November 2000 yet the test was conducted on March 2007? This is further PROOF that they have exceeded the speed of light as the information contained in the article appeared six years prior to the tests being reported at Slashdot.
:)
So: kdawson's integrity remains intact.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
You can't even figure out where your .sig is supposed to go and you are whining about editors? Just filter his stories in your preferences if you can't stand his article selections or frequent mistakes.
this comment body is here just to waste your time. Please move along.
I always wondered how they did that on star-trek.
Physics wouldn't allow it unless the light travelled 1/300 the distance. Gas wouldn't do it but within known physics it could happen with severely warped space. No laws are broken if the distance is shortened. Obviously that isn't what happened in this case.
if i recall matter cannot be accelerated to the speed of light
notinhg saying it cant start there or faster
What an utterly USELESS POST!
First of all - it is a fundamental assumption in Einstein's theory that the speed of light is the same in EVERY frame of reference; ie. two observers moving at some speed relative to each other will see the same lightwave moving at the same speed. One consequence of this is that all (rest-) massless particles move at the speed of light - in a way they only exist as movement or a disturbance of some field or other. Photons are disturbances in the electro-magnetic field, gravitons are disturbances in the gravity field (or the 'structure of space', if you like). Another consequence of the constance of the speed of light is that particles with real restmass > 0 get heavier when they move faster and the perceived mass goes to infinity as the relative speed approaches the speed of light.
It will be interesting to see in what sense they have exceeded the speed of light; so far all examples of this have proven to be tricks of the circumstances rather than actual physics - eg. it is easy, at least in theory, to make a shadow move faster than the speed of light, but it doesn't represent actual, physical motion; I'm sure most have heard about this one.
(Oh. No friction, by the way. Let's assume everything's soaked in WD40 or whatever.)
The heavens do not fall for such a trifle.
Time for the annual Slashdot story dedicated to people who don't understand the difference between phase velocity and group velocity.
Slashdot is, I believe, Rob Malda's blog and as such whatever he sees fit to include is proper content. In fact, the parent post is so completely up itself that it is looking at its kidneys from the inside. +5 informative? -5 troll more like. And I've just fallen for it - so it works!
Pining for the fjords
For another, more understandable report, here is a BBC website: http://www.whyevolution.com/einstein.html (search for Wang).
"Matter cannot touch the speed of light in vacuum; energy (e.g. light) cannot exceed it"
"Matter" and "energy" are two analogies for the same entity.
Not trying to sound preachy, but our clumsy language should describe concepts, not define them.
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
For those who want to see how this REALLY works...2 0/20.html
http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/APPLETS/
This is probably the worst article I've ever read. The journalist's dubious explanation of the findings and complete lack of understanding of how these findings fit into known science is a perfect example of how modern journalism is often at odds with the spread of knowledge.
The findings are IN NO WAY "at odds" with relativity.
The team did not "change the state of a vapour in a way that light travelling(sic) through it would travel faster than normal." They created a pattern of interfering waves that made a pulse that traveled faster than normal. This is like saying that swinging the end of a jump-rope changes the state of the surrounding air to make the rope move faster, when in reality the ends of the rope are stationary and only a pulse is moving down the rope.
This was on Fark yesterday and it was even lower than THEIR scientific standards. I'm waiting for it to hit Digg so 500 people can comment that there is a massive conspiracy to suppress FTL technologies.
I don't know if any of this is possible, but Cerenkov radiation is very cool to look at.
http://campus.umr.edu/reactor/cerenkov.html
I think there's a basic fallacy in the summary's logic. How is it possible for light to exceed the speed of light? There's such a thing called the reflexive property of equality. Perhaps what's being violated in this article is the postulate that the speed of light is constant.
You put a lightbulb inside a spinning coffee can with slits at 4 equally spaced spots around the circumference.
The photons are projecting out of the slits. As the can spins, the pattern of light and shadow turns and projects on the surroundings.
The outside surface of the can is moving at 1 full turn per second.
10 feet away from the can, the pattern of light and shadow is moving at 31.4 feet per second.
100 feet away from the can, the pattern of light and shadow is moving at 314 feet per second.
At just 2 miles from the can (we are using a BRIGHT bulb), the light and shadow is moving 22,619 miles per hour!
While you cannot exceed speed of light, sure having faster-then-light group speed can help in some applications!
Look at it from a simple example - a sattelite flying above the Earth that sends some file. As long as it covers large area, you can propagate this file faster then it'd took sending it through wires. Yes, it'll require "preparation" (you need to upload file to satellite first), but you'll get faster file distribution in the end. Each recipient gets his file at a speed of light, but group bandwidth increases immersely.
Parent comment posted by a humorist who has seen the result of people playing too many video games.
More ugly humor: Iraqis should be proud to be killed by those superior Americans.
Here's what he said:
The page also contains an "intuitive" explanation of the phenonmenon. A careful reading and some high school level physics make it simple to understand in a logical sense, but it remains completely incomprehensible intuitively (at least to me).
Fjodor42 said:
"I seem to remember reading about the following hypothetical experiment:
Let 2 enormously rigid "rods" of astronomical length be parallel. Let the one set of endpoints be fixed, and accelerate the other ends towards each other until crossing, and let them continue moving, now apart, with the rods intersecting. Even if the individual endpoints are moving at sub-c, one could easily imagine having the intersection point moving faster than c, however the intersection point is a logical construct, carrying neither mass nor information, and thus would this setup not contradict relativity, but merely present a challenge of engineering for anyone interested in carrying it out."
