/sci/ - Science & Math

Preemptive bump for thread security

we aren't going to develop anything that hasn't already been thought up.
>in before alcubierre drive
hawking radation would sterilize the bubble at any velocity above c, vaporizing anything inside. also requires exotic matter in a plank-length-think band around the bubble. not practical

next best is wormholes but again, exotic matter.

Come on /sci/, I know you can do it, don't be afraid.

Brainstorm!

>>5028401

FUCKING

*BZZZZZZZT

You lose faggot, I told you, you can't say this is impossible.

You have to use your mind to come up with a way for this to work, you have to be original.

This is impossible? Keep trying. Science never, can never, give up on innovative thinking to solve a problem.

Now get the fuck out, or play the game fag.

What if I make a tulpa, and then I send it mentally to where I want to go. After that, I just switch my physical body with the tulpa's mental body.

>>5028410

FUCKING

*BZZZZZZZT

You lose faggot, I told you

>Your ideas must (obviously) obey the laws of physics
>Your idea must work on a stationary object that can launch from Earth's orbit without fucking things up for Earth
>Your idea must be able to transport people without killing them.

>>5028407
sorry, current physics does not allow this, thinking harder will not solve the problem.
maybe we'll find something interesting if we find out the underlying principles of the standard model.
>in before string theory

either way, new physics are (is?) required

>>5028414

>Your ideas must (obviously) obey the laws of physics
Tulpas are pseudoscience, and cannot be proven wrong.
>Your idea must work on a stationary object that can launch from Earth's orbit without fucking things up for Earth
How could a tulpa fuck things up for Earth
>Your idea must be able to transport people without killing them.
If I tulpaforce a spaceship I can be safe

>>5028416


FUCKING

*BZZZZZZZT

You lose faggot, I told you

>You cannot give up and say this is impossible.

>>5028420

I told you, you have already lost, you cannot try again.

You niggas really don't want that present, do you?

>>5028420
I like you

>>5028424
I didn't lose. My solution fits your criteria.

>>5028424
i don't like switching to trollmode, but, well
>implying i didn't circumvent C with my dick in your mom's ass last night
heyooooo

>>5028427

Except you did, now leave fag.

>>5028425

Don't encourage it.

It's not impossible. But we don't know how to do it with our current technology and understanding of physics. And no matter how much we brainstorm here nothing's gonna come out. So stop making useless threads and start researching.

>>5028435
If you're really going to be such an ass about it there's other things I can be doing. See you later, faggot

>Your craft cannot be in motion
>implying cryogenic technology works

oh and before OP gets any weird ideas
>the higgs boson governs inertial mass, not gravitational mass
>and thinking we'll find some way to "harness" higgs bosons soon is like saying we should have some way to "Harness" Quarks after discovering them. good luck

<div class="math">ds^2 = -\left(\alpha^2- \beta_i \beta^i\right)\,dt^2+2 \beta_i \,dx^i\, dt+ \gamma_{ij}\,dx^i\,dx^j</div>

Collapse everything in the universe into one point via bending space. Go wherever you want. It doesn't break physics to twist space around, nor will it kill anything since they won't be actually touching like in a singularity.

>>5028445

We have a MOTHER FUCKING CONTESTANT TO WIN!

Alright junior, explain to everyone at home, how your FTL engine works.

>>5028449

But aren't singularities incredibly chaotic/entropic and hot?

>>5028450
That's just the Alcubierre drive you fucking retard.

>>5028460
which has the problems listed here
>>5028401

>>5028460

No shit faggot, I know.

But how would they be able to steer the craft if no signals can be made in the bubble, as well as radiation problems.

A portal to another dimension.

The portal doesn't have any mass.

Humans enter the portal, you send the portal at FTL speed to wherever you want to go, and then the humans come out of the portal.

As far as I understand it, there is only one aspect of our physical world that can travel faster than C

That's space itself. Physicists have made it pretty clear when explaining the big bang that, while there is a universal "speed limit", spacetime can do whatever the hell it wants, like expanding faster than C.

This is why the Alcubierre drive has received so much attention. If there is a way to actually travel faster than C, it will almost certainly be something like the Alcubierre drive, involving the bending of spacetime to get to your destination, whether it be riding the wave or going through a wormhole. And, if we're lucky, there's a way to do it without the need for exotic matter.

