Mathematicians Extend Einstein's Special Relativity Beyond Speed of Light

Hugh Pickens writes "The Christian Science Monitor reports that despite an apparent prohibition on faster-than-light travel by Einstein's theory of special relativity, applied mathematician James Hill and his colleague Barry Cox say the theory actually lends itself easily to a description of velocities that exceed the speed of light. 'The actual business of going through the speed of light is not defined,' says Hill whose research has been published in the prestigious Proceedings of the Royal Society A. 'The theory we've come up with is simply for velocities greater than the speed of light.' In effect, the singularity at the speed of light divides the universe into two: a world where everything moves slower than the speed of light, and a world where everything moves faster. The laws of physics in these two realms could turn out to be quite different. In some ways, the hidden world beyond the speed of light looks to be a strange one. Hill and Cox's equations suggest, for example, that as a spaceship traveling at super-light speeds accelerated faster and faster, it would lose more and more mass, until at infinite velocity, its mass became zero. 'We are mathematicians, not physicists, so we've approached this problem from a theoretical mathematical perspective,' says Dr Cox. 'Should it, however, be proven that motion faster than light is possible, then that would be game changing. Our paper doesn't try and explain how this could be achieved, just how equations of motion might operate in such regimes.'"

Comments

The challenge of getting past c

[Martin Blank]

As I understand it from reading a few other articles, there still exists the challenge of getting past the barrier of infinite energy required to even match the speed of light. Perhaps there will be found a way to tunnel past it, but I expect that while all the math may work neatly, actually breaking through is going to be nearly impossible. Then there's the problem of slowing down which means tunneling back through the other way.

Much as I've been warned off by the articles that claim the paper to be fairly impenetrable to non-mathematicians, I'm tempted to pay the $30 to get the article anyway.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[JustOK]

In the alternate universe, they would pay you.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Charliemopps]

But the mathematics do not work out neatly. They just skipped a whole bunch of math where E = infinity and broke their equations and went strait to "Now we're losing mas as we accelerate! Neat! Forget that whole "We just consumed all the energy in the universe and collapsed into a blackhole business back there!"

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't waste your money. It employes nothing harder than algebra and simply restates what physicist's have said about tachyons for years. Can't see how they slipped it passed the reviewers.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[fustakrakich]

The problem is seeing past c

Our senses and tools are very limited and primitive. Perception is everything. It is very difficult to work with something that exists outside of 'sensor range'. So we assume much when we create our theories of how things are.

"If you really don't believe that faster-than-light is possible, then humans will be limited forever,"

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[lister king of smeg]

so the speed of light barrier is where the universe throws a divide by zero error, and things like tachyons are where the universe says fuck it lets do it anyway. maybe this math is for explaining how tachyons can get a way with saying fuck you to the math.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Baron Eekman]

Indeed. The fact that they didn't put it on arXiv is another indication it's probably not much more than hype.

Now that I think of it, how awesome is this? Being published in a journal but not on arXiv is more suspicious than the other way around.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[JoeMerchant]

Someday, some race from some star system will look back at the silly "unbreakable" light speed barrier the way we look back at the "unbreakable" sound barrier today. Hopefully it will be the human race that does this first - it would be.... unfortunate to meet up with an expansionist species (like the Europeans on North America, or Australia, or Hawaii) after they have conquered interstellar travel and colonization.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Prof.Phreak]

I suspect it will be (if it ever will be, that is) something along the lines of twisting space-time in such a way that will allow you to move the universe around you (as opposed to you moving through space-time).

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Anonymous Coward]

Tachyons probably don't exist. No one even has a way to find them yet if they do. People seem to hear about them and assume they do exist, but they are just a prediction dependent upon string theory being correct. It isn't even testable in theory (yet) . Since it isn't provable yet, it isn't really science, just a neat thought experiment.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[jythie]

Well, tachyons aside, basically yeah.

I have not read the piece, but I am confused how this is 'new'. The behavior of the equations for values larger then C were things we went over in undergrad physics. You can not go the speed of light, but higher or lower works.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[jythie]

Well, not quite the same... the sound barrier was an engineering problem.. plenty of math saying people could break it but building a plane that didn't shake itself to pieces was non-trivial.... in this case the math doesn't work out and we don't have any known paths for getting past this.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Anonymous Coward]

Nearly impossible, you're such the optimist.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[man_of_mr_e]

This is sort of like the idea that there are temperatures less than absolute zero. These would be negative kelvin temperatures.

The idea being that 0k means 0 energy, you would then have anti-energy, possibly anti-matter, and anti-physics.

Of course it's all just hokum, but hey, it's fun to theorize.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[tverbeek]

I seriously thought this was commonly understood among Physics majors who occasionally smoked pot. At least that's who I learned it from about 20 years ago. Seemed pretty obvious-once-you-think-about-it to me (and that's coming from a guy who flunked Infinite Series the first time he took it).

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[hardburlyboogerman]

It sounds like they have mathematically described Tachyon space.Can a Hyperdrive or Warp drive be far behind.Where is Zefrim Cochrine when ou need him?

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Anonymous Coward]

In that Universe I would still spend it on hookers and blow... but a lot faster.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Dynedain]

At one time Einsteins theories weren't testable either and were just neat thought experiments.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[elucido]

But the mathematics do not work out neatly. They just skipped a whole bunch of math where E = infinity and broke their equations and went strait to "Now we're losing mas as we accelerate! Neat! Forget that whole "We just consumed all the energy in the universe and collapsed into a blackhole business back there!"

But is it a fact that even with all the energy in the universe that it would be possible?

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[ceoyoyo]

You'd think they were quantum theorists!

Seriously, theoretical physics has a LOT of "well, what if we didn't have that little problem...." Quantum mechanics has lots of awkward infinities that end up getting explained away (and lots more we hope will get explained away someday).

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[starless]

This is sort of like the idea that there are temperatures less than absolute zero. These would be negative kelvin temperatures.

The idea being that 0k means 0 energy, you would then have anti-energy, possibly anti-matter, and anti-physics.

Of course it's all just hokum, but hey, it's fun to theorize.

Negative absolute temperatures are fine. You just get a population inversion, such as in the case of lasers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_temperature

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[nebular]

Some have suggested that it may be possible to get past c by doing it within plank time. Although one would have to be going pretty close to c already in order to do that.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Anonymous Coward]

False. They were always testable, the ability to perform the test might be lacking, but that is two different things. As far s I know, string theory isn't even testable in theory.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[interkin3tic]

Forget that whole "We just consumed all the energy in the universe and collapsed into a blackhole business back there!"

There are two different quotes by the authors in the summary that pointed out they weren't trying to suggest ways that could be accomplished, only what would happen if it were. What more do you want, THREE different quotes from the authors saying "WE'RE NOT SAYING SUCH A THING IS ACTUALLY POSSIBLE!!!"

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Zordak]

Yeah, it's not that special. I went through these same thought experiments and worked the math as an electrical engineering undergrad. And I've never even smoked weed. Really, the interesting question is what are the implications of comlpex energy? Do you phase shift? Makes for some fun science fiction, but not much practical use.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

This is not new. When I was little some 35 years ago, my mom told me there was nothing stopping you from going faster than light, you just had to start off going faster than light.

Yes I grew up weird. Or maybe everyone else did.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[ockegheim]

Maybe we can’t interact with them because they’re on the other side of the speed-of-light barrier.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes..... If your ego is large enough, the universe will revolve around you (from your relative point of view, of course, although to you it will appear absolute) allowing you to move faster than the light that shines out of your rear end.

Or something like that.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[dudpixel]

What you said doesn't disagree with the post you replied to. Perhaps you are aware of that, but I thought I should point it out anyway.

In other words, at the point where Einstein's theories weren't testable, then they too were just neat thought experiments. In his case, they reached the point where they were testable and thus became real science, but in this case there is no guarantee.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[dudpixel]

As I understood it, things can travel FASTER than light, and things can travel SLOWER than light, but something that is currently travelling slower than light cannot accelerate so that it is travelling faster than light and likewise things travelling faster than light cannot slow down past the speed of light.

In other words, whichever side of the speed of light you are on now, is the side you must stay on forever.

The extension of that is that I don't know whether it makes sense to even discuss things that travel faster than light unless we can come up with some way of those things having an effect in our world. It may well be that those things are not "visible" to our reality in any way and have no effect on us at all. Therefore, whether they exist or not, we'll never know.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[ldobehardcore]

String theory has a few testable predictions, but they would require particle accelerators the size of the solar system eating a whole Jupiter's worth of mass-energy every second they're running. And even then it would be testing only the string theories that have been found out mathematically to be wrong for our universe.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Anonymous Coward]

So the alternate universe is Soviet Russia?

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Grishnakh]

Well, maybe the equations are describing "hyperspace" (or "subspace" as Star Trek calls it). In lots of sci-fi, there's some kind of device that moves you into "subspace", and back out of it too, so there's some kind of "jump" event, rather than a clean transition between sublight and FTL speeds. So maybe all that sci-fi was closer to the mark than previous suspected by physicists. The trick of course is to figure out how to move into this FTL realm. We're learning more and more about things like metamaterials and exotic matter, so maybe something like that will have a physical effect that can be exploited this way.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Grishnakh]

You're assuming that you need to actually travel at lightspeed at some point. That may not be the case at all. While theoretical, tachyons do not ever travel at sublight speeds, only FTL. The idea here is that maybe lightspeed is indeed impossible, but FTL speeds are not, so the trick is to figure out how to shift your ship into this FTL realm (let's call it "hyperspace") and back again.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Anonymous Coward]

Zefram Cochrane*

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Professr3]

Did she also tell you the tesseract was real?

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Grishnakh]

We're not talking about cars here, where you have to smoothly accelerate from a slow speed to a fast speed. Maybe there's a way to "jump" into this "hyperspace" realm and instantly be traveling FTL. Notice the way they did it in the recent Battlestar Galactica series; there was no "warp speed" there, only jumps of a limited distance. No one's walking around the ship during that time, they just disappear one place and reappear another, possibly by traveling at an absurdly-high FTL speed through a realm where physics are quite different.

Now obviously, figuring out how to shift into hyperspace is going to be a major challenge, but maybe before long we'll learn enough about exotic matter to be able to do such a thing.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Anonymous Coward]

Forced time dilation may be a way, but like the current understanding seeing it as a gain in mass, the equivalent energy involved to attempt this is non-trivial.

I think understanding the underlying mechanism of how mass produces the gravitic force and/or inertia needs to be understood first before we attempt anything resembling FTL interstellar travel. Paired virtual particles might be one way to explain it and work out possible loopholes, but then you're also starting to tread into stuff like actually harnessing zero-point energy as a power source which still seems doubtful at the moment.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Anonymous Coward]

Electricity travels faster than light. Just ask Eric Dollard!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhuSn6sc7sc

Ok... Parts of electricity that you physics guys ignore do....

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Anonymous Coward]

"unbreakable" sound barrier? You mean a bullwhip snapping?

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Anonymous Coward]

so its not really testable, then.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Anonymous Coward]

things can travel any speed. There is no speed limit, you can go faster than the speed of light, its just a number. But you need a way of getting to that speed. What einstein's equations say is that you can't accelerate so that you exceed the speed of light. Because basically, the equations say your mass increases until you hit c, where it becomes infinite. An infinite mass would take an infinite amount of energy to move. Hence, it is impossible.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[KingMotley]

I think you mean testing isn't practical. It is testable, just it's almost inconceivable that we will at any time in the near future be willing to put forth the effort to do so.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Sulphur]

So the alternate universe is Soviet Russia?

Not any longer.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Gablar]

Instead of thinking about the speed of light as the universe's speed limit, you can think of it as a peculiarity, like the sound barrier but more fundamental.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Gablar]

"We just consumed all the energy in the universe and collapsed into a blackhole business back there!"

If anything consumes everything, does the anything becomes everything?

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Roger W Moore]

plenty of math saying people could break it

I think you mean physics. Maths can say whatever you want because it is not tied to describing the real world.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Sentrion]

Presumably, any attempt to surpass the speed of light would required taking actions that will likely kill you. But if you succeeded you would be in a completely separate alternate universe. Since religion has taught us for millenia that you pass on to an alternate universe when you die, maybe the ancients were on to something. Since spirit beings would have zero mass they could theoretically, if they existed, shift into hyperspace. Test pilots just better hope there's a physical being on the other side to serve as a host body. I'm still waiting for the Heaven's Gate explorers to send back their message to let us know if they succeeded or not.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Artifakt]

Special Relativity was immediately testable. In fact, one of the tests for its predictions turns out to be the Michelson–Morley experiment, which was first performed in 1887 before Special Relativity was even a gleam in Einstein's eye. The M-M experiment was refined repeatedly during the period that Special Relativity was first discussed (1905-06) to focus on testing one of SR's basic predictions, so a test of at least one of special relativity's predictions existed by publication date.

          General relativity was immediately testable by measuring the Perhelion precession of Mercury. It was also possible to test it by observing solar bending of starlight any time there was a total solar eclipse. Yeah, you couldn't do that on the day of first publication because there wasn't a solar eclipse that day, but the researchers knew there would be total solar eclipses in the future and could set up to test the theory as soon as one happened. But, suppose they had had to wait until the next eclipse after that, or something? Do you really want to advance the claim that a theory isn't scientifically testable if a human event such as a war keeps the observers from getting to the location where it could be tested? Or if cloudy weather blocked observing? That nearly happened.

        Normally, the rule that it isn't science if it doesn't make testable predictions doesn't mean that something becomes unscientific if there are budget cuts or other such events that aren't themselves part of the scientific method.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Anonymous Coward]

"We just consumed all the energy in the universe and collapsed into a blackhole business back there!"

So, it'd be like an SUV of doom?

