The future is impossible
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Last reply I promise :) Just wanted to give you an example of something I do strongly argue against...people that think we are doomed to end with some catastrophic ripping apart of the universe. Firstly, to make any long-term prediction with any certainty about what will happen to a bubble of mass-energy where you literally have NO IDEA what 95% of it is or where it is coming from is insane. We live in but a tiny sliver of time of the universe and our predictions of where it is going and what it is going to do keep coming up wrong time and time again. We don't even know if the universe is a closed system. Given dark energy, it may not be. To decide we are doomed to explode from all this energy accelerating the universe that we know nothing about is insane to me. Secondly, look at the scientific advances in the last 100 years. Can you even begin to picture what scientific advances will look like in 500 years? 10,000 years? 1,000,000 years? Yeah...no. The current physical arrangement and makeup of our bodies may cease to be possible, but who's to say that in a million years we won't be able to discover tech that will continue to work and exist and persist our minds in a universe with much different physics than now? Nobody can. I love talking about this kind of stuff though haha. I was always trying to work out the whole faster than light travel thing in my head until I had an "aha!" moment one day while thinking about it and suddenly relativity, speed of light, time dialation, etc just clicked on a much deeper level than before and it started making sense. I was always relatively (pun intended) well-versed with relativity and how it worked, I could answer any question you wanted about what would happen if X, but that one aha moment was mind blowing, and I began to look at the universe entirely differently.
I know how those ah-ha moments feel. I had mine when I was trying to figure out why we couldn't define gravity and what gives particles their mass. That is when it struck me that it's not the science that is wrong, it is our perception of the science that is wrong. I have always acknowledged that when a problem looks impossible, it's time to shift your point of view and approach the problem in a different direction. I'm not saying that any of the discoveries of the last 40 years are wrong. I'm am attempting to point out that human failings have fixed our view point to a specific set of base hypotheses which limits our scientific flexibility of thought. To expand on how human perceptions play into scientific research I start with e = mc2 and how this formula influenced thought processes. Not many think much about this formula but it usually is one of the first physics formulas that we are exposed to; usually as children through TV and other media. Once we learn about what it means, it becomes a base for other thoughts. It's the rigid adherence to the formula's structure that could be the problem. By only looking at the formula, and the universe by extension, from one singular point of view, we have limited ourselves to functioning within that narrow space. By limiting ourselves to such a narrow point of view, science can only progress along one line of thought. Previously when I said that e = mc2 implied that energy was a function of an interaction between mass and the universal constant, I was attempting to make the point that, when you look at the formula like this, our brains interpret its meaning in that all particles are defined by their mass. All of the mainstream accepted science to this date is predicated on the idea that a fundamental aspect of particles is that they have mass. What if that were not true. With simple algebra, the formula can be rewritten to m = e/c2. Now, anybody with mediocre math will shrug at this and not see past the surface but it could be that if Einstein had written the formula this way our approach to physics would be completely different now. That is the line of thought that I like to explore. What the formula now implies is that all particles have energy and that mass is a function of energy and the universal constant. That means that particles are defined by their energy. When you approach it from the side of all particles have energy, the limitations caused by mass do not seem so insurmountable. I don't necessarily disa
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I know how those ah-ha moments feel. I had mine when I was trying to figure out why we couldn't define gravity and what gives particles their mass. That is when it struck me that it's not the science that is wrong, it is our perception of the science that is wrong. I have always acknowledged that when a problem looks impossible, it's time to shift your point of view and approach the problem in a different direction. I'm not saying that any of the discoveries of the last 40 years are wrong. I'm am attempting to point out that human failings have fixed our view point to a specific set of base hypotheses which limits our scientific flexibility of thought. To expand on how human perceptions play into scientific research I start with e = mc2 and how this formula influenced thought processes. Not many think much about this formula but it usually is one of the first physics formulas that we are exposed to; usually as children through TV and other media. Once we learn about what it means, it becomes a base for other thoughts. It's the rigid adherence to the formula's structure that could be the problem. By only looking at the formula, and the universe by extension, from one singular point of view, we have limited ourselves to functioning within that narrow space. By limiting ourselves to such a narrow point of view, science can only progress along one line of thought. Previously when I said that e = mc2 implied that energy was a function of an interaction between mass and the universal constant, I was attempting to make the point that, when you look at the formula like this, our brains interpret its meaning in that all particles are defined by their mass. All of the mainstream accepted science to this date is predicated on the idea that a fundamental aspect of particles is that they have mass. What if that were not true. With simple algebra, the formula can be rewritten to m = e/c2. Now, anybody with mediocre math will shrug at this and not see past the surface but it could be that if Einstein had written the formula this way our approach to physics would be completely different now. That is the line of thought that I like to explore. What the formula now implies is that all particles have energy and that mass is a function of energy and the universal constant. That means that particles are defined by their energy. When you approach it from the side of all particles have energy, the limitations caused by mass do not seem so insurmountable. I don't necessarily disa