Or maybe there isn't a way to do it without exotic matter, and that's why the universe seems like such a lonely place.

>>5028491

First of all, which dimension do you speak of.

Second, what material will this portal be made out of.

Third, how will you launch said portal to past the speed of light itself.

op, educate yourself.
1. science isn't about creative thinking. it's about what you can prove to be true.
2. ftl is under currently understood physical laws impossible.
3. ftl isnt just impossible, it's impossible for several, very different reasons. and no, you can't think of a way around all of them - there is no cascade failure-type line of reasoning around all of them.

>>5028497
The answer to all your questions is exotic matter called magic.

>>5028496

>There might have been vast Alien Civilization spanning only a solar system, because that's as good as they got, and they all went extinct when their sun died.

>>5028504


FUCKING

*BZZZZZZZT

You lose faggot, I told you

>You cannot give up and say this is impossible.

>No thread derailing with "hurrrr stupid thread", this is a fun mental masturbatory activity, deal with it

>Have phun

YOU HAVE FOLLOWED NONE OF SAID THINGS

>>5028496
No... everything without mass can travel faster than C.

>>5028519
no, things without mass travel at C as their default state, this is why photons travel at lightspeed, they have no mass and thus no energy is required to accelerate them, so they're always at the speed of light

>>5028497
you dont launch a portal really, you just have a receiving end

portals are not made out of things, they are holes in space

a spatial dimension above ours? i think?

>>5028531
Is this like Quasi-space in Star Control II?

>>5028424
>>5028515
I like the way you think

>>5028534
probably, since i dont know what it is

>>5028529
We just don't know how to accelerate them.

>>5028540
whining about how nobody is "thinking deep enough" is not going to fundamentally change physics. get over it.

getting really good sublight travel is more of a priority. 60% C would be fantastic, and would really open up the solar system

What if instead of accelerating to C, we simply change our velocity to C? Or even 5C, or 1000C

>>5028544

FUCKING

*BZZZZZZZT

You lose faggot, I told you

>No thread derailing with "hurrrr stupid thread", this is a fun mental masturbatory activity, deal with it

>>5028547

Sounds promising, something new at least.

How would we do that?

>>5028544
why is he whining? whining sounds more like what you're doing

dont respond to arguments when your only motive is to showcase your denial, its bad for everyone

>>5028561
>denial
shut up and go read some wiki articles about relativity.
you probably wouldn't be saying things like this if you really understood why ftl is impossible with current physics.

>>5028567


FUCKING

*BZZZZZZZT

You lose faggot, I told you

>You cannot give up and say this is impossible.

>No thread derailing with "hurrrr stupid thread", this is a fun mental masturbatory activity, deal with it

>>5028555
You have to be an alien that can take over the minds of mental patients in the form of a tulpa.

>>5028573

Do you really want Aliums in charge of our transportation, anon?

>>5028572
please just delete this thread already

>>5028581
FUCKING

*BZZZZZZZT

You lose faggot, I told you

>No thread derailing with "hurrrr stupid thread", this is a fun mental masturbatory activity, deal with it

>>5028583
please just delete this thread already

This is now a K-PAX thread

>>5028567
>doesnt understand that the future allows things to happen
warping space for example isnt ACTUALLY ftl, but for the purposes of this thread it is ripe topic. that's called thinking outside the box

go to bed, you are tired

>>5028587
look at how helpful you are! not even saging, leave /sci/, you are obviously not smart enough and underage

the reptilians already have the technology they don't want us to know it

>>5028589
warping space requires exotic matter (which probably doesnt exist) or harnessing black holes (which probably won't be possible for millenia).

again, you're getting uppity that reality doesn't work the way you want it to. fucking deal with it

>>5028543
Actually, I think physicists may have more to say about this than you give them credit for...

For example

Theoretically, tachyons move faster than C by LOSING energy as they move faster and faster than C and, at zero energy, move at infinite velocity.

Richard Muller talked about this on one of his "physics for future presidents" lecures on youtube. It was one of the lectures on relativity or the adjacent review session.

