firstly before i do this... i just gotta point out that this is such a hard topic to discuss because i so often want to refer to Einstiens theory of general relativity... but then am stuck because it predicts that you cannot do this. grrrrr. sight is based on sencing light particle hit the pickup. so if you are traveling FTL and are looking to the direction from where you came.. you would see nothing. no light particles can catch up to hit the sensor. Thats true if you were (for example) looking out the back window of your space ship. but if you were looking at a wall inside the ship in the same direction... it could be hypothesised (asuming we're not talking warp) that the image would stay the same at light speed. i think one area of scientific development that we are right on the dawn of is quantum computers.... this could open so many more possabilities in the feild of wormholes and/or dimensional manipulation assisted travel. (the impact of quantum computers would have an impact on all aspects of life... but is potentially more closely linked with these two feilds) space is already warped. its as if warp is another of the cosmos' standard forces that occur naturally. And all the best science simply makes use of that which already occurs naturally. A friend of mine (whom after years of being a fellow amatuer scientist and theorist is now studying physics at Uni) has some remarkable theories using gravity and magnetics to create super fast travel.* I do like the way in which you describe warp theory basics. hats of and applause. this is much the same way i visualise it, but can never quite find the words to explain it. I imagine that within the "ship" a "weight" is turned at the front (the intended direction of travel) that pulls the ship towards it... but this has to be done outside the body of the ship or else you will be contorting the forces that even bind the ship together. I feel i have already lost even myself in trying to explain it... the graphics of warp feilds as seen in Star Trek do perhaps even a better job of explaining it than i can. Warp is somewhat an anomaly in FTL travel. it has sometimes been described as creating your own galaxy inside the warp bubble... and if this is to be true... what happens to particles (all kinds of particles) that attempt to pass from outside to within or vice versa? damn... where is Proffesor Hawkings book... i need to refer to it for this bit.... of the many new sub atomic particles that have been discovered, there is a type that i need to refer to.... i think (not sure) its the ones that you get "up" and "down" variations. this could hold the key to what you propose. I'll get back to this once i get my hands on that book again to check up on it. and boy am i glad you did. *if people with no funding can come up with such ideas... its quite reasonable to asume that with all the power and resources of some of the worlds larger governments they might have already done so.
There are theoretically particles that exist in an inverse state,and travel faster than light. If they are slowed down to the speed of light it is theorized that they will become energy.
once a fat bisexual nimpho told me one of lifes great mysteries.... you can always tell a physicist by his interest in pink floyd. and in my case certainly... it was true. ... sorry.... just a light respite from the intensity of physics that some would find dull.
Digit, thanks for looking it over. I had another thought on what you would see behind you at the speed of light. I see what you're saying about when you go faster than light, but when traveling exactly the speed of light what would happen? You are travel at THE EXACT SAME speed as these rays that keep coming towards you. I believe that they would probably build up until a bright wight light. I've read Timeline and the ideas involved with quantam theory interests me. I need to read more about it. I know that space is warped. This could relate to another dimension in which there is a "shortcut" to another place if we can move out of 3d space like a cartoon walking on top of a newspaper and going the short way around the world. Thanks for the compliment on my description. It's not exactly the way I understand it from Star Trek, but it's the most plausible way I see it in the real world. I thought of a minor bump in my theory, the mounting on the ship. If you mount the well on the back of the ship, facing forward, it would crush the ship in on itself. If you place it on the front of the ship facing forward it would bunch up the space in front of the well, but the ship wouldn't necessarily be traveling over compressed space. It seems like you must place it on the front of the ship facing backwards. Now the ship must be reinforced in some way that it doesn't crush in on itself under the tremendous gravity. You then need to push the gravity well over uncompressed space. I guess you could open a hole facing forward as well to compress the space in front of the well, but the ship still needs to be made in such a way as to not be destroyed by the gravity, but using antigravity would reduce the affects we are trying to create. Any thoughts? I remember something about that. Haven't heard much about it in a while. The particles always comes in a pair and if you flip one the other flips no matter how much distance seperates them. Another thing pointing to extra dimensions which provide shorcuts. And in conclusion, I'd like to say I love theoretical physics, but my physics class can suck my dick.
