Look, I am not a physicist. I don’t understand much of this once you get into things such as quantum tunneling and inter-particle photon exchange
But what I do understand is the main point about sound waves:
If you push the pencil, the atoms you pushed “bump into” the next row of atoms. There is, naturally, a space between the atoms. THERE IS NO MATERIAL SO RIGID AS TO HAVE A SPACE OF ZERO. If there were, the speed of the wave would be equal to c, right? That’s where I get a little fuzzy. The point it, the speed of that compression, of that “bump”, is the very same property as the speed of sound for that object. That is what sound is, after all. A compression, a push. Pushing the pencil would be the same to the pencil as sound is.
If you have found a way to make information travel faster than light with such a “loophole” theory, you are almost certainly wrong.
If you have found a way to make information travel faster than light with such a “loophole” theory, you are almost certainly wrong.
We cannot rule out the possibility. Everyone seems to believe that C is a cosmic speed limit, barrier if you will and things that provide any information cannot transmit faster than this barricade. Given the mathematics today, sure it looks compelling that there isn’t a conceivable way of producing these results, but we are a small speck in a much larger picture. There could be and in all probability is, different laws of physics in different areas of space. What we call a limit to speed could very well be considered stationary in other areas of space. Areas where things such as time and space are altered (or even non-existent) in a way unimaginable to us. There could be information sent between dimensions instantly. What we call speed is nothing but velocity and time covering a given distance. If there is no distance to be traveled or time to record the movement of something from one place to the next, then information can be sent in an instant.
Like the theory if one could bend or distort the very fabric of space time so two points meet and are essentially the same point in space, information or objects could quite literally leap great distances, at what could be construed as faster than light travel.
Its all highly speculative of course, but I for one believe that the possibilities cannot be over looked or thrown aside just because we have been conditioned to believe that C is the end all, be all of velocities. Heck, there could even be atomic particles (more than willing to carry or transmit information) whizzing by us this very second at speeds many times greater than C. Only until a device is created to detect, collect and utilize these particles we would go on completely oblivious to their presence.
Fact of the matter is, we shouldn’t rule out the possibility. The fact that we ourselves may be traveling at the speed of light through the cosmos can’t even be ruled out, because the fact is… we just don’t know. We as a human race as still in our infancy as compared to other species or objects, so our capabilities are still quite new and most defiantly not refined. Time will be the true test. Maybe one day we discover it, maybe one day we disprove it. Until that day comes, as I said, we just don’t know. So lets not toss the matter aside as a impossibility because age old mathematics have a grudge against it, or have been built with a set limit because their developer thought light speed is all that anything is capable of. We have to entertain the idea, and try and develop proof and the math to back it up. One day it will happen.
The problem with your argument is that it basically says, “We don’t know everything, so anything could be possible, so really we don’t know anything.” Sure, the physics and mathematics that demonstrate the impossibility of exceeding the speed of light could be wrong, or only locally applicable, or any of a million other suppositions. And you could just be a figment of my imagination, or we could all be living on a speck carried around by a giant elephant. Ultimately, we establish standards of evidence precisely to distinguish between the more and less plausible, and while it is a given that our knowledge is necessarily incomplete and fallible, I don’t see it as necessary or practical to put a caveat in front of every “impossible” or “never” we use in conversation. You are superficially correct that the imperfect nature of our knowledge makes it possible for us to be wrong about almost anything, but the liklihood of being wrong about some things is so miniscule as to be meaningless. I’m not jumping of any buildings on the basis of an argument that we might be wrong about gravity. It’s just not a strong argument.
What about this one? In this clip the guy says that the galaxy rotates simultaneously thanks to the black matter. If I could stop the movement of the black matter that makes stars to rotate within a galaxy, I could send an instant message to the other side of the galaxy.
“Dear alien on the other side of Milky Way, when our galaxy stops to rotate, I don’t love you anymore.”
