Who's this we? I don't think the end is near, you don't either, so have we evolved our heads out of our asses and can we call that a win? On the whole both education and living standards have risen hugely since 5000 years ago; yes it's not perfect, but a very significant portion of the world enjoys amenities that the wealthiest monarchs couldn't have dreamed of a couple of centuries ago, and as time goes on I expect that trend to continue.
True there has been a lot of damage done to biosphere in the process, and that's a damn shame, but we're slowly getting on top of it, and hey let's face it, the biosphere has been almost completely wiped out many times previous to our existence.
In fact, on that note, ultimately the only end in sight for earth based life is as stellar ash drifiting through the cold void for all eternity; humankind represents probably the last best opportunity for that life to persevere and survive on a longer timescale.
The Earth is degenerating these days. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer mind their parents, every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching. - Assyrian Stone Tablet, 2800BC
there are reference frames where that FTL particles reaches its destinations before living its origin.
Do you mean the FTL particles reach their destination before leaving their origin, or before light from the origin can be observed, which goes back to the idea that if it's outside your lightcone it doesn't exist? What I'm saying is that if you're looking at a faster than light frame of reference, that doesn't imply time travel, since the frame of reference is larger than your lightcone.
That is what the GP is trying to say.
We suddenly discovering that General Relativity is wrong won't change that picture, as the time and simultaniety dependence on reference frames are "big" phenomena from GR, the time dependence being tested on practice (and enough to imply the simultaniety dependence).
Newton's laws aren't wrong either, just sufficiently accurate for their purposes. Likewise General Relativity is almost certainly perfectly accurate until you go beyond its useful scope, just like Newton hitting the quantum level. Yes, this is hypothesis and mild handwavery, but that time dilation has been tested doesn't indicate that the flow of time reverses past a certain stage. It doesn't go inverse, it goes imaginary. It's quite possible I'm missing something here of course.
What? You mean like a normal PC with a hard drive in it? Whats next, the amazing photonelectro stick, push a button and a ray of light springs out from the glass covered end?
To rephrase my point: "[Y]ou can pick at most two members of the set {special relativity, causality, FTL}" (from comment by Rich) Now, general relativity is a really successful theory (it explains a lot of the observations it is supposed to explain), so guessing that that is the one to go is not a good bet.
Newton's laws also did a great job for a long time, in fact they still do a great job today; that doesn't mean they aren't superseded by the more recent QM for certain sets of information. I'm not saying that FTL is possible, the brute energy requirements alone would make it basically impossible to achieve. What I am saying is that FTL doesn't imply time travel as far as I can see, there's just no logical basis for it. The equations mean that relatively, time goes slower for the traveller approaching lightspeed, one week inside his spaceship might be one year outside. Past lightspeed, time doesn't go negative in a linear progression, it goes imaginary, which is meaningless. This I feel is the source of much of the confusion on the matter.
There is no universally defined "now" in a relativistic universe.
Aren't you kinda going super relativistic with FTL? In which case "If A causes B outside it's own light cone (as it can with FTL communication), for one frame of reference, A has caused something that happened before A." has no meaning - as I said, the equations don't turn backwards, they just stop making any sense, I mean what is imaginary time? This is the point where a lot of this falls down:
1. If you can't go FTL, you never need a frame of reference outside your lightcone therefore 2. Causing effects outside that lightcone will do some funny things BUT and this is the big one 3. if you're postulating FTL effects anyway you need to expand your lightcone to the superlight cone, where superlight is however faster than light you've managed to go
You can't posit relativistic frames of reference in a super relativistic universe.
The whole affair has the feel of someone that poorly understood Einstein's theories and just ran with the time travel thing, and it's taken on some sort of a massive meme state by now.
In fact, from B's perspective, event A hasn't happened until B can see it; there is no such thing as universal simultaneity.
But here's the thing, it does happen anyway, and if you're in an FTL reference frame, that starts to matter. Time doesn't turn negative when you exceed lightspeed, it turns imaginary by the equations, so either the equations break down in a similar manner to Newtonian->Quantum or you can't exceed lightspeed. If you can, the equations don't imply time travel, they just don't work.