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that barrier the energy at which the Higgs particle starts to become less meaningful?

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Anonymous Coward]

There could be matter already over the speed of light and there could be a physical process of skipping past the speed of light without ever actually going the speed of light. Or maybe there isn't. In any case, your objection seems to be equivalent to saying that Newton should not have been allowed to think about what happens in space because he did not have the means to get into space. The math would be bad just because he ignored the impossibility at the time of actually getting into space. That's not how Science or rational thinking works - thank FSM.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Anonymous Coward]

As I understood it, things can travel FASTER than light, and things can travel SLOWER than light, but something that is currently travelling slower than light cannot accelerate so that it is travelling faster than light and likewise things travelling faster than light cannot slow down past the speed of light.

In other words, whichever side of the speed of light you are on now, is the side you must stay on forever.

With the assumption that light travels at something very close to the speed of light but not exactly at it.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[dargaud]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_temperature

Woah... Mind blown. I learnt something today.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Anonymous Coward]

We're not talking about cars here, where you have to smoothly accelerate from a slow speed to a fast speed. Maybe there's a way to "jump" into this "hyperspace" realm and instantly be traveling FTL.

That's what the parent said- you cannot accelerate. What you're talking about is not acceleration. That's the whole point- the faster you are going, the more energy is required in order to accelerate and you can't surpass the speed of light because you have to convert all the mass to energy in order to get there. Outside of fiction writers breathing heavily about "warp gates" and "wormholes" nobody has come up with any way to travel faster without accelerating.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[DMUTPeregrine]

If faster than light travel is impossible, humans will be limited forever. What you believe has no relevance. If it is possible, then it's only relevant as a motivation to find a way to travel faster than light.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[DMUTPeregrine]

Thought experiments can lead to interesting results, some of which eventually become science. What happens if energy is negative? What happens if energy is complex? What if spacetime is quantized? What if causality is not fundamental, and is the result of lower level phenomena? etc, etc.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[beelsebob]

Bullshit, the maths does work out, as this article covers... What it doesn't work out for is accelerating past the speed of light... If we can instantaneously shift to the speed of light, then it's a different ball game.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[tinkerton]

Normally, the rule that it isn't science if it doesn't make testable predictions doesn't mean that something becomes unscientific if there are budget cuts or other such events that aren't themselves part of the scientific method.

This focus on scientific thinking is valuable but there are still good reasons to opt for the stronger interpretation, namely that if you're not going to be able to test, even if it's just for money reasons, then your scientific method is still damaged. It's not a black and white situation but if it had been too hard to test Einsteins general relativity he would have been in a very uncomfortable position.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[man_of_mr_e]

It would seem that Negative Kelvin is really more like signed integer overflow. That is, if you are using an 8 byte signed integer, and you add 1 to 127, you get -127 (in 1's complement, or -128 in 2's complement)

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[man_of_mr_e]

Er.. I meant 8 BIT signed integer

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Anonymous Coward]

request a reprint by email from the corresponding author from http://rspa.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2012/09/25/rspa.2012.0340.short?rss=1 and you will get the article for free

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Anonymous Coward]

That sounds a lot like the engines on the Planet Express Ship.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[isorox]

Nearly impossible, you're such the optimist.

Nothing is inpossible, not if you can imagine it! That's what being a scientist is all about

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[GerryHattrick]

I thought the speed of light was 'instant', for an observer sitting on the photon. The photon has no mass, which is why it's at c. And being at c, time dilation means there is no 'time' between departure and arrival (for that observer only). How do you go faster than that? (Or, what's wrong with my oversimplification?0

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[stranger_to_himself]

As I understand it from reading a few other articles, there still exists the challenge of getting past the barrier of infinite energy required to even match the speed of light. Perhaps there will be found a way to tunnel past it, but I expect that while all the math may work neatly, actually breaking through is going to be nearly impossible. Then there's the problem of slowing down which means tunneling back through the other way.

Much as I've been warned off by the articles that claim the paper to be fairly impenetrable to non-mathematicians, I'm tempted to pay the $30 to get the article anyway.

If you want the paper then email the authors for a pre-print. They will send it to you.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Anonymous Coward]

Tachyons don't exist in string theory either, when the various parameters are chosen properly. In all the commonly reported on versions of string theory, they do not exist. In fact, the existence of tachyons is generally taken as a sign that your model is wrong, since they lead to an unstable vacuum state (in other words the universe could not actually exist stably.)

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Anonymous Coward]

And that last sentence is precisely why after decades of work String Theory remains completely worthless. Science only deals with and acknowledges this universe until such a time as somebody can demonstrate that there are other universes that exist and some way of observing what goes on there.

AFAIK, String Theorists have yet to produce even on testable hypothesis under the usual scientific standards.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[deimtee]

So you're saying a ship with the Total Perspective Drive will make the Bistromathic Drive look like an electric pram?

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[ultranova]

Special Relativity was immediately testable. In fact, one of the tests for its predictions turns out to be the Michelsonâ"Morley experiment, which was first performed in 1887 before Special Relativity was even a gleam in Einstein's eye. The M-M experiment was refined repeatedly during the period that Special Relativity was first discussed (1905-06) to focus on testing one of SR's basic predictions, so a test of at least one of special relativity's predictions existed by publication date.

Which means that it wasn't a prediction, any more than predicting that a ship like Titanic will likely sink if it hits an iceberg would be a prediction today. It's easy to come up with a theory that "predicts" what is already known; in the extreme case, just list all your "predictions" (postdictions?). So while SR certainly got credence by neatly explaining M-M experiment's results, it's wrong to say that it predicted it - because otherwise, every astrologer who "predicts" a famous figure's death after the fact could claim their horoscopes science.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Anonymous Coward]

The universe doesn't obey math, Math is built according to some aspects of the universe (the -at least statistical- objectivity of perception lets you assert the principle of no contradiction, that lets you build binary logic, that lets you attach axioms to a value of truth, that lets you build the rest on axioms), physics apply math to model the rest of the aspects of the universe.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[drinkypoo]

Lots of people have speculated about reincarnation.

And Plato talked about objects being representations of more complex objects on a higher plane.

Maybe to get from one place to another you wait until you die, then you're born there.

Of course, this sounds an awful lot like the MMORPG theory of reality. When this character dies, I want to restart on a server with magic!

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[arth1]

If anything consumes everything, does the anything becomes everything?

No, after the cherries, strawberries, cakes and keys, you hit a barrier, let's call it "c" at exactly 3,333,360 points. This is due to a bug in the universe, but there is no programmer to fix it.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Chris Mattern]

At one time Einsteins theories weren't testable either and were just neat thought experiments.

Although Einstein himself did mostly "thought experiments", predictions of his theories were immediately testable, particularly those covering the bending of light by gravity, which were confirmed during a solar eclipse in 1919, four years after the theory was formulated.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[oreaq]

Einstein published his theory of general relativity in 1915 and proposed his now famous classical tests for it (perihelion precession of Mercury's orbit, gravitational redshift, and deflection of light by stars) in 1916. There was a (short) period where gr lacked a solid empirical foundation.

There are lots of testable predictions comming out of string theory (supersymmetry, string harmonics, cosmic strings, etc.). They just can't be tested with energy levels that are accessible today. There was some hope that the LHC would provide positive proof for some of these predicitions; but no luck so far.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[hardburlyboogerman]

Thanks for the spelling correction.My eyesight is failing

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[History's Coming To]

Tachyons were predicted by Einstein in the original, he realised that the equations carried on after the asymptote and that this would lead to tachyon type particles, and that this was a relatively meaningless part of the theory without experimental backup. It sounds like this article simply rehashes this work.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[oreaq]

That is not true. Maldacena duality (AdS/CFT correspondence) for examples can be tested in low energy experiments and has also not "been found out mathematically to be wrong for our universe."

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you sure it's infinite energy, or just unexpressable energy, there is a difference. One implies a limit, the other implies another theory modification.
As much of the flat earthers the close minded only want to reject. The may say the way sound barriers were broke, light barriers may be broken also. Raw power, string theory, simularity, singularity who knows the way, may be inter-demonsional where the physical doors are with black hole locks. and those gamma ray bursts are someone knocking.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Joce640k]

At one time Einsteins theories weren't testable either and were just neat thought experiments.

There's a difference between "aren't testable using current technology" and "can never be testable with any possible future technology".

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Grishnakh]

Well of course they haven't, because this is all completely theoretical. But the point is, if this FTL speed is possible at all (which the math seems to say it is), such "warp gates" or whatever are probably going to be what's needed, as accelerating past c clearly isn't doable. For now, these devices remain in the realm of sci-fi, but who knows, maybe someone will figure out a method one day. We're constantly learning more and more about weird physics (quantum mechanics isn't that old, and it's pretty weird), exotic matter, metamaterials, etc. I do find it interesting however that many (but not all) of the sci-fi writers did already sorta predict this situation with the whole "hyperspace" thing or "FTL jumps"; you don't really see any sci-fi, except maybe very old and bad stuff, where they try to accelerate past c.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Anonymous Coward]

AFAIK, String Theorists have yet to produce even on testable hypothesis under the usual scientific standards.

There's at least one testable hypothesis. While the article barely covers the details and only intimates it in the last paragraph, the basic idea is that if you collide two particles together then it becomes possible for a graviton to "escape" into a higher dimension, thus eluding the detectors. This would demonstrate a higher dimensional universe, which is one of the tenets of M-Theory. Other scientists (e.g. Laura Mersini-Houghton, et al) in orthogonally related fields are also coming up with experiments and observations that would support M-Theory.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[leonardluen]

black holes don't seem to have a problem crossing the barrier.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Anonymous Coward]

At one time Einsteins theories weren't testable

WTF? Put down the crack pipe.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[mcgrew]

Presumably, any attempt to surpass the speed of light would required taking actions that will likely kill you.

Both you and the GP sem to be referring to Asimov's 1954 story Escape!
In the story, "the brain" (a 3 laws positronic brain) has to overcome the 1st law, because hyperspace kills you... but only for a fraction of a second.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[fustakrakich]

Belief is everything. It can stop all movement. Belief that something is impossible is an intestinal blockage that kills the motivation to prove otherwise. If everyone believes that FTL is impossible, then impossible it will remain for man to achieve. Belief is the brick wall that blocks all progress. It is very far from irrelevant. It is a prime motivator amongst humans.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Anonymous Coward]

There's at least one testable hypothesis. While the article barely covers the details and only intimates it in the last paragraph, the basic idea is that if you collide two particles together then it becomes possible for a graviton to "escape" into a higher dimension, thus eluding the detectors.

People were spewing the same garbage about missing energy before neutrinos were discovered. As if not being able to account for x warrants assumption y.

The escaping into extra dimensions meme is about as useful as declaring god did it in my not so humble view.

And guess what Gravitons don't exist or to put it less bluntly have never been observed any more than a pauliton (something I just made up to explain those omnipresent "force carriers" involved in implementation of pauli exclusion principal).

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Grantbridge]

Faster than instant, is arriving before you leave! Which is what travelling faster than c is predicted to do.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[tehcyder]

there still exists the challenge of getting past the barrier of infinite energy required to even match the speed of light

I love the way this is casually sidestepped. "Yeah, never mind that you would require infinite energy, let's just skip that stage and assume you're magically exceeding c".

I'm tempted to pay the $30 to get the article anyway.

Isn't it on The Pirate Bay?

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[tehcyder]

At one time Einsteins theories weren't testable either and were just neat thought experiments.

That's not true, quite early on people performed experiments which (a) produced results in accordiance with the theories' predictions and (b) would have been able to falsify the theories if they had turned out differently. They were proper scientific theories from the start.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Anonymous Coward]

the charged particles moving faster than light will loose energy by cherenkov radiation, and neutral via virtual charged particle pair creation - so yhey will very quickly slow down back to reality... yeah we are not physicists but just mathematicians - that says it all...

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Phase Shifter]

With the assumption that light travels at something very close to the speed of light but not exactly at it.

Actually, with the assumption that light has zero rest mass, and therefore travels only at exactly c.
Index of refraction is a whole different story--Essentially you have electrons absorbing photons and emitting them again with a slight delay (Classically, lag caused by that whole electrons have mass thing preventing an instantaneous response to variations in the EM field).

And that has made me wonder by way of analogy--if a bunch of charged particles can effectively retard electromagnetic waves, would space filled with massive particles slow gravitiational waves?

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to have skipped the part where x/0 != infinity. Undefined and Infinity are completely different things. Undefined is the result of a calculation that our current mathematical formulae cannot solve because math is not perfect, despite the theoreticians best efforts to claim otherwise. Infinity is an unending number of possibilities that is not a number and can never be calculated as such.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Anonymous Coward]

If your energy was negative, you'd either:

• have negative mass
• start moving backward in time.

the latter being more likely, in practice, but the former makes for a longer, more-interesting thought experiment.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[oh_my_080980980]

They're not talking about accelerating past the speed of light. They are talking about velocities after the speed of light. Which honestly is nothing knew. Researchers have thought about particles that already travel faster than the speed of light, such as tachyons. They exist at light speed but never below light speed.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[oh_my_080980980]

No there's not and quoting a science fiction show is not earning you any credibility.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[oh_my_080980980]

What!? Because you start to take on mass as you travel closer to the speed of light you would need an infinite amount of energy to achieve light speed. Not possible. There is no alternate universe for traveling faster than light. The universe is the universe.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[oh_my_080980980]

Warping space and it's the only way you can do it. Unfortunately you'd need a something that can really warp space without crushing you at the sametime.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[oh_my_080980980]

You're an idiot. Please stop pretending you understand what is being talked about. Traveling faster than the speed of light is not hyperspace. Stop with this battlestar galactica bull shit. All the article was talking about was something that existed traveling faster than the speed of light, not something that was accelerated past the speed of light. It's not possible to accelerate past the speed of light because it would take an infinite amount of energy.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Grishnakh]

No, you're an idiot, because you can't fucking read. I already said here that you can't accelerate past the speed of light, which is why some kind of "jump" would be needed to get past this barrier somehow.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[mcgrew]

If anything consumes everything, does the anything becomes everything?