Hi, I’m not a physicist either, but I know a little about this thing called quantum entanglement. If you hit a sodium atom with ultraviolet light, it emits a twinned photon. If these two photons are separated, they remain “entangled,” i.e., their spin and polarity (as well as other similarities) remain static relative to each other. Anything you do to one affects the other instantaneously. Let’s say you send one photon north and the other south. You do nothing to the south photon, but as the north photon reaches a point, say one thousand miles away from the start of the experiment, you cause it to pass through a field which reverses its polarity, and then you observe it. The result is that the southbound photon will realign it’s polarity simultaneously, with no delay as soon as the northbound photon is observed. This is one of several things: a: something not subsequently listed within this list which I am listing, b: an example of how information can travel faster than light, c: completely unexplainable by the likes of me, or d: an illustration of the theory of non-locality, which posits that there is no faster-than-light exchange of information because there is no actual space between the particles; any such observation is merely illusory.
As far as tachyons go, the laws of physics say that matter cannot exceed the speed of light, that is, it cannot start at a speed less than c and then attain or pass c. Tachyons, however, are hypothetical superluminal particles which, as their description implies, travel faster than light to begin with. They cannot go slower than c; however, barring some form of entanglement, they are also subject to the normal rules of spacetime, which disallows the transfer of information at superluminal speeds...kind of paradoxical, but hey, it’s almost Friday.
And as far as the pencil stretching from the sun, isn’t all the discussion about the makeup and molecular motion of the pencil irrelevant? It’s supposed to be a thought experiment, right? So, for the sake of the experiment, couldn’t you just say you had a pencil that was infinitely rigid? (insert joke here) Also, this part of the conversation reminds me of the Tippler device, which theoretically allows one to travel back and forth in time any time subsequent to the creation of the device. This has to do with the device being thousands of light years long, or something.
When I read the idea that both ends of the monster pencil travelled simultaneously, THAT was what raised my red flag. You don’t even need to have a really, really long pencil to see why this doesn’t make sense.
Take a normal pencil that you’d hold in your hand. Make a signal at one end (hit it, slide it, whatever). If the signal reaches its destination simultaneously, we have not merely broken c-- we have in fact achieved infinite speed by reducing the t to 0. In our hands, every day, with no effort, even! How blind we’ve been.
Thanks for the read, nice forum you’ve got here. Just wanted to point out the small-scale pencil idea.
/stumbled
Just curious, as I was reading the quantum entanglement information on the Wikipedia page, it says that each particle in an entangled pair has the opposite spin of the other.
The question here is this: would it be possible to use entangled particles to create a binary transistor allowing for data to be sent instantly to a receiver which then processes the data on its own?
I’m obviously no physicist, I just hold some interest in it, and while I understand to some degree that we seem to know nothing about why entangled particles change simultaneously, but if both are observed at the same time and one is always going to be spin-up and the other spin-down, and we could change the spin state at any given time - is it possible?
I’m a theoretical physicist and I would like to imagine I know my stuff…
No material is ever perfectly rigid, if it were then our fundamental notions of space-time would collapse and we would have to rethink quite a bit of physics since the turn of the last century. Do I know any details? Unfortunately not, other than this supposed fact (I’m not too closed minded to say absolutely that the the speed of light is an upper bound).
Though hypothetically speaking… neglecting all the current wisdom… faster than light travel would provide some interesting images. If you think about what’d happen if, say, a ball travelled faster than c towards you.... what you would see, is a ball moving away from you, as the closest images would arrive before the ones further away! This minor thought experiment predicts that if the ball was coming right at you, you wouldn’t know what hit you (since the ball would be going away from you, instead of coming towards you… lol).
I believe all contemporary physicists consider tachyons as unphysical but nevertheless necessary in keeping a theory consistent. We impose gauge fixing to remove them from the maths but they nevertheless appear at the start of many theories! For example bosonic string theory. When you construct states (i.e. the equivalent of quantum mechanical states but with strings) you find that tachyonic states arise directly from the derivations (along with all the other’s that are physical). We can use a choice of gauge to remove residual symmetries that remove these unwanted, unphysical states.
