These kinds of "right not to be offended" laws are among the most ludicrous pieces of legislation you can imagine, sad to hear Brazil has such an extreme case. In Finland we've got a law against "incitement against a group" which sounds harmless enough (you'd fall foul of the law if you went declaring out on the street that you believe Jews/blacks/redheads should be killed, say).
It's just way too easy for some group to have their sensibilities oh so deeply offended when one even tries to reasonably discuss whether something about them that affects you, too, should be perhaps reconsidered. I like to participate in Finnish language-policy discussions (long story short, the 93% who are Finnish-speakers are supposedly as Swedish-speaking as the 5,5% of them, and if they aren't, they must be made so), and it's incredible how massively offended some Fenno-Swedes can be at the mere suggestion that I happen to be Finnish-speaking, and that no, I don't think it is much of a flaw in my character (or that of my possible children) that needs fixing by state intervention...
Of course, this offends their dignity much and I've been told on numerous occasions that I'm close to inciting against a group..:-)
To me it seems to be pretty much in the same league as "if we rewrote Newton's mechanics so that gravity is repulsive, we'd get apples to fall downwards".
Sure we can write all sorts of equations, but it doesn't mean nature works like that.
Think of BSD systems as a backup in case Linux fails in the desktop market.
If BSD and Linux are the alternatives, they will fail together if "open source UNIX on the desktop" in general fails. The reason to this is that the end user only sees either KDE or Gnome, and makes his decisions based on that. They couldn't care less what is running under the hood, and in this regard, I am pretty sure both are good enough (although Linux probably has the lead in hardware support and the like).
Fully agreed with you actually, and I am an aspiring enterpreneur here in the most "socialist" part of Europe (ok, not France, which probably needed Sarkozy already). Business should be business, and the "social responsibility" that we speak of here regarding corporations is bull and a completely vague concept, as the corporation genuinely is there to optimize a certain process, and frankly, they will do so ruthlessly. Which is sometimes good, sometimes bad; they do need to be kept in check when it comes to, say, environmental regulations.
However, this does not lead me to a Libertarian point of view. I am very much a centrist and appreciate the fact there is the government side of things that "helps people help themselves" free of corporate interests' meddling. It brings a degree of optimism and humanity to the whole thing that would otherwise be missing... and I believe the reason why we produce such a great amount of great people compared to our population size is a result of not wasting the human resources we have.
To me it is really incomprehensible that in the US employers are saddled with the healthcare benefits of their employees. It's completely unrelated to their business, gives a (good) reason for unionization and makes competition more difficult in the industry as the goals of the corporation and how well they are being reached become harder to quantify.
The "only those who work should get healthcare" argument is odd as well, because it essentially ensures that illness removes a person from the workforce through a vicious cycle. I also have met maybe a few pathetic individuals throughout the course of my entire life who are just satisfied to sit on their butts and not do something constructive with their lvies... I just don't buy the "encouragement" argument. The vast majority of people prefer work, and their work and safety nets should be two decoupled things.
Wikipedia has something interesting on both distortion of spacetime and on the Alcubierre drive. IMO, the idea of us just being able to "change" the space-time metric at will is quite a tall order:-)
And just like Newtonian physics is included in our current understanding of physics, quantum mechanics will be part of the 'new' physics. The new physics will be a deeper understanding, just like quantum mechanics vs Newtonian physics. There's no reason to believe that quantum mechanics would have to be entirely discarded.
Actually, was talking about relativity and not QM there, but being unclear apparently. After all, it's not really QM that sets the limits we're discussing here, and indeed, I hope neither has to be discarded, as that would run contrary to our historical experience of science. There can be even rather drastic shifts in point of view, but as this one poster I still like to refer you to said, "apples didn't start falling upwards after Einstein".
History has lots of "this can't be done" statements. They are still true, but we violate them all the time.