But that's not rewriting the formula or looking at it differently. There isn't an "interaction" between mass and a constant...that formula is saying that mass IS energy. Don't look too much into the c^2 part...it's a constant. It's just a normalizing factor between mass and energy. All it's saying is that mass is directly proportional to energy. That formula is also not the full expanded formula, it's just the main part of it. There are particles with no mass. It's called light. Photons are exactly what you are saying - particles with energy. They have energy because of the part of that equation that you're missing, but that isn't rest mass. What happens from the perspective of a particle with no mass? Exactly what I described - it moves at the speed of light! No matter how much energy you give it, it still just moves at the speed of light, it just has a different amount of energy. That amount of energy defines the wavelength of the light. Low energy = radio waves. High energy = gamma rays. When a particle that has no mass is created, i.e. a photon, it's universe LITERALLY stands still. Photons live in a uniquely different life than particles with mass - their life is defined not by time, but by distance. Time literally stands still for a particle of light during its journey, and then it is instantly over as it hits it's destination (from the perspective of the photon). You really gotta work with the full equation to get any use out of it. m=e/c^2 without factoring in the missing part doesn't actually work. See here for a somewhat better explanation: energy - Does $E = mc^2$ apply to photons? - Physics Stack Exchange[^]
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I know how those ah-ha moments feel. I had mine when I was trying to figure out why we couldn't define gravity and what gives particles their mass. That is when it struck me that it's not the science that is wrong, it is our perception of the science that is wrong. I have always acknowledged that when a problem looks impossible, it's time to shift your point of view and approach the problem in a different direction. I'm not saying that any of the discoveries of the last 40 years are wrong. I'm am attempting to point out that human failings have fixed our view point to a specific set of base hypotheses which limits our scientific flexibility of thought. To expand on how human perceptions play into scientific research I start with e = mc2 and how this formula influenced thought processes. Not many think much about this formula but it usually is one of the first physics formulas that we are exposed to; usually as children through TV and other media. Once we learn about what it means, it becomes a base for other thoughts. It's the rigid adherence to the formula's structure that could be the problem. By only looking at the formula, and the universe by extension, from one singular point of view, we have limited ourselves to functioning within that narrow space. By limiting ourselves to such a narrow point of view, science can only progress along one line of thought. Previously when I said that e = mc2 implied that energy was a function of an interaction between mass and the universal constant, I was attempting to make the point that, when you look at the formula like this, our brains interpret its meaning in that all particles are defined by their mass. All of the mainstream accepted science to this date is predicated on the idea that a fundamental aspect of particles is that they have mass. What if that were not true. With simple algebra, the formula can be rewritten to m = e/c2. Now, anybody with mediocre math will shrug at this and not see past the surface but it could be that if Einstein had written the formula this way our approach to physics would be completely different now. That is the line of thought that I like to explore. What the formula now implies is that all particles have energy and that mass is a function of energy and the universal constant. That means that particles are defined by their energy. When you approach it from the side of all particles have energy, the limitations caused by mass do not seem so insurmountable. I don't necessarily disa
It's also important to note that for a given particle, ALL the parts of that equation are constants. A photon never changes the amount of energy it has - it gets absorbed and ceases to exist and then a new photon with more or less energy is emitted, but the energy lost in that transition is what adds or removes mass in the proportion identified in the e=mc^2 equation. So, that equation has very little to do with our ability to move faster. M is mass in a restful frame of reference. It has nothing to do with your speed or energy in a moving frame of reference. All that equation is saying is that if you absorb e energy, something has to gain e/c^2 mass. Likewise, if something loses m mass, you have to emit mc^2 energy. It goes both ways and gets applied both ways. It isn't an interaction, it's the static state of a particle during it's lifetime from the perspective of rest mass / rest energy. Adding kinetic energy to a particle to move it doesn't change it's parameters of e, m, or c from its frame of reference. [EDIT: sorry fixed my equations had it all mixed up]
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Thank you for not attacking the idea but, instead, asking for clarification. Let me expand on some of your points.