One more thing… wormholes do exist theoretically but are unstable by the rules of general relativity. Looking specifically at Einstein-Rosen bridges that arise from Reisner-Norstrom for example (charged BH) one can derive equations that show crossing the event horizon will result in an infinite blue-shift - ie infinite energy! (I believe the equations are in the part III cambridge BH course notes, at least they were in my year) So trying to get over a horizon, even with an infinitesmal perturbation to the system, causes the bridge to collapse and return to a schwarzschild spacetime. Therefore, you’d hit the singularity, instead of make it through to another asymtotically flat spacetime. Sorry folks! Unlikely to happen!
Cool, dante. Do physicists generally believe that something with zero mass can exist? Mass seems as limiting a factor as c, so if something can be nothing...??? I used to think this was a stupid question, but I swear the more I learn, the more I am confused.
Do physicists generally believe that something with zero mass can exist? Mass seems as limiting a factor as c, so if something can be nothing...??? I used to think this was a stupid question, but I swear the more I learn, the more I am confused.
Anything that travels at c must have zero mass—in particular, photons travel at c, they have zero mass. So yes, physicists do believe that things exist with zero mass.
I’d just like to point out for a second that photons do NOT have 0 mass, nor do they travel at the speed of light.
The mass of a photon is just considered to be 0 because we have no way of possibly measuring a mass so tiny, or getting something so small to move slowly enough that you could even observe it for very long. I believe there is an experiment going on in a university somewhere (someone elaborate if you know what i’m talking about) where they’ve slowed down light itself to a crawl by making it travel through a very very thick and sticky liquid. If the photon had no mass, it wouldn’t be effected at all by the ‘sticky collision’ that it has with this liquid. Seriously, if light had 0 mass and could travel at speed C, then it would never get anywhere, because at speed C, all objects lose all reference to time, and by virtue of being light would not have a defineable speed at all. It’d either be there or it wouldn’t. Also, photons react with electrons, another feat that would be impossible for a particle that can’t technically exist or work under the normal laws of physics.
Second, you could probably get a message to the earth before the blast got there by finding a particle that’s lighter than light, and applying the appropriate amount of energy to propel it a wee bit closer to that impossible limit, C. The beautiful thing is, because of the time-dilation that would occur for that closer-to-the-limit particle would experience, the earth would probably have a huge (comparitively, like 2-3 minutes) window to operate some sort of evacuation or defense in, if they had a 2-3 minute evacuation or defense.
The problem would be finding one of these lighter particles (which tend to be so light and fast that we cannot percieve their existence at all times) and keeping it stable long enough to get it to earth. Also, trying to write a message with it? Not likely.
Pencil idea?
depends on what mediums the light has to pass through before it gets to earth. probably not going to work.
I’d just like to point out for a second that photons do NOT have 0 mass, nor do they travel at the speed of light.
The mass of a photon is just considered to be 0 because we have no way of possibly measuring a mass so tiny, or getting something so small to move slowly enough that you could even observe it for very long. I believe there is an experiment going on in a university somewhere (someone elaborate if you know what i’m talking about) where they’ve slowed down light itself to a crawl by making it travel through a very very thick and sticky liquid. If the photon had no mass, it wouldn’t be effected at all by the ‘sticky collision’ that it has with this liquid.
Thanks rail. Googling slow light yields a lot of stuff. I found THIS LINK for the University of Rochester (just down the road from me) that states U of R researchers have created laser pulses that traveled faster than c.
Seriously, if light had 0 mass and could travel at speed C, then it would never get anywhere, because at speed C, all objects lose all reference to time, and by virtue of being light would not have a defineable speed at all. It’d either be there or it wouldn’t. Also, photons react with electrons, another feat that would be impossible for a particle that can’t technically exist or work under the normal laws of physics.
Well, I don’t know enough to talk to the theoretical semantics and time refereence, but I blew the dust off of my organic chem texts. They don’t make any disclaimers when stating that photons are massless packets of energy. I understand that photons are absorbed by rhodopsin, which in turn stimulates our nerves and lets us see. Absorbing a massless thing is somewhat difficult to imagine, but then I look at the theory of gravitons and I notice that “massless energy packets” certainly seem to be at play there. As I said earlier - the more I learn, the less I know. That’s fun.