Another, simple, way to envision the above idea is to think of a giant pair of scissors. The head of the scissors rests on the surface of the earth and the two blade tips reach into orbit but are open and at an angle to each other. Now, air resistance etc aside (Do it on the moon instead); when the scissors are "closed", each half moving at sub-luminal speeds, the virtual point of intersection between the two blades can in fact end up "moving" faster than the speed of light. It's movement of an abstraction though.
But there's a problem if you make the scissors too long; they cease to act as a rigid body due to the electromagnetic force binding it's atoms propagating at the speed of light. Say the scissors were one light year long and the arms only a couple degrees apart then suddenly closed. You would think that would create an obvious sudden signal one light year away. But, even if the scissors were made of material far stronger than we can make now, the far ends wouldn't actually close that fast. The scissors would in fact close "suddenly" in the visible distance, but the closing (not refering to the contact point mentioned earlier) would be occurring along the length of the scissors at a speed less than light, in a bending wave. The far tips would finally close a year or more later.
I would love to see FTL achieved. Perhaps subatomic particles/waves of some sort and some extraordinarly small scale could be coaxed into moving FTL?
All 4 basic forces: electromagnatism, gravity, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear (not Nukular; bite me, George) forces propogate at the speed of light in their reference frame.
Not at all correct. First the weak force is transmitted by W and Z bosons which have mass and therefore CANNOT propagate at the speed of light. Secondly in their own reference frame, by definition the weak force bosons will not propagate at all since your own reference frame is defined as the frame you are at rest in. Thirdly massless particles have no reference frame of their own.
I know you were quoting someone else but please pick someone who at least has a clue what they are talking about!
Well, no. The short answer is that there still is no way to make the bouncy ball move faster than light, or even at the speed of light.
Just because there are some falling blocks, doesn't mean the ball will jump on the head of the next block just because it's there. You'd still need to accelerate the ball from zero velocity (in your frame of reference) to reaching the head of the next block just in time. It would take infinite energy to even reach the speed of light, and may the elder gods help you in getting above that. Doing it in the tiny space between two domino blocks, heh.
It has nothing to do with friction. Even without friction, you still need to apply a force to accelerate an object. That's why you still need thrusters to change a satellite's orbit, even though friction and drag are negligible up there. If you don't apply enough force, the object just doesn't accelerate fast enough. At this point there isn't even anything relativistic about it, it's just plain elementary Newtonian mechanics, as you may have learned it in school.
Additionally, your wave is an artifficial construct. Just because the next block is a little tilted already, doesn't make the current block also fall faster. Any particular block falls just as fast as if it were alone, with the other blocks not even existing at all, until the point of impact with the next. Just because block 2 is already tilted, doesn't mean block 1 will accelerate faster.
So the ball you've put on top of block 1 also won't accelerate any faster. Just because block 2 was already tilted, doesn't mean the ball will be forced to keep up with the wave. It will still fall at the same speed, and probably fail to transfer to the top of block 2, since block 2 will have fallen earlier and it's top will be some way ahead of the ball. So at most the ball will keep on rolling at a lower speed over the already fallen blocks.
Or think of another analogy, someone else used it already, but let's use it again here since it makes a good illustration. Think of a traffic congestion. All cars are standing still, then the first car moves, the next driver takes some time to notice he can step on it, so he starts at a tiny delay, the third car does the same, etc. Better yet, let's say they're pre-timed to start at uniformly spaced intervals, so no particular transfer of information is involved in getting them started. So basically although the cars are moving forward, viewed from above there is a wave travelling backwards. (It's an uncanny similarity with the "it appeared to exit before it entered" claim in the summary. Viewed from above, the car wave too is seen at the front of the congestion before it reaches the back of the congestion.)
It also can appear to move faster than the individual cars. If every driver only needs 0.5 seconds to notice that he can hit the gas, and the cars are stopped, say, every 3m (10 ft), the wave will move at 20 m/s or 72 km/h backwards. Although this may happen in a town where the speed limit is only 50 km/h, so the individual cars won't exceed that by much.
Now imagine you give the first car in the pack your ball filled with love letters. Will it travel backwards together with the wave? Well, nope, that particular car still travel forward at 50 km/h. Let's say you give the last car in the pack your ball. Will the ball appear to exit the congestion before the last car even started? Well, no, not really.
Basically just because you can set up one particular kind of wave doesn't mean you can actually use it to transfer information between two points. Whichever car you give your ball of letters, still moves at 50 km/h, and the "wave" is just an artifficial illusion or construct.
Or think you have some people 1 km apart, with stopwatches and really big speakers and amplifiers, and they're told to shout "geronimo!" in 1 second intervals. The "wave" is faster than the speed of sound, but it can't carry any information that way faster than sound. At the end point you don't get any information the last guy di
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I seem to remember reading about the following hypothetical experiment:
/F
Let 2 enormously rigid "rods" of astronomical length be parallel. Let the one set of endpoints be fixed, and accelerate the other ends towards each other until crossing, and let them continue moving, now apart, with the rods intersecting. Even if the individual endpoints are moving at sub-c, one could easily imagine having the intersection point moving faster than c, however the intersection point is a logical construct, carrying neither mass nor information, and thus would this setup not contradict relativity, but merely present a challenge of engineering for anyone interested in carrying it out.
If you could construct an astronomically large rod rigid enough that it stayed perfectly straight as you wiggled one end of it, you could transmit information faster than light. The people at the other (fixed) end of the rod could just measure the rotation on that end, and thus tell how you were wiggling the other end. The reason this isn't a practical way to send information faster than light is because you cannot build rods that rigid; the energy you impart on the atoms at one end would have to be imparted in turn to the other particles in the rod faster than the speed of light. Since they cannot do that, the compression wave caused in such a rod can travel no faster than the speed of light.