>>5028595
>implying i didn't know it wouldn't be until long after i'm dead for this to happen
why CAN'T people harness enough mass to break space? that's a problem for engineers in their respective fields and time, the daydreamers come up with the concepts

If the universe is infinite, somewhere far away there is a person identical to me. There is no difference between both of us staying put and me switching places with him. I just switched places with him now. I win FTL.

>>5028607
Oh god, not the tachyons again...

>>5028615

Except the Universe isn't fucking infinite, if it was, the sky would be blanketed white based on the infinite number of light sources from stars.

>>5028615
this assumes a googolplex universe, where a cubic meter of space (the rough amount a human takes up) and all its quantum states can be repeated elsewhere in that universe (since there is a finite number of possible quantum states in any given volume of spacetime)

the googolplex universe is a shaky idea at best, mostly a concept.

If the universe is infinite, and alcubierre drives don't fail, then a spaceship would have already appeared out of random chance and flew into the Earth, exploding it. Either the universe isn't infinite, or alcubierre drives will never work.

>>5028386

My proposal:

>take mirrors
>trap some light in mirrors
>squish mirror molecules until they are less than 1 quanta apart
>stand still
>your particles now vibrate faster than light

Checkmate.

>>5028635

BY THE GODS

>>5028629
If the universe is infinite, and alcubierre drives don't fail, then a spaceship would have already NOT appeared out of random chance and flew into the Earth, exploding it. This is the universe we live in

>>5028640

Except the universe isn't infinite.

Sorry brah

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect

can this not go up to close to C?

>>5028624
Do you really think that whenever we look at the sky we're looking at every star in the existence, you absolute moron?

>>5028656

This shouldn't matter, because in an infinite universe, you have an infinite number of stars, it doesn't matter the distance that light travels, it would be infinite.

Therefore, space has definite limits, this is agreed upon by everyone that isn't a crackpot talking out of your ass like yourself.

>>5028656
What if all the photons are riding in Alcubierre drives?

>>5028386

Imagine two perfect spheres next to each other in space. Disregard size. We have Sphere A and Sphere B. You are on Sphere B. Both spheres have propulsion systems that are on the side of the sphere adjacent to the other. Simultaneously they both activate and propel in opposite directions accelerating to anywhere above 0.5C. Now use simple physics formulas to determine the speed at which Sphere A is moving away from you, at the time both spheres reach over 50% of light speed.

Profit?

>>5028635

Still waiting for my Nobel Olympic Medal of Honor OP

>>5028694

The present?

You won't see your idea ever realized and we will all rot on Earth and enter thermo-nuclear war before we ever achieve ftl travel.

We are all doomed.

>>5028705
nah, we'll probably be spread across a few planets before shit REALLY Hits the fan.

right now shit is sort of dripping onto spinning blades and making a bit of a mess, but some lysol wipes should get most of it up

>overextended metaphor parrot strikes again

>mfw futurama already did this

>>"The ship stays where it is, and the engines move the universe around it

>>"That's why scientists increased the speed of light in 2208."

>>5028676
you really put a lot of effort into a concept that is posted on /sci/ a lot

>hotly debated to this day.
>faster-than-light travel

The feasibility of FTL travel is "hotly debated" between those with the most tenuous grasp of special relativity pretending they have total mastery of the subject, and their friends with no grasp of it at all pretending that the limitations of SR will be swept away by future discovery, discovery that will almost certainly happen in their own lifetime, maybe next week even, just as it has in their favorite sci-fi novels and tv series.

SR is here to stay. Light-speed limitations are here to stay. There are theories involving exotic matter, yes. But the distance crossed in technological ability between a cavemen painting on a wall and a robot being lowered onto the surface of Mars via sky crane is small compared to the distance that must yet be crossed in order to begin testing these theories.

*We* will change first. The things that make the light speed barrier a problem for human exploration, our lifespan, the fragility of our mind and bodies, we will overcome these obstacles while the light-speed barrier yet remains. And what will the barrier matter then? When you live forever, what is a few decades here and there spent traveling between stars? When the culture of your species has obtained total equilibrium and is utterly stable, why feel the need for constant contact? We will change first. Humanity will bend itself to fit SR. And if one day we discover SR can be broken, then of course we will try to break it. But the beings that may one day break SR will resemble us less than we resemble the first vertebrates.

In case it hasn't been said, FTL is not possible because it's a zeno's paradox.

