It's official: FTL is impossible

[Crazy Eddie]

They don't.

If you can travel back in time, you can travel faster than light...

If you can travel back in time, you can travel faster than anything. But just because you can outrun your little sister in a foot race does NOT mean you are able to travel through time.

If you can travel faster than light, you can travel back in time – faster than light travel puts the cause before the effect

I'm pretty sure you mean "puts the effect before the cause."

But it doesn't. It puts the OBSERVATION of the effect before the OBSERVATION of the cause. If you are hit by an FTL bullet, that means you see the bullet before you see the person who fired it at you.

Mathematically speaking, it IS an observational anomaly, and not a real one, because the anomaly works out in both directions. In the classical thought experiment you have two astronauts on a space ship: one ship accelerates to close to the speed of light, the other stays stationary. Both astronauts have a clock that keeps identical time. The observer on the speeding ship looks across the distance at his partner's clock notices HIS clock is running slower than the clock on the stationary ship. This is called "time dilation," and the theory is sometimes interpreted to mean that time has slowed down for the one who has accelerated. It is less often interpreted to mean that time would REVERSE if the accelerated astronaut somehow exceeded the speed of light.

But it doesn't work that way in reality, because THERE IS NO UNIVERSAL REFERENCE FRAME. That means there is no UNIVERSAL truth as to which one of them is stationary; the accelerating ship may see his partner's clock running faster, but you run the equation from his partner's point of view and you discover that the stationary astronaut will see the exact same thing, that the ACCELERATED clock is now running faster. It works this way because acceleration isn't a factor in the equation, only relative velocity, and in special relativity it doesn't actually matter which space craft accelerated and which one remained stationary, or if they BOTH accelerated in opposite directions. Each sees the exact same thing: the other ship's clock is running faster than his own.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Oh, come on. Most of the papers that oppose the Big Bang theory do so by attacking the Doppler redshift in one way or another. But the Canadian physics professor Paul Marmet, who died about six years ago, was one of the first to do so by suggesting the presence of H2 in space, which the ESA later found, probably inspired by his and other papers that urged looking for it. I can't find the 1989 paper by Marment and Reber, but here's what he wrote in reference to it in 2000:

We also showed that the presence of large amounts of the hard-to-detect molecular hydrogen in interstellar space could provide an alternative explanation to the Big Bang theory, by explaining the observed redshift as a result of the delayed propagation of light through space, caused by the collision of photons with interstellar matter.

That's just plain silly. Propagation through matter will cause many things, but one thing it WON'T cause is a uniform doppler shift. Signal attenuation, sure, but not a SHIFT IN FREQUENCY.

Of course, what he's saying about collisions of photons is also the explanation for why light travels faster through air than through water or glass and faster through space than through air, etc.

Except that photons do not collide with one another, they collide with other atoms and molecules that absorb and then immediately re-emit them on the same or similar frequency. This, again, does not account for a uniform frequency shift under any known circumstances.

And I did put "material" in quotes. I already said it's really what is called by many names these days: zero-point energy...

Is energy, not material. It is also not yet confirmed to exist.

And if you want FTL and intertial damping for interstellar travel, the place to start is by blaming gravity on ZPE, as something that pushes from all directions, as mentioned upthread, where a massive body (a planet, black hole, etc.) acts as a partial shield in one direction against this ZPE pressure on another mass (a paperweight, barbell etc.), and is the luminiferous medium the determines lightspeed in space minus any delays caused by trace matter, and the cause of "wind" resistance responsible fror Special Relativity, all subversively explained upthread.

The "wind resistance" thing in special relativity is more accurately explained by Lorenz contractions than anything else, especially ZPE.

Although the notion of gravity as a repulsive/shading force is one that is not without its merits either, since gravity would under that mechanism behave EXACTLY like a "distortion of space time" so observed. Special relativity only applies to inertial (stationary) reference frames, so if you could parlay that into a non-inertial (moving) reference frame as per General Relativity it might actually work. Gravitational fields are the archetypical example of a moving (in this case, constantly imploding) reference frame. We've never encountered a reference frame that only moves in a specific direction, but there's no reason it isn't possible.

