The point of Quantum Entanglement? It has a number of interesting possible uses but the most immediate and daily-use one is Quantum Networks, which can in principle solve the Key Distribution problem -- what public key crypto is for -- completely securely.
As in you can send someone a private key, and know (via breaking of the entanglement between you and the end point) if it has been intercepted. If it wasn't intercepted, then you are free to use the private key. And then you can still tell if someone was intercepting your packets (but if it's really sensitive data then you don't want them to be able to read it at all, thus why you still use the private key crypto).
The problem is exactly the "if", which is treated here as if it were "for sure".
No, it's treated as if the massive preponderance of evidence in favor if it being the case means you require more than simply saying "we could be wrong" to seriously entertain the notion that we are.
Everyone knows the current model of the universe could be wrong -- well, it almost certainly is wrong is some ways, but wrong in the ways that would allow FTL communication which are basic and far-reaching -- and we all hope it is because we all would like our Communicators, Transporters, and Warp Drives thank you very much.
Nevertheless, that's not what the evidence says at this time.
That doesn't even make sense... The Higgs Boson was a prediction of the same model of the universe which says that quantum entanglement can't be used for FTL communication. The experimental verification of that prediction is further evidence for the model.
The myth is that quantum entanglement as we understand it would allow for FTL communication, when reality is that this phenomenon as understood does not.
It's possible that we're wrong, but your example is the opposite of supporting the idea that we might be.
Thanks for the link. I'll watch it as soon as I get time.
I should mention that the "We use particles that travel slower than light to explain causality" is not a minor issue. It's true that within Special Relativity you can think about particles going faster than light and the math works. But what it tells you is that this particle would be going backward in time relative to other observers, violating causality. SR assumes causality, so we conclude that FTL is impossible. Causality is one of the assumptions that may have been up for grabs if FTL neutrinos panned out.
I still don't see how you can redefine c without also losing Lorenz Invariance, but hey maybe I'll end up watching that podcast too.
Relativity would be deemed incomplete and we would need to discover why our previous calculations seemed to work so well using the highly precise but incorrect value of c.
Maybe incomplete in the same sense as Newtonian physics -- which is to say wrong in one of its basic assumptions.
And since so many calculations depend on the speed of light, and so many different experiments measure the same value, and the fact that it is always the same is one of the most compelling pieces of evidence for SR, measuring a different speed would suggest that the assumption that the speed of light is the same in all reference frames is wrong. Because here we have one where it was measured differently.
Sean Carrol discussed this in depth on a recent episode of This Week in Science.
Is that online, and if so do you have a link? It sounds like it would be immensely interesting. All I could find was the podcast by that name that interviewed him in 2009, and his Cosmic Variance blog entry about the experiment. In which he says that his favorite theoretical explanation for the result is violating Lorentz Invariance, i.e. the speed of light being the same for all observers and one of the fundamental assumptions of Relativity.
You mean the article where he explicitly says his inspiration was a weapon from Crysis 2?
Gauss Rifle was the term used in Traveller, but not only in Traveller, it's mentioned in many other places including games, which is why I knew exactly what a Gauss Rifle was despite never having heard of Traveller.
So it doesn't actually tell you that Traveller was his inspiration at all.
The faster than light neutrinos wouldn't have overturned relativity though - it would have mostly just redifined the value of c.
We have the value of c pegged with very high precision through a variety of measurements -- both direct measurements, and measurement of the physical constants which are directly related to it via Maxwell's equations -- conducted by a multitude of experiments and apparatuses.
The lowest value for the measured velocity of the neutrinos within the presumed error bars was significantly outside the error bars of the measurements of c.
it would be similar to what happened to Newtonian calculations after relativity.
Newtonian calculations are still used where either the correction for relativity is so small it is smaller than our ability to measure, or where it is larger than that but we simply don't care because we don't need that much precision.
This would be a case where the correction for c was significantly larger than our precision, would matter a great deal for a large number of experiments not to mention being of significant interest in and of itself, and yet had never been observed in many thousands of experiments.
So, no, not really the same at all.
If the result had panned out, it would have been exceedingly difficult to conclude anything but that the neutrinos were traveling FTL.
The idea of FTL is not 'out for the count' by a long shot, despite Einstein...
Er, well, to be clear... FTL is out for the count because of Einstein, so for FTL to be possible means a up-ending of one of the fundamental assumptions of Relativity. It is hypothetically possible that this is the case, but it is not to be presumed lightly (unless you're writing a sci-fi story.)