At relativistic speeds, velocities do not add. So you can push the throttle all the way past all the energy in the universe and you will gain no speed.

It's that simple. FTL is an impossibility. The only reason you want it to be true is that lazy science fiction writers have total control of your imaginations and you cannot fathom a universe with no quick and easy ways to the green women.

>>5028729
>philosophical paradox
>applied to real world
can you even into science

what say you on wormholes

>>5028742

Zenos paradox says that you can't reach a point because you always have to cross an infinite distance between something.

Relativity says you cannot reach the speed of light no matter how much you thrust.

ITS AN ANALOGY YOU TWITSHIT.

Wormholes are almost certainly too unstable and radioactive and rare to ever be practical. There are also severe causality problems that they cause and prohibit their existence.

>>5028750
Analogies are meant to be figures of speech, not logical arguments

>>5028754
lol, this.

>FTL is not possible because it's a zeno's paradox

that is not an analogy

also, 'ever' is a long time. how is causality involved?

>>5028754

Did you read my second paragraph, perhaps? I was framing it poetically.

Velocities

At

Relativistic Speeds

Do

Not

Add.

Got it?

>>5028761

Going faster than the speed of light would violate causality. You don't violate causality.

But i get the feeling that i am trying to explain a gameboy to an amish person.

>>5028762
why are you so mad, he didnt even say anything about that

>>5028386


-We are all part of a simulation

-Somehow contact Simulation creators/moderators/programmers and convince them to move a ship, dog, your Mom, whatever from point A to point B faster than light.

-Not sure how to contact programmers, maybe if we all just yell really loud like in Horton Hears a Who?

>>5028766
yeah you can go ahead and fallback on that statement

how does it violate causality? i meant wormholes that connect space, not time

>>5028774

>space, not time

>implying they are separate

Yep. I really am trying to explain a CPU to the amish.

Relativity proves that FTL travel is identical to Time travel (to help your research, the technical term for time travel is "Closed timelike curve"). Time travel makes Causality impossible, since it can be used to create paradoxes. So if you have Relativity and FTL, Causality is impossible. If you do not have Relativity, FTL is not Time travel, so you can have Causality. Or more mundanely you can have Relativity and Causality, but no FTL/Time travel (the latter is the opinion of physicist Stephen Hawking, he calls it the chronology protection conjecture).

>>5028774
>i meant wormholes that connect space, not time
Not the same guy, but space and time are the same thing. You can't have a wormhole that doesn't connect time as well as space. Your wormhole's exit has to have a when coordinate to go with that where coordinate. Otherwise it'd be like trying to specify a 3-dimensional point with (X,Y).

If you're gonna talk real high-level physics, you can't actually separate space and time. If you find yourself saying, "no no, I'm only talking about one, not the other," you already dun goofed, back to step 1.

>>5028774

Because anything which allows faster-than-light travel or communication in one frame of reference allows time travel for another frame of reference.

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/fasterlight.php#causality

>Figure out a way to decrease the mass of people and spacecraft to zero.
>No longer requires infinite energy to achieve the speed of light.
>Now able to go faster then light because why the fuck not.

my 2/10 effort for solving the problem

>>5028785
so folding space/time itself is right out too...?


awww...

>>5028794

>Figure out a way to decrease the mass of people and spacecraft to zero.

Good luck with that. We don't get magic elements like Mass Effect.

>>5028785
ok, so moving matter ftl is impossible, i get that

wormholes?

>>5028797

I've seen the figures for that. to move a 20m ship just a few miles by folding space would require the entire mass of Jupiter converted 100% to energy.

Ludicrously impractical doesn't even begin to describe it.

>>5028794
>digitizing people and shooting information lazers to rebuild people

i can dig it

>>5028801
honestly i dont see a problem with that

logistics arent a problem when you consider THE FUTURE. that's a problem for future engineers

Define the speed of light as D.
Define C= 60mph
Better than light travel.

fuck you op

>>5028799

>wormholes?

It's still FTL. so no.

>>5028810

Well then doctor who has rotted your mind.

There are limits in the universe.

>>5028813
no its not, its bending space

and time, i guess

>>5028801
so all we need is some sort of electron pump to rape another universe?
that's not so bad...but impractical inside our home planets gravity well

damn it all...