 

[YellowSubmarine]

But it doesn't. It puts the OBSERVATION of the effect before the OBSERVATION of the cause. If you are hit by an FTL bullet, that means you see the bullet before you see the person who fired it at you.

http://sheol.org/throopw/tachyon-pistols.html

Though I personally prefer taking Einstein's train thought experiment, imagining that the lightnings are non-corporeal life forms able of FTL communication, imagining three pairs of them existing in three inertial frames (one stationary, two in trains moving in the opposite direction), and creating a paradox that way.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

But it doesn't. It puts the OBSERVATION of the effect before the OBSERVATION of the cause. If you are hit by an FTL bullet, that means you see the bullet before you see the person who fired it at you.

http://sheol.org/throopw/tachyon-pistols.html

Though I personally prefer taking Einstein's train thought experiment, imagining that the lightnings are non-corporeal life forms able of FTL communication, imagining three pairs of them existing in three inertial frames (one stationary, two in trains moving in the opposite direction), and creating a paradox that way.

Except there is no paradox, not really, because once again, all three frames are equally valid, as are all three observations. The three beings can each accurately say "Time has sped up for them," all of which are logically contradictory, and all of which are equally correct.

The really weird thing is, those observations only remain valid as long they are in different frames. When they all return to the same frame (zero relative velocity) they immediately return to synchronicity).

 

[Bill Morris]

I've already explained upthread how to get around time dilation and why FTL doesn't result in going back in time, by addressing the mechanism itself of Special Relativity.

By the way, about never achieving FTL, well, perhaps you've heard of Skunk Works, Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Development Programs. Well, former CEO the late Ben Rich before he died said in a speech in L.A. that they'd already done in an above-top-secret, black-budget project. Information on whether he was full of beans or how far along they might really be is still very highly classified.

That's just plain silly. Propagation through matter will cause many things, but one thing it WON'T cause is a uniform doppler shift. Signal attenuation, sure, but not a SHIFT IN FREQUENCY.

Huh? A slight change in color, like that caused by atomic hydrogen in space, which is already accounted for. That's all. H1 and H2 both act as weak color filters, but the contribution by H2 is ignored and falsely atttributed purely to Doppler redshift, to put in simpler terms what those two phyicists explained in a 1989 paper.
Here's one of those early papers that explains it in detail:
http://www.newtonphysics.on.ca/bigbang/index.html

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I've already explained upthread how to get around time dilation and why FTL doesn't result in going back in time, by addressing the mechanism itself of Special Relativity.

Special relativity doesn't describe a mechanism, so I'm not sure what you mean.

By the way, about never achieving FTL, well, perhaps you've heard of Skunk Works, Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Development Programs. Well, former CEO the late Ben Rich before he died said in a speech in L.A. that they'd already done in an above-top-secret, black-budget project. Information on whether he was full of beans or how far along they might really be is still very highly classified.

You'd be surprised at some of the asinine shit Skunkworks has researched over the years. They mainly only declassify the stuff that works.

 

[Bill Morris]

Special relativity doesn't describe a mechanism, so I'm not sure what you mean.

I doesn't, but I already have in this thread. It's like wind resistance except that this wind is made of not air molecules but stuff (ZPE/gravitons) that affects every particle of you and your vessel's structure, causing what may seem like time dilation but is merely slowing down of phyical processes at a subatomic level, And exceeding lightspeed by the method I've already explained in this thread does not result in going back in time. If you want to just view the past, watch a prerecorded TV program, etc.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Special relativity doesn't describe a mechanism, so I'm not sure what you mean.

I doesn't, but I already have in this thread. It's like wind resistance except that this wind is made of not air molecules but stuff (ZPE/gravitons) that affects every particle of you and your vessel's structure, causing what may seem like time dilation but is merely slowing down of phyical processes at a subatomic level...

