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Thread: Faster than light travel

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    Arrow Faster than light travel

    I was just sitting here looking at some astronomy pictures and the question occurred to me .........When light passes a heavy gravitational field doesit speed up any ? . It has the dual properties of a wave and a particle remember so a particle would do so . Perhaps a wave also ........consider a sea wave hitting an island and the wave is changed behind the island .

    So next question ...if it did speed up then a system that appeared 10 Million light years away might actually only be 5...supppose it might then also work in reverse by the path being made longer and taking longer to get here ?



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    When you look at it as a particle, it has no motion, t=0 and thus is has no wave function. It only has a wave function when it is moving. There is no change in velocity of photon velocity... it's constant all the way down and all the way up. It doesn't change speed in the quantum world. In the real world, the change of speed is a change of vector or a change in direction.
    So while it appears to slow down in one dimension, it gains speed in another dimension. Looking at this in a classical 3 dimensional sense.

    Feel free to play with extra dimensions if you wish.

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    I'll go out on a limb here Trash........wouldnt the time dilation effect have a part to play where as the particle/wave will travel the same distance per unit time (according to it's relaity) yet an outside observer would see some thing different? An increase??? Or at least a delta V?

    Also, still hanging out there..

    F=MA

    F due to gravity

    M of photon = 0

    So for a positive F on particle M =0, accelertation = 0 no change in Velocity?

    carefully climbing back now

    porkop

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    yeah, your starting to get into the area where even I have to think carefully about it. Time and gravity seem to be inter related. The photons still move though the gravitational field at the same speed, they don't pick up speed at they fall in. This would create a dopler effect, a red light falling into a gravity well would appear more blue from the bottom of the well if it were picking up velocity.
    Gravity does however bend space, and when you bend space, you also stretch time.

    For example... the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.
    But in a place a differential graviational field between those points, and the straight line is now following lines of equal gravity. This means that the straight line is now bent between the same points and that line is now longer.
    Since the photon is traveling at a constant speed, it now takes longer to travel between those two points. It gives the effect of time dialation.


    Considering the light 'might' change velocity could explain some unusual things we see in the universe, like dark matter. The may be no dark matter, just a distortion in the way that we see photons behaving.
    That's just a whacky idea off the top of my head and I have no evidence to suggest it's even plausible.

    It's always fun to play with faster than light theories... but they hurt my head after a while. Running time in reverse is easier

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    This wins my WTF award for this week !

    http://cgi.ebay.com/Tachyon-Bioenergy-Spectrum-Ball-Radiation-Protection_W0QQitemZ250377534058QQcmdZViewItemQQpt ZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item250377534058&_trksid= p3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=66:2|65:3|39:1|240:1318

    I don't know how some people can live with themselves.

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    An injection-moulded piece of plastic with qualities unknown to science - farkin' 'mazin' !

    The 'new age' delusional weirdos make this shit up as they go....

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    I wouldn't feel safe without one.

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    Quote Originally Posted by machine View Post
    I wouldn't feel safe without one.
    Safe from what...reality or your US$187 (Plus US$10 for p+h) ?

    Hehe, some dippy clown with a nose ring will buy it...

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    Hahah you can buy them at the $2 shop

    Quote Originally Posted by trash View Post
    This wins my WTF award for this week !

    http://cgi.ebay.com/Tachyon-Bioenergy-Spectrum-Ball-Radiation-Protection_W0QQitemZ250377534058QQcmdZViewItemQQpt ZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item250377534058&_trksid= p3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=66:2|65:3|39:1|240:1318

    I don't know how some people can live with themselves.

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    Yes, but are they real "Tachyon Bioenergy Spectrum Ball Radiation Protectors" or are they just some cheap plastic copy ?

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    If you ever get the chance to visit the Australian Synchotron in Melbourne you might gain an intimate knowledge in to how photons behave in controlled conditions.
    They generate a few every 12 - 24 hours.
    This place runs up a 7 figure power bill annually - at taxpayer's expense.
    I don't think an armadillo shell will protect you.
    Lots and lots of little black balloons everywhere.....

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    No Tachyons in there either. You apparently can only find them at Paddy's Markets.

    The big power bill has its benifits.

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    Quote Originally Posted by tytower View Post
    I was just sitting here looking at some astronomy pictures and the question occurred to me .........When light passes a heavy gravitational field doesit speed up any ? . It has the dual properties of a wave and a particle remember so a particle would do so . Perhaps a wave also ........consider a sea wave hitting an island and the wave is changed behind the island .

    So next question ...if it did speed up then a system that appeared 10 Million light years away might actually only be 5...supppose it might then also work in reverse by the path being made longer and taking longer to get here ?
    My understanding is that the speed of light in a vacuum is constant at 299,792,458 metres per second. It doesn't speed up or slow down due to the effects of gravity (although it can be bent as evidenced in an Einstein ring). Light can be slowed by passing it through different materials (water, glass, rubies etc) but its speed remains constant in that material irrespective of the effects of gravity.