>>5028814
i didnt realize time is stagnant

>>5028805

There's not enough space in the universe for a computer that could store all of the quantum locations for every particle in a human body.

It'd also be instant death with a clone replacing you on the pad. They handwaved this in star trek with "Heisenberg compensators"

>>5028818
don't forget the assumption that physics is a constant throughout the vastness of the universe...lolz

>>5028820
>There's not enough space in the universe for a computer that could store all of the quantum locations for every particle in a human body.
source

>>5028818

Not enough energy in the universe to punch a hole into another one.

>>5028805

Then go spend the rest of your life building a perpetual energy machine and prove me wrong.

>>5028825
is there something WRONG with throwing around sun sized pieces of mass?

>>5028828
>>5028785
explain black holes?

>>5028826

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transporter_%28Star_Trek%29#Scientific_note

>>5028833

...which sun are you talking here?
there are limits here...apparently


i don't know...stars do that sort of thing all the time
why couldn't we, given the time...?

>>5028839

Like a star, but with more mass.

>>5028825

Yeah, we get new evidence for that every day.

http://www.redorbit.com/news/space/1112681363/spacetime-smooth-082412/

tune alternate dimensions into each other

>>5028833

Stars aren't solid?

>>5028841
so you dont think quantum computers and superconductors 50 years from now won't be any closer to something feasible? i don't even like the idea, but youre shooting down everything

>>5028848
that's what im saying

>>5028848

because science fiction is lazy and so are the writers, They want to have big, grand stories where these incredible things happen. So they ignore all of physics to do so.

Then people get this misconception that the science fiction is true and that anything can be achieved.

>>5028850
neither are you?

neither is any other mass?

>>5028861
>implying a good bit of high quality science fiction that has 'unbelievable' technology isnt set in the distant future
>implying you have the game plan of human history

>>5028624

Infinite doesn't necessarily mean there's an infinite number of stars, or an infinite amount of light.

I'm not saying I necessarily think the universe is infinite, just pointing that out.

>>5028853

quantum computers just think fast. They don't store things and superconductors just lower resistance.

Do you just not realize how many bits 10^45 is? A terabyte drive only holds 8×10^12 bits.

>>5028865

Well, given that we do not have Hal 9000 or flying cars, we can safely write out science fiction as the guidebook to the future, which was my only point.

>>5028870
there can't ever develop new methods of storing that are more efficient than binary? possibly based on quantum computing?

>>5028862

By what definition? Stars are plasma/gasses. I am not a gas or a liquid since i do not conform to my container.

>>5028874
well you have to be retarded to take science fiction seriously, as if it were reality. thats why its a fucking fiction genre

why do you take people taking things not seriously seriously? why do so many people do this

>>5028875

You might as well be asking why can't humans fly if they just flap their arms VERY very hard.

We store data by effecting electrons. There aren't enough electrons to store this data. quantum stuff won't help.

>>5028820
>There's not enough space in the universe for a computer that could store all of the quantum locations for every particle in a human body.
The amount of space required to store the information of one human body has a lower bound at least as small as the amount of space that human body occupies. You can tell because any given body is, definitionally, a perfect representation of the information it itself is made up of and it takes up exactly as much space as it itself takes up. That seems like a smartass answer, but it's very true. The absolute lower bound for storing the information which describes one body cannot be more space than required to store the body itself; such a thing's existence is impossible. If you find yourself taking the whole universe to do so, you are approaching the problem with a deliberately poor information representation scheme.

>>5028876
you can throw around gas and liquid if you have a container

>>5028878

People keep expecting space elevators, ftl, fusion, and a host of other things popularized in science fiction.

>>5028847
being skeptical is good

"The Equivalence Principle" really should be "The Equivalence Approximation"

A horrible idea to be sure...having skepticism, is the best case i could ever hope for...it's a start

Quasar observations show that the strength of electromagnetism over cosmological scales has a discernible and yet unexplained ever so slight gradient to it.

>>5028884

But you cannot make a shell for a star that wouldn't collapse like tin foil no matter what material you made it from.

Inb4 dyson spheres. The actual shells are just swarms of satellites in orbit.

>>5028887

>Quasar observations show that the strength of electromagnetism over cosmological scales has a discernible and yet unexplained ever so slight gradient to it.