Eddy Vluggen wrote:
If C holds, then faster-than-light travelling would equal time-travelling.
It's just a personal belief but I don't think that time travel is possible. When it comes to Einstein's theory on relativity, time dilation is really about the rate that information, which is traveling at the speed of light, arrives at a specific frame of reference (which can be moving or stationary). It's basically describing the Doppler Effect at close to the speed of light and has nothing to do with the actual passage of time. I don't know where this time travel tangent arose but, while it makes for some very interesting stories, isn't really possible in my eyes.
Eddy Vluggen wrote:
And if you can vary the C, does that make faster-than-light travelling possible, or does it change the point at which energy 'solidifies' into mass?
In the theory, everything that has energy has mass and I tend to think of C as a universal drag coefficient. By lowering the amount of drag, particles would, in theory, lose mass and could travel faster. Even light would travel faster.
Eddy Vluggen wrote:
Doesn't mass come from the God-particle? I remember some 'yo mama so fat' yokes about it
The Higgs Boson (i.e. the god particle) is still just a theory. They found evidence of particles in the energy range they were looking for at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe but it could be anything really. They don't know where mass comes from yet. I have this written down at home but I do not have the academic credentials to get anybody in the field of physics to listen. I just tell it to people who might be interested to hear. With so little in the way of resources, I wouldn't be able to prove a word of it in a lab. It doesn't help that I'm not really very good at any mathematics above college algebra which is why I stay clear of graphics programming and security algorithm design. Sorry if some of this is academic speech as I don't know of any other way to describe it.
if (Object.DividedByZero == true) { Universe.Implode(); } Meus ratio ex fortis machina. Simplicitatis de formae ac munus. -Foothill, 2016
Foothill wrote:
It's just a personal belief but I don't think that time travel is possible.
I surely hope so. Imagine children of the future having to learn 25 alternative histories that all happened.
Foothill wrote:
I don't know where this time travel tangent arose but, while it makes for some very interesting stories, isn't really possible in my eyes.
It comes from multiple places, including the idea that time-space warps around a black hole. Hollywood has a need for time-travel to be possible.
Foothill wrote:
In the theory, everything that has energy has mass and I tend to think of C as a universal drag coefficient. By lowering the amount of drag, particles would, in theory, lose mass and could travel faster. Even light would travel faster.
..which might be also a better explanation than the hyperexpansion of the early universe. If the velocity (or drag, depending on your viewpoint) can vary, then there is no longer a need for a rapid expansion.
Foothill wrote:
By lowering the amount of drag, particles would, in theory, lose mass and could travel faster.
Yeah, same sentence quoted twice, but just wondering; how much "particles" are there in a human that has no mass?
Foothill wrote:
The Higgs Boson (i.e. the god particle) is still just a theory.
Yes, but I haven't come up with anything better yet :rolleyes:
Foothill wrote:
I have this written down at home but I do not have the academic credentials to get anybody in the field of physics to listen. I just tell it to people who might be interested to hear. With so little in the way of resources, I wouldn't be able to prove a word of it in a lab. It doesn't help that I'm not really very good at any mathematics above college algebra which is why I stay clear of graphics programming and security algorithm design. Sorry if some of this is academic speech as I don't know of any other way to describe it.
Are you familiar with open source? If you can describe your ideas and distribute it (in whatever form), it will be built upon by others. You can fill up any current gaps using "fairy dust", as lots of theories are incomplete. My math-skills are at the level when I left school; junior second
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But that's not rewriting the formula or looking at it differently. There isn't an "interaction" between mass and a constant...that formula is saying that mass IS energy. Don't look too much into the c^2 part...it's a constant. It's just a normalizing factor between mass and energy. All it's saying is that mass is directly proportional to energy. That formula is also not the full expanded formula, it's just the main part of it. There are particles with no mass. It's called light. Photons are exactly what you are saying - particles with energy. They have energy because of the part of that equation that you're missing, but that isn't rest mass. What happens from the perspective of a particle with no mass? Exactly what I described - it moves at the speed of light! No matter how much energy you give it, it still just moves at the speed of light, it just has a different amount of energy. That amount of energy defines the wavelength of the light. Low energy = radio waves. High energy = gamma rays. When a particle that has no mass is created, i.e. a photon, it's universe LITERALLY stands still. Photons live in a uniquely different life than particles with mass - their life is defined not by time, but by distance. Time literally stands still for a particle of light during its journey, and then it is instantly over as it hits it's destination (from the perspective of the photon). You really gotta work with the full equation to get any use out of it. m=e/c^2 without factoring in the missing part doesn't actually work. See here for a somewhat better explanation: energy - Does $E = mc^2$ apply to photons? - Physics Stack Exchange[^]
The user's response to the question only reinforces the point I am trying to make:
Quote:
So formally one can still talk about the photon having a relativistic (or effective) mass $m = E/c^2$. But this concept of mass runs in all kinds of problems so its usage is discouraged.