We would all like for it to be true. Believe me, a huge number of people were hoping that despite the odds the "FTL neutrinos" would turn out to be real rather than an equipment failure.
In the same fashion we pressurize our airplanes and remain quite oblivious to the outside conditions, we have to find a way to encapsulate a piece of space time in our little ship while it zips along at warp 9...
But in the same fashion where, despite your comfort within, the airplane itself still must obey the rules of aerodynamics so too must this hypothetical spacecraft deal with the rest of the universe while violating the rules of said universe. And it's not the environment of space that prevents FTL, it's causality. The only way to "encapsulate" something against causality is for it to never interact with the rest of the universe again.
Now cue the naysayers to tell me how crazy I am for even thinking it. Radical, yes, but no crazier than the idea of man on the moon, or human flight. Faster than sound? I should be locked up for thinking up such insanity!
It's not crazy to think of it. It is crazy to act like it's a realistic possibility based on what we know of the universe, or that it is any way comparable to the other things you mention. The physical principles that would allow flight, supersonic flight, or traveling to the moon were well-known for a long, long time. It was, in essence, an engineering problem of how to work the well-known laws of nature such that you could fly, or rocket off the face of the earth.
Whereas FTL violates the known physical principles of nature.
So, once again, it could be possible, and damn I hope it is, but it's not at all like those other things.
Yes. Video-game inspired, because that's what inspired him to do it. Video games. Not 70s SF books. There's a chain of inspiration connecting them, but that's not the same thing.
It's the same way in which Nite Owl was inspired by Batman, rather than Zorro, even though Zorro was the inspiration for Batman.
Nothing wrong with knowing the history, of course. But "video game inspired" is still correct.
2.) Humans tend not to mix well with other species unless it's already fairly capable on its own. That's why rats, cats, and dogs thrive, while wolves, various forms of trout, and spotted owls are getting kicked in the teeth.
What? No, you have that backward. The species you mention are all quite capable on their own. It's when they aren't left alone, and humans either outright kill them or simply destroy their habitats or food sources, that they have problems.
Rats, cats, and dogs thrive because they were able to adapt to human presence. Other animals are doing this too, e.g. most species of vulture are doing better than ever thanks to roadkill, grackles love parking lots, etc.
The idea that wolves -- the ancestors of dogs -- aren't "capable on their own" is ludicrous.
If you cannot duplicate the results of an science experiment independently, then it didn't happen.
That's not true. Experiments are indeed considered to happen despite not having been reproduced.
Point of fact: the RHIC cannot exactly reproduce experiments done at LHC, and vice versa, because they are different machines colliding different particles with different detectors. The "reproducibility" actually occurs within each of the distinct colliders, as they collect more data from more runs of the same experiment to verify that they continue seeing the same results.
However one can check if the results of one experiment are consistent with the results of another.
Just because "I said so" doesn't make it so.
Which is not the consequence of not building a second LHC to reproduce all the exact same experiments, so true but not relevant.
Instead, they say "I have reams and reams of extremely high quality data, published here". Also, the LHC does itself have a form of reproducibility, in that there are two detector experiments -- ATLAST and CMS -- that measure many of the same things. However they are not identical machines, and so the experiments are once again not exactly reproduced. Since in the instance of the Higgs candidate discovery they did agree, this is considered a form of reproduction.
LHC and RHIC are different machines with different capabilities for running different experiments. Thus, that is what they should (and have no choice but to) do. The results should be compared for discrepencies, but expecting literal reproduction of experiment from one device at the other is unrealistic and an overly simplistic usage of the idea of reproducibility in science.
Watch the Curiosity press conferences, then. Nice and adult.
Also, for every person who says NASA should be a bastion of science, not pandering, there's another who says that NASA needs to sell itself to the public to keep interest up and thus Congress willing to give NASA money. Since despite their attempts at popular outreach NASA is still undoubtedly, unequivocally, unassailably, a tremendous bastion of science, I think the latter has the better point.
The farther out you go the less drastic the effect is. Could the rotation just appear (to our frame of reference) to be moving not as fast in the middle (where the gravity is strongest) even though it is moving as it should according to our theories?
Well, if this was the case, then we would see the same effect in our solar system -- both in the orbits of other planets, and in the orbits of moons around planets -- and they too would show flat rotation curves. However we do not, and both show decreasing orbital velocity with increasing distance from the sun in very close accordance with Kepler's Laws.