Source?

>>5028885

You're not just recording the physical items. You're recording every single electron's quantum position in every single atom in your body, as well as a magical device that could somehow put it all back together without it falling apart.

You lack the expertise to properly understand the problem.

Ok... Guize.... Wait...

What if we took a rocket. Fitted it with a whole load of the best engines/rockets we can buy.
You start with one engine and once you reach maximum speed you turn on the next engine and so on.

You'll get faster until you reach the edge of C. Once you hit it I reckon it'll do the work itself.

> seriously why won't this work??

>>5028895

the University of New South Wales had a research team start on that sisyphian task if memory serves...

never got back around to it though

>>5028881
i can't believe you're actually equating those two, confirmed for no imagination

doesn't quantum computing make use of like 6 different positions, where modern data is only binary? which is what i said?

>>5028885
nice

>>5028886
no imagination

>>5028901

Velocities do not add at relativistic speed. You could have a rocket the size of the galaxy and it wouldn't do shit at 99% of C.

>>5028907

Nahh. We don't know that fo sho.

I'm gonna try it and let you know

>>5028904

>doesn't quantum computing make use of like 6 different positions, where modern data is only binary? which is what i said?

To process data. Quantum computers do not store data how many times must i repeat myself?

>no imagination

no, that was the science fiction authors who imagined a 36,000 mile long ribbon with a tensile strength above 62 gigapascals.

Real engineering takes an imagination greater than handwaving.

>>5028912

If GPS works, then it's right. Same math governs both.

>>5028899

The information contained within the space of a human body isn't limited to "physical items" but does include the quantum position of every electron of every atom in your body, as well as absolutely everything else, known and unknown, that makes you you. If this weren't the case, you wouldn't be you.

>>5028919

Right. and to reproduce that data takes more computer storage than can exist.

Why are you bothering to argue this? It's one of a myriad of engineering impossibilities facing teleporters.

>>5028914

and yet X-ray powder diffraction studies in a diamond-anvil cell shows that ThGa 2 exhibits a tetragonal ThSi 2 -type structure at room temperature and pressure.
At about 0.2 GPa the unit-cell volume drops significantly (roughly 4%) without any change in the structure.
The tetragonal structure then remains perfectly stable for pressures up to as high as 62 GPa.

much rejoicing by all

>>5028891
yes it is true there is no human made material that exists on a large enough scale, obviously, that can be formed on a large enough scale and hold its shape, obviously

>>5028914
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubit#Bit_versus_qubit

evidence that there exists something called a future and the present will actually become the past

>>5028922
>modern computer

why cant you understand we arent saying what exists now, but what might exist in the future

maybe this just plain isnt /sci/

>>5028922

Teleportation also has problems with the law of conservation of energy and the law of conservation of momentum. If you are in a car travelling at 60 miles per hour, and you teleport out to the sidewalk, you will hit the sidewalk still moving at 60 miles per hour. Not to mention the fact that different latitudes of a planet rotate at different speeds. And if you teleport from orbit to the ground, all that potential energy which comes from altitude has to go somewhere. Probably as waste heat, which will be enough to kill you. Read Larry Niven's The Theory And Practice of Teleportation for details.

>>5028930

Because that's pointless speculation bordering on wish fulfillment and philosophy?

As i have said, data storage is just one intractable problem facing teleporters.

>>5028899
>You're not just recording the physical items. You're recording every single electron's quantum position in every single atom in your body
I don't think you really understand what information is. If you're trying to create a dichotomy between information and physical matter, you're totally wrong and you need to stop.

If you pick an atom in my body, that atom is a perfect representation of itself. It can't not be. The information of that atom is contained perfectly in that atom itself. Any suggestion otherwise is to claim that things are not themselves, and that's a level of mind-blowing-what-the-fuckery we won't be proceeding forward with. The fact that I exist is case and point that it is possible to represent a human body using the space of exactly one human body and that should be obvious to you.

The paper you're referring to is literally confined to binary storage of the complete and total state of a human being down to the quantum level. The reality is you would not use binary storage for transmitting particle states, and you would not need or even want a complete and total state description. You would take countless shortcuts and approximations.

