IC Forum Archive

Guardian FINAL · Posts: 1137

Taught in physics classes the world over, Albert Einsteins theory of special relativity holds that no object or information can move faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, or 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) per second. But NECs Lijun Wang says he created an experiment in which a light beam raced through a gas-filled chamber so quickly, it exceeded the speed of light by a factor of 300. Whats more, the light pulse appears to have left the confines of the chamber before it even entered a seemingly impossible occurrence according to theories of causality, which predict that causes must always precede their effects.

Is there any science fiction topic more talked about than time travel? I've met so many people who are fascinated by it. Popular movies from Back to the Future to Donnie Darko surely have some part in this, to say nothing of the even farther out-there applications in sci-fi novels. Is there a particular 'version' of time travel that you find most compelling? Do you think time travel is possible, and if so how does it relate to our existing physical theories? How do you resolve its paradoxes?

shnozlak · Posts: 704

Obligitory chronotrigger refrence!

Also 12 monkies is so far the only scifi work that Ive seen that handles the paradoxes of time travel in a believable manner.

Maztorre · Posts: 1175

The most compelling I felt was in Back to the Future when Marty McFly tried to teach people how to really rock out in the 50s but they didn't get it. There's a lesson there for us all.
Coincidentally, this very website is advertising Michael J Fox's Parkinson's Disease research foundation. Why don't we all aid humanity's future by donating?

Does the most plausible time travel theory provide a reason for us not seeing any time travellers in our current history? One suggestion I read about is that we do not have a "receiver" for time travellers to "arrive" at. Is the concept of a parallel universe being created for every unique event and possibility that is carried out bunkum or is it credible at all?

winkerwanker · Posts: 2414

I wouldn't like to run into Ace Winker anyway.

DonMarco · Posts: 565

12 Monkeys was crap. Futurama had two episodes that dealt with time travel. The first had them randomly jumping foward through time, and the second got Fry and crew back to 1950s where Fry ended up killing his own grandfather before he was married to his grandmother. So!

The WORST time travel movie was Terminator 3. When T1 and T2 came out, the movies took place in the same year (1984 and 1991), before Judgement Day (August 29, 1997). T3 (2003), came out 6 years after Judgement Day (in the movies, not real life!) would have taken place. Aparently, some dumbass writer thought that, yeah, you CAN change the future. So instead of a war-torn 2003, most of the movie takes place in the still-okay-for-now "present". And it's a light-hearted comedy. And it sucked.

Maztorre wrote:

Coincidentally, this very website is advertising Michael J Fox's Parkinson's Disease research foundation. Why don't we all aid humanity's future by donating?

I'll donate to stem-cell reasearch and cloning efforts. Not crappy oudated methods of CHEMICAL healing. Hell. Why not break out the leeches and find you a tear of phoenix while you're at it.

Psiga · Posts: 3990

To my understanding, the paradox effect doesn't really happen. If you go backwards in time and off your grandpappy, it doesn't make you disappear; doing so merely initiaties one of an infinite number of alternate timelines where your grandpappy died and thus your father and you don't get born. You, as the time traveller, come from another 'point on the hypergrid', and are unscathed.

Back to the Future and most other media that deal with time travel are thinking of things linearly, and putting too much emphasis on human things like 'birth'. They don't account for the 'infinite universes' theory, or the idea that the mass you're composed of is just energy being transferred around.

Fringe scientists have been talking about faster-than-light for a long while. The idea is that light is composed of elements that move faster than light. As for using gasses to somehow accellerate light? That kind-of goes back to the physics discussion that took place in the Time vs Money thread: The "constant" speed of light is measured in a vacuum, not a chamber filled with matter. Now, there are various non-US scientists who claim to have proven that the speed of light actually does fluctuate in vacuum, but US scientists won't have any of that.

Should be interesting to see what we can do with this knowledge, though. This is the first time I've heard of accellerating light itself, rather than simply dealing with the elemental components of it.

-Psiga

Mr. Mechanical · Posts: 1890

Maztorre wrote:

Does the most plausible time travel theory provide a reason for us not seeing any time travellers in our current history?

Haven't you ever heard of John Titor?

Maztorre · Posts: 1175

Oh, you magnificent bastard, I had forgotten about him until you decided to dredge that up!

Mr. Mechanical · Posts: 1890

Hehe, I'm just doing my part.

Magnificent bastard, I like that.

Kazu · Posts: 894

Guardian FINAL wrote:

Is there a particular 'version' of time travel that you find most compelling? Do you think time travel is possible, and if so how does it relate to our existing physical theories? How do you resolve its paradoxes?