ditto. I never really was all that interested in Physics @ school because i had the shittest teacher ever. An Irish man who always told us tose old "irish are backwards and stupid" jokes and taught us very little physics. yeah, this is the area of my last post i was most un happy about. Its difficult to theorise about something that has been deemed impossable by what most of yer physics knowledge is based on. A photonic boom... (kinda like we see on Star Trek i suppose). in the same way that a sonic boom works, if you are stationary and a sonic boom passes you, it lasts an instant... but if you are in the vessel creating the boom, it is a constant roar as you continually break the barrier. so for light perhaps it would be, not only for traveling the exact speed but beyond too, a constant super bright glow of a "photonic boom". once i get some powerfull 3D software installed on my computer again i'm going to try to replicate this in a little experiment using particle systems. (dont hold your breath for this though)_ I once read an article about the warping of space that proposed we lived in a universe with 5 spacial dimensions... which when displayed graphically to give some form of visual reference it showed a 3d grid of cubic shapes (as it would be if we asume 3D to be true) and then a "3D" latice of hexagonal (hexahedron???) shapes ... this warped the perspective tremendously. If we were to understand this warping of space as it really does exist better then i beleive we would shortly after find ways of traveling FTL. the way in which to discover the secrets of this warping, i beleive is to closely monitor and observe the actions of all the crazy subatomic particles (quarks, nuons, etc) and gain a better understanding of the really small before we attempt to traverse the really big. is our cosmos doughnut shaped, or spherical, or flat? this is a question that has yet to be reasonably answered by science. religion would probably say god shaped ;p
A photonic boom sounds feasible enough. I'd also like to see that pic when you make it. If you know where to find that article I'd love to read it. I have a hard enough time trying to think in 4 dimensions, a 5th would be even more interesting. One thing that has always bothered me is the fact that classical physics breaks down for the very small and the very big. If it breaks down for extremes like that, why not the very fast? Approach the speed of light and the laws of physics may change, and it may very well be related to subatomic particles. I've always thought of our universe as spherical. It has to do with fractals and recurring patterns you see in nature. Already with this arguent I feel that I could say disk shaped if I wanted as well. But spherical is easiest for me. The earth is round. You get smaller and we have globes, balls, etc that are round. Even smaller we have atoms which have a round nucleus and are surrounded by a round cloud of electrons. The electrons, protons, and neutrons are round. I always picture subatomic particles as little bitty balls. When you get bigger it can almost argue for a disk type universe. The solar system is almost disk shaped. The galaxy is fairly disk shaped. How do we know there aren't groups even bigger that contain a bunch of galaxies orbiting something else? The fractal idea has always bothered me because if something is infinitely scalable, then how do we know that our entire universe isn't encapsulated in an electron orbiting an atom in a cell in another being? That will make you feel insignificant. Or think of it another way, what if the dirt on your shoe contains someone else's entire universe. Makes you feel big now, huh? We don't know our true scale in the "universe"
like that big fat nomadic electron type particle that just whizzes right through everything.... sorry i still havnt found stephen hawkings book... so all my definitions of particles are all to be just as uniteligent sounding.
there are many things going on with nano-technology that could greatly extend our lives and quality of life. too much to talk about on this subject.... but anyway, the human lifespan could be extended to an almost unimagineable time as we look at it now. there will still be crime, accidents, and such but with this very long life. sorry if that was a little off subject, i just had to add that in. great discussion by the way...i love it
oohooh! please do smokin&tokin! please do! i've skim read over this thread again,.... its been a while..., and i dont think we've really delved too deaply into the whole time slowing at greater speeds thing. since all our known maths and physics kinda totally get blown outta the water when light speed is hit, what would happen to time?
