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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.'"
> until at infinite velocity, its mass became zero.
finally a diet that works!
In the alternate universe, they would pay you.
rewriting history since 2109
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.
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).
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!"
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.
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.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
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.
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)
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
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!
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.
Who is John Cabal?