Well, Time Travel could be possible ... i think. If you think of Time as a twine, imagine it's slovenly rolled out, there are some Turns and "Loopings" where two points of Time pass each other very closely. Maybe they even cross each other just for a moment of Time ("deja vu" anyone?)

If someone could manage to predict such a point where two time-lines are "meeting", maybe he could manage to take "another" route in time. There is no way it could be explained why or how that should work ... but that's one thing i came up in some boring biology-lessons.
Regarding Paradoxes ... have you ever seen someone who looked like you? Or people mistook you for someone that looked like you?
Now imagine if you would meet yourself, wouldn't you just try to make up a story instead of telling you that you are your future you?
Or maybe you help yourself like "Doc" Emmet L. Brown did in BTF 2.

If i had to choose one way of "time travelling", i would like to do the "Back to the Future"-way.

Maztorre wrote:

The most compelling I felt was in Back to the Future when Marty McFly tried to teach people how to really rock out in the 50s but they didn't get it. There's a lesson there for us all.

It's like a person would run around in 1989 and tell people "hell, Princess Di will be killed in a car accident 8 years from now on!"
Would anyone really believe him? Except for some tabloids and people who would believe anything nobody would take his words serious.
Anyway, Back to the Future tells the audience that messing with time causes problems. And we shouldn't enter a Delorean without having a nuclear rod to get back.
(and maybe it even wants to tell us that Huey Lewis and the News are really cool, too.)

Maztorre wrote:

Coincidentally, this very website is advertising Michael J Fox's Parkinson's Disease research foundation. Why don't we all aid humanity's future by donating?

didn't we do so in the future? err, i mean, won't we be doing so in the future?

*SPOILER - DONNIE DARKO*
An interesting thing is also the "Donnie Darko"-Way of Time Travelling - imagine you know something bad will happen if you travel back in time, would you still do it?
An interesting thing is also Time itself.
If you think of spending time with your girl/boyfriend, it's like time is going by way too fast and you can't believe that another day is over.
But if you are waiting for him/her, it seems like time is standing still.
Why is it that we aren't "equipped" with a "constant" and unchangable "sense" for time?

Maztorre wrote:

Does the most plausible time travel theory provide a reason for us not seeing any time travellers in our current history? One suggestion I read about is that we do not have a "receiver" for time travellers to "arrive" at. Is the concept of a parallel universe being created for every unique event and possibility that is carried out bunkum or is it credible at all?

The word "receiver" reminds me of Frequency. I have forgotten most about the film, but ... it was a strange one. I still don't know if i should like the film, though, anybody seen that film?

Pinstripe · Posts: 45

I'm... actually attempting to write a comic about time travel. It works sort of strangely:

The universe is infinite and has always existed. Matter is a constant, and so, though there exist VERY large spaces between one pocket of matter and another, matter is also infinite. When infinite matter is involved, every possible combination of that matter has to have already occurred, and not just once- an infinite amount of times.

Time traveling, then, in my comic, is a matter of travelling across space, into any number of infinite worlds of the past, present, future, or an alternate version of all three. In this way, paradoxes cannot be created- one merely changes the outcome on a single world.

There's also a reason why we don't see time travellers all over the place, but I get the premonition that I'm already boring my potential readers.

I thought of this wacko alternative, because, frankly, I'm not very good with numbers, and Quantum Theory confused me. I wanted to create something that would be simpler to explain.

I FAILED.

I'm still writing the goddamn thing, though.

dessgeega · Posts: 3317

you realize that if the universe was infinite than the night sky would not be black, since any given angle of viewing would inevitably intersect something.

Pinstripe · Posts: 45

No I most certainly DID NOT.

If you speak of a sky white with stars, I'm not talking about a universe with matter more densely packed than it already is. The amount of visible stars in our own night sky are a mere fraction of those that exist, or so the scientists tell us. In this theoretical universe, the actual spacing of pockets of matter approaches infinity, and the things in the vicinity of our planet do not change.

ipslore · Posts: 262

That would be [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers'_paradox]Olber's paradox[/url] we're talking about. Check it out.

Pinstripe · Posts: 45

Defeat admitted. This will require thought.

Psiga · Posts: 3990

dessgeega wrote:

you realize that if the universe was infinite than the night sky would not be black, since any given angle of viewing would inevitably intersect something.

To my knowledge, scientists still don't know how large our universe really is, because things get sort-of cloudy toward the edges of what we're able to see from here. What's on the other side of the cloudy stuff? More universe, they presume.

Valkyrie wrote:

Well, Time Travel could be possible ... i think. If you think of Time as a twine, imagine it's slovenly rolled out, there are some Turns and "Loopings" where two points of Time pass each other very closely.