Thus, your enormous rods would be extremely floppy if viewed altogether, no matter how rigidly you tried to build them; you would move the ends of them, and the middle portions would take, at the very least, a number of seconds equal to their distance in light-seconds away from you to move in response. So you uncross your ends, and three years later, the portions of the rods three lightyears away from you would uncross (assuming these rods were as rigid as theoretically possible, transmitting compression at c).
Even at mundane scales, if you grab a stiff piece of rebar (the heavy iron reinforcement bar used in stone/brick/block construction), about an inch thick and maybe three feet long, and wave it around... it may appear incredibly rigid to you, and there will certainly be no visible compression waves in it, but when you wave it around, it is still flopping about ever so slightly, just as a floppy car antenna would if you waved it around likewise. If you got a longer piece of rebar and waved it around you'd even be able to see it flopping. You could make it thicker and it would flop less again (to the point of not being noticeable), but at no point does it actually cease to flop entirely. In fact, that's a good mundane model of this. Grab two long pieces of half inch rebar, say 50ft long, and fix one end of each at some point, like your setup. Note that if you move the loose ends fast enough, you can cross and uncross them before the crossing has propagated all the way down their lengths. The longer or thinner the rebar, the more noticeable this is, and the shorter and thicker (and therefore more rigid) it is, the less noticeable - in fact you'll quickly get to proportions where you simple can't, as a mere human, move the ends faster than the compression travels - but those compressions waves are always there, and still limited to the speed of light.
In short, to surmount your "challenge of engineering" would itself require that relativity be violated, for energy would need to be transmitted faster than c for any rods to be so rigid; and perfect rigidity would require instantaneous transmission of energy.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
...absolute speed limit? Ok, I really don't expect an answer to that question. I just wonder, whether there is a theory, which deals with this question directly or indirectly. I don't care how goofy the theory is. With all the strange theories, be it string theory, be it M-theory be it whatever, is there one theory, which does not take the 'you cannot exceed the speed of light' as axiom, but tries to explain it? Somehow it is easier for me to accept the laws of thermodynamics, than this somewhat arbitrary speed limit.
Wake me up when the scientists of Arkintoofle Minor publish their findings.
I did it long back. Its a very simple setup, all you have to make sure that The pulse seemed to exit the chamber even before entering it.
If a warzoot went faster than light in outterspace, & nobody was there to see it, did it really go faster than light ?
Only if it leaves behind somthing similar to a log.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
...like in the star gate episode, i would rather not want to see all those extradimensional critters!
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
If they broke the speed of light, how come it takes six years before it's on Slashdot?
Seriously, there is a very simple question to ask: "Did information travel faster than c?" And the answer will be "no". And if the answer is "yes", ask again, you'll find that somewhere down the line the real answer turns out to be "no". And if the answer is "no", the story is not interesting. I'm getting mightily tired of that sensationalist pig fodder.
Well it must be. Suitably, the posted article arived 26 light days before it was sent. (By my calculations GMT+/-0)
such words should never be used for things related to technology/science. likewise words were spent in abundance in 19th century for a limitless number of proposed stuff, and naysayers have always been proved wrong. Science always moves forward, and nothing is impossible in the universe.
Read radical news here
This news report is new and the experiment was conducted recently but because the information travelled back in time we all had to wait six years to read - hence the date!
Cool. The Voyage Home next and then First Contact!
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
It's funny how people always claim that this is impossible because of some theory by some scientists.. Scientists used to think the earth was flat: wrong.. Scientists used to think the atom was the smallest thing: wrong.. And there are many examples where scientists where wrong... So because it can't be explained with current theories, it doesn't mean it isn't real..
That link made me understand it. I especially like how if you put a break in the beam then the superluminal pulse disappears when it gets to the break and then re-appears on the other side, proving without a doubt that it can't be used for data transfer.
Three friends were at a bar, drinking and chatting.
- Hey guys... ever wondered what's the fastest thing in the universe?
- Dunno... it's a thought, maybe?
- No, man, it's light.
- You're all wrong. It's diarrhea.
- What the hell? Diarrhea?
- Yeah. I once had a diarrhea so bad that I ran to the toilet and didn't have enough time to think about turning on the lights.
Circumcision is child abuse.
It's funny how some experts still claim that "x cannot be done" or "x cannont go faster than y". Yould figure that after the thousands of times such statements were proven wrong, the experts would quit saying it. How many times has it been said that we can't fly or can't travel faster than the speed of sound? Yet we do both. Speed of Light is just the another barrier to be broken. Not to mention, how do we know that light is the fastest speed that something can move? Who can accurately say without guessing that ther isn't anything faster? I thought scientists were open minded ... go figure.
Why travel faster then the speed of light? A: It about information transfer.
....
....To know the future, means you cannot cannot change it, you cannot benefit from it
........
Can information be transfered faster then the speed of light? A: yes absoltutely!
Beyond all the rethoritic that doesn't really do it, do you see the object that is traveling over half the speed of light directly away from you while you are doing the same away from it? A: No, Sight is light based.
Does this mean that object traveling less then the speed of light, that you do not see, doesn't exist? Of course not.
So if light cannot travel faster then its own limits, then what has that to do with information transfer?
It shows that in the media and mechanism of limited scope, you cannot do things that are outside of those limits with that media and mechanism.
Are we capable of being able to receive information faster then the speed of light? A: Yes.
We do it all the time, though mostly not aware of it as its more or less second nature.
Even at times knowing before you get the information in more solid, traditional manners.
Why can't I predict the lottery numbers, horse race winner, etc..?
Information has to first exist before it can be transfered. Duh!
But you can know it at the same time it is created.
But in which mode of knowing do you prefer to know it?
What would be more fun, knowing your horse came in when you
were talking to a man about a horse or with your friends outside
the jon?
Can future events be predicted with certainty? seems to be the real question here.
