I was being sarcastic, in the light of the Murdoch empire's penchant for making shit up; the BBC is a beacon of integrity compared to that and, indeed, compared to most news media on the planet.
It's official: FTL is impossible
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I was being sarcastic, in the light of the Murdoch empire's penchant for making shit up; the BBC is a beacon of integrity compared to that and, indeed, compared to most news media on the planet.
There was even an TNG episode where Picard talked about one of the great yet-unsolved math problems - turns out it was solved relatively shortly after that episode aired
Humans gain new knowledge, in some cases proving old knowledge wrong. Some won't except it if too invested in the old knowledge. Sometimes old theory becomes a subset of new theory (a happy circumstance). Sometimes wrong theory is can be successfully used until correct knowledge can be found. There is a story, at least, that Archimedes told people to use 22/7 to calculate pi as a temporary measure until he could figure out how get a reasonably accurate figure.
The quote "Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful", is attributed to George E.P. Box. In classical physical, we've probably got it nailed, but at the level relevant to striving for FTL, we've just got models that we know are incomplete and inconsistent, even if they are pretty close to describing experimental results, but very little about gravitons, virtual particles, ZPR, whatever you want to call the stuff we can't even detect other than maybe briefly if they change form when exposed to positrons or strong lasers.
An example is the Crookes radiometer, invented in 1873 and sold in stores today as a novelty item (light mill). It was invented based on a wrong theory, and many papers were published over the years theorizing how it really worked, by Maxwell, Einstein, and others. It's complicated, but here's the Wikipedia link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_mill
The quote "Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful", is attributed to George E.P. Box. In classical physical, we've probably got it nailed, but at the level relevant to striving for FTL, we've just got models that we know are incomplete and inconsistent, even if they are pretty close to describing experimental results, but very little about gravitons, virtual particles, ZPR, whatever you want to call the stuff we can't even detect other than maybe briefly if they change form when exposed to positrons or strong lasers.
An example is the Crookes radiometer, invented in 1873 and sold in stores today as a novelty item (light mill). It was invented based on a wrong theory, and many papers were published over the years theorizing how it really worked, by Maxwell, Einstein, and others. It's complicated, but here's the Wikipedia link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_mill
Isn't a maths problem a known problem? The fact it hasn't been solved is irrelevant to this debate. That nothing but a photon can travel at the speed of light and nothing can travel faster than the speed of light is not a problem. It's a fact.
Oh, come on. My previous explanation should be sufficient. Okay, if you think of a photon moving along as a wave, just looking at three of its nodes, you see that it gets from the first node to the third at standard lightspeed for the medium, but between first and second it's traveling a curved path, meaning faster than lightspeed. The shorter the wavelength, the faster it goes along the curve between two nodes. And the medium that carries it and puts it through a lot just to get from one node to the next knows no limits. A wave in water is propagated by water molecules that do their gyrations much faster than the wave. If they didn't, they couldn't support that wave motion. FTL is a matter of playing by a different set of rules: running with the jailers rather than the prisoners.
An exercise: You're told that a triangle can't have three right angles. It can. Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to figure out or find out how and report back with an explanation. That's easier than beating the Kobayashi Maru test.
Cosmologically speaking, the entire universe is expanding at many times faster than the speed of light; any object in the cosmos father away from us than 13 billion light years is in fact traveling away from us at FTL velocities. Mathematically speaking, this is in accordance with relativistic physics and is perfectly allowable, ergo FTL travel is still possible under certain circumstances with a sufficient curvature of space.
Mathematically speaking, it is possible to exceed the speed of light by changing the conditions of your local reference frame via the Alcubierre Metric or various other solutions to the field equations.
CONTEXTUALLY speaking, I'll again remind you that the article in the OP pertained to time travel, not FTL travel.
Um, what's the difference?
The article doesn't talk about time travel, it talks about FTL travel, and then a time travel thing is just thrown there out of the blue to add more funny words to entertain the reader. But since FTL travel and time travel imply each other, their deduction is correct albeit redundant.
It's not fair that I should have to give you the key to understanding how mainstream astrophysics is full of beans without someone's taking up the challenge of my triangle question above, the answer to which is just a Google away and nicely illustrates thinking out of the box.
Okay, expanding universe? Big Bang? These silly conclusions were based on calculations using observed redshift of distant celestial objects, obviously. So what did they do wrong? They accounted for the known distribution of atomic hydrogen in space, which reined in their resulting speed of expansion a little. That form of hydrogen is easily detected with radioastronomy, But when two atoms of singlet hydrogen (H1) meet, what to they do? They mate for life and live happily ever after, or as long as can they avoid oxygen, etc., as H2. But since the electric field and spin of an H2 molecules' electrons are completely canceled, this unusual, happily married molecule is very difficult for astronomers to detect in space. We can do so now only if it's hot, and we have to develop technology to detect cold H2 in space. Hot H2 has been detected by the European Space Agency's Infrared Space Observatory. E.A. Valentijn and P.P. van der Werf detected huge amounts of molecular hydrogen (H2) in NGC 891, an edge-on galaxy 30 million light-years away in Andromeda (Valentijn and van der Werf 1999). In their report published in September 1999, they stated that their result "matches well the mass required to solve the problem of the missing mass of spiral galaxies." They concluded that the galaxy contained 5 to 15 times more molecular than atomic hydrogen. So there is perhaps ten times more molecular hydrogen in space than atomic hydrogen (that ratio is not known, since we don't have the proper instruments to measure it). But to deny it exists is like saying that hydrogen atoms don't pair off and become happy couples. Yet the above-mentioned calculations don't account for any H2 at all (let alone 5-15 times as much H2 as H1), and folks spin these wild yarns about expanding universe, Big Bang, and lots of other things that don't make sense but do address the problem of attracting students to fields of study they might otherwise find boring. So it does have that upside and continues unabated even though, as I mentioned, the key was detected over a decade ago, and anyone who brings it up is labeled a spoilsport. I've been called worse. But in the perhaps distant future, people will joke about this and compare it to the situation before the idea of meteorites as remains of meteors was accepted, in which mainstream scientists said, "Rocks don't fall from the sky!" And such thinking pretty much prevailed until that generation died off and was replaced by a generation who accepted the existence of meteorites as common knowledge. So it takes a while for things to sink in.