The upshot is that the time dilation effect is extremely small compared to the amount that velocity will drop off with distance from the primary concentration of mass.
How does it jibe for balancing things without using 'dark matter/energy'?
Not well.
These SMBHs are in the centers of galaxies, and piling up more mass at the center of a galaxy doesn't explain the problem of flat galactic rotation curves. The mass needs to be in and surrounding the galaxy, which is why the non-exotic DM theory is called "MACHOs" as in MAssive Compact Halo Objects -- because it'd have to be in the halo.
It's even worse for Dark Energy, since extra mass would actually have the opposite effect that DE has, pushing the universe closer to the Big Crunch scenario. It certainly would not explain accelerating expansion.
In the long term -- "long" that makes the current age of the universe look like an eye-blink and protons seem unstable -- the CMB will be redshifted away until even supermassive black holes begin losing mass.
Not that you need nukes to wreck things from orbit. A dense, sturdy object that's going at orbital velocity would itself pack the punch of a nuke (from tactical to strategic size depending on mass of impactor). Project Thor was the U.S. military's exploration of the idea.
Yeah, I've always questioned that phrase, since while the pun might not have been intentional, your decision to call attention to it rather than changing your wording to avoid the pun certainly was.
Yeah, I think rover should be independent - this is more of a movable sensor for the probe really, as opposed to some sort of autonomous rover... It doesn't need to carry it's own power source, or communications, etc.
And I don't see how using an external power source nullifies the principle aspect of a rover: That it roves.
The Sojourner rover never went more than 12m away from the lander. If the only way to accomplish the exact same mission was by having the lander provide power through a tether, then it wouldn't have counted? What if it received the power wirelessly?
Of course Sojourner wasn't autonomous anyway because it required the lander for communicating with earth. Which if autonomous communications are a requirement, then wouldn't that techincally make Mars-3 just an orbiter with a dropable-sensor?
Slashdot Mirror
The point of Quantum Entanglement? It has a number of interesting possible uses but the most immediate and daily-use one is Quantum Networks, which can in principle solve the Key Distribution problem -- what public key crypto is for -- completely securely.
As in you can send someone a private key, and know (via breaking of the entanglement between you and the end point) if it has been intercepted. If it wasn't intercepted, then you are free to use the private key. And then you can still tell if someone was intercepting your packets (but if it's really sensitive data then you don't want them to be able to read it at all, thus why you still use the private key crypto).
The problem is exactly the "if", which is treated here as if it were "for sure".
No, it's treated as if the massive preponderance of evidence in favor if it being the case means you require more than simply saying "we could be wrong" to seriously entertain the notion that we are.
Everyone knows the current model of the universe could be wrong -- well, it almost certainly is wrong is some ways, but wrong in the ways that would allow FTL communication which are basic and far-reaching -- and we all hope it is because we all would like our Communicators, Transporters, and Warp Drives thank you very much.
Nevertheless, that's not what the evidence says at this time.
The Higgs boson was also a common myth
That doesn't even make sense... The Higgs Boson was a prediction of the same model of the universe which says that quantum entanglement can't be used for FTL communication. The experimental verification of that prediction is further evidence for the model.
The myth is that quantum entanglement as we understand it would allow for FTL communication, when reality is that this phenomenon as understood does not.
It's possible that we're wrong, but your example is the opposite of supporting the idea that we might be.
Thanks for the link. I'll watch it as soon as I get time.
I should mention that the "We use particles that travel slower than light to explain causality" is not a minor issue. It's true that within Special Relativity you can think about particles going faster than light and the math works. But what it tells you is that this particle would be going backward in time relative to other observers, violating causality. SR assumes causality, so we conclude that FTL is impossible. Causality is one of the assumptions that may have been up for grabs if FTL neutrinos panned out.
I still don't see how you can redefine c without also losing Lorenz Invariance, but hey maybe I'll end up watching that podcast too.
Yes. See my first post.
Relativity would be deemed incomplete and we would need to discover why our previous calculations seemed to work so well using the highly precise but incorrect value of c.
Maybe incomplete in the same sense as Newtonian physics -- which is to say wrong in one of its basic assumptions.
And since so many calculations depend on the speed of light, and so many different experiments measure the same value, and the fact that it is always the same is one of the most compelling pieces of evidence for SR, measuring a different speed would suggest that the assumption that the speed of light is the same in all reference frames is wrong. Because here we have one where it was measured differently.