But that is a schrodinger's cat thing, not a moving faster then light thing.
If you knew the future and had the ability to change it and did, then what you
knew would be wrong, no verification that you are not crazy.
(the same lack of verification is often used in deception, the natural avoidance of
evidence, the not knowing the result of an alternative you have not tried against
what you are doing [because you can't do both at the same time?]. This is the cause
of the military paranoia and military budgets vs. spending even just a third of
that on genuinely removing the real world problems that otherwise promote human
friction and cause wars - sorta a self supported dependancy the military is)
in any way that you wouldn't have anyway, that's the way it works, a matter of father
physics and mother nature. Such knowing can be a curse, very depressing, especially
if you can also see alternatives butr cannot make them happen. Something you'd likely
decide you didn't want to know after a while of doing it.
SO why? Why move faster then the speed of
Did you see the movie "A beautiful mind?"
They have simply succeeded in creating a negative vacuum. I for one take my hat off to that achievment.
Nothing witty
When they do this with radio waves I'll be impressed. Imagine being able to use wifi and have negative latency! I'll really do some ass kicking with first person shooters then!
Maybe it's due to the time bending effects of this, but the space shuttle already beat them.
j pg.html
CNN doesn't lie!
http://fire-eyes.org/gal/v/hmr/cln/shuttleisfast.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
E = mc2
Tells us that any object with a positive mass would require a near infinite amount of energy in order to become accelerated to the speed of light. However, an object whose net mass is equal to zero would have no trouble reaching or exceeding the speed of light.
What kind of object has zero mass, you ask? Easy. An object that contains--somehow--equal parts matter and antimatter.
Does't that make total sense?
OK, I see something like eight articles that have been put up by kdawson, whoever he (or she) is. This one is pretty typical: While spouting off about how the article got the physics wrong (arguable at best), the "editor" failed to notice that the article in question is over six years old!!!
Pathetic, really. It's like a return to the days of Jon Katz.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Was I the only one who skimmed the story header and thought of Thiotimoline?
The Web is like Usenet, but
the elephants are untrained.
...it's called the Picard Manouevre.
This also provides a solution to bandwidth problems. A signal will be observed to propogate at c in all frames so to conserve energy its frequency must shift. If moving towards a source the frequency is increased an so is the bandwidth. So, if your ISP is slow, just move towards it very very quickly and you should be able to get satisfactory performance. Obtaining equipment to implement this kluge is up to you.s -selling-solar.html
--
Harvest solar power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
and the article is over 6 YEARS old.
Wow, that's older than most slashdotters.
Have you read my journal today?
I'm not saying that these scientist did or did not achieve the posted results. I just want to remind everyone that prior October 14, 1947, the speed of sound could not, could never will never be broken. Before testing the first atomic bomb some scientist felt that an atomic detonation would cause a chain reaction that would turn the entire atmosphere into burning vapor. During the early part of the 1900's if you traveled faster than 25 mph it was felt that the skin on your face would be ripped off. Prior to 1492, almost all of Europe felt that if you kept sailing west you would fall off the edge of the world. My point is this, 'barriers' are meant to be overcome. We put limits on things that we don't understand, claiming it is impossible. Nothing is impossible, once you figure it out.
"...a civilian some of the time, a soldier part of the time and a patriot all of the time." -Brig. Gen. James Drain
Guy's we should not forget that relativiy is actually just a THEORY not a fact. And in quantum mechanics we deal with the inconsistencies of relativity on a daily basis (just look at quantum mechanics superposition). While we dont comprehend the feasibility of time/space altering we must not all together consider it impossible. Time and time again scientists believe things unlikely or impossible, later on only to realize they simply did not consider everything because they did'nt have all the facts. We are pushing the limits of relativity. If we lock ourselves down to unquantifiable theories we will never progress. All people of logic would say they know the universe in unified in its physics and forces. Yet relativity and quantum mechanics are constantly arguing on the most fundamental things. one of my favorite quotes form einstein is "the universe is just an illusion. Albeit a highly persistent one" This guy was a dreamer, and look at what he acheived. I think more of us should be dreamers like that.
Hmm, if Einstien's theory is correct, then the atoms pushed faster than light would have traveled back in time.
so.... hmmmm
I like how the OP of the story decides to insert his ABSOLUTE opinion on einsteins THEORY of relativity. So based on one statement he completely dismisses the possibility of the research experiment. This is science, Theories are made to be broken or proven. Not to dictate what is possible and discount the impossible.
Actually, the results were invalidated last year (Jun 2008), so obviously it doesn't work.
Just stop and consider how a new speed of light might affect the field of astronomy, where they've carefully mapped everything out in terms of how long it would have taken the light to reach the earth at 300 times slower than it's new maximum known speed.
Depending on whether those lab conditions are ever met in the wild, there might be some serious refactoring to be done.
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
Wasn't there an experiment demonstrating changing quantum states of 'sister' particles such that the two particles changed quantum states at the same time over a large distance with a propagation delay faster than the speed of light?
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
It goes like this: Let's say there's some point we define as stationary and call point X. 1. The faster you go (or the greater the gravity field you are in) relative to point X, the slower your clock ticks relative to the clock sitting on point X. 2. The factor governing the time dilation described above is Gamma = 1/(1-v2/c2) or something like that - anyway it goes to infinity when v (your speed relative to point X) goes to the speed of light c. 3. That means that if you reach the speed of light (you ordinarily should be massless to achieve that), Gamma = infinity, and time stands still for you (still everything from the point of view of the mythical point X) 4. If you exceed the speed of light, Gamma turns negative - which mean from the point of view of point X, your time flows backwards.