Do you think of the third dimension as a string of twine? Dimensions are only linear when left to themselves. Once you start connecting them to eachother, their space is compounded.

And why do people stop at only four dimensions? I mean geeze.

-Psiga

Kazu · Posts: 894

Psiga wrote:

To my knowledge, scientists still don't know how large our universe really is, because things get sort-of cloudy toward the edges of what we're able to see from here. What's on the other side of the cloudy stuff? More universe, they presume.

It's kind of interesting to see how humans have progressed in gaining some knowledge of the universe that surrounds us. If you think of people believing that the Sun circles around the earth just some 500++ years ago ... but maybe we'll find the Restaurant at the End of the Universe someday!

Psiga wrote:

Do you think of the third dimension as a string of twine? Dimensions are only linear when left to themselves. Once you start connecting them to each other, their space is compounded.

Well ... yes, i did. Kind of. If you think of a string of twine doing a looping like here and if you take the part where the "tracks" are as close together as they can be - well, maybe that's the thing about having a "deja vu".
It's just some thing i came up with ... because i had one that day and it was feeling like i had seen that scene before.

Shapermc · Posts: 2450

I am completly shocked that this site has not been linked.

http://www.mjyoung.net/time/index.htm

Talk about over analisis.

Takashi · Posts: 820

Valkyrie wrote:

The word "receiver" reminds me of Frequency. I have forgotten most about the film, but ... it was a strange one. I still don't know if i should like the film, though, anybody seen that film?

I'm obcessed about that film. It's not only a sci-fi story, it's a fireman movie, a serial killer thriller and a father-son relationship drama.

Anyway, it's concept is born from a random event- the same radio machine, tuned at the same frequency, during a rare meteriologic event, are able to comunicate tru time. When the timeline past starts changing, and those changes are effective imediately in the future. One must however, belive the two timelines are running, or changing, in real time. This doesn't make sense in the single string theory. in this view, only after a actuion in the past has been taken, it affects the future, but it doesn't work allways like that.

ryan · Posts: 297

Shapermc wrote:

I am completly shocked that this site has not been linked.

http://www.mjyoung.net/time/index.htm

Talk about over analisis.

"It would seem that although there are some places in which a disaster might happen, the limited time travel in Planet of the Apes sets up some benign if complicated interlocking N-jumps. Time will continue after this story; and while Earth may not be the place we would hope for our future and that of our children, perhaps we can take consolation that somewhere in the galaxy there is a place where humans and other intelligent creatures live together in harmony, mutual respect, and even perhaps love."

Yes. This is for you, Planet of the Apes.

Mr. Mechanical · Posts: 1890

ipslore wrote:

That would be [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers'_paradox]Olber's paradox[/url] we're talking about. Check it out.

I was under the impression that scientists had determined that the universe was not static, therefore negating the kinds of paradoxes that come with that line of thought.

And, I think Time Travel would only be possible if we were accepting of the multiple universe theories, which is what I think the guy behind all the John Titor stuff was going with to make everything he said sound plausible.

newave · Posts: 616

The wrost time travel film was RETURNER

FortNinety · Posts: 4591

newave wrote:

The wrost time travel film was RETURNER

This I can agree with 1000%.

DonMarco · Posts: 565

FortNinety wrote:

newave wrote:

The wrost time travel film was RETURNER

This I can agree with 1000%.

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!

I think Time Cop is like 50 pegs down from Returner.

Takashi · Posts: 820

How is The Butterly Effect, by the way?
I always liked Quantum Leap, when I was a youngin'.

DonMarco · Posts: 565

Takashi wrote:

How is The Butterly Effect, by the way?
I always liked Quantum Leap, when I was a youngin'.

Quantum Lesap was very "you can change the future" which leads me to believe that it took place in a multi-verse or alternate dimension. And as such really isn't time travel. It's just traveling. I think Timeline touched on this.

Time travel implies one linear time to travel on.

aderack · Posts: 5018

SPACE.com wrote:

Taught in physics classes the world over, Albert Einsteins theory of special relativity holds that no object or information can move faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, or 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) per second.

Riddle me this. If speed is relative (which it inherently is), how can you say that nothing can go faster than the speed of light?

I mean. Isn't there a conflict here?

What if I'm standing on a beam of light going due north, watching another beam of light going south. From my perspective, it will be moving at twice the speed of light. Which means, relatively speaking, that's the speed it is moving.

extralife · Posts: 3316

The worst time travel movie of all time is this peice of shit. It was MST3Ked.

ipslore · Posts: 262

aderack wrote:

SPACE.com wrote:

Taught in physics classes the world over, Albert Einsteins theory of special relativity holds that no object or information can move faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, or 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) per second.