Hardly of the nature and with the evidence for them that relativity provides. The spooky part about them is that the limits are, in the Occam's razor sense, extremely economical and with fundamental implications from really simple first principles. It's really tough to believe reality itself would be altered to the point of just sneaking around them. In particular I'm not buying the sound barrier example as a valid analogy -- bullets went supersonic all the time at the time, and it was just an engineering issue, and known science wasn't as opposed to the idea of building a supersonic plane as it is opposed to building an FTL spaceship.
There is no way to break the sound barrier with a typical WWII-era airframe, no matter how many jets you strap on it. The plane will disintegrate. Yet we go supersonic all the time now. The old rule is still true, we just figured out a way around it. [...]
Again, going back to the sound barrier, we discovered that if you make your planes a little different, they can go supersonic quite easily. Once we've got another 100, 500 or more years of physics experiments behind us, we might figure out a way to make stuff that can travel FTL.
I'm glad to see that you accept the basic idea that we still with very high probability will have to play by the old rules when in the domain of the old rules (which is large already). However, the light barrier seems to be something of a property of space and time, energy and mass itself... and in an deeper sense, of consistent reality. Making your spaceship a little different by eliminating mass, say, would just allow you to travel at light speed. If you managed to give it something like negative mass, you'd be going backwards in time in some reference frame. Now... I am not well-versed in the spacetime consistency effects of warp drives that effect spacetime itself, but it seems that we'll be constrained by the very economical (and thus widely applicable) first principles of relativity for a LONG time unless we become truly godlike and detach from spacetime altogether -- and still, we'd have to make sure we don't kill our grandparents. FTL travel is just simply, sort of unnatural, and we don't even have any natural examples of it anywhere we could try to mimic. Absolutely nothing in known nature violates the FTL limit.
Really, you seem to be coming at this situation from a position where we've figured out most everything and are just finalizing the small details. That hasn't been the case since we left our caves and started taking a good, hard look at the world around us. The more we learn, the less we end up knowing.
That's a really tragic and defeatist idea regarding science if anything.:) I believe that in a universe with a completely naturalist explanation, that explanation is not infinite. It is discoverable, and we're constantly moving towards finding it. Our current science is already remarkable, as it has helped us explain a huge swathe of previously magical phenomena. I'm just wait
I'm certainly not a physicist so I am not going to offer any actual arguments about Dune-style warp drive's consequences to our perception of reality, but I can't avoid getting the feeling that this would introduce the time-travel paradox issues (killing one's parents etc) or at least make reality somehow inconsistent if not for you, for multiple observers at least... loss of locality is a big thing.
Anyway, God-like spacetime bending is magic as far as I'm concerned;-)
As the poster I referred to said, it's not neccessarily an end-condition yet, but our entire scientific method would become suspect if all of a sudden it turned out that our greatest theory so far wasn't included in the eventual great theory of everything. The theory absolutely has to be consistent with what we've got, and "this can't be done" statements at the scope of speed of light barrier one are going to be neccessarily part of it. I find it very unlikely that anything the theory of everything would extend relativity with would make relativity void for the practical purposes of trying to throw mass around at or above the speed of light. It might tell us in clear terms why exactly things are the way they are, but breakthroughs would have to topple so much of what you know the theory starts risking self-contradiction (unless you are willing to throw relativity into the bin completely, and this would be the greatest revolution in Physics ever).
QM didn't supplant Newton... and Newton didn't say that QM doesn't and cannot exist. As an added example, heavier-than-air airplanes don't contradict Newton (they don't fly because of antigravity drives), but because of an added understanding of aerodynamics... and Newton didn't say planes would by neccessity drop out of the sky (bar something extreme like causality violations).
And I do also believe that there *is* a final theory of everything (that is, everything can be explained naturally), and that we are getting relatively close. Having everything turned upside down this far along would be remarkable... even the Copernican Revolution maintained a lot of observations, just with a better explanation...
And I for one wouldn't want to be sent in as a colonist to meet these machine-raised probable psychopaths that would be populating the initial colony...;-)
Who is going to say that and remember us after the destruction of the universe?
The older I get, the more hippie I become in the sense that spending time building cathedrals to glorify oneself/one's nation/species in the face of utter final nonexistence is the dumbest thing you can do...