Its been some time since i read a physics book, but a while ago i read somewhere that relativity is symetrical around the speed of light, and it is possible for particles to go above the speed of light (tachyons). It would take an infinite amount of energy to reduce a particle to the speed of light as it would to increase one to the speed of light if the particle has mass.
But photons speed surely could be increased as they could be reduced given the correct situation.
You still can't get your rocket with mass to go faster than light, and not sure if you could gain propulsion from particles going faster than light by ejecting them out of the back. Who knows maybe in 50 years i can get a decent internet connection using faster than light particles.
I can't take this bullshit stories from slashdot anymore.
Someone! please get a mood system for this editors.
Math is beautiful... e^(pi*i)+1=0
...where a magician seemed to make an elephant vanish. No, of course the elephant didn't ACTUALLY vanish, it just "seemed" to. His trick was carefully planned so that from our particular vantage point, the elephant seemed to move faster than light from one place to another. In point of fact, it was not consumed in a fireball as it was converted from mass to energy.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
If you define the group velocity as the speed of the peak of a gaussian pulse modulated by some frequency, this can travel faster than c. However, there are "tails" that extend far from the hump, and these contain the information about the hump.
A discontinuity (I wake up and decide to press a button) cannot be propagated faster than c.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
I'd been planning on moderating this thread, but I felt that just using mod points here wouldn't be enough....
E=mc^2 does *NOT* refer to velocity. Or speed. It refers to the amount of energy contained within a particle. If you were to totally annihilate a particle of a given mass M, the equation tells you how much energy you'd get out of it. This equation does *NOT* apply to general or special relativity, or the amount of energy required to accelerate something to a given velocity. C is a constant. It's a really big constant, but it's still a constant. C^2 is still a constant, too. It's a really really big constant, but it's still a constant. If that equation really had anything to do with getting something up to the speed of light, then we'd know exactly how much energy would be required to get any object up to the speed of light. You might even find that the world's current energy output is enough to accelerate a small object like a bullet to the speed of light. That's a far cry from the supposed "infinite" energy needed to accelerate something with any mass at all to the speed of light.
Secondly, antimatter has positive mass. Its electro-magnetic properties are the opposite of normal matter, but that's as far as it goes. A positron has the same mass as an electron, and an antiproton has the same mass as a proton. Simply throwing in equal parts matter-antimatter does *not* reduce the mass to zero. It doubles the mass.
The reason antimatter was used as a fuel in Star Trek is the incredible amount of energy that can be released by matter-antimatter annihilation. We don't currently have an energy-positive form of fusion available to us. Even if we did, there'd still be nuclear waste left over. Fission is the most energy-efficient method of power production we have, and it still leaves behind large amounts of nuclear waste that has to be properly disposed of. All of that mass left over equals energy that was not released by the reaction. In a matter-antimatter annihilation, there is zero mass left over. All of the available energy in the equation is released as energy. It's an entirely different class of energy production to what we're currently using, and the writers of ST were working on the assumption that if you were ever going to get to that kind of speed, you'd need an awful lot of energy. In the 1960's, and today, matter-antimatter annihilation is the most efficient source of energy known. It only made sense that they'd use it.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
This is something I often think about, but never found an answer to. Given the size of the universe, and the idea that it is meant to be expanding, is it possible that two objects at opposite sides could be moving away from each other at a speed greater that that of light?
Or is the idea of 'opposite sides' invalid? Or does the speed of light somehow limit the size of the universe? Or its rate of expansion?
Thank you for the education. It occurs to me that there must be some kind of negative mass. Perhaps we don't know what that is but it seems to me it should exist. Any thoughts?
The subject of this story looked recently familiar.
It popped up as a Stumbleupon yesterday...
Stumbles must be cached globally and not so unique individually.
Original Poster Posers, get a life, your gig is up.
How bizarre, how bizarre...How very sadly bizarre.
From the summary: "Wrong. Matter cannot touch the speed of light in vacuum; energy (e.g. light) cannot exceed it; and information cannot be transferred faster than this limit."
That's wrong. They proved information travels (almost) instantly in the quantum realm about 12 years ago, IIRC, by using two quantum entangled photons and changing the spin on one and the spin on the other changed faster than light could have reached it.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
The subject of this story looked recently familiar. It popped up as a Stumbleupon yesterday... Stumbles must be cached globally and not so unique individually. Original Poster Posers, get a life, your gig is up. How bizarre, how bizarre...How very sadly bizarre.
The group velocity is metadata, and I can totally search for it with Spotlight or Pixvue or something. Since I'm a Mac Fanboy, I know that spotlight indexes everything "instantaneously", ergo, that "information" got to me faster than light itself. The rest of your argument falls apart like a house of cards...
Checkmate.
Was I the only one who skimmed the story header and thought of Thiotimoline?
Yes.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Slashdot allows you to time travel!!!
I can read future stories by reading archived stories!
Einstein bah! Taco should get the next Nobel for Physics!
No.
Further evidence that headlines that end in question marks aren't news.
Question everything
Simple example of something that appears to mover faster than light, but it is of course only phase velocity:
Paint a dot on a distant mountain with a laser. Now move the laser around. The dot can easily exceed the speed of light even though none of the photons in the laser beam does.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
Big deal. I did this last week in my front yard with the old engine out of my Pathfinder.
Crisis is the rule, not the exception.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...faster than this limit." - Well, we already know that entangled photons can 'transfer' information faster than the speed of light.
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Would that apply if you had a warp drive metrics like Alcubierre's.