See, that doesn't work for special relativity because 1) it doesn't account for relativistic doppler shift OR Lorenz contraction, 2) time dilation doesn't ACTUALLY occur, it is only OBSERVED to occur and 3) since there is no such thing as a universal reference frame, it isn't meaningful to speak of "drag" from a putative virtual particle field that must be stationary with respect to the traveler.

Basically, I'm saying you can't use special relativity to disprove special relativity. You have to start with the observed phenomena that SR is supposed to explain (Lorentz contractions, doppler shifts, etc). SR never postulates a physical mechanism, it's just a mathematical abstraction; if its predictions are wrong, then you can't really devise a mechanism that's consistent with it, can you?

And exceeding lightspeed by the method I've already explained in this thread does not result in going back in time.

Exceeding lightspeed by ANY method does not result in going back in time.

 

[YellowSubmarine]

Exceeding lightspeed by ANY method does not result in going back in time.

Even though your rocket launcher obliterated my tachyon pistols, I suggest looking at the tachyonic_antitelephone too.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

According to Feynman, antimatter particles can be considered as matter particles travelling backwards in time, although I don't know if anyone has tried to establish if entropy is similarly reversed for such particles from our perspective. I guess you could test the hypothesis on a gas made from anti-hydrogen molecules. If the arrow is reversed then would it be possible to send information backward in time by encoding it as correlations in antimatter somehow?

 

[Bill Morris]

Special relativity doesn't describe a mechanism, so I'm not sure what you mean.

I doesn't, but I already have in this thread. It's like wind resistance except that this wind is made of not air molecules but stuff (ZPE/gravitons) that affects every particle of you and your vessel's structure, causing what may seem like time dilation but is merely slowing down of phyical processes at a subatomic level...

See, that doesn't work for special relativity because 1) it doesn't account for relativistic doppler shift OR Lorenz contraction, 2) time dilation doesn't ACTUALLY occur, it is only OBSERVED to occur and 3) since there is no such thing as a universal reference frame, it isn't meaningful to speak of "drag" from a putative virtual particle field that must be stationary with respect to the traveler.

Basically, I'm saying you can't use special relativity to disprove special relativity. You have to start with the observed phenomena that SR is supposed to explain (Lorentz contractions, doppler shifts, etc). SR never postulates a physical mechanism, it's just a mathematical abstraction; if its predictions are wrong, then you can't really devise a mechanism that's consistent with it, can you?

And exceeding lightspeed by the method I've already explained in this thread does not result in going back in time.

Exceeding lightspeed by ANY method does not result in going back in time.

Well, like gas molecules in a sealed container, these so-called virtual particles would only static in a statistical sense in relation some arbitrary point in their midst for convenience in constructing a theoretical model. It's not hard to see how a clock would be affected if physical processes were slowed or how non-Doppler frequency shifts could be produced when photons are emitted under these conditions, but it does tend to require looking at positions and motions of any two points of reference as both being relative to some arbitrary fixed point within the entire system, in this case infinite space filled with a sea of virtual particles. About Lorentz contraction, that has been addressed in various presentations, papers, and probably books that I would likely have no luck trying to access online. It's not quite the same, but one can easily see how a gas-filled balloon attached to a flat, forword-facing surface of a fast airplane would be flattened out during travel, but with the virtual-particle wind that passes through everything, the model becomes more complex. Anyway, it's hard to answer all that in one paragraph. But I did post a YouTube video earlier in this thread in which Einstein briefly acknowledged this but using the 19th-century term aether. Here it is again:

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yH9vAIdMqng[/yt]

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Well, like gas molecules in a sealed container, these so-called virtual particles would only static in a statistical sense in relation some arbitrary point in their midst for convenience in constructing a theoretical model.

Which is still a universal reference frame, which is invalid in special relativity. If you're going to postulate something like that then you need to dump SR altogether and revert to aether theory, and there are a handful of problems from THAT paradigm you need to solve first before you can even begin to tackle time dilation and/or Lorentz contractions.

