Breaking the speed of light.
How does traveling faster than the speed of light allow you to arrive somewhere before you left somewhere else.
I’ll let physicists explain…really not my field…but keep in mind that in theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice they aren’t.
If they have indeed found a way to go faster than the speed of light (in a vacuum…as you can go faster than the speed of light in a medium, for instance, the cerenkov effect) then, it’s probably a bit premature to say anything considering the major change it will create in modern physics.
I think in Feynman’s theory of Quantum Electrodynamics he allows for particles going backward in time and travelling faster than light… Not sure how he squares this off with Special Relativity, but he seems to think that his is the crown jewel of physics.
One thing I have come to accept is that the pieces of the puzzle in physics never fit quite perfectly. Folks who insist on perfect consistency are liable to be disappointed.
Someone please explain why it was thought that you couldn’t travel faster than the speed of light. So many things have been disproved over time that it seems funny this barrier would be an absolute…
I remember seeing on the crawl of CNN one day in college (maybe '01) that scientists managed to teleport an atom… and then nothing was ever said about it again. I am still waiting for more info about teleportation. It would make moving apartments a lot easier…
In Newtonian physics you could apply a force to a particle and it would accelerate as long as that force is applied. There was no limit to the speed that the particle could attain.
In Special Relativity the particle appears to be heavier the faster it goes, so that the same force produces vanishingly small accelerations, with the effect that the speed is limited by the speed of light. This may explain why I feel like shit when I try to go fast on my bike.
Another way of saying the same thing is that if you want to accelerate the particle at a constant rate, you’d better be prepared to deliver more and more force as the particle goes faster. Eventually as the particle approaches the speed of light, you would need an infinite force to make it gain any speed at all.
This may explain why I feel like shit when I try to go fast on my bike.
Uh, that would be some really heavy shit, man.
Hawkings, dabbling with quantum mechanics some 10 years back or more, came up with an application of the Uncertainty principle and black holes and got the result that since the location of a photon would be precisely known within a black hole event horizon, that it would create a large uncertainty in its velocity, or in other words, the light particle could exceed the otherwise absolute speed of light limit in such a case.
Yeah! You wouldn’t want to fuck with me on the bike!
**Someone please explain why it was thought that you couldn’t travel faster than the speed of light. **
I had the same thought.
**So many things have been disproved over time that it seems funny this barrier would be an absolute… **
Except Global Warming. That science is in and beyond dispute.
Someone please explain why it was thought that you couldn’t travel faster than the speed of light. So many things have been disproved over time that it seems funny this barrier would be an absolute…
I think that its not so much that scientists believe that you can’t travel faster than the speed of light; its that they can’t explain how you possibly could given the most generally accepted model of how the universe works that they have to work with (the one Albert gave us). Lightspeed travel is an asymptote in that model; they can no more explain light speed travel than they can divide by zero.
A new scientific paradigm might more clarify the possibility of lightspeed (and faster) travel. Its champion will just have to go the usual route…being stoned, burned at the stake, mocked in scientific journals, that kind of thing.
Does anyone know whether the notion of tachyons with imaginary mass is given any credence these days?
scientists managed to teleport an atom…
They actually transferred the quantum state of an atom onto another atom. The atoms never moved and no “matter” was teleported.
and then nothing was ever said about it again.
Well, transferring information with a fidelity of only 0.75 isn’t that useful, really. This is the kind of stuff where “you do it first, or you do it right”. Still waiting for someone to do it right.
Dre’
Right on Dr. EPR paradox…As explained to me by a colleague in physics, EPR was brought up as an experiment countering quantum mechanics, however all it does is negate special relativity at the micro level. The paper pretty much shows that the EPR paradox at the macro level.
As far as information traveling instantly, we’re not there yet…
with some boron atoms
It was actually calcium (by the Austrian group). And the boys at NIST used beryllium.
I think a meter or so is the record
Three years ago, the “record” was close to a kilometer.
Dre’
This reminds me of the Steven Wright joke:
“If you were in a car, traveling at the speed of light, and you turned on your headlights…would they do anything?”
.
“They actually transferred the quantum state of an atom onto another atom. The atoms never moved and no ‘matter’ was teleported.”