QE doesn't allow FTL data transmission. However I am still somewhat puzzled as to why FTL anything enables time travel, I mean from the wider light cone events still don't get observed before they happen, in such a way that you can manipulate the event at all. I know there is no general frame of reference, but it doesn't take much imagination to envision a frame of reference larger than your lightcone. Which you'd have to if you went FTL.
I'm sick of people proffering this and only this as a reason to Google+ growth. There is something more to it, after all, iTunes Ping isn't Facebook either. Why didn't they balloon up to 20 million in two weeks?
They didn't have massive coverage in global internet searches and services to leverage from?
What's the difference between a government investment and a bank investment, which is apparently proper capitalism? In both cases you're dealing with a faceless beaurocracy that really doesn't understand the business it's investing in.
I'm not sure how a powerful military enforces that though, the situation mostly exists through the US being the largest single and single language market. The dollar isn't backed by bullets, it's backed by taxes.
I have a bee in my bonnet about people spoiling the most important day of a young woman's life, especially for grubby reasons. And it would still be worth it, even if the judge didn't rule mitigating circumstances, which he or she would. Sometimes a good hiding is just what's called for.
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Who's this we? I don't think the end is near, you don't either, so have we evolved our heads out of our asses and can we call that a win? On the whole both education and living standards have risen hugely since 5000 years ago; yes it's not perfect, but a very significant portion of the world enjoys amenities that the wealthiest monarchs couldn't have dreamed of a couple of centuries ago, and as time goes on I expect that trend to continue.
True there has been a lot of damage done to biosphere in the process, and that's a damn shame, but we're slowly getting on top of it, and hey let's face it, the biosphere has been almost completely wiped out many times previous to our existence.
In fact, on that note, ultimately the only end in sight for earth based life is as stellar ash drifiting through the cold void for all eternity; humankind represents probably the last best opportunity for that life to persevere and survive on a longer timescale.
The Earth is degenerating these days. Bribery and corruption abound.
Children no longer mind their parents, every man wants to write a book,
and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching.
- Assyrian Stone Tablet, 2800BC
Sadly, the ISS is just too tiny to make a sufficiently large bang to pass on the favor to the next up and coming class of lifeforms
Why sadly?
Imagination is a lot harder than knowledge.
Jesus fucking christ. If it doesn't fit in a twitter post you lazy fucks just don't want to know.
Hi, welcome to slashdot, take a seat, I'll be right with you.
Question is do the cancer cells naturally accumulate gold and platinum when other cells do not, and if so, why?
there are reference frames where that FTL particles reaches its destinations before living its origin.
Do you mean the FTL particles reach their destination before leaving their origin, or before light from the origin can be observed, which goes back to the idea that if it's outside your lightcone it doesn't exist? What I'm saying is that if you're looking at a faster than light frame of reference, that doesn't imply time travel, since the frame of reference is larger than your lightcone.
That is what the GP is trying to say.
We suddenly discovering that General Relativity is wrong won't change that picture, as the time and simultaniety dependence on reference frames are "big" phenomena from GR, the time dependence being tested on practice (and enough to imply the simultaniety dependence).
Newton's laws aren't wrong either, just sufficiently accurate for their purposes. Likewise General Relativity is almost certainly perfectly accurate until you go beyond its useful scope, just like Newton hitting the quantum level. Yes, this is hypothesis and mild handwavery, but that time dilation has been tested doesn't indicate that the flow of time reverses past a certain stage. It doesn't go inverse, it goes imaginary. It's quite possible I'm missing something here of course.
What? You mean like a normal PC with a hard drive in it? Whats next, the amazing photonelectro stick, push a button and a ray of light springs out from the glass covered end?
To rephrase my point: "[Y]ou can pick at most two members of the set {special relativity, causality, FTL}" (from comment by Rich) Now, general relativity is a really successful theory (it explains a lot of the observations it is supposed to explain), so guessing that that is the one to go is not a good bet.