Riddle me this. If speed is relative (which it inherently is), how can you say that nothing can go faster than the speed of light?

I mean. Isn't there a conflict here?

What if I'm standing on a beam of light going due north, watching another beam of light going south. From my perspective, it will be moving at twice the speed of light. Which means, relatively speaking, that's the speed it is moving.

Well, no. See, at near-light speeds, the math changes; it isn't just 'Speed A plus Speed B' anymore. It's more like 'A plus B, divided by 1 plus AB over lightspeed squared'. Check out the Wikipedia article for more.

aderack · Posts: 5018

What is the reasoning behind why must it do this?

Takashi · Posts: 820

aderack wrote:

What is the reasoning behind why must it do this?

Because there's proof?

aderack · Posts: 5018

That's a link about an experiment to measure the presence or non-presence of aether in outer space as a transference medium for light.

I don't see how this elucidates the rationale for math changing at "near light speeds".

Considering, again, you know, that speed isn't actually a property of the universe so much as a relative (and compound) measurement that we apply.

Dakravel · Posts: 125

That's the crazy thing, no matter where you're looking at a beam of light from, it's going the same speed. If some guy on a train going .1C shines a laser in the same direction the train is going, he sees the beam of light going relative to him at C, right? This is perfectly normal.

Now, suppose a guy from outside watches the ordeal from a frame which is at rest. Relative to this guy, the train is moving .1C in whatever direction. As he sees the light, normal physics implies the light SHOULD be traveling at 1.1C from this guy's POV, but as it turns out it's still traveling at C. Non-intuitive, yes, but it's the only way a lot of things make sense.

It's not MATH that's changing at near-light speeds, it's the way that moving through space warps the way you're moving through time. Supposing time is a fourth dimension, the total vector-sum of the magnitudes of our velocities in each dimension (x, y, z, time) must add up to a constant I'll call K. That means if I'm not moving at all in the x, y, or z dimensions, then I am moving at speed K through time. As I speed up in the x direction, that is taking away from the speed at which I am travelling through time.
At low speeds (relative to 3*10^8 m/s), this time dilation effect is minimal and so we just do simple addition of speeds to determine relative speeds. As we move faster and faster, we can't ignore the time dilation effect and thus we must calculate thing with relativistic physics instead of normal physics.

A really good experiment to show this time dilation effect is the quantity of muons near the Earth's surface. Muons are created when cosmic rays hit the Earth's atmosphere. They have an average lifespan of 2.2 microseconds when at rest, and travel at .998C. Well, (2.2*10^-6)*(3*10^8) gives an average travelling distance of 660 meters or .4 miles before an average muon, without relativistic effects, will decay into its component parts. Since cosmic ray bombardment is the only source of muons, we should pretty much no muons near the Earth's surface.
As it turns out, we have plenty of muons down here, which means that since muons are travelling so goddamn fast, 2.2 microseconds in their frame of reference is a long, long time in our frame of reference.

That in turn proves the necessity of relativistic physics.

Edit : Well, it doesn't prove the necessity of, but it is unexplainable without relativistic physics.

aderack · Posts: 5018

So you're saying it's a perceptual problem, because of our limited frame of reference for activity outside of the three (and a half, perhaps) dimensions we're used to processing.

Dakravel · Posts: 125

I..., don't quite understand what you're saying.

You might consider some aspect of this a perceptual problem since we don't normally think about things moving faster or slower through time. We aren't built to comprehend that kind of thing since that kind of thing makes no difference to us in most everyday life situations.

There is no actual "problem" though and once again it's not math that's changing, it's simply that Newtonian mechanics are a subset of relativistic physics that assumes the time dilation effect to be negligible. You can't apply Newtonian mechanics to situations where the objects are moving at such speeds that time dilation starts to make a significant difference.

I should maybe explain better this idea of moving through space slows movement through time?

As I said before, I don't understand what you mean or what your question is. If you elaborate, I can try to address your concerns.

I'll specifically address your earlier questions though. Maybe this will help?

Riddle me this. If speed is relative (which it inherently is), how can you say that nothing can go faster than the speed of light?

Speed IS relative. The problem here is that when you get up to certain speeds, time passes differently for you and the way that people see you is different as well. For example, some guy moving at a speed significantly more than you might think two events are occuring simultaneously. For you, you might see the events as occuring one after the other.

I mean. Isn't there a conflict here?