You'll just eliminate all public spending and then poach all our taxpayer-educated PhDs and researchers from us as they migrate overseas in search of lower taxes...
No you wouldn't. I'm not a quantum mechanic, but if I understood my Penrose correctly, information still cannot travel FTL.
The idea is that you can say that two particles are in the same state (or more accurately, wavefunction will collapse into the same state) -- you do not know which one -- and then when you observe the other, you know that the other particle will also be in this same state.
The funny thing is, you can't actively "flip" these entangled particles in any way to actually send a signal. You could imagine you and your friend manufacture two entangled particles, put them in black boxes and then transport the other box below lightspeed somewhere else, having agreed that you take some action at some particular observed state (and then you'd still be essentially doing things at random, yet according to the same state). You could also seek to verify that indeed you are seeing the same state post-observation, but this communication would also be below light speed. In no situation you get to really affect the state the other guy gets in his particle.
This theme has been repeated ad nauseam in responses to my original post as I've been branded defeatist; I'll just refer you to this brilliant response as it took care of responding to all of you;-)
There is a huge difference between just having a hunch that there won't be a way to accomplish something and not being able to give a scientific basis for why exactly not... and having the actual, well-reasoned weight of our physical knowledge giving us a hard limit that you just won't be moving anything past the speed of light. All appeals to a future theory that contradicts our current theory sound extremely unlikely at best, as relativity's relationship to the consistency of our reality is of such fundamental nature.
And I could be God if I could just manipulate reality to bend it to my will...
But taking your argument at face value, if one could "manipulate spacetime" in some warp drive fashion we would probably still get some sort of causality/reality-consistency issues (I'm just an armchair physicist like most of Slashdot, but I'd assume so). If you mean being able to bring any spacetime point to any other spacetime point... you need to start dealing with time-travel paradoxes which is so far beyond our current knowledge and ability that yeah, I'd say that our current knowledge doesn't allow FTL in principle.
Let's just say that if you want to claim that there is reason to believe it's doable in light of our current knowledge, your extraordinary claim will require extraordinary evidence, and I am not the one needing to defend our current state of knowledge which says pretty bluntly you aren't going to accelerate matter beyond light speed.
Thanks for nicely fleshing out this argument... I am too lazy tonight to defend myself against accusations of defeatism.:-)
There's a huge difference between not knowing yet how to accomplish something and having to actually disprove an established scientific theory first in order to get where you want to go -- preferably without putting the entire framework of the scientific method in doubt.
Limiting theories are sort of boring like that, but there you are... Computer Science is dull in a similar way esp. in the computability theory part -- it would be quite remarkable if someone proved P=NP, say. So remarkable I don't think it'll happen with Turing machines. We'll see what happens with some new fancy architecture -- at least the limit (hopefully) isn't as profoundly, fundamentally hard as the one we're seeing in Physics.
I would say scientific facts haven't really been "disproven" since Enlightenment established our basic knowledge of the world -- there's just improvement. The classic example is of course that Newton was correct enough for his time but Einstein was even more correct and complete.
Although our advances in technology have relied in a more refined understanding of nature, it's more difficult to find examples that rely on applications of something brand new that would have been just blatantly wrong and impossible based on earlier knowledge. I find relativity's light speed barrier to seem to be of such a fundamental nature that we'd be in absolutely deep doo-doo theoretically and even philosophically if it were ever discovered it can be broken... and without FTL, our colonization of space becomes a slow affair...
Yeah, but none of those magic wands of the past went directly against the principles of sound scientific knowledge at the time.
I feel the speed of light barrier is going to keep us from reaching Star Trek, ever. It's unlikely there be new physics that is both consistent with our current knowledge and allows FTL travel without truly weird consequences...
I'm Finnish... and was being tongue in cheek. There are certain stereotypes across the Atlantic about the Nordic style of government:-)
I must admit that the Conservative element of our brand new centre-right government worries me in these regards; they are so eager to suck up to Americans that I'm sure they'd be willing to totally sell the farm in order to get a pat on the head from Microsoft... the parliament is unfortunately rather incompetent in technical matters, and with ideological bias thrown in, I'm not sure we'd be able to resist this sort of a "MS Tax". But we'll see.