You might be amused by the JE I posted yesterday, a rerun from my old site ten years ago.

But past the lightspeed limit, the universe seemed to shrink to a pinpoint, which was angrily chasing me. Which was a very silly thing for it to do, as I wanted to get back inside it. It was kind of like my wife when she's mad at me.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a reason why infinite energy is needed. That energy is not added to your mass, as the equation might state. I know that there are logical people here and this is a thought experiment.

To increase your speed in any direction faster than you can do on your own, you need some form of mass/propulsion device pushing you in that direction. Say I wanted to travel the speed of sound. I have a device that uses sound waves traveling the opposite direction that I want to travel. Mr. Newton states for any action there is an equal and opposite reaction. So by forcing sound waves out behind me and zero resistance to me traveling the other direction, I will eventually gain speed to where my speed will match the speed of sound. An infinite more amount of sound waves will not make me travel any faster. And no, the sound waves are not adding to my mass.

Chemical reactions and the pressures they create travel faster than the speed of sound, so using those reactions will get you to travel faster than the speed of sound.

But, Chemical reactions and the pressures they create do NOT travel faster than the speed of light. No amount of chemical reactions will get you to the speed of light.

Microwave energy does travel at the speed of light. So if I was to use a device that forced microwave energy out one direction, per Mr Newton and zero resistance in the opposite direction, I could eventually be traveling at the speed of light. And again, an infinite amount of microwave energy would still only get me to the speed of light. An infinite amount of microwave energy does not make me gain mass.

If by some yet undiscovered way that microwave energy could travel just slightly faster than the speed of light, that microwave energy would be given off or shed as mass, the E=mc squared thing....If I remember correctly. It would not add to my mass in any shape or form.

But as I were propelled in the opposite direction as this undiscovered way, as I passed through the speed of light, my electromagnetic energy that I shed every day, would be transformed to mass, much like a sonic boom is created.

If I looked the opposite direction that I was traveling, behind me would be all dark, no electromagnetic energy would be reaching me. In front of me would be all dark too. The visible spectrum that my eye could detect would have long ago shifted to ultraviolet and way beyond. But to the sided of me I would still be able to see.

There is nothing preventing me or any mass from traveling faster than the speed of light....., Well.....except a way to propel it that fast.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[jythie]

That is kinda the point, there is currently nothing solid to support a method for instantaneiously shifting your speed. The article talks about behaviors above lightspeed, but those are kinda old hat, nothing actually new there. Crow, we covered that stuff in freshman physics....

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[beelsebob]

And yet a bunch of scientists and mathematicians published this in a paper as seminal research... Doesn't that rather suggest to you that there was something new in their calculations, over what you might do as a freshman?

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[mcgrew]

Man, you really fucked that joke up. It's the infinite improbability drive. You got the Heart of Gold's propulsion system confused with the Total Perspective Vortex, which shows one how utterly and completely insignifigant one is compared to the vastness of the universe.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[ATMD]

In alternate universe Soviet Russia... things are pretty normal, actually.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Anonymous Coward]

I still don't get why you can't travel faster than the speed of light (compared to your slower friend and the light he has with him).

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[nine-times]

Special Relativity was immediately testable. In fact, one of the tests for its predictions turns out to be the Michelson–Morley experiment

IIRC, Special Relativity was an attempt to explain the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment, so I'm not sure that exactly counts as a test. In fact, it's kind of begging the question.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[DMUTPeregrine]

"If it is possible, then it's only relevant as a motivation to find a way to travel faster than light."

Belief is relevant to human action, but the results if the action is taken are independent of belief.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Anonymous Coward]

Time goes backwards for the super c observer.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Anonymous Coward]

It would probably involve time going backwards and breaking causality...

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[fustakrakich]

Forget everything I said about this. What we will achieve is FTL communications. Sending a signal is much easier than having to drag a body along for the ride. In fact, I'm now thinking the idea of FTL travel is silly. Holodecks and the quantum entanglement (it's not just for computers) will substitute very nicely.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Anonymous Coward]

since your engine is supplying a constant force, your mass is dropping and your speed is increasing and your mass is dropping and your speed is increasing and ...

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Anonymous Coward]

It might actually be harder to get out of hyperspace if the physics are changed than to get in...

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Anonymous Coward]

from the observers point, the photon cant pass c,as this is infinite mass and energy, but from the photons view,its infinite speed at zero mass.
Completely lines up with the proposed theories.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[cavebison]

In a sci-fi sense, I've always been fond of the idea that an object (a ship) would somehow snap itself over into "hyperspace" (the other space these guys allude to), travel for a bit (faster than light), then snap back over into normal space. Except that, once back in normal space, their vector (direction and velocity) has not changed since they left.

Which would create problems of course, if you're travelling to another planet, as any two given planets would be moving at incredible speed difference, relative to each other. So you'd first have to adjust your normal-space vector so that it matches that of your destination planet, before you jump.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[doccus]

Well, here's what I don't quite get. *Light* has mass, if even an infinitesimal amount (if it did not, it could not get trapped by a black hole) , and travels at the speed of light, so why isn't the mass of light infinitely huge?

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[doccus]

And string theory seems to have bit the dust.. http://www.physnews.com/physics-news/cluster157697382/

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_in_The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Bistromathic_drive/

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[DirtyLiar]

At one time Einsteins theories weren't testable either and were just neat thought experiments.

There's a difference between "aren't testable using current technology" and "can never be testable with any possible future technology".

Me thinks that's why he used the phrase "At one time", which implies the following statement is no longer true. Which, by definition means that something, like technology, has changed. And there is an assumption, even in the general public, that physics (not Physics) can't change.

Re:The challenge of getting past c

[Anonymous Coward]

But the mathematics do not work out neatly. They just skipped a whole bunch of math where E = infinity and broke their equations and went strait to "Now we're losing mas as we accelerate! Neat! Forget that whole "We just consumed all the energy in the universe and collapsed into a blackhole business back there!"

I think you're misguided here. Just because there's quantum mechanics doesn't mean the math for Newton's equations of motion suddenly don't work out neatly. Similarly, just because there's a physical impossibility at 'c' doesn't mean the mathematics describing motion at speeds greater than 'c' are suddenly wrong.

In the unhidden world...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the first post in the unhidden world!

Re:First post!

[able1234au]

> until at infinite velocity, its mass became zero.

finally a diet that works!

What about the speed of information?

[stanlyb]

No one yet answered this question, what is the speed of information? What is the speed of the universal laws? What is the speed of the gravitational force??????

Re:What about the speed of information?

[Anonymous Coward]

Speed of information = speed of light (this is well known).
Speed of gravitation = speed of light (this is also well known).
"Speed of universal laws" is not a question that makes sense. "This isn't right. This isn't even wrong." -- Pauli (And the quote is well known).

Re:What about the speed of information?

[goombah99]

No one yet answered this question, what is the speed of information? What is the speed of the universal laws? What is the speed of the gravitational force??????

It works in reverse. All information is known at all points in space but as you go faster, you start to forget things.

Re:What about the speed of information?

[Charliemopps]

Yes they have. It's the speed of light.
The speed of information and the speed of gravitational force were both predicted by Einstein.
The speed of information was proven rather quickly there-after in experiment. You'll have to wikipedia it for details because they escape me.
The speed of gravitational force was proven recently. Maybe in the 90s? I believe by measuring some gravitational lensing effect the sun had on stars just past its horizon or some-such. I don't remember the specifics. But if the sun vanished right now, it would take 8 minutes for the earth to stop orbiting and shoot off into space.

The speed of universal laws? I'd think that would fall under information... irrelevant however, as everything obeys the speed of light.

Re:What about the speed of information?

[lister king of smeg]

if speed of gravitation is equal to c then why can it pull in light and bend time? it would seem to me to be faster then c to bend time. please explain?

Re:What about the speed of information?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean like braking, signaling, and following distance?

Re:What about the speed of information?

[arkane1234]

Not everything known travels at the speed of light...
Information travels at the speed of the transport mechanism it's traveling on. If it's sound, it travels at the speed of sound. If it's internet, it's at the speed of electricity... and the routers.

Re:What about the speed of information?

[stanlyb]

Nope, it is not the same, and no one yet proved it. And the Einstein theory does not say anything about it. In fact, all the laws that we have, are making the presumption that the speed of the information is infinite. Period. But is it really so?

Re:What about the speed of information?

[tibit]

Because you made up a problem where there's none, that's why. Speed of gravitation is simply how fast change propagates. You wiggle something here, it makes wiggles on something somewhere else, but later. This doesn't preclude steady state. A gravitational potential well doesn't need a round trip to begin to affect something. If an object comes into being in a potential well, it is immediately under the action of gravitation of the central mass in said potential well. It will, alas, take light time for the effect of the object's being to affect the central mass, and whatever effects that had to propagate back. Same goes for a potential well in electric field, etc. Yes, there will be photons or gravitons that carry out the interaction, but if my outsider understanding is any good here, don't forget that those carriers are created on a whim, and their creation or destruction is all that you need for an interaction to occur.

Re:What about the speed of information?

[Charliemopps]

Ah, I see. You're one of those TimeCube guys. Listen, if you believe in magic over science, I can't help you. Relativity is, at this point, fact. It is probably the most researched, proven, time tested theories in modern science. We are more sure of relativity than we are of Newtons laws. If you were to ask a physicist what were more likely to happen tomorrow, The sun to explode? or Relativity to be found incorrect... they'd choose the sun. If you google it, there are experiments you can do in your living room with pen lasers, flashlights and lenses that'll prove the theory for you. Unless of course, you believe in magic. If magic is real, well shit... you can prove much of anything can you?

Re:What about the speed of information?

[Anonymous Coward]

No they don't.

Re:What about the speed of information?

[Jack9]

> Yes they have. It's the speed of light.

> But if the sun vanished right now, it would take 8 minutes for the earth to stop orbiting and shoot off into space.

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/GR/grav_radiation.html

There's a number of competing models which fit existing data.

http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2010/08/25/what-is-the-speed-of-gravity/

See the closing paragraph referencing LISA ~ 2030 A.D.

The real way to measure the speed of gravity is to detect and study gravitational waves. By comparing the arrival of a gravitational-wave signal with that of an electromagnetic signal from an astrophysical source, one could compare the speed of gravity to that of light to parts in 10^(17).

As I understand it, we're still waiting to find out if gravitational waves/radiation propagates at the speed of light.

Re:What about the speed of information?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, it is not the same, and no one yet proved it. And the Einstein theory does not say anything about it.

Wrong on so many levels.

Re:What about the speed of information?

[countach]

A black hole doesn't "pull in light". Rather it bends space time to such an extreme that light travelling in a straight line does not exit the event horizon, because space time has "bent back on itself".

Re:What about the speed of information?

[nebular]

Actually the maximum speed information can propagate is the speed of light in a vacuum according to relativity. Anything faster than that and you have problems of the results of events happening before the event from some points of view, according to relativity. Every experiment we have done to try and send information faster than light has come up short.

Re:What about the speed of information?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. The Black Hole is a phenomenon predicted only by an asymptote. The asymptote separates two distinct segments of space-time. One is the world in which we live. The other is an area where we have no idea what is happening.

Re:What about the speed of information?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was once lead to believe that the effects of gravity, much like quantum teleportation, were instantaneous. Now I know my friend is a liar.

Posting AC because I'm ashamed.

Re:What about the speed of information?

[shoor]

Hmm, so people are saying here that the speed of information can't be faster than the speed of light _in a vacuum_ because of results of events happening before the event, in other words paradoxes. I asked about this in a different subject only a few days ago, and, I don't think it's completely resolved.http://http//slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3164219&cid=41554569

I recently saw a Nova documentary on TV, part of the 'Fabric Of the Cosmos' series, the "Illusion Of Time" chapter, hosted by Brian Greene. In one place he talked about an alien living in a far away galaxy seeing events on earth. If he was moving towards earth, he would see our 'future'. There was a hint that the future might, in some sense, already exist.

It does seem to me that people should not be too cavalier about associating the speed of light with the speed of information unless they can define clearly what information is, and how it is linked in some concrete way to the speed of light.

Re:What about the speed of information?

[Grishnakh]

Magic IS real. Go back in time and show an ancient Greek person a smartphone, and ask him if it isn't magic.

Re:What about the speed of information?

[Boronx]

You might be able to shine a laser on the air molecules that make of a sound and watch the back scatter. You'll pick up the sound at the speed of light! Just because we normally wait around for it doesn't mean we have to.

Re:What about the speed of information?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's wrong in a couple of ways. First of all, we do have an idea of what is happening inside a black hole. There have been whole books written on the subject. Those ideas may not be 100% accurate, but they do exist. Perhaps you are thinking about the singularity? But even there, as far as we know, there's no "segment of spacetime" beyond the singularity. The singularity is where spacetime ends, or at least, where our ability to explain it does.

Second, the inside of the black hole is part of the world in which we live. In a sense, you can think of a black hole as a physical analog of the future. You can get from here to there, but you can't as far as we know, get from there to here. (Actually, if you could go from the future to the past, that would be a neat way of leaving a black hole.) So a black hole is as much a part of our world as the future is.

Re:What about the speed of information?

[WaffleMonster]

No one yet answered this question, what is the speed of information? What is the speed of the universal laws? What is the speed of the gravitational force??????

C

Re:What about the speed of information?

[Anonymous Coward]

As I understand it, we're still waiting to find out if gravitational waves/radiation propagates at the speed of light.

