Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
> until at infinite velocity, its mass became zero.
finally a diet that works!
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.
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.
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
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).
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).
Whoops - that should have been "without using *imaginary* mass".
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...
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.
Every couch potato has already verified that at zero velocity, mass becomes infinite.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
So that's his secret! Not our yellow sun, not the cape ... it's SPEEDO FLIGHT !!
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
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.
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.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
> 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.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
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.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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".
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?
A republic cannot succeed till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour.
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.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
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!
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.
Who is John Cabal?
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
I'm not a crank, my mother had me tested!
$ unzip, strip, touch, finger, grep, mount, fsck, more, yes,fsck,fsck,fsck,umount, sleep
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.