Slashdot Mirror
Hehe... someone mod this funny, it really is.. ;)
These kinds of "right not to be offended" laws are among the most ludicrous pieces of legislation you can imagine, sad to hear Brazil has such an extreme case. In Finland we've got a law against "incitement against a group" which sounds harmless enough (you'd fall foul of the law if you went declaring out on the street that you believe Jews/blacks/redheads should be killed, say).
:-)
It's just way too easy for some group to have their sensibilities oh so deeply offended when one even tries to reasonably discuss whether something about them that affects you, too, should be perhaps reconsidered. I like to participate in Finnish language-policy discussions (long story short, the 93% who are Finnish-speakers are supposedly as Swedish-speaking as the 5,5% of them, and if they aren't, they must be made so), and it's incredible how massively offended some Fenno-Swedes can be at the mere suggestion that I happen to be Finnish-speaking, and that no, I don't think it is much of a flaw in my character (or that of my possible children) that needs fixing by state intervention...
Of course, this offends their dignity much and I've been told on numerous occasions that I'm close to inciting against a group..
... and taught me that a civilized government won't have these sorts of weird arms that are not open to oversight by citizens.
;-)
Americans just suck at government.
To me it seems to be pretty much in the same league as "if we rewrote Newton's mechanics so that gravity is repulsive, we'd get apples to fall downwards".
Sure we can write all sorts of equations, but it doesn't mean nature works like that.
If BSD and Linux are the alternatives, they will fail together if "open source UNIX on the desktop" in general fails. The reason to this is that the end user only sees either KDE or Gnome, and makes his decisions based on that. They couldn't care less what is running under the hood, and in this regard, I am pretty sure both are good enough (although Linux probably has the lead in hardware support and the like).
Fully agreed with you actually, and I am an aspiring enterpreneur here in the most "socialist" part of Europe (ok, not France, which probably needed Sarkozy already). Business should be business, and the "social responsibility" that we speak of here regarding corporations is bull and a completely vague concept, as the corporation genuinely is there to optimize a certain process, and frankly, they will do so ruthlessly. Which is sometimes good, sometimes bad; they do need to be kept in check when it comes to, say, environmental regulations.
However, this does not lead me to a Libertarian point of view. I am very much a centrist and appreciate the fact there is the government side of things that "helps people help themselves" free of corporate interests' meddling. It brings a degree of optimism and humanity to the whole thing that would otherwise be missing... and I believe the reason why we produce such a great amount of great people compared to our population size is a result of not wasting the human resources we have.
To me it is really incomprehensible that in the US employers are saddled with the healthcare benefits of their employees. It's completely unrelated to their business, gives a (good) reason for unionization and makes competition more difficult in the industry as the goals of the corporation and how well they are being reached become harder to quantify.
The "only those who work should get healthcare" argument is odd as well, because it essentially ensures that illness removes a person from the workforce through a vicious cycle. I also have met maybe a few pathetic individuals throughout the course of my entire life who are just satisfied to sit on their butts and not do something constructive with their lvies... I just don't buy the "encouragement" argument. The vast majority of people prefer work, and their work and safety nets should be two decoupled things.
Wikipedia has something interesting on both distortion of spacetime and on the Alcubierre drive. IMO, the idea of us just being able to "change" the space-time metric at will is quite a tall order :-)
No objections there... my grudge here is mostly against those who don't appreciate the size of the big red NO our modern physics says to FTL ;)
I wonder if fusion power -produced antimatter was what is needed to do the trick with plausibly existing tech...
Actually, was talking about relativity and not QM there, but being unclear apparently. After all, it's not really QM that sets the limits we're discussing here, and indeed, I hope neither has to be discarded, as that would run contrary to our historical experience of science. There can be even rather drastic shifts in point of view, but as this one poster I still like to refer you to said, "apples didn't start falling upwards after Einstein".