I know you can't build one, and probably anything like this requires god like levels of technology, but as far as I know it is possible to beat a light beam to a given point without any weirdness.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Have to blow my mod points for this thread, but you're wrong about accelerating mass to speed C. A particle, a mass, cannot reach speed C as it would require infinite energy, which is by definition impossible. You can pump more energy in, but what happens is this: the speed increase becomes lesser and lesser the closer to C it approaches. Sort of fractal. "Asymptotic curve", I think it's called. You pump more kinetic energy in, the increase slows. The energy added is quite real, and the effect is that the object gains mass in proportion referencing the classic e=mc2 equation, which does apply in calculating relativistic mass. Also, time dilation increases as speed progressively approaches C.
No matter what energy level you have, even if you have all the energy that was and ever will be, the particle will not reach C; it will keep acquiring more mass, keep inching towards C, and the timeframe for the particle, if you could measure it somehow, will move slower in relation to the rest of the universe. The universe will speed up for the object, years, centuries, millions of years will pass outside as it transits a few miles.
To achieve speed C, the object would have to aquire infinite kinetic energy, infinite mass, and time would stop in its framework.
To exceed C, one first has to achieve speed C, which is impossible given the requirements. But time would theoretically reverse in the particle's framework. Mass would become ????? Negative? Irrelevant to space time? God knows what the energy would be. The particle would be unknowable.
To toss a bone here, theory doesn't say that particles couldn't exist that *started out* at a speed greater than C. They've long been noodled over, and even have a name: tachyons. They're a hypothetical animal (not a theoretical one). The problem with those critters is that they can't slow down enough to achieve speed C, so they cannot *go slower* than C.
Summarize: mass can't achieve speed C. Theoretically, mass could exist that started existence at speed greater than C. But the limit of C applies to both sub- and theoretical hyper-light speed mass. C is the wall.
Thanks from me to Dr. Isaac Asimov, who patiently explained and re-explained the subject in so many essays I read growing up. We need more of him.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I could swear light was proven to be matter, not just energy. Considering it does travel in wave form........
It is very possible that two objects at "opposite sides" of the universe are moving away from each other at a speed greater than light. But these two objects are divided by what is called an event horizon, so communication between these two objects is never possible.
Oh, c'mon, PreacherTom totally pulled one over on the editors. It's funny, laugh.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
As I understand it, Einstein's theory did NOT say it was impossible for anything to travel at the speed of light. Rather, that relative to each other objects would always appear as less than the speed of light. So it might be possible for something to travel faster than the speed of light but you would experience it as travelling only NEAR the speed of light (but less than). It's not an absolute law, but a RELATIVE law.
can we auto /ignore anything by PreacherTom???
i don't know about you guys - but i dont feel like wasting my time reading old news that was sensationalized in the first place, and really, the headlines mislead people.
can someone fire him from slashdot? kthx bye
can slashdot have a minimum IQ req. for submitters?
This isn't really all that exciting. What is going on is that light has several velocities. There is the speed the actual stuff making it up can move at (signalling speed) and there are also several other velocities.
What they are talking about here is if you watched the crest of the electric field how fast that would appear to move. If you set things up very carefully that seems to move faster than any of the particles in the light.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Many thanks for the reply. I have to admit that I wasn't expecting one. From the Wikipedia article, I'm guessing that the event horizon means that at such distances you can't think of the universe as an ordinary space where normal things happen. You can imagine them, but you can't measure them. And if you can't measure them, then they don't really mean anything. I guess it also means that if two things were moving faster than light relative to each other, then we would never know about it. You might even assume that it could be happening all the time, somehow, but we would never know.
I suspect there isn't an easy anwer to this. Not easy enough for me to understand, anyway.
"Beyond all the rethoritic that doesn't really do it, do you see the object that is traveling over half the speed of light directly away from you while you are doing the same away from it? A: No, Sight is light based.
:)
Does this mean that object traveling less then the speed of light, that you do not see, doesn't exist? Of course not."
Actually, since you do not see it, and have no way of detecting it, or ever detecting it, is does NOT exist.
"Can future events be predicted with certainty? seems to be the real question here.
But that is a schrodinger's cat thing, not a moving faster then light thing."
That "cat thing" had nothing to do with future events. The illustration was one of observation locking down an outcome. Of COURSE the outcome is/has been determined when observed. But not until its observed (in quantum physics).
But this doesn't have anything to do with the lottery. The numbers are determined when drawn, and NOT when you look at your ticket. Indeed, the numbers on your ticket are determined when it is purchased. Of course you can STILL miss a winner by not checking your ticket
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
I have read some on the big bang theory and at the early stages it was expanding at multiples of the speed of light. Something like a couple seconds after the event the universe was already many millions of miles in diameter. During the first moments of the universe there was no matter, only energy, but energy was moving faster than the speed of light from the origin. But the unverse itself is space time so it doesn't really break the rules of relativity because space itself was expanding and the enregy itself wasn't really moving at such high velocities. I can't remember the source though, it was years ago that I read this. The sme thing could still be hapening since the universe is still thought to be expanding, so in reality the mass and/or photons that are moving apart at faster than the speed of light aren't moving faster themselves, it is just a part of the universe itself expanding.
I used to have as a neighbor a world famous theoretical physicist, who worked on gravity ( i think)
and i once asked him if anything could go faster then c, the speed of light in vacumn
and he gave me that look parents give kids when they are asking a whole series of particularly irritating and stupid questions.
no, he said, repeat slowly, C is the maximum. whatever it is, it ain't faster.
so, this is like perpetual motion machines: you may not know exactly the super clever trick being used, but it really aint worth worrying about.
If something does go faster then C, it will be front page news, and you will hear about it pretty quickly, like from teh nobel prize committee.....
or, to put it in/. geek speak, this iis like someone telling you he has this simple trick to make any babe love you. You know not only is it jive, but it ain;t worth figuring out either
That makes sense. If the space your measuring the speed in is expanding (and I believe that space is 'defined' by the objects within it), then you have to take that into account when calculating it. Or something.