Inasmuch as a lot of popular science books characterize the speed of light as a limit not only for the motion of matter but also for the transmission of information, the result is still interesting–even if the information only has partial fidelity.
If (and that’s a big IF) they’ve pulled something like this off, and it can be replicated using something more substantive than subatomic particles, it threatens to upend everything we know about relativity. These particles, excited as they were by microwaves, basically “instantaneously” appeared at one prism at the same time as they (or “it”) resided at the other prism. Theoretically, this just simply isn’t possible. We, however, know just about *bupkiss *when it comes to how subatomic particles behave.
Interestingly, and I’m not really a big fan of his movies, John Carpenter used so-called “tachyon transmission” as a plot device as a way to send audio and video message backwards in time. It was some movie from the late '90s, I believe. Typically schlocky, but that whole tachyon issue was very intriguing. The implications for time travel, space travel (and a way for us to get off this dreary rock) are enormous.
Regards,
T.
“Navy and Marine Corps … the WINNING Team”
Relativity says nothing about quantum mechanics and vice versa, which is why researchers have been working so hard to reconcile the two into something like quantum gravity.
My point exactly. If we can’t find a way to fit this into Einstein’s theories on SR, what does that say about our understanding of the way the universe works? Do we really know all that much about it, realistically?
Which part? Because quantum mechanics makes it very clear that tunneling is possible. There are a wide variety of modern electronics which would not exist were tunneling not possible. And if you consider phase space to be real space, then yes, the experiment violates SR, but is phase space the same as real space? That’s the debate and only something like quantum gravity is likely to answer such a question.
I think that we’ll have to find some explanation, and it may very well be that there are billions upon billions of alternate universes (and, by implication, billions upon billions of us) and that your quantum gravity and the ability of it to allow tunneling could be the “roadways” that will allow us to move among and between these universes. Elegant, but far more difficult to solve than any of us are prepared to concede.
My advice, don’t hold your breath on these technologies. Time travel is simply not possible. Using this discovery for space travel would require building an analogous device, which means constructing a prism here, and one on the other side of the tunneling gap… which means you’re already in the location you desire to go! Kind of self defeating 
See my response in the second point above. Maybe we can, given time and study (on the magnitude of hundreds and thousands of years) find a way to use a naturally-occurring analogous device at some “point” (I know … it sounds too much like sci-fi, what with talk of transfer points, and whatnot, but “dream big, act big” I always say) in space where we desire to go. Surely that would be an easier way of moving about space/time than in trying to overcome the physical issues involved in harnessing gravitational fields in a black hole’s event horizon or artificially creating a wormhole or some other artifice?
Believe me, I’m with you all the way … I just want us all to hope that there’s something more “out there”. And that maybe that “something more” would also be a way to ease our lives back here on good old terra firma.
Regards,
T.
“I think that we’ll have to find some explanation, and it may very well be that there are billions upon billions of alternate universes (and, by implication, billions upon billions of us)”
It is only my belief in this hypothesis that allows me to get out of bed every morning and go to work in an attempt to convince my fellow humans that this planet is finite and therefore precious. Because I know, that even if the me in this reality is doing a marginal job in helping to preserve the planet for high quality human habitation, there’s the high lprobablility of one of the other of the infinite numbers of me in those alternate realities is kicking ass!
Hey, it’s at least as good a faith based system as Christianity or Islam (probably not Buddhism though).
Well since there were no answers to the OPs original question, just a bunch of amatuers pretending they know what they are talking about, i give you this link. The man who wrote this info (John D. Norton) was one of the foremost researchers of einsteins work, in fact he was the one who translated einsteins zurich notes into english. Norton teaches a class at Univ of Pittsburgh called Einstein for Everyone, it is a way to bring some of einsteins work to the masses who may not have a high level of physics and math.
Check out the link to section II the light postulate, to see why time slows down at speed approaching the speed of light, but the whole thing is a good read…
http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410_2007/lectures/Special_Relativity/index.html
All amateurs are dangerous. I’ve read the Stephen Hawking books (plus every work of sci-fi by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, David Brin, Greg Bear and Julian May) and I therefore believe I’m highly qualified to at least head up NASA (haha).
Regards,
T.