Newton's laws also did a great job for a long time, in fact they still do a great job today; that doesn't mean they aren't superseded by the more recent QM for certain sets of information. I'm not saying that FTL is possible, the brute energy requirements alone would make it basically impossible to achieve. What I am saying is that FTL doesn't imply time travel as far as I can see, there's just no logical basis for it. The equations mean that relatively, time goes slower for the traveller approaching lightspeed, one week inside his spaceship might be one year outside. Past lightspeed, time doesn't go negative in a linear progression, it goes imaginary, which is meaningless. This I feel is the source of much of the confusion on the matter.
There is no universally defined "now" in a relativistic universe.
Aren't you kinda going super relativistic with FTL? In which case "If A causes B outside it's own light cone (as it can with FTL communication), for one frame of reference, A has caused something that happened before A." has no meaning - as I said, the equations don't turn backwards, they just stop making any sense, I mean what is imaginary time? This is the point where a lot of this falls down:
1. If you can't go FTL, you never need a frame of reference outside your lightcone therefore
2. Causing effects outside that lightcone will do some funny things BUT and this is the big one
3. if you're postulating FTL effects anyway you need to expand your lightcone to the superlight cone, where superlight is however faster than light you've managed to go
You can't posit relativistic frames of reference in a super relativistic universe.
The whole affair has the feel of someone that poorly understood Einstein's theories and just ran with the time travel thing, and it's taken on some sort of a massive meme state by now.
I dunno, the world isn't that bad really, I mean look at sunsets, although a lot of people do go to extraordinary lengths to make it bad.
In fact, from B's perspective, event A hasn't happened until B can see it; there is no such thing as universal simultaneity.
But here's the thing, it does happen anyway, and if you're in an FTL reference frame, that starts to matter. Time doesn't turn negative when you exceed lightspeed, it turns imaginary by the equations, so either the equations break down in a similar manner to Newtonian->Quantum or you can't exceed lightspeed. If you can, the equations don't imply time travel, they just don't work.
QE doesn't allow FTL data transmission. However I am still somewhat puzzled as to why FTL anything enables time travel, I mean from the wider light cone events still don't get observed before they happen, in such a way that you can manipulate the event at all. I know there is no general frame of reference, but it doesn't take much imagination to envision a frame of reference larger than your lightcone. Which you'd have to if you went FTL.
Just to fuck everyone up they should align the doors with compass directions.
And the reasoning behind the layout for the Stonehenge chariot park becomes clearer...
I think there's one Chinese group that already practises this, the Mosuo. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1939297
I'm sick of people proffering this and only this as a reason to Google+ growth. There is something more to it, after all, iTunes Ping isn't Facebook either. Why didn't they balloon up to 20 million in two weeks?
They didn't have massive coverage in global internet searches and services to leverage from?
I don't know, it's already at like half the number of real people that use facebook...
Yeah, I know there were a couple of movies lately I'd have loved to go see, but the shekels just aren't there any more.
What's the difference between a government investment and a bank investment, which is apparently proper capitalism? In both cases you're dealing with a faceless beaurocracy that really doesn't understand the business it's investing in.
why shouldn't there be focus on increasing demand for all sorts of jobs rather than beating the drum of "retrain or starve"
Careful now, you'll be supporting the idea of marketing before you know it.
They've been stopped from doing the same thing many times in the EU.
Ooh, I like the Saturn one, very 1960s sci-fi, gives me an idea for a story actually.
I'm not sure how a powerful military enforces that though, the situation mostly exists through the US being the largest single and single language market. The dollar isn't backed by bullets, it's backed by taxes.
Mod parent up, and to think I just spent my last point. Private companies are not entitled to act as judge, jury, and executioner.
I have a bee in my bonnet about people spoiling the most important day of a young woman's life, especially for grubby reasons. And it would still be worth it, even if the judge didn't rule mitigating circumstances, which he or she would. Sometimes a good hiding is just what's called for.