>>5028935
>pointless speculation

it's like you're ASKING me to >Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand

Ok guys here's my two cents.
So it may be impossible to move from P to Q faster than C when we're talking about kinematics so our best bet is to "slip" through.
>Ok here's an idea don't laugh at me if it's completey roody pooish
What we need to do is spend time in the theories on what gives something mass. Even a photon has a speculated mass of what something 10^-36 if I remember right.
Say we have a field of particles that in fact give something it's mass by a "drag" effect as something moves through space/time. If we figure out how to repel those particles away from said object we want to move faster than C, then even the slightest force might theoretically move the object at a rate that might be equal C or way faster who knows. Or it could just slip through space at an infinite velocity until it regained the properties of mass
>Photons have mass people, almost negligible mass, but they do have it. So if we have something with true 0 mass then who knows how fast it could move through space time.

>This assumes a model that an elementary particle gives mass and a way to manipulate that particles field of particles wherever your object is.

Also if there's something blatantly obvious that contradicts this then I'm sorry as well

>>5028944
>Even a photon has a speculated mass of what something 10^-36 if I remember right.

You remember wrong. Photons have zero rest mass. Their relativistic mass depends on their wavelength.

>>5028949
but mass is energy

>>5028949
ah. Well do photons have inertia? If so then shouldn't they have mass, even a photon must have some resistance to change.
It just seems that if we could make something truly have no inertia then it's weird to think that even something with no resistance to change would have some "speed cap" at C.

>>5028955

Mass is not the same as rest mass.

>>5028954

>Well do photons have inertia? If so then shouldn't they have mass, even a photon must have some resistance to change.

Nope. they go from zero to lightspeed in an instant.

>>5028957
fuck

ok professor, bedtime for me

>>5028959
Yes but how can you actually test that? Going from 0 to C in a truly infintesmal amount of time sounds impossible to test. If you have an infinite number units of time from 0 to 1 can it truly get up to C in the smallest unit of said infinity? Couldn't it be that it's inertia is so low that it just SEEMS to be an instant when truly it's not?
>Yes I somewhat understand rest mass of photons but how is it possible to actually test it in an experiement and not just theoretical computation

>>5028954
>Well do photons have inertia?

Not in the conventional sense.

They can only travel at c, and they do so in all reference frames simultaneously. They are incapable of any other speed.

Gluons would probably behave this same way being massless themselves, but they can't exist as free particles.

>even something with no resistance to change would have some "speed cap" at C.

Ignoring the fact that anything with energy (ie: anything that exists) has relativistic mass as a function of its energy and is thus subject to the light speed barrier...

How would you accelerate something with no inertia?

>>5028964
>Going from 0 to C in a truly infintesmal amount of time sounds impossible to test.

They actually pop into existence at c, whether they're generated by an electron state change or spontaneously from vacuum. They quite literally do not exist at any other velocity.

>>5028964
> If you have an infinite number units of time from 0 to 1

The physical limits of Planck scale ensures that time is quantized. Time cannot be divided infinitely.

>>5028965
it might accelerate itself along a straight line path through the curvature of space time if it truly had no inertia. with no resistance to change it might just accelerate to infinity.

Also I read once that a photon does have a speculated upper bound limit to what it's mass could be but it's super small.

I'm just spitballing here :) I may be wrong and make physics majors shake their heads, but I'm always willing to try and learn why it's wrong and gain more knowledge through true understanding.

>>5028976

Then pursue higher education. Our half-explanations and analogies are just as harmful to your perspective as the science channel's.

>>5028976
>it might accelerate itself

That still doesn't explain how it can be subject to acceleration in the first place.

Nevermind the silly notion that it would just accelerate by itself because it feels like it.

The closest particle to what you're describing is a photon, which already travels at exactly c and cannot be subject to acceleration.

Has anyone said quantum entaglement yet?
One pod full of particles, another 1 light year away full of particles that are entangled to the other pod.
Using quantum computing technology and computers of the future, could we scan our bodies particle information and send it to pod 1 and instantaneously pod 2 must recieve the same information correct?

so what are you gonna do when we get around to exposing high-energy electrons produced at SLAC to a terawatt beam from a neodymium-YAG laser and the intense electromagnetic field experienced by the electrons as they enter the beam affects their interaction with the quantum vacuum's own field...in short, changing their inertia?