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    Quote Originally Posted by SCT View Post
    My understanding is that the speed of light in a vacuum is constant at 299,792,458 metres per second. It doesn't speed up or slow down due to the effects of gravity (although it can be bent as evidenced in an Einstein ring). Light can be slowed by passing it through different materials (water, glass, rubies etc) but its speed remains constant in that material irrespective of the effects of gravity.
    ahhh yes, but if it did speed up within the effects of a gravitional field, its actual time period relative to you would slow down so then it didnt speed up, if you can grasp that?

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    light has a wavelength, a photon also has no mass. i think it comes down to what exactly holds a photon together. with no mass, a photon cannot rely on a strong force attraction to prevent its waveform spreading out (reducing in frequency). gravity can and will change the wavelength though, but why does it not destroy it completely?

    the wavelength of light is longer than a single atom-



    so what holds it together? consider a photon fired on a single path ie spinning in one direction. how does the photon at any particular point along that path 'know' its level of energy ie how does it oscillate at a given frequency when there is nothing to prevent the spin from breaking the energy packet apart and concluding in an ever increasing wavelength. in any form of mass there will be a strong force (nuclear, but probably the misunderstood basis for gravity) to hold that wavelength and allow a resonance without destruction, so what holds it together when no mass exists?

    of course this comes back to what we were talking about in the other thread about black holes etc. the easiest way to convert mass to just energy is to slam matter into antimatter. so what we have left is a big bundle of massless photons trapped by gravity.

    though i have come to not see photons as particles or waves (energy packets), i dont beleive either could exist within understood laws. there is a thing called quantum entanglement, which in a way shows how photons do not react as separate particles in all instances.





    this leads to a rethink i believe of quantum concepts. it seems to me that photons behave more as an aether than a separate particle or wave. in reference to time, the speed of light obvioulsy defines it as a constant within our own physical universe, however a weak force exists on each particle in ony one direction points to a time arrow not relative to our own reference to time (ie the speed of light).

    consider the arrow of time-

    ---------------


    "The symmetry of time (T-symmetry) can be understood by a simple analogy: if time were perfectly symmetric then it would be possible to watch a movie taken of real events and everything that happens in the movie would seem realistic whether it was played forwards or backwards.[1]

    An obvious objection to this assertion is gravity: after all, things fall down, not up. Consider first, some bodies interacting in space. Perhaps one asteroid approaches another, loops part-way around it, and slingshots off in another direction. In this case the forward-recording and the backward-recording look equally realistic.

    One could film a tossed ball as it moves up, slows gradually to a stop, and then falls back down. This is another case where the forward- and backward- recordings clearly look equally realistic. One might expect it to take the same amount of time for the ball to go up in reverse as it did for it to go up going forward, but as it turns out the film would show it taking slightly longer going forward than going backward. This is not because gravity is asymmetric but because when the ball is going forward in time it loses energy to air molecules it bumps into, but when the ball is going backwards in time the air molecules are bumping into it, giving it energy. Note that this inequality doesn't contradict the definition of time reversal because forward-up is a different leg of the trip from backward-up. So the system is strictly T-symmetrical, but we recognize that while going "forward," useful kinetic energy is dissipated into the environment: entropy is increasing. Entropy, which is a purely statistical observation, may be one of the only processes in physics that is not time-reversible.

    This kind of thinking turns out to be critical to understanding the final case of this example. What if you record somebody simply dropping a ball? It falls for a meter and stops. Certainly someone watching this recording in reverse would notice an unrealistic discrepancy: a ball falling upward! But imagine the forward-recording carefully. When the ball lands, its kinetic energy is dispersed into sound, shaking the ground, and some heat. That is what allows the ball to be moving one moment and still the next. Now think of the recording in reverse. Those sound waves, those ground vibrations, and that heat, are all rushing back into the ball, imparting just enough energy to propel it upward into the person's hand. With this understanding, the backward recording appears perfectly realisitic. The only way that someone can tell the video is in reverse is by making the statistical prediction that it's unlikely that these forces could incidentally interact to propel the ball upward into your waiting hand."
    -------------

    gravity turns the time arrow along with the rest of the paticle towards it, the waveform of the photon can no longer be considered as being on the same path of time as the observer. the observer only sees the end waveform within his own time symmetry.

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    a photon also has no mass
    No "rest" mass. At velocity it has mass. Which if you think about it suggests that it 'should' have rest mass. I'm not up on the latest particle physics with respect to photons. Mysterious little buggers they are.

    so what holds it together? consider a photon fired on a single path ie spinning in one direction.
    Woe ! pull that photon over to the side of the quantum turnpike !
    You're only permitted to speak of photons in terms of particles when they are not moving, oops, no mass.
    When you speak of them in motion... quantum physics speaks of them in terms of waves, the properties of particles become fuzzy.
    Such is the duality of photons. Solve this problem, you'll answer your own question and win that Noble prize for Physics

    so what we have left is a big bundle of massless photons trapped by gravity.
    and the neutrinos ? DOH !!!

