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

[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

[Dynedain]

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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[ATMD]

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

Re:First post!

[able1234au]

> until at infinite velocity, its mass became zero.

finally a diet that works!

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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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

[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.

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".

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).

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

[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

[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: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: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 !!

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.

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.

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[bigrockpeltr]

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

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: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?

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.