Relativity doesn't really use the speed of light. It uses the maximum speed of information, which the speed of light happens to be pretty close to. In real life, information faces delays all the time, which slows down its speed when we measure it.
Your car can make hundreds of miles per hour. This frozen light business is like a New York traffic jam.
The c in E=mc^2 (or E^2 = M^2c^4 + p^2c^2) refers to an intrinsic property of spacetime. Bose Einstein Condensates and so on don't really alter that. One way to think about it is to stop with the 'slowing down light thing', and instead conceive it as the BEC swallowing up photons for a while, storing the information, and then reconstructing a new photon which is exactly identical at the end. This is pretty much the same, because in QM, you can't really track anything exactly, and you definitely can't distinguish between objects with the same properties.
But money does determine directions for research. It's more or less inevitable. Scientists need to feed their families. Equipment costs money. Governments need to justify their expenses to the taxpayers. In practice, everybody does explicit and implicit cost-benefit analyses. Of course, the ideal of science is of a transcendental betterment of mankind, but in the end, all that matters is that the money-men get told that if you give us X dollars, in the long term you will get Y dollars back.
Why does Open Source want to be popular? Seriously - this is a question we need to ask. With proprietary software, the reason is simple - income. With open source software, however, that isn't so often true.
To an extent, Free/Open source software do require popularity. But it isn't user popularity - what is required in an input of developers, code-tinkerers, programmers to take an interest in the software, and to help develop it. If not directly, then at least add some positive feedback. Bug reports, feature requests, etc. Now, making the software easy to install and use does attract more users - but realistically, what sort of positive benefit would an open source project derive from being used by people who would normally never use a program on their computer that did not come pre-installed?
Much of the time, open source developers are just playing straight into proprietary software's hands. (In many ways, Microsoft etc dictate users' perceptions of what is 'user friendly'. Many complaints about alternatives are that they fail to replicate proprietary software's flaws.)
It looks like what Open source really needs is really some sort of social engineering, to coax more people into viewing software as something other than essentially singular 'products' but instead as an ongoing process in which participation is required. Perhaps open source needs free software?
Slashdot Mirror
Relativity doesn't really use the speed of light. It uses the maximum speed of information, which the speed of light happens to be pretty close to. In real life, information faces delays all the time, which slows down its speed when we measure it.
Your car can make hundreds of miles per hour. This frozen light business is like a New York traffic jam.
It's not the same.
The c in E=mc^2 (or E^2 = M^2c^4 + p^2c^2) refers to an intrinsic property of spacetime. Bose Einstein Condensates and so on don't really alter that. One way to think about it is to stop with the 'slowing down light thing', and instead conceive it as the BEC swallowing up photons for a while, storing the information, and then reconstructing a new photon which is exactly identical at the end. This is pretty much the same, because in QM, you can't really track anything exactly, and you definitely can't distinguish between objects with the same properties.
But money does determine directions for research. It's more or less inevitable. Scientists need to feed their families. Equipment costs money. Governments need to justify their expenses to the taxpayers. In practice, everybody does explicit and implicit cost-benefit analyses. Of course, the ideal of science is of a transcendental betterment of mankind, but in the end, all that matters is that the money-men get told that if you give us X dollars, in the long term you will get Y dollars back.
Devil's advocate:
Why does Open Source want to be popular? Seriously - this is a question we need to ask. With proprietary software, the reason is simple - income. With open source software, however, that isn't so often true.
To an extent, Free/Open source software do require popularity. But it isn't user popularity - what is required in an input of developers, code-tinkerers, programmers to take an interest in the software, and to help develop it. If not directly, then at least add some positive feedback. Bug reports, feature requests, etc. Now, making the software easy to install and use does attract more users - but realistically, what sort of positive benefit would an open source project derive from being used by people who would normally never use a program on their computer that did not come pre-installed?
Much of the time, open source developers are just playing straight into proprietary software's hands. (In many ways, Microsoft etc dictate users' perceptions of what is 'user friendly'. Many complaints about alternatives are that they fail to replicate proprietary software's flaws.)
It looks like what Open source really needs is really some sort of social engineering, to coax more people into viewing software as something other than essentially singular 'products' but instead as an ongoing process in which participation is required. Perhaps open source needs free software?