>>5028986

You can't actually transfer information through quantum entanglement.

The entangled particle's behavior is indistinguishable from randomness unless you have a classical data stream telling you exactly what is being done to its twin and exactly when.

>>5028980
I am. Mech E major minoring in physics. Although I'm a sophmore and my understanding of physics is only Classical mechanics and forces w/ calc. And Electricity, Magnetism, Electromagnetism, and Optics w/ calc.

>>5028990

We change the inertia of electrons all the time. They're called power plants.

>>5028991

You can't just "watch" the entangled particles constantly either, because observation at these scales requires interaction, which will alter its state and erase any message you might be trying to receive.

>>5028991
I thought they had already transfered information from one photon to another using quantum entanglement over like 60 miles or something already?

>>5028998

They did, and they required a slower-than-light electronic means of communication to actually perform the experiment.

They knew that the state change had been instantaneous, but they only learned this after the fact through the classical electronic communication channel.

This is probably the most frustrating thing about quantum entanglement. You can know it happened. You can even know it happened FTL, but you can only find out about it at c or slower. Thus, no information actually makes it across the distance faster than c.

what if our understanding of a vacuum is wrong?
>Vacuum implies nothing is there
Well if theres a boson field then can we model that field as a "material" that the photon must pass through. And since C is dependent on the material it passes through, then if we had a true vacuum with no particles except that one photon then what if C increases?

>C is dependent on the material the photon travels through
>What we originally thought C's value in a vacuum to be is actually it's value through the "material" of a smaller elementary particles field.
>If true, and a theoretical vacuum was created through manipulation of the field, then it seems logical that C would increase.

>>5029010
>then it seems logical that C would increase

True vacuum is something that's already studied, and if it's actually possible in our universe it will do something far, far more terrible than raise the speed of light.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum

>>5029010
>if we had a true vacuum

That would destroy the universe. We don't want true vacuum anywhere, or anytime. True vacuum bad.

>>5029021
so is the universe not expanding INTO a true vacuum? Is a true vacuum not beyond what our universe has expanding into?

>>5029026

The universe is the entirety of everything that exists. Nothing can exist apart from it. Being "outside" and thus unable to affect or interact with things "inside" is functionally equivalent to non-existence.

The universe isn't an object or inflating balloon inside something else. There's nothing beyond the universe to expand into.

One of the biggest mindfucks for the uninitiated about universal expansion is that the universe does not possess an "outside" surface.

>>5029021
higher-energy collisions happen in nature all the time, and we're still here, so this is nothing to worry about

the risk is effectively zero to the universe

>>5029047

Mainly because we haven't yet exceeded energies that happen naturally.

Either some limit will prevent us from ever doing so, or we just might find out what happens some day.

>>5029043
You have no way of knowing that. No one does.
There is no reason to assume the universe is everything after all it used to be in a hot dense state. Our universe is not the only place where shit is going down.

>>5029052
>You have no way of knowing that. No one does.

Which is the entire point. Being unknowable is equivalent to non-existence.

>There is no reason to assume the universe is everything

It's the scientific definition of what the universe is. "The entirety of everything that exists."

What you're thinking of would be something like transdimensional pockets, all of which would still exist in the universe.

(don't quote that name; the phenomena would receive a proper descriptor if and when we actually observe such a thing and actually know enough about it to give it a name)

>Our universe is not the only place where shit is going down.

It is by definition the only place shit goes down. Do NOT conflate layman's definitions with scientific ones in a scientific context. You will only confuse yourself and others.

clearly NO ONE here understood relativity.....


why the fuck would you need FTL travel ??
getting to 90% or higher if possible..would already be LIKE teleportation for those traveling.. the big issue would be dealing with the travel itself... radiation.. collisions and route calculations..etc

>>5028386
Any general purpose FTL device either:
1- allows for a go back in time machine with all of the causality thought problems (see: general relativity), or
2- requires a preferred reference frame, or
3- has even more bizarre restrictions.

It seems likely FTL is impossible no matter how you do it.

>>5029080
Uhh, Maybe I want to go to the star system in the next star over at breakfast, and get back before lunch.

>>5029097
Well...assuming you are having the breakfast and launch already in the space ship, yeah, you totally could.....

just to clarify something...while you do that
a couple of years might have passed on earth..