Hardly of the nature and with the evidence for them that relativity provides. The spooky part about them is that the limits are, in the Occam's razor sense, extremely economical and with fundamental implications from really simple first principles. It's really tough to believe reality itself would be altered to the point of just sneaking around them. In particular I'm not buying the sound barrier example as a valid analogy -- bullets went supersonic all the time at the time, and it was just an engineering issue, and known science wasn't as opposed to the idea of building a supersonic plane as it is opposed to building an FTL spaceship.
I'm glad to see that you accept the basic idea that we still with very high probability will have to play by the old rules when in the domain of the old rules (which is large already). However, the light barrier seems to be something of a property of space and time, energy and mass itself... and in an deeper sense, of consistent reality. Making your spaceship a little different by eliminating mass, say, would just allow you to travel at light speed. If you managed to give it something like negative mass, you'd be going backwards in time in some reference frame. Now... I am not well-versed in the spacetime consistency effects of warp drives that effect spacetime itself, but it seems that we'll be constrained by the very economical (and thus widely applicable) first principles of relativity for a LONG time unless we become truly godlike and detach from spacetime altogether -- and still, we'd have to make sure we don't kill our grandparents. FTL travel is just simply, sort of unnatural, and we don't even have any natural examples of it anywhere we could try to mimic. Absolutely nothing in known nature violates the FTL limit.
That's a really tragic and defeatist idea regarding science if anything. :) I believe that in a universe with a completely naturalist explanation, that explanation is not infinite. It is discoverable, and we're constantly moving towards finding it. Our current science is already remarkable, as it has helped us explain a huge swathe of previously magical phenomena. I'm just wait
I'm certainly not a physicist so I am not going to offer any actual arguments about Dune-style warp drive's consequences to our perception of reality, but I can't avoid getting the feeling that this would introduce the time-travel paradox issues (killing one's parents etc) or at least make reality somehow inconsistent if not for you, for multiple observers at least... loss of locality is a big thing.
;-)
Anyway, God-like spacetime bending is magic as far as I'm concerned
It's going to be directed by Uwe Boll, the grand master of videogame movies!
Still requires crazy amounts of energy, and just gets worse the faster you want to go... and it's just the nearest star, and that's already 4 LY.
As the poster I referred to said, it's not neccessarily an end-condition yet, but our entire scientific method would become suspect if all of a sudden it turned out that our greatest theory so far wasn't included in the eventual great theory of everything. The theory absolutely has to be consistent with what we've got, and "this can't be done" statements at the scope of speed of light barrier one are going to be neccessarily part of it. I find it very unlikely that anything the theory of everything would extend relativity with would make relativity void for the practical purposes of trying to throw mass around at or above the speed of light. It might tell us in clear terms why exactly things are the way they are, but breakthroughs would have to topple so much of what you know the theory starts risking self-contradiction (unless you are willing to throw relativity into the bin completely, and this would be the greatest revolution in Physics ever).
QM didn't supplant Newton... and Newton didn't say that QM doesn't and cannot exist. As an added example, heavier-than-air airplanes don't contradict Newton (they don't fly because of antigravity drives), but because of an added understanding of aerodynamics... and Newton didn't say planes would by neccessity drop out of the sky (bar something extreme like causality violations).
And I do also believe that there *is* a final theory of everything (that is, everything can be explained naturally), and that we are getting relatively close. Having everything turned upside down this far along would be remarkable... even the Copernican Revolution maintained a lot of observations, just with a better explanation...
And I for one wouldn't want to be sent in as a colonist to meet these machine-raised probable psychopaths that would be populating the initial colony... ;-)
Who is going to say that and remember us after the destruction of the universe?
The older I get, the more hippie I become in the sense that spending time building cathedrals to glorify oneself/one's nation/species in the face of utter final nonexistence is the dumbest thing you can do...
You'll just eliminate all public spending and then poach all our taxpayer-educated PhDs and researchers from us as they migrate overseas in search of lower taxes...
No you wouldn't. I'm not a quantum mechanic, but if I understood my Penrose correctly, information still cannot travel FTL.