There isn't a conflict because of this weird time dilation effect. Essentially, as you get closer and closer to the speed of light, you move slower and slower through time. Once you've hit the speed of light, you are, presumably, not moving through time at all. Moving faster than that gives you imaginary numbers for your other speeds which doesn't make a whole lot of sense. This implies that moving faster than light is near impossible.

What if I'm standing on a beam of light going due north, watching another beam of light going south. From my perspective, it will be moving at twice the speed of light. Which means, relatively speaking, that's the speed it is moving.

There's the rub. No matter who is looking at any particular beam of light and no matter how fast each of those people are moving, everyone will think the beam of light is traveling at C. You might be moving alongside the light at near C and I might be moving in the opposite direction at near C, and some yokel in between us is sitting in the middle of the road not moving at all and yet we will all see that particular beam of light as moving at C. Applying newtonian mechanics to this situation is not feasible since newtonian mechanics is really just a subset of relativity which assumes this time dilation effect is minimal.

What is the reasoning behind why must it do this?

It's not so much that there's some "reason" why the real world does anything; things are the way they are and physics is an attempt to put to paper what exactly the rules of this game are. Relativity is supported because it solves a lot of problems and inconsistencies that happened when people tried using newtonian mechanics to predict celestial body movements and the muon problem and things like that. It worked to an extent, but there were errors that weren't simple rounding problems.

I think it might help if you read this. I've skimmed it and it seems to not be lying.

Edit : The more I think about this, the more I remember how absolutely crazy it seemed when I learned about it. The ramifications of special relativity are insane, and only in doing simulations do you begin to appreciate how intricate and subtle the theory really is. It's the first step to realizing how very limited our senses are and how absolutely apeshit the universe is.

Edit 2 : I also just now realized I haven't explained WHY things can't move faster than light. The wikipedia page talks about how doing so would violate causality..., but I can't think of a way to explain why that is the case without talking about world-lines and weird shit like that. The article does do a reasonable job of trying though.

Psiga · Posts: 3990

One of my dream projects is to develop a stereoscopic 'chalk board' of sorts, to aid in visualizing 4 dimensional concepts. I believe that human brains are capable of understanding the concepts; they just don't receive enough points of reference to develop the ability to process them as fluent thoughts.

Dragging the poor fringe scientists back into this, they are currently saying that scalar waves (most notably discovered by Tesla, as the product of smashing a 3D wave-antiwave pair against eachother) are waves polarized into the 4th dimension. Because we don't build any scientific instruments that read the potentials of scalar waves, all of the numbers that our scientists derive from all of our most expensive equipment are all plotting nothing more than 1 to 3 spatial dimensions worth of information. We can take multiple readings over time, yeah, but the idea is that a scalar potentiometer could do it relatively well in just one reading.

Edit: Regarding the speed of light stuff: A big problem is that we play with metaphors of things like trains. When you get up to speeds like that, we're dealing less on the conceptual level of wood and metal, and more on the elemental level of the energy that matter is composed of.

The elements can only move so fast before they hit a maximum speed of atomic action (superconduction), at which point things are temporally static until you slow down. Unless you can take everything that makes a train and turn it into a big mass of a superconductor (currently impossible, to put it simply), the idea of a train moving at c is actually just a shitty metaphor. The mechanical parts of a train cannot function if the elements that the parts are made of are static in time. Same for human brain function, really.

-Psiga

aderack · Posts: 5018

Dakravel wrote:

There's the rub. No matter who is looking at any particular beam of light and no matter how fast each of those people are moving, everyone will think the beam of light is traveling at C. Applying newtonian mechanics to this situation is not feasible since newtonian mechanics is really just a subset of relativity which assumes this time dilation effect is minimal.

It's not so much that there's some "reason" why the real world does anything; things are the way they are and physics is an attempt to put to paper what exactly the rules of this game are.

That's what I mean by a perceptual problem. We don't perceive time in the same way as the other dimensions. And as you say, if any body always has its own timeframe relative to any other body (which seems to be the implication here), we ain't built to notice it. Perhaps this phenomenon, this apparent burp in the system described at higher relative velocities, might total sense to a hypothetical being that sees time the same way we see distance, in the same way newtonian mechanics are obvious to us, with the perceptual tools we have to work with.

I'm thinking of, say, a 2D slice of 3D motion and how bizarre that might seem, with things popping in and out in random places, for no apparent reason

The main thing is, I'm just having trouble understanding the why behind this time thing. Why it's neccessary. What it's related to in the great universal machinery, and what would be different if it weren't there (which might not be immediately intuitive). You seem to insist that's a question on the level of "but why must a body at rest always stay at rest unless acted on by an outside force?!" It still seems to me like something that could be clarified more. In a conceptual, rather than mathematical, way.