My understanding is that while we don't have an exact measurement, the currently-measured error bars place it within a percent of c. Which means, basically, nobody takes seriously any suggestions that it isn't c because the idea of it being a similar yet different speed seems highly implausible.

Re:What about the speed of information?

[Anonymous Coward]

The real way to measure the speed of gravity is to detect and study gravitational waves. By comparing the arrival of a gravitational-wave signal with that of an electromagnetic signal from an astrophysical source, one could compare the speed of gravity to that of light to parts in 10^(17).

As I understand it, we're still waiting to find out if gravitational waves/radiation propagates at the speed of light.

I have no clue how people are actually expecting to detect gravitational waves when every last bit of matter and energy along the path is a source of noise.

Re:What about the speed of information?

[niftydude]

As I understand it, we're still waiting to find out if gravitational waves/radiation propagates at the speed of light.

You are correct, we are still waiting for experimental validation, however, if gravity waves exist, then the gravitons that carry gravitation force are expected to fit into the Standard Model as a massless gauge boson. Theoretically, according to the Standard Model, all massless particles travel at the speed of light.

It will be *very* interesting if we find that gravitation waves do not travel at the speed of light.

Re:What about the speed of information?

[actiondan]

>In one place he talked about an alien living in a far away galaxy seeing events on earth. If he was moving towards earth, he would see our 'future'.

What was the reasoning behind that?

Re:What about the speed of information?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're insane if you think that example proves anything.

Re:What about the speed of information?

[Neil Boekend]

They measure it by using huge gravitational events. Some events cause gravitational ripples. The gravitational ripples of events such as the colliding of black holes are big enough to measure and quite fast (frequencies of 0.01 Hz).

If I understand correctly even earth emits gravitational waves (due to it's orbit around the sun), and although the amplitude is minuscule compared to black holes the source is so much closer than the black holes (thank FSM for that).
The frequency is what separates the black hole gravitational waves form the waves of the earth. Earth has 0.0000003171 Hz (one vibration per year), black holes orbiting and colliding have a frequency of 0.01 Hz to a couple of 100 Hz. That difference is what makes the black hole waves detectable.
But yes, there is a lot of noise. That's wht LISA is meant for in space, where the most sources of noise (someone driving on a road, a researcher walking in the test facility and stuff like that. Everything that has mass and moves emits gravitational waves) are far away. The ones that are left are predictable (planets, the sun, nearby stars), can be used to check the speed of gravitational waves (since they coincide with a visible event) or are extremely rare.

Re:What about the speed of information?

[Anonymous Coward]

"if the sun vanished right now, it would take 8 minutes for the earth to stop orbiting and shoot off into space."...

Wouldn't it be instantanious?

Re:What about the speed of information?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you're in the quantum world. Entangled pairs affect each other instantaneously, regardless of distance. Welcome to the edge of theoretical physics. Things get weird here.

Re:What about the speed of information?

[Grishnakh]

It's an illustration of the definition of "magic", which is "any technology sufficiently advanced that the observer can't comprehend it and blames it on supernatural forces".

Re:What about the speed of information?

[Talderas]

Everything that has mass and moves emits gravitational waves) are far away. The ones that are left are predictable (planets, the sun, nearby stars), can be used to check the speed of gravitational waves (since they coincide with a visible event) or are extremely rare.

How would spacecraft affect this?

Re:What about the speed of information?

[shoor]

I only wish he had given more of the reasoning behind it, but I suppose it would have been too mathematical for a Nova program.

Re:What about the speed of information?

[tibit]

Last I heard it was supposedly a misconception, hmm. Fell free to prove me wrong citing a credible paper with experimental results that shows this effect.

Re:What about the speed of information?

[stanlyb]

If i throw a ball and it hits your head, does that means that every time i throw a ball it will hit your head???
I hope you do understand the comparison.

Re:What about the speed of information?

[Neil Boekend]

A spacecraft has mass and it moves, so it does generate gravitational waves. But space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
The result of this mind-bogging size is that most objects are quite far away. Spacecrafts are light (compared to planets) so they emit only a small wave. If the spaceship is also far away then this means the effective noise of it will be minuscule.
Besides, the locations of all spaceships in our solar system are quite known. If you know the mass, location and speed then some geniuses can calculate the wave it should generate (I can't).

Unless you are talking about alien spaceships. If such a spaceship would travel close enough to LISA then it could probably be detected. Maybe the aliens will be curious as to why we are positioning some weird ass satellites at the exact points of an equilateral triangle with arms of 5,000,000 km.

Re:What about the speed of information?

[Anonymous Coward]

Invalid analogy. It's obvious you do not understand the reason.

Did you take any science courses at all?

[EvolutionInAction]

What. The. Hell. This is not profound. This is trivial.
Anybody that took any science classes knows that the equations work fine as long as v != c. Just like I can get negative frequencies out of a fourier transform. The math works, but that doesn't mean I have actual, physical negative frequencies.

Re:Did you take any science courses at all?

[ColdWetDog]

What? You've never felt a negative vibe before?

Re:Did you take any science courses at all?

[BiggerIsBetter]

Depends... What's your definition of a negative frequency? A frequency out of phase with a positive one might qualify. I'm pretty sure you can make one of those... and Ars Technica had an article on negative frequency photons a while back too.

Re:Did you take any science courses at all?

[EvolutionInAction]

When you use a fourier transform to put a signal into frequency domain you end up with positive/negative components. If you then bandshift, the negative component becomes positive and will actually exist when broadcast. But only the positive part is actually a physical thing. It's... weird.
But you know what I mean. All the equations of motion work if we negative mass, but that alone isn't any reason to think that negative mass exists. Was that a better example?

Re:Did you take any science courses at all?

[Longjmp]

The math works, but that doesn't mean I have actual, physical negative frequencies.

Exactly. Two more simple examples:
1st: Pythagoras
a^2 + b^2 = c^2. Let a = 3 and b = 4.
Which leads to c^2 = 25, result is +5... Not quite: (and congrats to those who could follow without a calculator ;-)
There are two results, +5 and -5 mathematically, however, only one, +5, makes sense in a physical world, since there is no negative length.

2nd: Give me a few (hundred?) years and I'll come up with a mathematical model where the sun, planets and the rest of the universe is circling around the earth.
It wouldn't make sense whatsoever, but mathematically it still would be true.

Re:Did you take any science courses at all?

[Jamu]

Exactly what I thought, along with why the f' is this news? It's been known about since the publication of Special Relativity over 100 years ago, and certainly before we started calling them tachyons, around 50 years ago.

Re:Did you take any science courses at all?

[DriedClexler]

Isn't a negative frequency just the wave flipped about an axis (or perhaps unchanged)?

cos (-w t) = cos (w t)
sin (-w t) = -sin(w t)

Did you maybe mean imaginary frequencies?

Re:Did you take any science courses at all?

[stanlyb]

Exactly, having a model proves nothing. And who says that the current model is actually the true one???

Re:Did you take any science courses at all?

[buswolley]

Can there be a consistent 'mirror existence' where all such examples do have applicable meaning?

Re:Did you take any science courses at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole concept of negative numbers is simply a human mathematical construct. Negative temperatures are only negative because of an arbitrary choice of where to place the 0 point. In your example, the -5 simply represents the side of a triangle measured in the opposite direction. There's no such thing as negative weight or pressure, and negative speed is simply telling you that you measured the wrong direction.

Re:Did you take any science courses at all?

[Longjmp]

You are confusing units (and vectors) with math and distances

Re:Did you take any science courses at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-xSrbCDC2bP8/T-iuQrQdPsI/AAAAAAAAEao/z4Bxcu0dHXw/s1600/a_winner_is_you_1024.jpg

Re:Did you take any science courses at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

he math works, but that doesn't mean I have actual, physical negative frequencies.

Well, these are mathematicians. Enough said. ;)

And yes, in science department there are always jokes about mathematicians vs rest. Math is not really a part of science. Math is a (very important) tool used by science. There are no math theories - there are theorems. There are no doubt in math circles, everything is proven to be true. There is nothing proven in science, it is only observed. etc. etc.

Mathematicians may find some interesting things while investigating math used in physical sciences. But almost all of it just remains interesting, in the math sense.

Re:Did you take any science courses at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is why you use a Laplace transform.

Re:Did you take any science courses at all?

[EvolutionInAction]

Not unless I've forgotten more from my signals courses than I thought. If you use a fourier transform, your independent variable becomes w. w=2pi*f. You have positive w and negative w, but only positive w can be broadcast.

Re:Did you take any science courses at all?

[Longjmp]

Can there be a consistent 'mirror existence' where all such examples do have applicable meaning?

Short answer: no, since in their world our -5 would be their +5 (and vice versa).

Long answer: you are talking about parallel universe(s) which could exist in a mathematical model.
However there is no way we can prove or disprove the existence of such a world, the same way we cannot know what happened before the "big bang" or what's outside of our universe.

Re:Did you take any science courses at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

Doing this is simple enough that I've seen it assigned as a homework problem in even high-level undergraduate courses.

Re:Did you take any science courses at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

I had no idea the solar system was the entire universe.

Re:Did you take any science courses at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

All the equations of motion work if we negative mass, but that alone isn't any reason to think that negative mass exists. Was that a better example?

Though, isn't the fact that all the equations worked out behind successfully predicting the positron?

Re:Did you take any science courses at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

2nd: Give me a few (hundred?) years and I'll come up with a mathematical model where the sun, planets and the rest of the universe is circling around the earth.
It wouldn't make sense whatsoever, but mathematically it still would be true.

Mathematically, the Ptolemaic, Copernican, Tychonic, and classical models of the solar system are all correct: add enough epicycles to a circular orbit and you get an elliptical orbit, or in the case of the Ptolemaic system, the composition of two elliptical orbits. In all four cases, it's simple enough to extend the system to encompass the entire universe.

Re:Did you take any science courses at all?

[Longjmp]

thanks for proving my sig ;-)

Re:Did you take any science courses at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

When you use a fourier transform to put a signal into frequency domain you end up with positive/negative components. If you then bandshift, the negative component becomes positive and will actually exist when broadcast. But only the positive part is actually a physical thing. It's... weird.

This is one interpretation, and taught by some professors who think students can handle weirdness better than complex arithmetic, but it's much more elegant to deal in complex signals, where the negative- and positive-frequency elements are conjugates and sum to exactly the real signal.

Once you understand this, Fourier transforms will stop being magic crap and start making sense.

Re:Did you take any science courses at all?

[tbird81]

I took Christian Science courses, you insensitive clod.

Re:Did you take any science courses at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not unless I've forgotten more from my signals courses than I thought. If you use a fourier transform, your independent variable becomes w. w=2pi*f. You have positive w and negative w, but only positive w can be broadcast.

Either you have forgotten, or your signals course sucked. Ever notice the magnitude misses by factor 0.5 when you treat it that way? It's because real signal at w is sum of F(jw)*e(jwt) and F(-jw)*e(-jwt), which imaginary (aka Q, quadrature) component sums to zero, and real (aka I, in-phase) component sums to a sinusoid. You'll never really grok heterodynes, I-Q syntheesis, QAM, etc. until you get past sines and cosines and learn to think in phasors.

Re:Did you take any science courses at all?

[Nivag064]

The positron was predicted because the equation of the electron had 2 solutions of opposite sign - a few years later the positron was actually discovered.

So when any mathematics suggestions solutions that have not been found yet, then physicists are interested, but they fairly carefully consider if the solutions are possible - sometimes fundamental assumptions need to be carefully re-examined.

Re:Did you take any science courses at all?

[NeutronCowboy]

It's as profound as the realization that just mathematically speaking, a positron is just an electron traveling backwards in time. I.e., it's games with roots, squares, multiplying with -1, etc.

It's actually not even new. We covered that in Physics in college. It was an interesting exercise, and, just like the positron versus electron discussion, demonstrated that just because an equation is possible doesn't mean it has any useful application in the real world.

In short: mathematicians need to discover that they aren't physicists, and that while math is necessary for physics, it is not the same.

Re:Did you take any science courses at all?

[hankwang]

When you use a fourier transform to put a signal into frequency domain you end up with positive/negative components.

That's more a mathematical artifact of using a complex-valued Fourier transform for real-valued signals; the amplitudes of the positive and negative components are each other's complex conjugate, so there is not really any information in the negative half of the spectrum. For real-valued signals, you can write the Fourier transform in terms of sines and cosines, with only positive frequencies. It's just that it's more work to write it like that.

Re:Did you take any science courses at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

-5 does have a meaning in the physical world. Negative numbers are usually a sign that you were assuming the wrong direction (in this case to measure the length of the edge of your triangle)

The same holds for negative speeds, you're simply driving in the other direction that you were assuming..

Re:Did you take any science courses at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

Over a century of continuous experiments to the highest precision we can manage?

Of course, that's only proof that the current model is REALLY FUCKING CLOSE, not proof that it is "true" (a scientifically meaningless term anyway).

Re:Did you take any science courses at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

Jokes on you, I turned the transmitter in the opposite direction and now I have negative frequencies.
Yeah.

Re:Did you take any science courses at all?

[Provocateur]

"I got a baaad feeling about this."

"You always say that!"

Re:Did you take any science courses at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect that the main problem is that the equations are all incomplete. For convenience or laziness the mathematicians don't put in the function that causes the whole equation to become undefined when the numbers take on values that cause the equation to not reflect reality. Of course defining that function is essentially what science is all about.

Re:Did you take any science courses at all?

[chihowa]

All the equations of motion work if we negative mass, but that alone isn't any reason to think that negative mass exists. Was that a better example?

Though, isn't the fact that all the equations worked out behind successfully predicting the positron?