Sean Carrol discussed this in depth on a recent episode of This Week in Science.
Is that online, and if so do you have a link? It sounds like it would be immensely interesting. All I could find was the podcast by that name that interviewed him in 2009, and his Cosmic Variance blog entry about the experiment. In which he says that his favorite theoretical explanation for the result is violating Lorentz Invariance, i.e. the speed of light being the same for all observers and one of the fundamental assumptions of Relativity.
You mean the article where he explicitly says his inspiration was a weapon from Crysis 2?
Gauss Rifle was the term used in Traveller, but not only in Traveller, it's mentioned in many other places including games, which is why I knew exactly what a Gauss Rifle was despite never having heard of Traveller.
So it doesn't actually tell you that Traveller was his inspiration at all.
The faster than light neutrinos wouldn't have overturned relativity though - it would have mostly just redifined the value of c.
We have the value of c pegged with very high precision through a variety of measurements -- both direct measurements, and measurement of the physical constants which are directly related to it via Maxwell's equations -- conducted by a multitude of experiments and apparatuses.
The lowest value for the measured velocity of the neutrinos within the presumed error bars was significantly outside the error bars of the measurements of c.
it would be similar to what happened to Newtonian calculations after relativity.
Newtonian calculations are still used where either the correction for relativity is so small it is smaller than our ability to measure, or where it is larger than that but we simply don't care because we don't need that much precision.
This would be a case where the correction for c was significantly larger than our precision, would matter a great deal for a large number of experiments not to mention being of significant interest in and of itself, and yet had never been observed in many thousands of experiments.
So, no, not really the same at all.
If the result had panned out, it would have been exceedingly difficult to conclude anything but that the neutrinos were traveling FTL.
The idea of FTL is not 'out for the count' by a long shot, despite Einstein...
Er, well, to be clear... FTL is out for the count because of Einstein, so for FTL to be possible means a up-ending of one of the fundamental assumptions of Relativity. It is hypothetically possible that this is the case, but it is not to be presumed lightly (unless you're writing a sci-fi story.)
We would all like for it to be true. Believe me, a huge number of people were hoping that despite the odds the "FTL neutrinos" would turn out to be real rather than an equipment failure.
In the same fashion we pressurize our airplanes and remain quite oblivious to the outside conditions, we have to find a way to encapsulate a piece of space time in our little ship while it zips along at warp 9...
But in the same fashion where, despite your comfort within, the airplane itself still must obey the rules of aerodynamics so too must this hypothetical spacecraft deal with the rest of the universe while violating the rules of said universe. And it's not the environment of space that prevents FTL, it's causality. The only way to "encapsulate" something against causality is for it to never interact with the rest of the universe again.
Now cue the naysayers to tell me how crazy I am for even thinking it. Radical, yes, but no crazier than the idea of man on the moon, or human flight. Faster than sound? I should be locked up for thinking up such insanity!
It's not crazy to think of it. It is crazy to act like it's a realistic possibility based on what we know of the universe, or that it is any way comparable to the other things you mention. The physical principles that would allow flight, supersonic flight, or traveling to the moon were well-known for a long, long time. It was, in essence, an engineering problem of how to work the well-known laws of nature such that you could fly, or rocket off the face of the earth.
Whereas FTL violates the known physical principles of nature.
So, once again, it could be possible, and damn I hope it is, but it's not at all like those other things.
Yes. Video-game inspired, because that's what inspired him to do it. Video games. Not 70s SF books. There's a chain of inspiration connecting them, but that's not the same thing.
It's the same way in which Nite Owl was inspired by Batman, rather than Zorro, even though Zorro was the inspiration for Batman.
Nothing wrong with knowing the history, of course. But "video game inspired" is still correct.
The bacon is also rat.
2.) Humans tend not to mix well with other species unless it's already fairly capable on its own. That's why rats, cats, and dogs thrive, while wolves, various forms of trout, and spotted owls are getting kicked in the teeth.
What? No, you have that backward. The species you mention are all quite capable on their own. It's when they aren't left alone, and humans either outright kill them or simply destroy their habitats or food sources, that they have problems.
Rats, cats, and dogs thrive because they were able to adapt to human presence. Other animals are doing this too, e.g. most species of vulture are doing better than ever thanks to roadkill, grackles love parking lots, etc.
The idea that wolves -- the ancestors of dogs -- aren't "capable on their own" is ludicrous.