And I wonder if this has anything to do with why light is so fucking weird, on its own right. Whether there's any kind of relationship there, and if it is, what kind. I mean what, is it a four-dimensional particle? And would that even make sense?

Hell. Our linear perception of time -- is that just because of the velocity things were moving in time at the time of the big bang? I mean, on the other side of the universe, is time going in the opposite direction (relative to our frame of reference)? Likewise, if our own sense of being and causality is based in our linear perception of time, what would that make us to beings that perceive time in a spacial sense? Inanimate?

Psiga · Posts: 3990

Ameobae?

-Psiga

DonMarco · Posts: 565

Dakravel wrote:

I mean. Isn't there a conflict here?

There isn't a conflict because of this weird time dilation effect. Essentially, as you get closer and closer to the speed of light, you move slower and slower through time. Once you've hit the speed of light, you are, presumably, not moving through time at all. Moving faster than that gives you imaginary numbers for your other speeds which doesn't make a whole lot of sense. This implies that moving faster than light is near impossible.

What about if you get a train up to the speed of light, then you walk from the back of the train to the front. Doing so would allow you to move faster than light.

Also, as long ass you dont hit anything or run out of fuel, there's no reason you couldn't accelerate youself past the speed of light in a complete vacuum. The science of how this would be possible is pretty realistic, what with the warp fields. In fact, Star Trek's "warp factor" is how fast they are going relative to the speed of light. Warp 5 is 50% the speed of light and 9.3 is 93% the speed of light. There were these screwball episodes where The Traveler showed up and accelerated them faster than light, and Q once threw them in the Delta quadrant (90 billion million jillion miles away) in ten seconds. The finale had an Enterprise that could go warp 13... that was pretty funny.

As for "Time Dilation" problems, people living in Japan are 13 hours ahead of me according to time zones and calanders, so now it's 2am Wednesday morning, about. Relative to me, they are in the Future. My position in time is in the past, relative to them. If you were standing on a space platform using two telescopes to stare as us while we both waved our hand right now, we would both be waving our hands at you at the same, according to you.

Obviously, the person observing everything from space is correct, and we are waving our hands at the same time. The person from space can also say the two of us on the ground are moving at roughly 1000 mph. We landlubbers can't feel it, but it's true. To another degree, the universe, iteself, is spinning at 400,000 mph and the galazy is spinning at 2,000,000 mph. I made those last two figures up, but PROVE ME WRONG, bitch! Until they get someone outside our galaxy and measure it from there, then these numbers are good enough for me.

NOW!

If you were to have another witness, someone in the fourth dimension observe all this. What would they say? Besides our location, weight, speed, mass, melting point, physical characteristics... our time? And not "age" which is a means of measuring a creature relative to sun rotations. Everything on Earth, including the planet, has an age. Our time would be a number/location on this massive linear line. Like a mile marker on a 100-billion year long road.

FortNinety · Posts: 4591

Takashi wrote:

How is The Butterly Effect, by the way?

A decent flick that is totally marred by a horrible actor and a totally ridiculous ending (I'm talking about the original one, which stupid as it was, is still much better than the theatrical one).

Psiga · Posts: 3990

Y'know, I'm not even sure that a superconducting atom could be brought up to the speed of light, so the train metaphor is probably even more shit than I thought it was an hour ago. Relatively speaking, anyhow.

And I'm still holding out for the resurrection of the aether theory, dammit. Relativity will become yet another subset! The ~~south~~ aether shall rise again!

-Psiga

ipslore · Posts: 262

DonMarco wrote:

Dakravel wrote:

I mean. Isn't there a conflict here?

There isn't a conflict because of this weird time dilation effect. Essentially, as you get closer and closer to the speed of light, you move slower and slower through time. Once you've hit the speed of light, you are, presumably, not moving through time at all. Moving faster than that gives you imaginary numbers for your other speeds which doesn't make a whole lot of sense. This implies that moving faster than light is near impossible.

What about if you get a train up to the speed of light, then you walk from the back of the train to the front. Doing so would allow you to move faster than light.

Also, as long ass you dont hit anything or run out of fuel, there's no reason you couldn't accelerate youself past the speed of light in a complete vacuum. The science of how this would be possible is pretty realistic, what with the warp fields. In fact, Star Trek's "warp factor" is how fast they are going relative to the speed of light. Warp 5 is 50% the speed of light and 9.3 is 93% the speed of light. There were these screwball episodes where The Traveler showed up and accelerated them faster than light, and Q once threw them in the Delta quadrant (90 billion million jillion miles away) in ten seconds. The finale had an Enterprise that could go warp 13... that was pretty funny.