The positron has positive mass. Antimatter has the same mass as normal matter, but opposite charge. And positrons and other forms of antimatter are regularly observed. PET scanners, for example, (positron emission tomography) use matter-antimatter (positron-electron) annihilation reactions for medical imaging.

Re:Did you take any science courses at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://xkcd.com/435/

And, no. Most of the interesting things discovered while investigating Math, have real-world applications. Some of those applications take quite a while to be discovered, or are *incredibly* domain-specific, but they're there.

Some of them currently have no practical application other than being Math. Some of them don't even have *imagined* applications yet, but that could change at any point in the future.

Mathematics is the means by which we model the universe. Physics, and the other hard sciences, are the means by which we test that model.

Infinite velocity

[Antony T Curtis]

Some parts make sense: At infinite velocity, a particle would necessarily pass through every point in the universe. The particle must have zero mass otherwise the entire universe would collapse into a singularity exceedingly quickly as the mass of the universe becomes effectively infinite.

Just a random thought.

Re:Infinite velocity

[Prof.Phreak]

...the whole universe could be just 1 particle moving at infinite velocity, and the visible universe (e.g. us), is just that single infinite velocity particle interfering with itself :-/

Re:Infinite velocity

[buswolley]

I really don't know the math but two probably dumb questions.. 1: Would the relative velocity between an object going slower than c and an object going faster than c be restricted by c somehow? 2: Given the suggestion that objects lose mass the faster they go on the other side of c, is it possible for two objects to have identical mass, but be going wildly different speeds? ..one going faster than c, and the other slower than c?

Re:Infinite velocity

[GrahamCox]

At infinite velocity, a particle would necessarily pass through every point in the universe.

Nah, you're thinking of the Infinite Improbability Drive. It beats all that tedious mucking about with faster-than-light equations.

Re:Infinite velocity

[stanlyb]

When you explain what MASS is, then you will have your answer. Good luck.

Re:Infinite velocity

[CapOblivious2010]

Some parts make sense: At infinite velocity, a particle would necessarily pass through every point in the universe.

Actually that happens at the speed of light: to a photon moving at the speed of light, time has stopped completely and the universe is forsehortened from a 3D volume to a 2D plane - so effectively the photon is at every point along it's path "at once", at least from it's point of view.

Re:Infinite velocity

[tibit]

Ta-da :)

Re:Infinite velocity

[Urza9814]

Sounds like Scott Adams' (guy who does Dilbert) book, God's Debris...
http://www.andrewsmcmeel.com/godsdebris/

Re:Infinite velocity

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would a particle moving at infinite velocity "necessarily" pass through every point in the universe, as opposed to through every point in a straight line?

Re:Infinite velocity

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the thing I HATED about Star Trek so damn much.

Hey guys, warp 10 is the fastest. Hey, that planet just chucked us away at speeds past warp 10.
Oh sup, we are the Borg, we can transwarp, suck it warp drive.
Oh but hey, we can make a silly little ship travel at INFINITE VELOCITY and exist in the entire universe at every point at the same time. Take THAT! Science, bitches.

Re:Infinite velocity

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy hell... That just blew my damn mind.

imaginary mass

[cathector]

have not RTFA,
but if you just let the mass become imaginary, the relativistic velocity equations work just fine.
the only singularity comes in when you're going at c.

Re:imaginary mass

[cb123]

If you just read the abstract to TFA you can see that the claim here is less novelty than the press release makes it sound like (the press overplays things - SHOCKER! ;-). They are really only presenting an alternate derivation without using mass of long-known results related to tachyonic physics and virtual particles and so forth.

Now, I am personally a bit dubious this is the first time the alternate derivation has been done, but I havne't read their particular approach. One would hope any reviewers assigned to the paper would have done reasonable due diligence/homework about the particulars (though sometimes that hope is in vain).

Re:imaginary mass

[cb123]

Whoops - that should have been "without using *imaginary* mass".

Time

[hemo_jr]

My question is what happens with time in an FTL regime? Speeds up? Slows down? Goes backwards?

Re:Time

[Prof.Phreak]

...also, is time chunky? does it interfere with itself kinda like light? Does space interfere with itself? How would such things manifest themselves in our observable universe?

Re:Time

[Anonymous Coward]

No, that's what would happen to time in a Romney regime, depending on the crowd he's speaking to.

Tachyons

[slew]

I don't think there is much new here, several tachyon papers have trodden down this road before (e.g., http://arxiv.org/pdf/1112.4187v2.pdf).
If they somehow have figure out how to extend the lorentz transform for v > c in 4 dimensional space (vs 6 dimensional space as asserted in the above reference paper to void imaginary distances), that would be something.

Unfortunatly, I haven't found a way around their paywall (yet) to see what they are up to...

Re:Tachyons

[buswolley]

How do journal fees support my research? While there is some cost to publishing, most of the labor is unpaid for by the publisher (reviewers and researchers). It would be better to publish online without a for profit company, and make it open access. Mild submission fees could be used to cover operating costs related to hosting.

Re:Tachyons

[DarwinSurvivor]

Says anonymous coward on a free website that posts links to other authors' content with summaries that are either 100% inaccurate or simply copy/pasted from the article's first paragraph...

Re:Tachyons

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone missed their medication this morning...

Re:Tachyons

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as I can tell there really isn't anything particularly novel about all this. Their equations introduce sinh/cosh/tanh into the solutions so it seems like they just rewired things under the hood such that 1=i and recreated the same thing as the well known imaginary mass tachyon work previously known.

Re:Tachyons

[AK Marc]

In most cases, taxes paid for more of that research than the paywall did/would. I've already paid for the research once, why should I pay again?

Re:Tachyons

[Anonymous Coward]

lol kill yourself

Re:Tachyons

[joe_frisch]

I haven't seen how any of these deal with the causality problem : if you move between two points travel faster than light in any frame and if relativistic frame in variance holds (darned well tested), you can reach your own past. It doesn't matter how you get between those points or if you do it in this or some other universe. One can probably write down the math for non-causal physics but I can't imagine what it would mean.

Re:Tachyons

[godrik]

Fuck you. That "paywall" helps to pay for research

Actually it does not.

When the paywall comes from a private publisher, none of the cost you pay actually fund research. Researchers in the loop of publishing (authors, reviewers, editors) receive no money from the publisher. The publishers pays some money to keep the journals running such as the printing/hosting cost, the copy editors, and some layout folks. But it mainly pays the publisher itself.

Printing/hosting cost is quite low nowadays and it could very easily be absorbed within the universities and libraries budget. Copy editing is only midly useful, but that could be taken care of at the university level as well. Layout folks in editors are actually making a terrible job, I need to point out layout mistake often while the layout was correct in the version I had sent them.

What else are the publishers doing? They have some quite bad recommendation service nobody use (we actually wrote our own at http://theadvisor.osu.edu/ ). Seriously, what else are they doing?

When the publisher is a scientific entity such as IEEE and ACM, the money does not really fund research as well. They have some travel awards for student sometimes, but that pretty much it. The money is also used to bootstrap some conferences, which is useful, but overall it could be covered in other ways.

Seriously, they are sucking funds out of research, we would be better without them.

PS: most of my publications are available on arxiv or on my website.

Re:Tachyons

[godrik]

You could redirect the saving you make from not payaing the publishers to fund a distributed service within universities' library. Seriously, how much is needed. A few machines to store meta data and the articles and a bittorrent tracker. Then connect all universities library together on these trackers, et voila, you have the cheapest super resiliant system ever.

Re:Tachyons

[SecurityGuy]

I used to work in research. I'm on ~10 or so papers. Not one thin dime of that money went into the research we did. Every penny of it was paid by taxpayers in the form of NIH grants, or private drug companies.

Not that I'm supporting bypassing the paywall, but your theory that the money supports research is a load of crap.

Re:Tachyons

[Anonymous Coward]

I just dont know how it will change...

Re:Tachyons

[Anonymous Coward]

When do I get my kickbacks from Elsevier? Oh wait, you clearly have no idea how academic publishing works.

Re:Tachyons

[Anonymous Coward]

For once, due to reasons you just described, I actually believe you might have met a real troll instead of "just a fucking idiot". Sadly, these are getting rare on ./ these days. So hooray for that. Now, dear GPP, can we have templates, page-widening posts and links to shock sites back? :)

Summary repeats common misconception

[Anonymous Coward]

The Christian Science Monitor reports that despite an apparent prohibition on faster-than-light travel by Einstein's theory of special relativity,

There was never any such prohibition or restriction. The prohibition is on as-fast-as-light-in-a-vacuum travel.

Re:Summary repeats common misconception

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually there is. Sublight particles can't accelerate to the speed of light and you can't go faster than the speed of light. So says the Special Theory of Relativity. Of course it's wrong, but that's according to the current flawed understanding of particle physics.

so basically

[z3alot]

he postulated tachyons and their properties again?

Now take it a step further

[Anonymous Coward]

Hill and Cox's equations suggest, for example, that as a spaceship traveling at super-light speeds accelerated faster and faster, it would lose more and more mass, until at infinite velocity, its mass became zero.

What happens above infinite velocity?

Re:Now take it a step further

[CapOblivious2010]

As Buzz Lightyear - he's been beyond infinity!

Re:Now take it a step further

[arkane1234]

dont ya love that?
even the term 'infinite' being used as a measurement is ridiculous. About as ridiculous as multiple universes, or infinite space. all three are a divide by zero, in my book.

Re:Now take it a step further

[buswolley]

or alternatively what happens at zero (relative) velocity? Making a wild no-stakes speculation, the ultimate truth will turn out to be that every than c particle with identical difference of velocity from c. Speeding one particle up, slows the other particle to conserve energy. lol orrrrrr ha ha ha maybe the other particle always has identical mass...and velocities change to conserve energy really...the problem with me reading this stuff is I get to have fun pondering, but I will never get a chance to really know what I am talking about, given career demands..

Re:Now take it a step further

[buswolley]

crap sorry about the bold

The beauty of settled science

[DriedClexler]

I, for one, am sick of science "breakthrough" reporting like this. Oooh, we understand physics past the speed of light now!

Stop for a second. Do you even understand the current state of settled science on General Relativity? Do you appreciate the problems that existed in pre-GR, and how Einstein's equations were such a beautiful, innovative solution to them? Have you connected it to your general understanding of science and astronomical observation? How much would you have needed to be told to connect the rest of the dots yourself?

And yet people are so excited about the mere possibility of passing the next hurdle.

Well, dispense with chasing these bleeding edge results that you barely understand the pre-requisites for. Grab a good textbook, and just see if you can understand and appreciate the physics that physicists don't argue about anymore. You'll actually learn something.

(Too lazy to credit the article that gave me this insight.. Just google the subject.)

Re:Christian Science

[Farmer Tim]

No, it's the Christian Science Monitor. How are Christians supposed to know what to get upset about next if science isn't being monitored?

Tesla

[theedgeofoblivious]

Didn't Tesla believe that as something moved faster it would lose mass and that things could move faster than the speed of light?

If this story turned out to be true, that would be a huge victory for Tesla.

the double slit experiment

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment

information traveling faster than the speed of light.

Re:the double slit experiment

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. Information hasn't traveled faster than light.

Re:the double slit experiment

[Longjmp]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment

Personally, I'd prefer the double slut experiment.

Re:First post!

[bill_mcgonigle]

Every couch potato has already verified that at zero velocity, mass becomes infinite.

Tag: speedoflight

[arielCo]

So that's his secret! Not our yellow sun, not the cape ... it's SPEEDO FLIGHT !!

Re:Tag: speedoflight

[dkleinsc]

No, not Speedos. Buy Lightspeed Briefs!

There is only one speed in the universe

[Anonymous Coward]

From what I've read, there is only one speed in the universe, which is the speed of light. Velocity can be thought of as a fourth dimensional vector, including the three dimensions of space and the dimension of time. Speed is the length of the vector, which is constant. When one goes faster in space, one moves slower in time, but the length of the vector remains the same.

Dear Hugh Pickens,

[heptapod]

One link is necessary for Slashdot. Slashdot isn't Wikipedia.

After reading the first sentences of your submissions and seeing five different links, I give up and go to reddit for the actual story. You're doing Slashdot a disservice.

Go create your own blog with a feed.

Thank you.

There is only one speed: c

[qbitslayer]

'The theory we've come up with is simply for velocities greater than the speed of light.' In effect, the singularity at the speed of light divides the universe into two: a world where everything moves slower than the speed of light, and a world where everything moves faster.

Actually, the exact opposite is the truth: nothing can move faster or slower than c. It is an illusion that objects move slower than c. Motion is discrete and consists of discrete jumps at c interspersed with huge numbers of discrete wait periods. This is true regardless of how smooth you think motion is. Why is c the only possible speed? For two reasons:

Firstly, a time dimension is illogical. Why? Because a time dimension makes motion impossible? Why? Because it is self-referential. This is the reason that Karl Popper compared Einstein to Parmenides and called spacetime, "Einstein's block universe in which nothing happens. Surprise! So in order for an object to move at different speeds, nature would have to calculate temporal intervals, which is impossible.

Second, the universe is necessarily discrete. Why? Because a continuous universe would lead to an infinite regress.

Read Physics: The Problem with Motion for more if you're interested. Believe me, you don't understand motion especially if you think you do. The truth is weirder than fiction.

Re:There is only one speed: c

[MightyMartian]

Relativity does not state that something cannot move faster than c says you cannot accelerate to c.

And I cannot sort out why anyone interested in SR, GR, QM or physics in general would read Popper.

Re:There is only one speed: c

[qbitslayer]

Popper understood relativity better than Einstein. He understood why nothing could move in spacetime. Einstein apparently never realized this. Or if he did, he kept quiet about it. Otherwise, most people would have figured out that there is no such thing as bodies moving along their geodesics in spacetime. Just saying. Take it or leave it.