I try to read about this stuff, honestly, but it just doesn't 'sink in'.
Like others said, it's the phase velocity that can be greater than the speed of light. But they were talking about a negative speed of light. Ever heard of metamaterials? You can see such phenomena in those artificially designed metamaterials. If booth the permittivity and permeability of the material are negative, the refractive index an thus speed of light is also negative. Light exits the material before it has even entered it. Victor Veselago thought of that long ago and John Pendry was the first to create such a material. My professor does this kind of crazy stuff all the time: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/312 /5775/892
"01000110 01101110 01101111 01110010 01100100 00101110" translates to fnord. Which is exactly correct. Thanks. Mike
My-PC-Help.com - Online Computer Learning and Tutorial Videos
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
Damn. Here I was, brave theoretician, thinking after I wrote my little blurb about the effect of unknown tachyons whizzing around, unable to slow down for us to detect them, and thought: dark matter, is that you?
: cosmos.asu.edu/publications/papers/TachyonicDarkMa tter%252082.pdf+tachyons+dark+matter&hl=en&ct=clnk &cd=1&gl=us
I googled the two terms, and here we are: "Tachyonic Dark Matter", by P.C.W. Davies:
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:WzdQk_JHdScJ
The answer is: This can travel from Sirius to Betelgeuse in the blink of an eye.
Ummm... what is 'an angel', Alex?
Ooooh, no sorry. The correct question was: "What is 'my gaze'?"
"Last Updated: Friday, November 10, 2000 | 11:57 PM ET"
Yes, this is a dupe. Likely of a dupe of a dupe.
I seem to remember that quite a few years back a German physicist group at some university claimed that they made information travel faster than light. Their device was tunneling, what they said was that when an electron tunnels through a barrier, it does it rather instanteniously and after "disappearing" on the one side it does not wait c * thickness of the barrier time before "appearing" on the other. They had some experimental device that they said that you fed information on the one side and it came out on the other earlier than a modulated light beam (in vacuum) would have done.
Don't know what was the end of their story, though.
I'm not a physics dude, obviously. Does Group Velocity also apply to solid matter? Like for instance, if you were to connect the surface of the Earth to the surface of the Moon using a diamond rod three inches thick, save one foot for vertical movement of the rod, would it take the equivalent time of light to travel the length of the rod for any vertical movement to register at the other end?
To an outside observer I guess then it would look like the rod was being compressed and extended by the movement, without either the density nor the mass of the rod ever changing. Which seems a bit weird.
Just curious.
This is a question I have asked many times, to many people... maybe someone out there can enlighten me as to why the equation: e= m*c^2 means that the speed of light cannot be exceeded?
as the equation simple states that energy equals the mass times the speed of light squared
(posting from work... so I'm anonymous today...)
-Ed
I was wondering when the bug in Microsoft's Space-Time Continuum code would be brought to "light."
Am I the only person whom finds 'Quirks and Quarks - The flagship science programme of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation" really ... dumb?
As a long time (well, 18 months) listener to the programme, I find it terrible the lengths to which the host goes to ask the most inane, obvious and useless questions. Great selection of stories, access to key researchers, high production standards, but really, really dumb interviews.
I'm Australian, and I'm probably spoilt by The Science Show. To anyone whom listens to Quirks and Quarks on their commute, do youself a favour and download a dozen episodes of The Science Show aswell.
All sorts of wacky scientific papers seem to end up in Nature.
I remember this being funnier the first time...
I completely understand what you are saying about it not sinking in. I am no astophysicist so my knowlede isn't very detailed but I do try. I have read books on things like string theory and relativity jsut because I find it interesting but when they get into proving their statements I have no idea of how to verify any of it. I am really good at understanding concepts without knowing the nuts and bolts though and I do manage to get tidbits here and there... but others here are definately more knowledgeable, but they tend to use too complicated of explanations for others to understand. I think most of the time this is because they don't really understand the theory but understand the math, but it is hard for me to verify this, or it could be that they are just trying to impress people by using complicated explanations as many scientistific types tend to do.
As far as space being defined by the objects in it I don't think you are really correct. While space is considered to be "empty", it is made of something that we just don't understand yet. This is where string theory has come into play. String theory, although considered junk science by many, is an attempt to define the space-time construct, and in doing so unite relativity with quantum mechanics. While space obviously contains objects and matter it isn't really what defines space. Without matter or energy there would still be space, and based on the current understanding of the big bang theory and events following it space itself is expanding, regardless of the matter in it. No one really knows if space will continue to expand indefinately or collapse, but the evidence suggests that the rate of expansion is accellerating which poses another problem. Considering that the initial rate of expansion far outpaced that currently observed, it seems difficult to accept that expansion could be accelerating but the evidence suggests just that.
This is why many (including myself) have a difficult time believing in current theories even though they predict much of what we can observe. It's kind of like newtonian physics though, the theory works under most known circumstances but when things get going really fast or mass becomes really large the laws break down. Einstiens theories have helped expand our ability to understand and predict under these circumstances, but I really doubt that they are 100% correct. They also break down at even larger extreems such as in black holes. Even though Einstein predicted black holes and the effects they would have on their surroundings they fail to predict what happens once in a black hole. Since no one will ever be able to go there one could actually say that claiming to predict what happens in a black hole is no different from any religius claim since it is impossible to test. While math could possibly predict what happens, the true basis for the scientific method is the ability to make a prediction and then test it at some point (the one making the prediction doesn't have to be able to test it, it just has to be something that can be tested, hence the difference between theory and laws, laws have been proven by repeted testing of all possible predicitons where theories still lack sufficient testing to ensure that all possible combinations of predictions are 100% true).