If you cannot duplicate the results of an science experiment independently, then it didn't happen.
That's not true. Experiments are indeed considered to happen despite not having been reproduced.
Point of fact: the RHIC cannot exactly reproduce experiments done at LHC, and vice versa, because they are different machines colliding different particles with different detectors. The "reproducibility" actually occurs within each of the distinct colliders, as they collect more data from more runs of the same experiment to verify that they continue seeing the same results.
However one can check if the results of one experiment are consistent with the results of another.
Just because "I said so" doesn't make it so.
Which is not the consequence of not building a second LHC to reproduce all the exact same experiments, so true but not relevant.
Instead, they say "I have reams and reams of extremely high quality data, published here". Also, the LHC does itself have a form of reproducibility, in that there are two detector experiments -- ATLAST and CMS -- that measure many of the same things. However they are not identical machines, and so the experiments are once again not exactly reproduced. Since in the instance of the Higgs candidate discovery they did agree, this is considered a form of reproduction.
LHC and RHIC are different machines with different capabilities for running different experiments. Thus, that is what they should (and have no choice but to) do. The results should be compared for discrepencies, but expecting literal reproduction of experiment from one device at the other is unrealistic and an overly simplistic usage of the idea of reproducibility in science.
Watch the Curiosity press conferences, then. Nice and adult.
Also, for every person who says NASA should be a bastion of science, not pandering, there's another who says that NASA needs to sell itself to the public to keep interest up and thus Congress willing to give NASA money. Since despite their attempts at popular outreach NASA is still undoubtedly, unequivocally, unassailably, a tremendous bastion of science, I think the latter has the better point.
The farther out you go the less drastic the effect is. Could the rotation just appear (to our frame of reference) to be moving not as fast in the middle (where the gravity is strongest) even though it is moving as it should according to our theories?
Well, if this was the case, then we would see the same effect in our solar system -- both in the orbits of other planets, and in the orbits of moons around planets -- and they too would show flat rotation curves. However we do not, and both show decreasing orbital velocity with increasing distance from the sun in very close accordance with Kepler's Laws.
The upshot is that the time dilation effect is extremely small compared to the amount that velocity will drop off with distance from the primary concentration of mass.
That must have been painful.
Well if it doesn't I paid a lot of money for nothing.
I'll let my mass drivers do the talking.
How does it jibe for balancing things without using 'dark matter/energy'?
Not well.
These SMBHs are in the centers of galaxies, and piling up more mass at the center of a galaxy doesn't explain the problem of flat galactic rotation curves. The mass needs to be in and surrounding the galaxy, which is why the non-exotic DM theory is called "MACHOs" as in MAssive Compact Halo Objects -- because it'd have to be in the halo.
It's even worse for Dark Energy, since extra mass would actually have the opposite effect that DE has, pushing the universe closer to the Big Crunch scenario. It certainly would not explain accelerating expansion.
In the long term -- "long" that makes the current age of the universe look like an eye-blink and protons seem unstable -- the CMB will be redshifted away until even supermassive black holes begin losing mass.
"This, too, shall pass."
Indeed they would.
Not that you need nukes to wreck things from orbit. A dense, sturdy object that's going at orbital velocity would itself pack the punch of a nuke (from tactical to strategic size depending on mass of impactor). Project Thor was the U.S. military's exploration of the idea.
When speaking, of course, because you can't change your spoken words after saying them.
Writing "no pun intended" rather than going back and editing to remove the pun means that the pun's continued existence is in fact intentional.
I'm talking use a pun go to jail level of enforcement.
Seems excessive. Surely punitive damages would be more appropriate.
Yeah, I've always questioned that phrase, since while the pun might not have been intentional, your decision to call attention to it rather than changing your wording to avoid the pun certainly was.
Yeah, I think rover should be independent - this is more of a movable sensor for the probe really, as opposed to some sort of autonomous rover... It doesn't need to carry it's own power source, or communications, etc.
And I don't see how using an external power source nullifies the principle aspect of a rover: That it roves.
The Sojourner rover never went more than 12m away from the lander. If the only way to accomplish the exact same mission was by having the lander provide power through a tether, then it wouldn't have counted? What if it received the power wirelessly?
Of course Sojourner wasn't autonomous anyway because it required the lander for communicating with earth. Which if autonomous communications are a requirement, then wouldn't that techincally make Mars-3 just an orbiter with a dropable-sensor?