Re:There is only one speed: c

[qbitslayer]

You retard.

LOL. That's funny and I need the humor. Thank you.

Re:There is only one speed: c

[Dunbal]

At first I wondered why someone called you a retard. Then I read your blog. I think the whole universe is just a little bit dumber since you wrote it. I guess no one can force you to understand the universe. The un-nerving part is that you try to induce others into error. I wonder what happened to you that you have such a desire to be believed. Why don't you put the ground-work in and educate yourself and try to make real discoveries about the myriad things that are still left to be discovered, instead of making up hokum about very basic, verifiable observations that flawlessly predict quite a number of things and upon which a great deal of other observations rely.

Re:There is only one speed: c

[qbitslayer]

Thank you for your 2-cents.

Re:There is only one speed: c

[aquabat]

I dunno, Einstein's theory seems to be pretty useful for explaining and predicting a lot of things we experience. It explains everything Newton does, plus some things tat Newton can not. What things does Popper predict accurately that Einstein does not? In what ways is his theory simpler and more elegant than Special and General Relativity?

Re:There is only one speed: c

[Atzanteol]

Holy hell I wish I'd read your comment before his blog. Newton was wrong, Einstein was a tool, nobody knows how the universe works but me...

Here's a thought - if you have to tell people you're not a crank, well, you probably are.

Re:There is only one speed: c

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are still interested in learning more, I've found a great collection of scientific research here! here!

Re:There is only one speed: c

[Anonymous Coward]

Two questions:

- How fast are we going? The earth is spinning around the sun, the sun around the galaxy, the galaxy around somthing else (probably).. put it together, and we're going a good fraction of c now, right? Is whatever number that is relevant at all?
- If it's the relative speed that matters, aren't we going the speed of light, relative to light? Eg a photon thinks it's stationary, and sees us wiz by at c, so are we going the speed of light ourselves? I know this is wrong, but why?

Re:There is only one speed: c

[fredprado]

Short answer: in absolutely nothing. Do not expect miracles from a philosopher with superficial knowledge of physics.

Re:There is only one speed: c

[bondsbw]

Not that I think his blog is even worth the time to debunk...

But one basic tenet of science is the verification of previous discoveries. I'm glad there are people making new discoveries, but they don't mean much unless others pore over the data and verify it, and others come to the same conclusion by applying the same or similar experiments.

And we should always question how far our experimental results verify the hypothesis in question. This is what happened with Newton. Experimental results verified his theories to the extent that mattered at the time, but the results didn't hold up to interpolation to very large speeds.

So... I disagree that everyone should look to the unexplored domains for discoveries. Some discoveries can be found in scrutinizing the discoveries that have already been made.

Re:There is only one speed: c

[DahGhostfacedFiddlah]

How fast are we going?
Short answer: We have no idea. We don't know what "stopped" looks like, so we can't possibly say how fast we are going compared to "stopped". We can see that we move at X compared to the sun, and Y compared to the galactic core, but since they're in motion as well, ...well, we have no idea how "fast we are going".

Aren't we going the speed of light, relative to light?
Yeeesssss? Sort of? For anything other than light, the answer is straightforward. If we accelerate an electron to 99% the speed of light, that electron behaves exactly as if it were sitting still, and we were the ones moving towards it at 99% the speed of light.

But once we start talking about photons, and moving at 100% the speed of light, things sort of break down. Photons are fundamentally different from us in that they travel at C and have no mass. That lack of mass may mean that the two situations (us moving towards a photon at C vs a photon moving towards us) may not be symmetrical. But I honestly have no idea - I'm quite out of my depth at this point.

Re:There is only one speed: c

[Anonymous Coward]

Obligatory: http://xkcd.com/675/

Re:There is only one speed: c

[ranpel]

Actually, if I'm not mistaken, that was a lot of sense. Why limit yourself to just two? That shit adds up quick.

Re:There is only one speed: c

[Artifakt]

Longer answer is, Quantum Mechanics and Relativity don't really fit together. One way to get around this is to impose a minimum amount of various quantities in relativity. If you set the minimum quantum of velocity all the way up to c, that's an admittedly extreme example of such reconciliation. The point is, to get a unified theory, either you take just about all the quantization out of quantum mechanics, or you add quite a bit of quantization to relativity.

          Minkowski was the guy who showed Einstein that special relativity implied that the geometry of the universe was 4 dimensional. At first, Einstein though that Minkowski was just doing an interesting math trick, but he soon decided that the real shape of space was a 4 dimensional inseperable space-time. Einstein credited Minkowski's work with showing him the first steps to bridge the gap from Special to General Relativity. Unfortunately, Minkowski died in 1909, just three years after he started corresponding with Einstein on Spec. R. . The Minkowski model really is 'static' and 'blocklike' and nothing can really said to be happening, and that's the first place Popper got the idea from. Einstein himself later (1940's-50's) spent lots of time talking to Godel about just that, and if Popper was just a 'philosopher with superficial knowledge of physics', Godel was just the mathematician who Einstein went to when the math got really tough, and who had ready access to the then greatest living physicist in turn. Some of what Godel developed from General Relativity gives abstract geometric models of the whole universe which aren't "Static Block-like", but they also allow for the existence of time travel via 'closed time-like curves'. Godel's interpretation came just shortly before he published mathematical proofs of the existence of God and the Afterlife, and he later died basically from refusing to eat for fear he was being poisoned. Personally, I agree more with Godel's interpretation of the geometry of the whole universe than with Minkowski's, but given all the facts, I'm not going to dismiss Popper (and certainly not Minkowski) as easily as some people here are.

Re:There is only one speed: c

[Anonymous Coward]

You should read his articles on programming. He seems to be under the impression that the answer to all of the problems of programming large scale complex systems is to switch from current programming models to something that seems to remarkably resemble verilog in its programming model. Which is to say, it's even harder to write large complex systems in than current models.

Re:There is only one speed: c

[Anonymous Coward]

Godel's interpretation came just shortly before he published mathematical proofs of the existence of God and the Afterlife

Lol...

Re:There is only one speed: c

[EJB]

Actually, photos do have an effective mass (=relativistic mass). You could say that they have no rest-mass, though.
Photos are affected by gravity - light bends around heavy stars, for example: the gravity lens effect.

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/ParticleAndNuclear/photon_mass.html

Re:There is only one speed: c

[wonkey_monkey]

Disclaimer: the following is just how I try to visualise spacetime and relativity, and is probably full of mistakes.

and we're going a good fraction of c now, right? Is whatever number that is relevant at all?

The bit you have to remember is, "a good fraction of c relative to what?" There is no velocity except that which you can measure against some other, arbitrary, object/frame of reference.

- How fast are we going?

We, like everything else in the universe, could be considered to be travelling at the speed of light - into the future. If you were to look a comet racing past at 0.1c through space, consider that the remainder of its (relative) velocity is in the direction of time.

Imagine you and a friend are on a 2d grid, and everyone travels at a set speed - 1 unit per second. If your friend is moving horizontally away from you at a speed of 0.707 units per second, you know that he must be moving vertically away from (or towards) you at 0.707 units per second in order for his total velocity to be 1 unit per second.

Imagine you and your friend starting out at (0,0). The plan is for you to move straight up the y-axis and for him to go diagonally sideways to (0.707,0.707), then back towards you diagonally - he won't meet you, because you'll be further ahead, but if you imagine that your line of travel is a timeline, he'll intersect your timeline at (0,1.414) - but at this point his timeline will be longer than yours. This is a sort of inverse twin paradox - your friend has travelled further than you at this point, even though he was travelling at the same speed, so he's older at this point on his timeline than you are.

The reason the twin paradox is the other way around is because time has this funky inverse relationship with space - like rotating a square but having it collapse down on you instead.

Alternatively, think of space and time like a banana. Then forget that, because it's nothing like that.

Re:There is only one speed: c

[Anonymous Coward]

In about 1984 when I was a physics undergraduate at Imperial College Karl Popper came to give a lecture. I recall with some mirth how the lecturers were all lined up behind him, smirking and shaking their heads. Among those lecturers were Tom Kibble, co-theorizer of the Higgs Boson, and Chris Isham.

Re:There is only one speed: c

[famebait]

You should team up with this guy..

Re:There is only one speed: c

[serviscope_minor]

At first I wondered why someone called you a retard. Then I read your blog. I think the whole universe is just a little bit dumber since you wrote it.

No you don't understand! Now I've read that, I've been deeply enlightned. Don't you see it? The world is a 4-D lattice. That meshes so prefectly with the idea of a time cube, which could only work if the universe was a cubic lattice.

Once the ivory tower pyhsicists are ejected when the revolution comes, we will finally be able to get FTL travel and unlimited free energy. Obviously you're so locked into the status quo being propagated that you can't see how biased you've become. I sent my treatise on this to Nature, Science, New Scientist and Scientific American. Naturally such a piece could not get past "peer" review becuase it is not sent out to my peers, but to my "peers" who are ivory tower types so invested in promoting and pushing the liberal-fundementalist manifesto that they would refuse to acept even the possibility that they are fools and so are willfuly blind to upstarts from outside who will overturn their cushy jobs and cast them out onto the street where they belong.

Naturally, the liberal-fnudementalist propaganda has infested the government and such instutuins such as the patent office as my machine based on magnets and heat pumps and lots of springs (I wont tell you the details since the liberalist-mideast oil cartel wishes to suppress this) to tap into the energy grid was rejected from the patent office for being a perpetual motion machine. Which is typical liberal propaganda as there is no such thing, but it does extract unlimited energy from the grid. The free market will eventually succeed where the liberal-communist-oil-energy-fundemtnealists has failed, but only eventually. I am currently seeking investment from individuals and companies wo understand the status quo and who wish t be part of a briter future with the ivory towers burned. So, I a currently seeking investment in this revolutionary technology. Because of the libero-communo consipracy poses a real danger to this, I will aturally invest 50% of raised funds in armaments to defend my compound in rural Montana in order to protect your investment.

(invoke poe)

Re:There is only one speed: c

[arth1]

Actually, photos do have an effective mass

Yes, moving all my wife's photos taught me that.

Photos are affected by gravity

Indeed, and they are particularly attracted to big toes.

Re:There is only one speed: c

[sFurbo]

Short answer: We have no idea. We don't know what "stopped" looks like, so we can't possibly say how fast we are going compared to "stopped". We can see that we move at X compared to the sun, and Y compared to the galactic core, but since they're in motion as well, ...well, we have no idea how "fast we are going".

Aren't we going the speed of light, relative to light?

Doesn't the red- and blueshift of the CMB tell us something like the total velocity of the earth?

Re:There is only one speed: c

[Anonymous Coward]

The next question is: do digital photos have mass? We know Polaroids do.

Re:There is only one speed: c

[dywolf]

I thought the bending wasnt so much because they have a mass to be deflected by gravitational forces, but rather the warping of space-time itself (the "gravity well") causes what is a linear path from the perspective of the photon itself to be a bent path to us observing on the outside.

Re:There is only one speed: c

[bigrockpeltr]

I'm not a crank, my mother had me tested!

Re:There is only one speed: c

[DahGhostfacedFiddlah]

If you want to take the CMB as a reference point, then you can. But there's no reason to think the CMB isn't moving at its own velocity compared to "stopped"...if there even is such a thing as "stopped".

Re:There is only one speed: c

[DahGhostfacedFiddlah]

I was using "mass" as shorthand for "rest mass", for which I am deeply, deeply sorry. You are of course correct.

But I did get hung up on the question of whether or not particles with mass have infinite mass at C, and what that would mean to a photon moving towards them. Is the "infinite mass" strictly in terms of gravitational pull, or energy required to change velocity, or would this "infinite mass" also cause increased spacetime curvature?

That last bit feels wrong. And either it's wrong, or there's a good reason we can't model a photon standing still while we rush towards it at C. If we could, all photons would immediately become trapped by the infinite gravity well of the nearest mass.

Re:There is only one speed: c

[Quirkz]

No, not at all. It tells us the relative velocity of the red- and blue-shifted object compared to our own velocity, but it's only a comparison.

Re:There is only one speed: c

[leonardluen]

The importance of the big bang isn't so much that it created the universe or matter. the real importance is that it made it move.

I agree there is a lack of understanding of motion, but your kook has it more wrong than most. there are a lot of issues with his argument, but if you really read it you will see he doesn't really even believe in a truly discrete universe. more like a continuous universe with dimples the particles like to rest in. his explanation that particles need to accelerate and decelerate to jump between discrete locations is laughable and shows that he is really just trying to extrapolate his idea of a discrete universe to a continues universe. which brings us back to the infinite regression you seem to be so against. his idea of there only being acceleration just plain doesn't work.

please explain how a continues universe leads to infinite regression? and what is wrong with infinite regression anyway?

oh look i can post blogs from random kooks also, just because they are on the internet doesn't make it a valid source, or even make sense...

Re:There is only one speed: c

[fredprado]

I, on the other hand, will dismiss anyone that tries to write about something that he doesn't have a clue about, like you.

Re:There is only one speed: c

[MightyMartian]

Popper was full of crap. He didn't understand Relativity. While he certainly was entirely a rubbish merchant, on this count, as on others, he had no idea what he was talking about.

Re:There is only one speed: c

[leonardluen]

yes actually digital photos do have mass.
electrons have mass, so that means 1's are heavier than 0's

also for magnetic storage a few years ago, i believe it was IBM (and there as a slashdot article about it, i leave it up to someone else to find it if they want), calculated the theoretical minimum change in mass to change a magnetic bit. from 1 to 0. since E=mc^2 it means that there is a difference in mass between a 1 and a 0 on a hard drive.

so yes, digital photos, even if you only count the bits and don't include the storage media, have mass.
 