Here is an example of the lengths that science will go to avoid the fact that the way they may be looking at physics isn't quite right. Two different ways of examining the exact same thing are available but one is accepted and the other is avoided because it causes trouble. By causing trouble, I more suspect it means that if it is accepted as priciple their life's work will be invalidated. To me, it smells of hypocrisy. Here is light which, by saying is a massless particle, breaks their own fundamentals so instead of admitting that a photon has an infinitesimally small mass, they just call it zero and tell the rest of us to drink the cool-aid so that they don't have to go back and perform decades of rework. Don't get me wrong here. I am not attacking you or the information you have provided. I don't think we are discussing the same thing. You have been providing the results of research while I am trying to examine the thought process that led to those results to determine if the human element has led us to a misunderstanding of the results or that our very base assumptions of physics are fundamentally incorrect. To me, physics has hit a brick wall of sorts which has led me to question everything I have been taught.
if (Object.DividedByZero == true) { Universe.Implode(); } Meus ratio ex fortis machina. Simplicitatis de formae ac munus. -Foothill, 2016
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The user's response to the question only reinforces the point I am trying to make:
Quote:
So formally one can still talk about the photon having a relativistic (or effective) mass $m = E/c^2$. But this concept of mass runs in all kinds of problems so its usage is discouraged.
Here is an example of the lengths that science will go to avoid the fact that the way they may be looking at physics isn't quite right. Two different ways of examining the exact same thing are available but one is accepted and the other is avoided because it causes trouble. By causing trouble, I more suspect it means that if it is accepted as priciple their life's work will be invalidated. To me, it smells of hypocrisy. Here is light which, by saying is a massless particle, breaks their own fundamentals so instead of admitting that a photon has an infinitesimally small mass, they just call it zero and tell the rest of us to drink the cool-aid so that they don't have to go back and perform decades of rework. Don't get me wrong here. I am not attacking you or the information you have provided. I don't think we are discussing the same thing. You have been providing the results of research while I am trying to examine the thought process that led to those results to determine if the human element has led us to a misunderstanding of the results or that our very base assumptions of physics are fundamentally incorrect. To me, physics has hit a brick wall of sorts which has led me to question everything I have been taught.
if (Object.DividedByZero == true) { Universe.Implode(); } Meus ratio ex fortis machina. Simplicitatis de formae ac munus. -Foothill, 2016
I'm not sure what you mean. It's not infinitesimally small, it's zero. The equation measures rest mass. They are saying if you change the definition you can use it the other way but you've changed the definition into something that makes a mess of things, not because the equation is correct and we just don't understand it, but because if you use that definition of mass then now you have to carry the second part of the equation that you left out into EVERYTHING ELSE to make it work. And the second part of that equation is messy. There's no conspiracy here.
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Foothill wrote:
It's just a personal belief but I don't think that time travel is possible.
I surely hope so. Imagine children of the future having to learn 25 alternative histories that all happened.
Foothill wrote:
I don't know where this time travel tangent arose but, while it makes for some very interesting stories, isn't really possible in my eyes.
It comes from multiple places, including the idea that time-space warps around a black hole. Hollywood has a need for time-travel to be possible.
Foothill wrote:
In the theory, everything that has energy has mass and I tend to think of C as a universal drag coefficient. By lowering the amount of drag, particles would, in theory, lose mass and could travel faster. Even light would travel faster.
..which might be also a better explanation than the hyperexpansion of the early universe. If the velocity (or drag, depending on your viewpoint) can vary, then there is no longer a need for a rapid expansion.
Foothill wrote:
By lowering the amount of drag, particles would, in theory, lose mass and could travel faster.
Yeah, same sentence quoted twice, but just wondering; how much "particles" are there in a human that has no mass?