In my own opinion...you can ONLY read this thread while listening to Pink Floyd. I am just attracted to all this new knowledge about something I thought didnt exist. I am really looking forward to physics this year
edit :dang, posted to wrong thread, and edit to get rid of it. ooops, never post stoned and drunk again. right, letmesee...
ok, lets kick this thread back into action. a little off topic this, but still i searched this thread out specifically for this.... light from distant stars take millions of years to reach us. ie, what we see happened millions of years ago. however, thats from our perspective. from the perspective of the photons (and this is far too rarely thought about) time might as well not exist at all. when they arrive at their destination they're just as young, spritely and fresh as they were when they left their stars. not even a second passed for them (asuming nothing slowed them down at all to what we'd call sub-light speeds) from departure to arrival, yet for us, millions of years. people say that space travel to distant stars and galaxies in the lifetime of a human is impossable without folding of space or other FTL travel. bullshit. sure, the people you leave behind would age and die and their kids' grandkids too, but from your perspective, you in your Light speed microbus would get there instantly (not accounting for acceleration and deceleration). we travel through time as comonly as we travel through space, its just a little harder to comprehend from our everyday experiences how that travel manifests, and how it varies. i really hope i got that all right. its like when calculating time difference... theres always that nigling thought in the back of my mind that goes "nah, you got that the wrong way around again".
hey amatuer scientists... where are yas? over at www.frostcloud.com or other? http://www.inventor-warp-speed.com/ just saw this... oowhee! listening to lamb while reading this thread. its not dead! its life jim!
Well I've registered with frostcloud. Looks like an interesting forum on philosophy, thanks for the heads up.
First off, I love Pink Floyd, and so did my high school physics teacher. We listened to them all the time in class. Anyway, just how constant is c? What about the experiments where the wave group velocity g of a pulse of optical energy traveled faster than c in "fast-light" optical media? In the same experiments, the wave group velocity g was even negative at some points. So, even though c is the vacuum speed of light and it's supposed to always be constant, light can also travel at velocities greater than c and even negative velocities? I don't even know how to try to tie that into the space-time continuum and what happens if you are trying to turn on your headlight while traveling at c. What if your vehicle had a constant acceleration at the same time? Could your vehicle push the light particles faster and faster? Would the collision destroy the vehicle or the light? Whenever I think, I come up with more and more questions, and no answers. I love it.
Aight...haven't read the whole thread. Gonna get around to the rest of it later. But I'll shed some light on this one: Light, as science understands it, is both particles (it has an impulse) and waves (it reacts like a wave). Now picture a boat on a lake. You sit at the front of the boat. You use a stick and poke the water. That produces waves which travel at a constant speed (the speed is relative to the density of the water in the lake). Now move your boat at the same speed. Poke the water with your stick again. What do you think will happen? The wave you produced from the moving boat will travel the same speed as the wave you produced from the stationary boat.
loved reading this ok here is my answer... first, whomever said that we would cease to be anything but energy is what the physic prof answered...but that is too easy an answer. so givin that we COULD actually do what i said and travel @ the speed of light and could function as we do now, would u see the headlights??? according to einstein, nothing travels faster than the speed of light so we couldnt see the light because of that theory. but now that we are a few years removed from einstein, i think we maybe able to find stuff faster...but givin what we know now, i think that the analogy of the waves in the water that Mr Skinner is a good answer, if we are traveling at a fixed speed and put in more waves, those waves are limited by the density of the water(or the known physics of the water). there may well be a speed limit and the wave in the water analogy is a good explaination of that concept. one more thing, someone mentioned that 'what if everything that we know is wrong?". i would contend that that is correct and incorrect at the same time. its huberus to believe that we know all or that all of our 'facts' are correct 100% of the time. but its also truth that we do have observational facts to many things. usually what science has found is that we have gotten smaller and smaller or bigger and bigger and the grounding theroies have included the facts on the ground. ill give an example like the one used. the world is flat, see, u can see ur neighbors 1 mile away. certainly that is true on a relatively small basis, like ur county or city or back yard. but as we (we = the collective knowledge of man) have gone bigger in our technology, we have come to the conclusion that its just an optical anomoly that one sees the world as flat. doesnt mean that we dont 'see' the world as flat, but that what we see is fundimentially wrong in many ways. so in essence, we are right (we see the world as flat) and we are wrong (the world is round) at the same time.