Re:There is only one speed: c

[the biologist]

I suspect part of the answer relates to time dilation. As a photon is traveling at the speed of light, from its perspective time has stopped.

Re:There is only one speed: c

[DahGhostfacedFiddlah]

Yeah - the question itself seems to lend itself to a lot of inconsistencies. For instance, what is a "photon at rest", since a photon is described in the context of changing EM fields, which produces a very definite value (c) as to its velocity.

As you say, maybe the photon does "see" an infinite mass, but because we're considering it to be at rest, it has zero mass (by definition, a photon has zero rest mass), so it doesn't actually experience any gravity?

Or maybe the question itself is nonsense to someone who knows what they're talking about :)

Re:There is only one speed: c

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, photos do have an effective mass (=relativistic mass). You could say that they have no rest-mass, though.
Photos are affected by gravity

Old paper photos are definately affected by gravity, not sure about the newer digital ones though. I suppose they will have some mass due to the energy associated with their storeage, but I'm not sure. I wonder how much Facebook weighes?

Re:There is only one speed: c

[rant64]

Quick! Someone update the Standard Model!

Re:There is only one speed: c

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't necessarily say that 1s are 'heavier' than 0s until you determine how the information is encoded.

If a 1 is encoded as a negative charge, then, yes, 1s are 'heavier'.
If, however, a 0 is encoded as a negative charge, then 0s are, in fact, 'heavier'.

Re:There is only one speed: c

[sFurbo]

How would that be? Isn't the CMB representative of the material 300.000 years after the Big Bang? If it is, doesn't conservation of momentum mean that movement relative to that must be movement relative to the average mass at the Big Bang, and as such, of the universe?

Re:There is only one speed: c

[DahGhostfacedFiddlah]

Hmm - maybe you should rephrase the question. I'm not sure what you're getting at.

I disagree with the idea that the Big Bang should be chosen as the "official" reference frame, but I don't want to argue that point. If we assume that the sum of the CMB is "stopped", that fact doesn't really lead to any new knowledge.

If I'm travelling at 0.8c compared to the sun, then I will be slowed down by a factor of 0.6 - when viewed from the sun. This fact doesn't change whether the frame of reference is Earth, the CMB, or anything else.

So given the fact that experiments come out the same regardless of the "official" frame of reference, I really don't see the point of just arbitrarily assigning the CMB this special status - except maybe as some sort of interstellar navigational standard. Certainly not for any scientific reasons.

Re:There is only one speed: c

[sFurbo]

In that case, the answer to "how fast are we going?" is that there is no answer, as the question is not meaningful. My question was merely meant as a way to make the question meaningful, and the inertial frame of reference of the center of mass of the universe seems like the most universal frame of reference, given that all inertial frames of reference are equally good from a physics point of view.

you just were hacked

[Anonymous Coward]

and im reading your article , so fuck you.....
have a nice day....and your full a shit with that math btw..

Another article, wonder if they might be related?

[Bomarc]

There is another article ... Time-twisting test stuck in limbo that I read about, and I was wondering if the articles might be related - or the experiment might be related to this article and they didn't know about the relationship?

Did you take any science courses at all?

[b4dc0d3r]

You don't need years, just minutes. Ptolemaic system already did it. In fact, there are working physical models which demonstrate the relative positions of planets given a geocentric alignment.

Good Fuck, did you not consider that someone else might have done this in the thousands of years since we have had enlightened beings on our planet? Ptolemy based his work on the Babylonians.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocentric_model

Somewhere around the discovery of the functions of the Antikythera Mechanism, slashdot had a link to a website where you could switch between a geo- vs helio- centric view of the solar system, an animation which displayed what was happening at that moment in time. I could not find it in time for apathy to set in, Bing it if you feel the need.

Here's a picture for you to start with, undoubtedly created from a model

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Geoz_wb_en.svg&page=1

Could all the energy in the universe surpass c?

[elucido]

If it cannot, then it's impossible to ever surpass the speed of light because the amount of energy in the universe is definitely finite and it's unchangeable.

Re:Could all the energy in the universe surpass c?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you can extract the energy of a massive particle already moving faster than c in order to accelerate some other particle past c.

Re:Could all the energy in the universe surpass c?

[oreaq]

the amount of energy in the universe is definitely finite

Why?

Re:Could all the energy in the universe surpass c?

[Phase Shifter]

Going faster than c requires imaginary mass, if I recall my equations correctly. Of course, this article MAY have done something different than the basic playing with numbers everyone does when they first look at the SR equations. But the hype they're using to entice people to pay for the article doesn't indicate it actually contains anything new, or anything you can't figure out on your own with a standard physics textbook and 30 seconds of time.
Now one thing I haven't ever done calculations for is collisions between superluminal and subluminal objects. That might be worth pondering during a few idle minutes this afternoon.

Re:Could all the energy in the universe surpass c?

[elucido]

Conservation of energy.

Re:Could all the energy in the universe surpass c?

[oreaq]

So? This only means that the amount of energy is constant. Why is it finite?

Star Wars Technical Commentaries

[nebular]

I remember reading something very similar in the Star Wars technical commentaries on hyperspace and the actions of tachyons if they had mass. Obviously they didn't go into the math, but if this is the first time anyone tried this it's very surprising

Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

Einstein never nothing could travel faster than light, he said nothing could accelerate faster than light. If start you off going faster than light, that's fine.

not what I understand...

[Ralph Spoilsport]

Hill and Cox's equations suggest, for example, that as a spaceship traveling at super-light speeds accelerated faster and faster, it would lose more and more mass, until at infinite velocity, its mass became zero.

AFAIK, all actual experiments point out that baryonic matter GAINS mass as it approaches C. Again, AFAIK, experiment always trumps theory, so explain to me how, after 100 years of confirmation, I some how missed the fact that matter loses mass as it gains velocity? I must have been on a vacation this passed century, someplace called REALITY.

Re:not what I understand...

[JK_the_Slacker]

It's an inversion of the math, somewhat like the absolute value of a number decreasing the closer you get to zero, no matter if you approach it from positive or negative infinity.

Re:not what I understand...

[rwise2112]

AFAIK, all actual experiments point out that baryonic matter GAINS mass as it approaches C. Again, AFAIK, experiment always trumps theory, so explain to me how, after 100 years of confirmation, I some how missed the fact that matter loses mass as it gains velocity? I must have been on a vacation this passed century, someplace called REALITY.

You missed the part where it specified super-light travel, which means above the speed of light. Basically the equation says mass increases up to the speed of light, at which it is infinite, and then decreases from there as speed increases. The problem is jumping over the c barrier.

Re:Causality

[Jarik C-Bol]

they literally said that, IN the summary. 'We are mathematicians, not physicists, so we've approached this problem from a theoretical mathematical perspective,'

I can break the sound barrier.

[khasim]

A bullet travels faster than sound.
The question was whether we could have manned flight faster than the speed of sound. Not whether we could break it.

As far as we know, nothing travels faster than light.

Re:I can break the sound barrier.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup - from a certain distance you won't hear what hit you.

Re:I can break the sound barrier.

[Anonymous Coward]

A bullet travels faster than sound.

the British had cannons that could break the sound barrier. In 1600.

Re:I can break the sound barrier.

[Boronx]

Whips have been breaking the sound barrier for longer than that even.

Re:I can break the sound barrier.

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as we know, nothing with mass travels faster than light in a vacuum. It's just that we have a hard time finding things that don't have mass that we can get going faster and faster until they break the speed of light. Or possibly fail to break the speed of light.

Re:I can break the sound barrier.

[philgp]

Back in the 80s, Peter Murphy broke the sound barrier in an armchair just by listening to Maxell audio cassettes.

A geocentric model already exists

[williamyf]

The math works, but that doesn't mean I have actual, physical negative frequencies.

2nd: Give me a few (hundred?) years and I'll come up with a mathematical model where the sun, planets and the rest of the universe is circling around the earth.

It wouldn't make sense whatsoever, but mathematically it still would be true.

...No need to waste many years of your life coming up with a mathematical model. The greeks did it "a few" centuries ago (in the 2d century AD, to be a tad more precise).

More info here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocentrism

Re:A geocentric model already exists

[Longjmp]

nit-picking: You are right about planets, but what about our galaxy?
Anyway, moot points, you got mine, I got yours ;-)

As Einstein said about mathematics:

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

And your credentials and proof is?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell us a little more.

m = e/c2?

[aNonnyMouseCowered]

Too tired to read TFA. But from TFS, I had the impression they merely applied the basic rules of algebra to sort-of reverse the equations like when you solve for x given "6 = 3x"?

Re:m = e/c2?

[Boronx]

Yeah, it sounds like what many schoolkids do when they first see the equations of special relativitity. They plug in numbers bigger than than the speed of light.

I think I must be crazy

[Psychotria]

But from my admittedly basic understanding of mathematics it should be possible to express anything; even if the thing that's being expressed makes no sense whatsoever. From a programming (algorithmic) perspective it's very easy to come up with a "model" of something that doesn't exists at all. All states of this imaginary model would of course be valid, given the parameters of the model, and valid when using the model itself as a reference. How is "extending" formulas in mathematics different? How is coming up with a '[...] theory we've come up with is simply for velocities greater than the speed of light' saying anything at all apart from their formulas "work" (whatever that means). Going a step back, though, is that even a theory at all? Doesn't sound like one to me. Maybe a hypothesis, if stated differently, but surely not a theory.

Infinite energy

[Dadoo]

there still exists the challenge of getting past the barrier of infinite energy required to even match the speed of light

I've often wondered: if you're using a fuel where the energy produced is derived directly from the mass you input (like a fusion or matter-antimatter reaction), wouldn't the energy you get increase as you get closer to the speed of light and the mass of your fuel (assuming you're carrying it with you) increases? In other words, wouldn't the increase in energy cancel out the increase in mass, so your acceleration stays the same?

Of course, after doing some math, I wonder why anyone wants to go anywhere near the speed of light. Using standard Newtonian physics (without even taking relativity into account), I figured out that, assuming you're converting mass directly to energy with 90% efficiency, something like 95% of the mass of your ship would have to be fuel, and unless someone invents some type of anti-gravity technology, it would take over a year to accelerate to that velocity (and another year to decelerate at the end of your trip).

Re:Infinite energy

[ldobehardcore]

wouldn't the energy you get increase as you get closer to the speed of light and the mass of your fuel (assuming you're carrying it with you) increases?

That's an interesting idea that I haven't thought of. I'm by no means a trained physicist, but I have the feeling that as you jettison high mass fuel in order to go faster, the mass of the ship you're accelerating will still grow proportionally to the mass used as reaction-fodder. So it gets to a point where no matter how fast you're going and how much fuel you've got, if you try to accelerate more using that fuel, even if you jettison it, you'd still get less energy out of the mass reaction than would be necessary to push you over c.

It reminds me of the workaround used in Mass Effect, where element zero will decrease or increase the mass of other objects depending on the current applied to it. The explanation for FTL is that there's an element zero drive that lowers the mass of the ship as it approaches c, so it can go FTL without needing infinite energy or growing to infinite mass. But the element zero workaround still wouldn't pan out. You'd need to carry the energy on the ship to run a current through the element zero anyway. Would the effect of element zero apply to that mass-energy as well as the mass-energy of the ship, and the mass-energy being jettisoned to propel it?

Re:Infinite energy

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, after doing some math, I wonder why anyone wants to go anywhere near the speed of light. Using standard Newtonian physics (without even taking relativity into account), I figured out that, assuming you're converting mass directly to energy with 90% efficiency, something like 95% of the mass of your ship would have to be fuel, and unless someone invents some type of anti-gravity technology, it would take over a year to accelerate to that velocity (and another year to decelerate at the end of your trip).

Because it's the only socially and psychological plausible way to accomplish manned interstellar flight -- generational and cold-embryo schemes are blocked by technica (sustainable closed ecosystem and artificial womb/robotic childcare respectively) and socio/psycho unknowns, while near-C is just technological (mass-conversion drive).

Re:Dear Hugh Pickens #2,

[Anonymous Coward]

Even though parent may have a point, please do not be discouraged.

Many of us recognize that every post can't be a hit.

I welcome your contributions and hope they keep coming.

I have read parts of your blog and enjoyed it. If you create a feed, please post it on Slashdot.

Sincerely,
No disrespect to parent.

Square Root of -1

[rossdee]

I thought when you put values greater than c into Einstein's equations you get values involving the square root of negative 1
which does not exist.

Mathematicians used to refer to that number as lower case i

But I think Apple have patented, trademarked and copyrighted that these days.

They should expect a lawsuit.

Re:Square Root of -1

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought when you put values greater than c into Einstein's equations you get values involving the square root of negative 1 which does not exist.

It doesn't??

I need to tell everyone here we can stop worrying about reactive power! Hey guys, just throw the imaginary results away, the power factor is always 1.0!

Man, my life just got a lot easier.

Hint: Just because it's called 'imaginary', doesn't mean it's not real. Err...well, it means it's not a real number, as in belonging to the set of real numbers, but it can still mean something physical :)

How is this news?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've always considered this to be somewhat implicit.

The issue with faster than light travel is that if you speed is exactly the speed of light and you have a rest mass, there is a division by zero in the relativistic energy-momentum equation (and I imagine others too). It simply isn't defined for that input.

But for all others, it seems defined just fine. I've always interpreted this as, you can slower that light, you can go faster, but you can't transition from one to the other because at some point, you'd be going AT the speed of light.

Should it, however, be proven that

[fisted]

Yeah. Good luck with that proof. I'm outa here, with c.

Re:Should it, however, be proven that

[fisted]

meh that should read "with < c"

People, shut up and get past the summary TITLE!