Foothill wrote:
The Higgs Boson (i.e. the god particle) is still just a theory.
Yes, but I haven't come up with anything better yet :rolleyes:
Foothill wrote:
I have this written down at home but I do not have the academic credentials to get anybody in the field of physics to listen. I just tell it to people who might be interested to hear. With so little in the way of resources, I wouldn't be able to prove a word of it in a lab. It doesn't help that I'm not really very good at any mathematics above college algebra which is why I stay clear of graphics programming and security algorithm design. Sorry if some of this is academic speech as I don't know of any other way to describe it.
Are you familiar with open source? If you can describe your ideas and distribute it (in whatever form), it will be built upon by others. You can fill up any current gaps using "fairy dust", as lots of theories are incomplete. My math-skills are at the level when I left school; junior second
Yea, you have to be jovial while exploring lines of thought that run counter to established beliefs. If you want proof that time travel is impossible, thank history. Do you think for a second that if time travel were possible somebody would have already traveled back in time and assassinated Hitler in the trenches of France during WWI? We're human and I am certain some American would have done it just to prove that it could be done. :laugh: I also don't think that black holes exist or at least not in the way that we currently think that they do. The point is that we use math to describe the universe but it doesn't work in reverse. While Hawking is a brilliant mathematician, just because you can prove something exists on paper does not mean that it exists in reality. I find it far more probable that the phenomenon that we think are black holes are really just the dead cores of the very first stars. Since black holes where accepted in mainstream physics, some people have gone to great lengths to try and prove it and thereby preventing other avenues of thought. I see them as very large bodies of normal matter with large proportions of radioactive material. The radioactivity will keep them very hot for a long time, continuously spewing radiation into space but other then that they behave like any other celestial object. Until we get close enough to one to take real-time measurements, it is still an educated guess either way.
if (Object.DividedByZero == true) { Universe.Implode(); } Meus ratio ex fortis machina. Simplicitatis de formae ac munus. -Foothill, 2016
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I'm not sure what you mean. It's not infinitesimally small, it's zero. The equation measures rest mass. They are saying if you change the definition you can use it the other way but you've changed the definition into something that makes a mess of things, not because the equation is correct and we just don't understand it, but because if you use that definition of mass then now you have to carry the second part of the equation that you left out into EVERYTHING ELSE to make it work. And the second part of that equation is messy. There's no conspiracy here.
I'm not calling a conspiracy. Recent discoveries have led me to a questioning of fundamentals. Take the EM Drive for instance. The experiment has repeatedly shown that the drive is creating thrust from electromagnetic energy in a vacuum but that shouldn't be possible. I really goes against convention. The EM Drive is basically saying that a vacuum is not empty and there is something there for the EM Drive to push against. Since we might have gotten the concept of what's in the space around us wrong, what else have we gotten wrong?
if (Object.DividedByZero == true) { Universe.Implode(); } Meus ratio ex fortis machina. Simplicitatis de formae ac munus. -Foothill, 2016
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Let me see if I can explain this little theory I've been mulling over in my head since back when I was taking physics at my local university. First, I will start with your statement
Eddy Vluggen wrote:
come up with a theory where light goes faster
One of the central tenants of my idea is not to find examples of light deviating from it's set speed but to answer why does it always want move at that speed. What is it about the constant that makes it this way not just for light but all energy. So I started pondering the meaning of Einstein's famous equation and it's implications. e = mc2 implies that energy is a function of an interaction between mass and the constant. It implies that energy is irrelevant and only mass and C matter. Most of the widely accepted theories are rooted in this. If we switch things up, the equation takes on a whole new meaning. m = e/c2 implies that mass is a function of an interaction between energy and the constant. It implies that mass is irrelevant on only energy and C matter. More to the point, since energy is in a constant state of acceleration, the mass of a particle is a direct result of energy shedding velocity due to the C. The caveat is that if we could figure out what the universal principal is that causes all energy to shed velocity to make mass, we could figure out how to negate it, thus making faster-than-light travel possible. I may be off my marks but I've asked several physicists about this without a straight answer; even emails to NASA and FermiLab got me nowhere. The answer was always make up a mathematical model and prove it. It's the same exact model they have now just a different way of looking at it. Never did get anywhere with it so far. The only nice thing is that it offers an explanation for electron quantum jumping. I've got theories on gravity too but I can never get any help from physicists on that one either. Not even a suggestion on where to start.