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    Gravity affects time reference frames.
    In all the reference frames of all observers, independent of their velocity or gravitational time dilation, the speed of light does not change.
    It's wave length and other interactions however are dependent on the time frame of the observer or the observed system.

    Light carries information.
    If it were to travel faster than itself, due to gravitational effects or what ever other means, this information would appear in the past.
    This has never been observed.

    ... well that's my 2c but i might be wrong.


    Quote Originally Posted by trash View Post
    Considering the light 'might' change velocity could explain some unusual things we see in the universe, like dark matter. The may be no dark matter, just a distortion in the way that we see photons behaving.
    That's just a whacky idea off the top of my head and I have no evidence to suggest it's even plausible.

    It's always fun to play with faster than light theories... but they hurt my head after a while. Running time in reverse is easier
    Here some Science Fiction fun that comes to my mind after a few beers
    Mass can never reach the speed of light.
    However it is at least mathematically possible for mass to have always existed beyond the speed of light as long as it has never reached c or lower, under consideration of complex numbers.
    Dark matter might be actually be such matter.
    Why don't we spontaneously crash into it and destroy the entire universe?
    ... because it is imaginary.
    The current through an inductor also has an imaginary component when AC is applied to it

    Another idea: it could be very far away but it's gravitational force is causing us to expand and accelerate.
    Only problem is that the acceleration would get weaker if it is moving faster away from us than light ...but in reality we are increasing acceleration.
    That would mean it could be coming towards us
    ...and if I am wrong and it is not imaginary ... hello BIG BANG ... lets make a new Universe !!!
    Update: A deletion of features that work well and ain't broke but are deemed outdated in order to add things that are up to date and broken.
    Compatibility: A word soon to be deleted from our dictionaries as it is outdated.
    Humans: Entities that are not only outdated but broken... AI-self-learning-update-error...terminate...terminate...

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    im sorry i clicked the link to read this @ 1.13am now im going to wonder about the relativity of everything.

    NS
    The Early Bird May Get The Worm But Its The Second Mouse That Gets The Cheese!




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    all matter/mass including neutrinos have an anti. there would be no radiation.
    -------------


    The Standard Model of particle physics assumed that neutrinos are massless, although adding massive neutrinos to the basic framework is not difficult. Indeed, the experimentally established phenomenon of neutrino oscillation requires neutrinos to have nonzero masses.[11]

    The strongest upper limit on the masses of neutrinos comes from cosmology: the Big Bang model predicts that there is a fixed ratio between the number of neutrinos and the number of photons in the cosmic microwave background. If the total energy of all three types of neutrinos exceeded an average of 50 electronvolts per neutrino, there would be so much mass in the universe that it would collapse. This limit can be circumvented by assuming that the neutrino is unstable; however, there are limits within the Standard Model that make this difficult. A much more stringent constraint comes from a careful analysis of cosmological data, such as the cosmic microwave background radiation, galaxy surveys and the Lyman-alpha forest. These indicate that the sum of the neutrino masses must be less than 0.3 electronvolt.[15]

    In 1998, research results at the Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector determined that neutrinos do indeed flavor oscillate, and therefore have mass. While this shows that neutrinos have mass, the absolute neutrino mass scale is still not known. This is due to the fact that neutrino oscillations are sensitive only to the difference in the squares of the masses.[16]

    -----------------

    only a photon could be considered 'pure' energy. a photon does not have an anti, they both exist as one and the same in our physical universe.

    though i think that is a bit broad though because i believe with the weak force presenting a fixed arrow of time means that the speed of light can only 'define' our own finite universe, not what exists outside it. ie there are two constants, first the speed of light and 2nd the cpt symmetry violations mainly described as the weak force, everything else varies with the state of time. the violations have their anti and gravity can affect them, but the only way they could remain constant over a changing time variable would be if they dont exist within this universe and do not adhere to the speed of light limit/definition.

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    What drugs have you been taking ?? You've been popping that smart pills haven't you Mobihci ?
    Either that or my braincells are starting to die off at an increasing rate.
    (I'll blame lead poisoning from too many solder fumes).

    So we're still back where we started from. No faster than light travel.

    I try not to think too much about neutrino masses, and their effect on the universe. Have a look at galactic masses and velocities nomeat. That's a good place to consider mystery masses on ordinary matter.
    I'm still waiting to see what the boffins have to say about dark matter in irregular galaxies and it's effect on the motion of the stars within. I suspect that's where the key clues will be found.

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