[GodfatherofSoul]

'The actual business of going through the speed of light is not defined,'

The SUMMARY...never mind the ARTICLE!!!! explains that this is a thought exercise about the > c universe. No need to share your high school physics-level knowledge about approaching the speed of light. This is SlashDot. WE KNOW!!!

Welcome to mass as friction

[holophrastic]

Makes a lot of sense. The faster my billiard ball rolls, the less friction it needs to overcome and the less friction it applies to the table surface. Friction occurs over time. So it makes sense that at massively significant speeds, (finally got to use massive correctly) less mass would be "applied" to the space.

I actually like the idea of mass acting like friction, it compliments the idea of gravity quite well -- and says that if you move fast enough, gravity matters less and less.

Basic misunderstanding

[Anonymous Coward]

This sounds ridiculous. Everyone who knows relativity knows that the universe is divided into less than light speed (time-like) and 'greater than' light speed (space-like).
The reason that we call the second space-like is that there is no causal relationship over time, so it is wrong to consider this as movement of an object.

So faster than light is non-causal, therefore not motion. It is not because you can't physically accelerate a body beyond the speed of light.

sounds right to me

[slashmydots]

If you think about it, you keep feeding antimatter-matter reaction energy into an engine that makes your spaceship go 1 direction, SOMETHING has to happen after you're already going the speed of light. Some cosmic hand doesn't reach down and stop you from accelerating more, that's stupid. The energy doesn't simply disappear from the universe, that's impossible. The matter doesn't simply fail to accept the energy, that's weird and without precedent. So the only explanation is that it can still take more energy and accelerate faster, just physics don't work correctly at that point. Simple and obvious.

Re:sounds right to me

[tbird81]

The point is that you require more and more energy to accelerate, to the point you need infinite energy to go any faster. You're not going to get infinite energy.

Re:sounds right to me

[iggymanz]

sounds like you watch too much of certain tv sci-fi. We already do matter-antimatter reactions, you get gamma rays and mesons. you cannot even accelerate to light speed using the products of the reaction.

This is not a new idea.

[erichill]

A friend of my in the 70's who was a math grad student at the time was playing with taking the absolute value of gamma = 1 / sqrt(1-v^2/c^2) to avoid the imaginary aspect of the term. Only at light speed was a massive particle forbidden. The square of the momentum remains real. Other results were the same: Things become less energetic the farther you get from light speed in either direction. At sqrt(2) times c, your relativistic mass and time are the same as at rest and your subjective trip time matches that of distant observers. Finally, at infinite speed you have zero mass and your subjective trip time is the same as the distance traveled (times c, of course). I seriously doubt my friend was the first person to come up with this. What's different with the new publication, AFAICT, is that these guys have an eager university press office. I love it when the press release folks feel obliged to mention that the work appears in a "prestigious" journal.

Good thing you're not a doctor

[Anonymous Coward]

The un-nerving part is that you try to induce others into error.

Otherwise, you would kill people.

I think I honestly spent more time reading the comments on your blog than your blog itself.

The Great Green Arkleseizure

[Anonymous Coward]

You were doing reasonably well up to this point, whereupon I stopped reading the rest in the realisation that this is nonsense.

"having achieved infinite velocity their mass would be zero"

There is no such thing as infinite velocity. There is no number you can point to and say "that is infinite", so it cannot be used to measure speed. Any number you can conceive of, no matter how large, is so far below 'infinite' that it might as well be zero.

All of which is a great shame, as breaking the light speed barrier is the only thing that will make the stars anything other than twinkling lights in the night sky, forever beyond our reach. And having them within our reach is a dream that many have. If we are trapped on this bloody rock forever, on the shores of such a vast and alluring sea, then that just sucks big time.

With Math

[KalvinB]

everything is possible.

It's physics that's the problem.

Mass invariant

[Roger W Moore]

Now we're losing mas as we accelerate!

Actually I think they say this because they are mathematicians, not physicists. Mass is a Lorentz invariant and is constant in all inertial frames and it is a common misconception deriving from the fact that it is easier to think of mass increasing with speed that it is to grasp the concept that our Newtonian notion of velocity does not actually work in relativity because space and time are relative and not independent of one another. My guess is that this is also true in their paper and that, rather than mass decreasing, it is their concept of velocity which actually needs to change, not the mass.

Math - Physics - Engineering jokes, yay!

[Anonymous Coward]

['We are mathematicians, not physicists, so we've approached this problem from a theoretical mathematical perspective,' says Dr Cox.]

And the jokes starting with "so a mathematician, a scientist and an engineer walk into a bar" begin in 3... 2... 1...

Zitterbewegung

[Roger W Moore]

Interestingly enough, while the OP is clearly not playing with a full deck, there is a phenomenon know as Zitterbewegung which is very similar to what the OP was suggesting. However this behaviour is suggested by free-particle solutions to the Dirac equation which is firmly grounded in both special relativity and quantum mechanics.

Essentially the solutions suggest that e.g. an electron may propagate by jittering back and forth at the speed of light such that the velocity averages out to the expected value. The frequency of this jittering is of the order of 10^21 Hz and so it has never been experimentally observed but it is, nevertheless, an interesting possibility. Sometimes reality is stranger than even crazy people think!

Grammar police to the rescue

[Anonymous Coward]

Should be: "Our paper doesn't try to explain..."

At last, humility!

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoah, scientists actually putting the importance of their work into perspective? Medical researchers of the world, take note!

dangerous

[Anonymous Coward]

Maths that does not translate into real physics is dangerous. Its predictions are not to be trusted. In any case the predictions have to be carefully verified experimentally.

Its like making the mistake by accidentially deviding by a null term. Such an equation can have an arbitrary result. Which of course makes no sense at all. Its a common mistake in long mathematical proofs.

This is old Science

[Anonymous Coward]

I read this in 1995. Are not neutrino's at rest at 2C?

Sleeping thru physics 101

[WaffleMonster]

What do you think is worse?

Not getting the memo about FTL neutrinos?

Sleeping thru the "tachyon" lecture and later claiming to have discovered it?

One day early ...

[Anonymous Coward]

the news would be more fitting for Columbus-Day ... considering that this "discovery" is not new at all.

Maybe we are already traveling faster than C

[tinkwink]

Is this possible? In the universe for FTL does all matter fly apart? Maybe we are going backwards and just think we are going forwards? How would we know?

So the Enterprise will have no mass?

[jsepeta]

Sweet!

Why not Arxiv.org?

[FithisUX]

Why choose a damned paywall?

Re:First post!

[Anonymous Coward]

> until at infinite velocity, its mass became zero.

finally a diet that works!

Brings a new meaning to "rapid weight loss"

Yawn

[meglon]

Pfft.... let me know when they figure out how to go faster than ludicrous speed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mk7VWcuVOf0

So what's "new" here?

[AliasMarlowe]

The tachyon solution to relativity (actually to Lorentz factors) was known a long time ago. I learned of it in high school, back in the early 70s.

The accuracy wasn't sufficient to prove.

[Anonymous Coward]

The precession of mercury's perihelion wasn't possible at that time to get accurate enough with the instrumentation available to prove that the evidence was solid.

We had to improve engineering a little before we could definitively call it proof.

Re:Causality

[Anonymous Coward]

they literally said that, IN the summary. 'We are mathematicians, not physicists, so we've approached this problem from a theoretical mathematical perspective,'

So? Just because they admitted to ignoring the real problem doesn't excuse them because they say "We're Math, not Reality!" It's like saying "Assuming that you can both have mass and not have any mass at the same time, our Math works!"

stopped reading after

[brezel]

"christian science".

Testable

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh no, you have it backwards. True scientific theories aren't just made up and then people try to dream up experiments to prove them. What happens is that we have a current accepted theory or set of theories that explain the results of most experiments. However there are one or more experiments whose results don't agree with the current theories. We then come up with a new set of theories that explains not only all the old stuff that the previous ones did but also the results of the new experiments. The Michelson-Morley experiment was one of the things that caused Einstein to come up with relativity. The results of the experiment didn't agree with the then current theories and therefore someone had to come up with something else. Einstein just happened to win the race.

You don't prove a theory with an experiment, you test a theory with an experiment. If theory "X" is true then doing this will result in "Y". Lets do "X" it and see if "Y" happens, if "Z" happens then we have to come up with a new theory. The best science can really say is that so far theory X explains why we get the results of all the experiments that we have done so far.

Thats why things like creationism aren't science. There is no way to come up with an experiment that might ( not will) disprove it.

Separate Universe

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no such thing as a separate universe. By definition the universe is everything that is. If it is possible to go faster than light then you are just going into another part of the universe.

Religion is an attempt to unscrew the inscruitable and collect big bucks or at least exert big control while doing it, it has nothing to do with mathematicians playing with equations.

Re:Separate Universe

[leonardluen]

and an atom by definition cannot be broken down further, but now we know about sub-atomic particles.

sometimes definitions need to change as we learn more and need to add another layer.

Re:Separate Universe

[DirtyLiar]

You mean "scrutinize the inscrutable".

Inscrutable has nothing to do with screwing, it means "unable to examine" / "unknowable", or "difficult to understand", or "unable to be seen".
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/inscrutable

Scrutinize, on the other hand means to investigate carefully, or to examine in detail.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/scrutinize

Damaged scientific method? No.

[DragonWriter]

This focus on scientific thinking is valuable but there are still good reasons to opt for the stronger interpretation, namely that if you're not going to be able to test, even if it's just for money reasons, then your scientific method is still damaged.

No, your "scientific method" is fine. What you have then is a testable but -- until testing is both practical and executed -- untested hypothesis. Heck, even speculation as to mechanisms that doesn't yet have an identified testable prediction is important in science, its just the step before finding a testable prediction that would make the speculation into a testable hypothesis. Its obviously the goal to get to something that is not merely testable in principle, and not merely testable in practice, but actually tested. But there are several steps on the way to that, and each is important in science, and a being able to get to one of those steps without immediately taking the next doesn't mean "your scientific method is damaged". Its a routine part of science. And you publicize what you've been able to do, however far along the road you've gotten, and hopefully, even if you can't take the next step, someone else can, ideally soon, but sometimes it takes a while.

Re:Damaged scientific method? No.

[tinkerton]

Takes a while...

If you'd avoid definitions for a moment, my point would be clearer. There's a very important distinction for which Popper became well known: it's based on the idea of falsifiability. His thesis was that hard sciences were a lot better at creating falsifiable hypothesis. In layman's words, if you have a hypothesis that made down to earth predictions and if a testing apparatus showed the number 4 while it should have shown between 10 and 11, then you'd know the hypothesis was wrong. On the opposite side you had theories that would say people are motivated by love for their mother. And if someone said they didn't love their mother, then there would be this corollary that said people often suppressed that feeling so they would only think they didn't love their mother, So you had this kind of immunity that allowed people to hang on to a theory for life.

So Popper and others said, let scientific theories be those that are down to earth enough so that you know when they're wrong. it's not that only scientific theories have value, but they're much better at growing and evolving .

Now take a look at superstring theories. They have the problem with tests being out of reach. That means you're losing feedback from reality. The problems are serious enough for physicists to decide to find another area to work in because now it's just math. A few years they can manage, but a whole career is too much. You can still call it scientific, but the feedback loop is too weak. And I think that is unhealthy and in some ways it's a similar problem as the old unscientific social science theory.

Re:Damaged scientific method? No.

[Anonymous Coward]

This focus on scientific thinking is valuable but there are still good reasons to opt for the stronger interpretation, namely that if you're not going to be able to test, even if it's just for money reasons, then your scientific method is still damaged.

No, your "scientific method" is fine. What you have then is a testable but -- until testing is both practical and executed -- untested hypothesis.

Heck, even speculation as to mechanisms that doesn't yet have an identified testable prediction is important in science, its just the step before finding a testable prediction that would make the speculation into a testable hypothesis.

Its obviously the goal to get to something that is not merely testable in principle, and not merely testable in practice, but actually tested. But there are several steps on the way to that, and each is important in science, and a being able to get to one of those steps without immediately taking the next doesn't mean "your scientific method is damaged".

Its a routine part of science. And you publicize what you've been able to do, however far along the road you've gotten, and hopefully, even if you can't take the next step, someone else can, ideally soon, but sometimes it takes a while.

These guys are mathematicians. Coming up with the testable physical theory isn't their goal.

Not news...

[neminem]

I remember my college frosh physics prof, like 10 years ago, mentioning that this was a possibility. Obviously entirely theoretical how he described it, but then, these guys don't make it sound any less theoretical, either.

Sub-Space Mathematically proven...

[Anonymous Coward]

...Scotty is not impressed. Looks like another one that Trek did first.

Wait... what?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Christiam Science monitor. So this is like creationism?

Traversing the Luminiferous Aether

[Anonymous Coward]

Faster than instant, is arriving before you leave! Which is what travelling faster than c is predicted to do.

... Which can also wreak havoc on a host's carefully arranged seating plans:

"Simply be sure to inform the host that you are not an additional guest but a herald from the future, and thus have already eaten."

Shocking!

[Anonymous Coward]

Local physicists are losing tons of mass by following this one, weird rule...

Faster than light

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing new. Look up Tachyon theory.

pay to read

[peawormsworth]

I cannot read the paper without paying for it. Is there a source to the actual paper without paying? I fundemantally do not believe in paying for scientific information and theories.

Interactions

[hicksw]

What are the interactions between sub-c and super-c objects?

Could this be the missing mass/dark matter/dark energy?

We, the credulous, want to know!
--
Does that make you feel better? No, didn't think so.

to infinity and beyond

[KingBenny]

where everything becomes zero again not all neural pathways have been blocked. I wish i understood a little more of all of this than just what i can visualize. I'll need a few extre live to get some background in physics, mathematics and engineering but that's gonna be a lot of points and i'm out of credits ... cruel world