About Lorentz contraction, that has been addressed in various presentations, papers, and probably books that I would likely have no luck trying to access online.

Wikipedia is free.

It's not quite the same, but one can easily see how a gas-filled balloon attached to a flat, forword-facing surface of a fast airplane would be flattened out during travel, but with the virtual-particle wind that passes through everything, the model becomes more complex.

And flawed, because once again the measured contraction is only valid when measured on a moving object in a stationary reference frame. Since velocity is relative, the magnitude of contraction is also relative, yet PROPER LENGTH remains the same in each object's reference frame.

Like time dilation, it only effects your observations, not the object itself.

 

[YellowSubmarine]

Given that you can explain the universe by tiny vibrating strings in 11 dimensions, I'm sure you can also explain it with a theory that uses some non-stationary virtual particle analogue of aether that implements enough math tricks to guarantee equivalence to relativity!

 

[Bill Morris]

Watch the video. If Einstein himself was satisfied, what's to argue about?

 

[YellowSubmarine]

Just because a great mind with an amazing contribution to physics has said something doesn't make that thing true.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Given that you can explain the universe by tiny vibrating strings in 11 dimensions, I'm sure you can also explain it with a theory that uses some non-stationary virtual particle analogue of aether that implements enough math tricks to guarantee equivalence to relativity!

Not to echo my cynicism from the Pluto thread, but that's kind of the weird thing about physics: if you devise a sufficiently complicated equation you can prove that the moon is a rectangle and 2+2=5, and nobody could call you on it, because 99% of the human race isn't smart enough to understand the equations and the 1% that is can't afford to look like they don't understand it.

 

[YellowSubmarine]

Proving that the Moon is a rectangle is rather trivial by first proving it is a cube using an inverse taxicab norm and then increasing the dimensions of a rectangle using improper orthogonal recomposition. Incidentally, that's how I managed to catch a lion in the desert after I showed that the moon is virtually indistinguishable from a desert.

 

[Deckerd]

Einstein made mistakes. There's no point in quoting him when he's saying something which hasn't been proven. As newtype A says you can invent virtually anything and then prove it with an equation. Calling it 'research' is a stretch.

 

[Bill Morris]

This elaborates on what Einstein is heard saying in the video (Einstein"s views on the aether, near the bottom of the page). The last sentence, in my view, points out the problem here: that most physicists today don't go along with Einstein's concept of the new aether (as opposed to the 19th concept), which would be the zero-point energy, virtual particles, or whatever term you like. But that may already be changing--slowly. And that's the key to the concept I've explained about addressing this background energy to get around the lightspeed limit, as well as provide interial damping and fuel for your craft for interstellar or even local flights.


Wikipedia: Luminiferous aether
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_aether

 

[JarodRussell]

And achieving FTL is not about curvature of space. It's about using the unseen material that comprises the fabric of space as your fuel and creating a local vacuum in that fabric, into which every particle of matter comprising your vessel will be individually pushed forward by the ZPE (gravitons) comprising the fabric of space. You won't feel any g force when changing speed, since you are being pushed along by the same stuff that is sometimes called gravitons. Special relativity, as I have already explained upthread, applies if you use conventional rocketry, but not in this scenario. To even get started designing an FTL system you have to think of gravitons as not reaching across tens of thousands of light-years from the galactic core to pull on our solar system to keep it and our Orion Arm in orbit but being everywhere not occupied by so-called "real" subatomic particles and pushing. Think of a ball of water floating around in the Space Shuttle. Atmospheric pressure holds it together. So the acceleration you get with the type of FTL I described pushes every particle of matter individually in the direction of travel, a situation not covered by special relativity. This is a hot area of research today, but it's still in its infancy. And, as I mentioned, the terminology is all over the place, with many names for the same thing.

Now this is some deep shit.

If it's a hot area, do you actually have some recent research papers/conference publications that you can link us to?