if (Object.DividedByZero == true) { Universe.Implode(); } Meus ratio ex fortis machina. Simplicitatis de formae ac munus. -Foothill, 2016
OK, let me come at this from a more philosophical angle. Which came first, energy or matter? AFAIK, current mainstream cosmology would have to say that energy came first, at least if you hold with the Big Bang Theory. You can convert energy to mass and vice-versa, but when you look closely enough matter is fundamentally a product of energy (think of what an atom truly is). So is the everyday material world even "real" then, if solid matter is merely an "illusion" created by tiny energy clusters sparsely distributed through vast quantities of empty space? Well, it's as real as real gets, from the experiential viewpoint, because there's no "more real" world that you can visit. However, that doesn't mean that matter is the foundation of reality itself, it's just the foundation of our experience of reality. But what is it that experiences this reality? There is one truly undeniable statement in philosophy, one statement that is more certainly true than anything else that can be said. It was famously stated by Descartes as "I think, therefore I am." In other words, the fact that I am able to contemplate being proves that, in fact, being is a thing and that I exist. Importantly, the only thing that we can be so certain that exists is consciousness. Consciousness is the only thing that experiences reality, and so in some sense reality is always defined in terms of consciousness (even for materialists, who have to deal with the sensory problem). You cannot, in good intellectual faith, ignore the question of consciousness if you seek an accurate understanding of reality. [I'm going to beat on Daniel Dennett a bit here because his book Consciousness Explained has become like a bible for naive materialists, so I have to deal with him in order to argue my case, because a lot of people think that the title of this book wasn't a lie.] But science ignores the question of consciousness all of the time, mainly because it's so hard. When scientists do consider it, many of them go with a tortured materialist explanation a la Daniel Dennett. But when they do so they have to wrestle with the problem of mind/body dualism (Idealism doesn't have this problem, but Dennett seems ignorant of that and considers an assault on mind/body dualism enough to dismiss all non-materialist views). More importantly, materialists have to explain how consciousness exists at all in a materialistic universe. The idea that consciousness is an emergent property of matter is mystical magical BS, the very thing that material
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The longer one practices physics, the more entrenched prevailing thought becomes. The "trap" of science is that eventually it becomes its very antithesis: a religion, one based upon perceived facts. The word "perceived" escapes notice, however, and the physicists become the acolytes of the "church" of science. Those acolytes then defend their religion to the death. Your new idea is heresy.
Have you read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn? I think that you would like it.
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I'm not calling a conspiracy. Recent discoveries have led me to a questioning of fundamentals. Take the EM Drive for instance. The experiment has repeatedly shown that the drive is creating thrust from electromagnetic energy in a vacuum but that shouldn't be possible. I really goes against convention. The EM Drive is basically saying that a vacuum is not empty and there is something there for the EM Drive to push against. Since we might have gotten the concept of what's in the space around us wrong, what else have we gotten wrong?
if (Object.DividedByZero == true) { Universe.Implode(); } Meus ratio ex fortis machina. Simplicitatis de formae ac munus. -Foothill, 2016
I completely agree, all I'm saying is that faster than light travel doesn't make sense because speed of light travel is actually INSTANT. So, you are going to have to define what you mean by faster than light travel, because I don't know how you can get somewhere faster than instant.