The idea is that you can say that two particles are in the same state (or more accurately, wavefunction will collapse into the same state) -- you do not know which one -- and then when you observe the other, you know that the other particle will also be in this same state.
The funny thing is, you can't actively "flip" these entangled particles in any way to actually send a signal. You could imagine you and your friend manufacture two entangled particles, put them in black boxes and then transport the other box below lightspeed somewhere else, having agreed that you take some action at some particular observed state (and then you'd still be essentially doing things at random, yet according to the same state). You could also seek to verify that indeed you are seeing the same state post-observation, but this communication would also be below light speed. In no situation you get to really affect the state the other guy gets in his particle.
This theme has been repeated ad nauseam in responses to my original post as I've been branded defeatist; I'll just refer you to this brilliant response as it took care of responding to all of you ;-)
There is a huge difference between just having a hunch that there won't be a way to accomplish something and not being able to give a scientific basis for why exactly not... and having the actual, well-reasoned weight of our physical knowledge giving us a hard limit that you just won't be moving anything past the speed of light. All appeals to a future theory that contradicts our current theory sound extremely unlikely at best, as relativity's relationship to the consistency of our reality is of such fundamental nature.
And I could be God if I could just manipulate reality to bend it to my will...
But taking your argument at face value, if one could "manipulate spacetime" in some warp drive fashion we would probably still get some sort of causality/reality-consistency issues (I'm just an armchair physicist like most of Slashdot, but I'd assume so). If you mean being able to bring any spacetime point to any other spacetime point... you need to start dealing with time-travel paradoxes which is so far beyond our current knowledge and ability that yeah, I'd say that our current knowledge doesn't allow FTL in principle.
Let's just say that if you want to claim that there is reason to believe it's doable in light of our current knowledge, your extraordinary claim will require extraordinary evidence, and I am not the one needing to defend our current state of knowledge which says pretty bluntly you aren't going to accelerate matter beyond light speed.
And don't forget the large colonies of mycoplasma genitalium that just love living in the sticky substance...
Thanks for nicely fleshing out this argument... I am too lazy tonight to defend myself against accusations of defeatism. :-)
There's a huge difference between not knowing yet how to accomplish something and having to actually disprove an established scientific theory first in order to get where you want to go -- preferably without putting the entire framework of the scientific method in doubt.
Limiting theories are sort of boring like that, but there you are... Computer Science is dull in a similar way esp. in the computability theory part -- it would be quite remarkable if someone proved P=NP, say. So remarkable I don't think it'll happen with Turing machines. We'll see what happens with some new fancy architecture -- at least the limit (hopefully) isn't as profoundly, fundamentally hard as the one we're seeing in Physics.
You're late with the idea ... A free market based solution to democracy.
I would say scientific facts haven't really been "disproven" since Enlightenment established our basic knowledge of the world -- there's just improvement. The classic example is of course that Newton was correct enough for his time but Einstein was even more correct and complete.
Although our advances in technology have relied in a more refined understanding of nature, it's more difficult to find examples that rely on applications of something brand new that would have been just blatantly wrong and impossible based on earlier knowledge. I find relativity's light speed barrier to seem to be of such a fundamental nature that we'd be in absolutely deep doo-doo theoretically and even philosophically if it were ever discovered it can be broken... and without FTL, our colonization of space becomes a slow affair...
Yeah, but none of those magic wands of the past went directly against the principles of sound scientific knowledge at the time.
I feel the speed of light barrier is going to keep us from reaching Star Trek, ever. It's unlikely there be new physics that is both consistent with our current knowledge and allows FTL travel without truly weird consequences...
I'm Finnish... and was being tongue in cheek. There are certain stereotypes across the Atlantic about the Nordic style of government :-)
I must admit that the Conservative element of our brand new centre-right government worries me in these regards; they are so eager to suck up to Americans that I'm sure they'd be willing to totally sell the farm in order to get a pat on the head from Microsoft... the parliament is unfortunately rather incompetent in technical matters, and with ideological bias thrown in, I'm not sure we'd be able to resist this sort of a "MS Tax". But we'll see.