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.
Drag is exactly right. It's the mechanism for Special Relativlty. It's like wind resistance except that this wind is made of not air molecules but stuff that affects every particle of you and your vessel's structure. But it's not so much a matter of stimulating virtual particles to make them form real particles less frequently as it is to stimulate them to take a form you can harvest and use as fuel as you clear them out of the way and form a pocket of graviton vacuum in your path, not an easy task but the key to FTL without "packing a lunch" (carrying fuel tanks).
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And don't tell me to talk to a scientist, they're all lying and getting me pissed.
Lying? I would go easy and call it kidding, like saying January 1, 2000, was the start of a new century and millennium, which no one was expected to believe, since we all knew there was no year zero.
Even though I suspect that both time travel and FTL are probably impractical if not impossible, I maintain that the research quoted by the BBC does not establish their impossibility as a fact. The BBC is not infallible, for example:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14370878
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14370878
FTL travel involves rapid travel in space within a finite period of time. Time travel involves rapid travel in time within a finite amount of space.
They don't.
You're confusing "Big Bang cosmology" with the theory of Dark Matter/Dark Energy. These are two very different things.
I agree, though, that the whole issue of molecular hydrogen is as good an explanation as any for the "dark matter" problem, especially if we don't have a means to detect it. But I've always thought dark matter was an attempt to bullshit an obviously flawed model by tossing assumptions on top of assumptions and seeing what would stick.
The expanding universe is based on redshift observations which have nothing to do with molecular hydrogen (or lack thereof) and everything to do with the known spectral emissions of hydrogen as it moves through space. I happen to believe they've made other errors in this regard as well; HOWEVER, one thing that is clear from observed data is that the universe is much larger (some 70 billion ly) than it is old (13 billion years) which means huge parts of it HAVE moved at FTL velocities at some point and are probably doing so now.
IF the curvature of space works as a mathematical abstraction--and it does--then it explains this phenomenon nicely... mathematically, anyway. The physical mechanism is yet to be determined, but special relativity has never made any attempt to determine that anyway.
There is no "material" that composes the fabric of space. Space is full of material and energy, though, so if you could find a way to harness or manipulate that (i.e. the Alcubierre Metric) you might have something.
If you can travel back in time, you can travel faster than light - simply travel the slow way with a relativistic drive and then travel back in time to compensate for the time passed in the planetary frame of reference. If you can travel faster than light, you can travel back in time – faster than light travel puts the cause before the effect in some frames which is nothing other than time travel.
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:
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.
This is all I could seem to find about this at the moment:
http://www.newtonphysics.on.ca/hydrogen/index.html
It's the source of the quote above.
And I did put "material" in quotes. I already said it's really what is called by many names these days: zero-point energy, etc., etc.--long list. And we know it exists not only in quantum mechanics but for real, from the Casimir effect and from inability to bring helium down to its freezing point, which is lower than the temperature of what people normally think of as empty space. Well, it's not that empty. 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.
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.
This is all I could seem to find about this at the moment:
http://www.newtonphysics.on.ca/hydrogen/index.html
It's the source of the quote above.
And I did put "material" in quotes. I already said it's really what is called by many names these days: zero-point energy, etc., etc.--long list. And we know it exists not only in quantum mechanics but for real, from the Casimir effect and from inability to bring helium down to its freezing point, which is lower than the temperature of what people normally think of as empty space. Well, it's not that empty. 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.
Nothing written here has convinced me that it will ever be practically possible anyway. Theoretical physics is all very well but when you're talking about transporting ugly bags of mostly water housed in big metal pressure vessels I doubt it'll ever happen. If you could change the state of a human without degrading the personality within the brain, then I could be more persuaded.
For some reason I'm pretty convinced that if faster than light travel or time travel was possible it would be so difficult and expensive that it will still be a practical impossibility. Ideas such as Alcubierre drive also come with the tremendous amount of energy required to fuel one.
I once had this somewhat crazy idea – faster than light travel is physically possible, but it can lead to causal paradoxes which are impossible, so the universe could only exist if the means to cause these paradoxes do not exist in it, and so we will never break the energy requirement or something else. The universe wouldn't exist if we would.
But there is something else – faster than light travel and time travel are much harder to believe and imagine than violations of the first two laws of thermodynamics. And if you violate either of them, you could then produce an endless amount of energy to fuel your FTL engine. This means that FTL travel + infinite energy supply is only slightly more crazy than FTL travel itself, so... Maybe we can have both?
My own feeling is that great distance exploration will only be experienced vicariously, whether by sending machines, or by very sophisticated visual techniques; unless humans manage to manipulate their minds to project out into the galaxy, but since humans don't have telepathic powers, this would be an amazing leap in technology on its own.
That said, I expect inevitably there will be travel at sub-light speeds, once some reliable level of long term stasis is achieved.
That said, I expect inevitably there will be travel at sub-light speeds, once some reliable level of long term stasis is achieved.
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