Well... no. With the train, from your perspective, the train isn't moving, and you're moving at normal walking speed. According to an outside observer, though, the Lorentz transformation shrinks the length of the train, so that its front and back are the same place. Freaky.

About Star Trek... I don't see where you're getting that from. It's always been my understanding that the warp drive goes faster than light, through unknown science-fictiony technobabble. Possibly gravity waves, which would compress the distance in gfront of the Enterprise, and expand it behind.

Dakravel · Posts: 125

aderack wrote:

The main thing is, I'm just having trouble understanding the why behind this time thing. Why it's neccessary. What it's related to in the great universal machinery, and what would be different if it weren't there (which might not be immediately intuitive). You seem to insist that's a question on the level of "but why must a body at rest always stay at rest unless acted on by an outside force?!" It still seems to me like something that could be clarified more. In a conceptual, rather than mathematical, way.

Well, a big part of it is just electromagnetism. According to Maxwell's laws, the speed of an electromagnetic wave is constant. Period. It has nothing to do with the relative speed of the objects creating the wave, the wave itself will always travel at a constant. Using that and some other stuff, one figures, "hey, that's some crazy crap", and special relativity is born.
There may be a more conceptual way of describing why the lorentz effect (things get smaller as they travel faster) and time dilation happen, but no simple analogies come to mind. Those two ideas however are intensely related.

Technically, we're composed of "four-dimensional particles", since we are capable of moving through time. As for the weirdness of light, I really don't know what to say about that. I could say something along the lines of "Light is the force-carrying particle of the electromagnetic force and happens to be massless" but even then I don't know if that really describes why. Like I said before, I don't know if you can really ask "why" about this stuff. God maybe?

Presumably beings that were capable of movement in the fourth dimension would see time just as we see the first three dimensions. They could go to any point in time they wanted whenever they wanted. Kinda like the aliens in Slaughterhouse Five.
We might think of a two dimensional object stretched out in a very long way. One end of the object could be considered its birth, the other end its death, and we can view every moment at all times.

DonMarco wrote:

What about if you get a train up to the speed of light, then you walk from the back of the train to the front. Doing so would allow you to move faster than light.

Getting a train up to C is going to take a lot of work. This has to do with the fact that at relativistic speeds, an objects momentum (and therefore velocity) is not in direct proportion to the energy of the object but is actually a square root relation I think. That means the faster you're going, the more energy it'll take to go faster. Light is capable of travelling at the speed of light because it's massless. Everything else would take an infinite amount of energy to get up there.

About warp, you can read about it here! Warp 10 is way faster than the speed of light I believe. And uh.., taking Star Trek as science makes me think this post = postcount++.

The long and short of it is you can hypothesize about objects moving at whatever speeds, but nothing has ever been observed to move at >C, and at this point it seems impossible. As things with mass approach C, it gets harder and harder for them to continue accelerating and so, yeah.

DonMarco · Posts: 565

ipslore wrote:

Well... no. With the train, from your perspective, the train isn't moving, and you're moving at normal walking speed. According to an outside observer, though, the Lorentz transformation shrinks the length of the train, so that its front and back are the same place. Freaky.

Regardless of YOUR perspective you would be going faster than light, from someone else's perspective. Especially if that person was standing outside the train.

OKAY

(-2)--------------(-1)--------------0---------------1--------------2--------------3--------------4------->

Every number is one second traveling at the speed of time. So every number is 186,000 miles apart. The train itself is 180,000 miles long.

(-2)xxxxxxxxxx(-1)--------------0---------------1--------------2--------------3--------------4------->

Well the blue xs are the 186,000 mile-long train, traveling between 0 and 1. one second later is looks like this:

(-2)--------------(-1)xxxxxxxxxx0--------------1--------------2------->

Putting a person at the very end, which will be this cyan o, starting at that-person's "second zero" here:

(-2)--------------(-1)--------------0oxxxxxxxxx1--------------2--------------3--------------4------->

One second later the person hasn't moved much. MUCH.

(-2)--------------(-1)--------------0--------------1oxxxxxxxxx2--------------3--------------4------->

Saying you could walk 4 miles in an hour without eating or sleeping, it would take you 46,500 hours, or 1,937.5 days to walk from the back of the train to the front. Now the train has been moving contantly at exactly yhe speed of light. so after 1,937.5 days, or 5.03 light years, it is somewhere like this:

<--------------167399996---------------167399997---------------167399998---------------167399999xxxxxxxxxxxo167400000--------------->

So the front of the train has traveled 167,400,000 seconds and the end 167,399,999 seconds. Had you waited in the seat at the very end of the train, you would've traveled at the same speed as the rest of the train: the speed of light. But by walking for the last five years, you have traveled (167,399,999 seconds x 186,000 miles-per-second + 186,000 mile-long distance walked = ) 31,136,400,000 miles covered. Divide that by the time spent in total (in seconds), 167,399,999.