No.
Expect the dupe last Saturday.
But then, I already told you that.
DIDN'T I?
.
- aqk
F U
I, for one, bow down to our coffee-can overlords.
In Soviet Russia, our coffee cans spin YOU!
.
- aqk
F U
There was a young swordsman named Fisk,
.. . . . grrrrr...
whose fencing was extremely brisk.
So fast was his action,
That the Fitzgerald Contraction,
Changed his rapier into a disk!
www.dejavu.aqk.ca .
.
- aqk
F U
There once was a woman named Bright Who's speed was much faster than light. She left home one day, in a relative way, and came back the previous night...
"Nature bats last..."
I remember reading about this a while back, and have found some links (at the bottom), that says that when particles are entangled, that their state can be transferred faster then the speed of light. Doesn't help much to end AIDS, but meh, at least We know what state the virus' particles are in. http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=76 2100
Maybe he is referring to the multi-universe theory. In that case, when someone goes back to kill his own grandfather, he's actually killing his grandfather in another reality, and creating a new future where he doesn't exist, but it's not the future/universe he came from.
In that case, causality isn't violated.
Now, in my opinion, this is a higly unlikely probability, at least in any practical sense, but as a theoretic construction, it is quite possible (without violating causality). It's a bit like your 2 + 2 = 5 example, where you say it's impossible. Actually, that's a wrong statement; it's impossible using Euclidean mathematics, but it's perfectly possible the statement would be true within another mathematical reference-frame.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
I don't remember my opinion being asked!
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
In microwaves there is a similar phenomenon known as apparent velocity.
So - they're just making waves.
Regards,
BubbaJon
I think 'defined' was obviously a poor word to use. It's just that I read something recently that said that space was created at the same time as matter in the big bang, and that the two were interdependent in some way. Before that, I'd always imagined that the big bang happenned in the middle of space, but now I have to imagine that there wasn't even any space to begin with, and that the frontier of space still coincides with the expanding frontier of matter. What's beyond that anyone's guess. Nothing, apparently.
Of course, no-one really knows, but it's still interesting. Thanks for coming back with your thoughts.
This is an olg issue, publishd in 2000, then for further comments on this get the whole "letter" to nature at this link: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v406/n6793/pd f/406277a0.pdf
Actually at the very begining (first seconds) there was no matter, only energy. This energy was converted to matter (don't ask me how). One theory of how the big bang happened is that it was something like a super black hold with a singularity and that included all space, time, matter, and enegry. At some critical mass it just blew up. Obviuosly this is all just conjecture, but I think it is a way to explain both the big bang and the idea that black holes can simply disapper. If they disappear it violates the law of conservation of mass, but if they create a new universe/dimension than it wouldn't violate that constraint.
Matter and space do have some relationship, but it is more gravities warping of space than anything else. Theoretically space could exits with no matter or energy, but the reverse isn't true. Some believe that garavity will eventually collapse space back into a singularity at some point in the big crush, others think that everything will become so spread out that the average temperture in the universe apporaches absolute zero (to within something like 1X10^-1000000000000 degrese K) resulting in the big freeze. Don't ask me to explain this in much detail because it seems kind of crazy to me. All was created in the big bang and there is a relationship between them in that all of the energy require to create the big bang had to exist to create space, but if all of the energy and mass that resulted from the energy entered black holes and they disappered space would still exists although it would be impossible to test since our mass and energy wouldn't be here to test this hypothosis.
Richard Feynman's "Strange Theory of Light and Matter" is a good introduction to this topic.
The only big asses are the Einstein religious who close their minds to all but that which they want to believe. Even bigger ones are heads of astronomy observatories who when brought FTL results in red shifts demand that those underlings who made the observations apply 'correction formulae' to 'bring the results in line' with predetermined opinions. FTL red shifts happen all the time. The universe is a large and dangerous place full of presently humanly unimaginable objects, groups, phenomena and events. Ohjects in space are traveling in many trajectories. To apply a 'speed limit' to them would suppose
a direct physical connection between every partical of every object and every field in all the universe, unobservable or not. Even Einstein would consider that a nightmare. The very exixtance of the universe is a contradiction of Einsteins relativity. It is bigger than the speed of light could ever reach from its origin, speeding along for the presently conjectured age of the universe. We still have not seen the ends of the universe, and probably never will. The way this 'speed of light' hypotheses is crammed down the throats of all scientists on pain of their jobs and careers, one would think
that there is something else going on. Who would stand to gain by humans never trying to go to space? The answer often
comes up religious fanatics and folks who do not live here. Instead of all the brain dead prattling about our limitations,
we should be thinking instead of things like the possible multidimensionality of time. Think about it. No paradox, no causality as a new principal would be that you COULD go back in time, just not on your original timeline, for that would be
a violation of a Pauli exclusion principle in temporal space. Think of objects as occupying the three dimensions of space and a line in multidimensional time, say three. To try to go back on the same timeline would be to occupy your own space
and violate your six dimensional shape.
All objects are moving relatively with every other object in the universe, and have an infinite number of relative velocities with an infinite number of objects. Get over it.
The date on the Slashdot linked article is 2000, old news?
am I reading correctly that the article is from over 6 years ago? or is there some new calander where it is year 2000 now?
Assume an entangled pair A and B.
I thought that when you tweaked entangled photon A, that entangled photon B changed almost instantly (or absolutely instantly). Now if the mechanism that tweaks A is a push button, and the result of flipping B is an LED, it seems like data is transferred.
It looks like there are several people in this thread who think so, and some who don't think so.
I would appreciate it if someone could explain this to me, either yea or nay.
Thanks, Dave
These scientists have never had to babysit toddlers or they might have known, that todders have not read the rules regarding speed limits.
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