31,136,400,000___________distance = (speed)
_167,399,999 ______________time

Equals!
186.00000111111111774857298535587 miles per second. Which is faster than 186,000 miles/second. Hense! Faster-than-light.

GRANTED! These numbers are extreme, but only because you are reading them in 2005. If someone had told you back in 1989 that in 15 years you could fit all the video games known to man on something the some of a postage stamp and play them on one system, you would say they were crazy. They would then say they were all free and collected in less than 10 seconds, and you would punch them in their face. Go back a millenium and tell som poor book transcriber that in your time printed books cost less than a meal and are created 15,000 at a time. The tell them that most readable words aren't on paper, but microscopic crystals that create any shape or color in magical tablets.

Psiga · Posts: 3990

You know, I still can't tell if he's serious.

Ediiiit: So, hey. For starters, let's say that you've accellerated a train to the speed of light. In the process of doing this, the blue-shift of moving toward light coming at you would drive the oncoming EM radiation into deadly levels that would pass through and/or destroy train materials. You'd have to break a wavefront of oncoming light around the train (perhaps with a sheath of magical matter that makes the light move three hundred times faster than normal?) so you wouldn't be absolutely destroyed by the radiation.

Even then, you have the problem of how quickly the protons and electrons and such that compose atoms are capable of moving through the quantum foam (or whatever flavor-of-the-month cosmic foundation is named). By 'vacuum' they don't mean free space where all other rules are off. Something fundamental is preventing light from moving any faster than it already does. To my understanding, I think modern scientists like to say that the elements of atoms would drag on that fundamental thing as they picked up velocity, which would warp their orbits in such a way that they'd eventually become unstable and collapse. Or require "infinite energy" in order to force their orbits to remain stable.

A better metaphor might be the ghosting that you see on LCD panels. Say that a dot can only move from pixel A to pixel B after pixel A has completely settled. You can't move faster than that, or the dot will smear; you can't skip from pixel A to pixel C, because you're only allowed to move from one square on the grid to an adjacent square on the grid.

This experiment that makes light move up to three hundred times faster than normal is kind-of like being able to make an LCD refresh much faster than usual, but each super-refreshed pixel can only be a random color. You can't move anything useful.

I mean, this is going by my understanding of 'normal' physics. I still think there's more to it than people are accepting right now. A hundred years ago, the New York Times said that man wouldn't fly for a thousand years. Scientific American initially claimed that the Wright Bros. test flight was a hoax. That's what we're dealing with. They're going to piss and moan until they see proof, then they'll rave about how awesome it is without so much as an apology, let alone a lesson learned.

Still, though.. WTF, Marco?

-Psiga

extralife · Posts: 3316

That's because Marco is the boy who cried wolf.

aderack · Posts: 5018

I think I might remember the topic of one of those papers I talked about in the other thread. Something about time actually being two dimensions rather than one. Or, rather, time itself is as linear as any other dimension. Once you factor in potentiality, choice, and whatnot, however, you're talking about moving right and left at various intersections.

So time and potential, I guess, are perhaps two closely-interrelated dimensions, with time being the X and potential being the Y. From our perspective we're hurtling though time, always, inelectably. We can't move forward or back. All we have opportunity to do is choose right or left. To eat broccoli or to eat lima beans. To go to the park or to stay home and masturbate.

If, as Heideggar observes (kind of astutely), Being is time -- that is, our hurling through time is the same thing as consciousness, as awareness, then perhaps this fifth dimension is what we might from a subjective standpoint (whereby we feel we are remedially in control of our actions, rather than simply acting out a role in an infinitely complex causal framework) see as "choice" or "free will".

...

So yeah. It's basically Doctor Who-level stuff. It knocked the socks off of some professors, though.

Back to light. From what we've been talking about, I still can't shake this weird feeling that it's got some greater four-dimensional significance than we're giving it credit for. Like there's some important relationship between light behaving as it does (both wave and particle); moving at the speed it does, which also coincidentally happens to be the fastest relative speed anything can move before things start to break down; and time. Like, I don't know, electromagnetic waves even being measurable within the first three dimensions is somehow a fluke. Like they're not exactly a phenomenon of "normal" space (as we understand it with three dimensions), and yet simply by moving at the speed of light, they're "breaking through" from someplace else.

Except I also get the feeling that that's somehow backwards from what I have in mind, and I should be looking at it from the other side, only I don't know what's over there..