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OK, let me come at this from a more philosophical angle. Which came first, energy or matter? AFAIK, current mainstream cosmology would have to say that energy came first, at least if you hold with the Big Bang Theory. You can convert energy to mass and vice-versa, but when you look closely enough matter is fundamentally a product of energy (think of what an atom truly is). So is the everyday material world even "real" then, if solid matter is merely an "illusion" created by tiny energy clusters sparsely distributed through vast quantities of empty space? Well, it's as real as real gets, from the experiential viewpoint, because there's no "more real" world that you can visit. However, that doesn't mean that matter is the foundation of reality itself, it's just the foundation of our experience of reality. But what is it that experiences this reality? There is one truly undeniable statement in philosophy, one statement that is more certainly true than anything else that can be said. It was famously stated by Descartes as "I think, therefore I am." In other words, the fact that I am able to contemplate being proves that, in fact, being is a thing and that I exist. Importantly, the only thing that we can be so certain that exists is consciousness. Consciousness is the only thing that experiences reality, and so in some sense reality is always defined in terms of consciousness (even for materialists, who have to deal with the sensory problem). You cannot, in good intellectual faith, ignore the question of consciousness if you seek an accurate understanding of reality. [I'm going to beat on Daniel Dennett a bit here because his book Consciousness Explained has become like a bible for naive materialists, so I have to deal with him in order to argue my case, because a lot of people think that the title of this book wasn't a lie.] But science ignores the question of consciousness all of the time, mainly because it's so hard. When scientists do consider it, many of them go with a tortured materialist explanation a la Daniel Dennett. But when they do so they have to wrestle with the problem of mind/body dualism (Idealism doesn't have this problem, but Dennett seems ignorant of that and considers an assault on mind/body dualism enough to dismiss all non-materialist views). More importantly, materialists have to explain how consciousness exists at all in a materialistic universe. The idea that consciousness is an emergent property of matter is mystical magical BS, the very thing that material
I've read up a little on the conscious angle. It's an interesting blend of physics an philosophy and I think I could attempt sum it up as "the universe exists the way I observe it because I am the one observing it that way." The point that I am trying to make with this sub-thread is that there could be some fundamental flaw in our current perception of physics but time has turned theory into doctrine and it has become nearly impossible to change direction due to the 100+ years of momentum that has built up behind it. To me, a lot more things make sense when you boil the entire universe down to three things: natural energy (the stuff that makes up particles), kinetic energy, and some still undefinable force that keeps the natural energy from existing everywhere simultaneously.
if (Object.DividedByZero == true) { Universe.Implode(); } Meus ratio ex fortis machina. Simplicitatis de formae ac munus. -Foothill, 2016
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I completely agree, all I'm saying is that faster than light travel doesn't make sense because speed of light travel is actually INSTANT. So, you are going to have to define what you mean by faster than light travel, because I don't know how you can get somewhere faster than instant.
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True, there is no shorter distance then zero. To me, FTL is traveling in excess of 300,000 km/s.
if (Object.DividedByZero == true) { Universe.Implode(); } Meus ratio ex fortis machina. Simplicitatis de formae ac munus. -Foothill, 2016
Yeah but....you are. You are travelling infinitely fast from your perspective. If you are travelling at the speed of light, your rocket ship can instantly arrive anywhere in the universe INSTANTLY. I think that's what you are missing about the whole relativity thing. Pick the further thing in the universe you can think of. If you get your ship up to 99.99999% the speed of light, you will literally get there in a second.
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Yeah but....you are. You are travelling infinitely fast from your perspective. If you are travelling at the speed of light, your rocket ship can instantly arrive anywhere in the universe INSTANTLY. I think that's what you are missing about the whole relativity thing. Pick the further thing in the universe you can think of. If you get your ship up to 99.99999% the speed of light, you will literally get there in a second.
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True, there is no shorter distance then zero. To me, FTL is traveling in excess of 300,000 km/s.
if (Object.DividedByZero == true) { Universe.Implode(); } Meus ratio ex fortis machina. Simplicitatis de formae ac munus. -Foothill, 2016
Allow me to clarify for a second. You see an awesome star you want to visit. You look into the night sky, and you see a supernova exploding. You want front row seats to this event, so you jump into your speed of light ship to go look at it. You get there instantly, i.e. you have aged say 1 second, but when the ship stops at its destination you will have found that the supernova is gone. But how? You got there instantly! Well that's simple...it's because the light you were looking at from Earth was 20 billion light years old, so the star actually exploded 20 billion years ago. You got there instantly, but "instantly" near the star is 20 billion years later than the light you are seeing from earth. So if you don't believe in time travel, this is the fastest you can go. If the star exploded 20 billion years ago and it's now dead, you can't get to the star as it was 20 billion years ago. You can begin your journey now at infinite speed from your perspective and see how it looks NOW, 20 years after that supernova explosion that the light just got to you from. If you have an alternate proposition, such as multiverse theory, then I'm all game, it's possible. But you can't have no time travel and faster than light travel, it just doesn't make sense. If you explain a theory of how that would work where I can picture it working then I'm all for it being possible, but as you've laid it out, it won't work.
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Allow me to clarify for a second. You see an awesome star you want to visit. You look into the night sky, and you see a supernova exploding. You want front row seats to this event, so you jump into your speed of light ship to go look at it. You get there instantly, i.e. you have aged say 1 second, but when the ship stops at its destination you will have found that the supernova is gone. But how? You got there instantly! Well that's simple...it's because the light you were looking at from Earth was 20 billion light years old, so the star actually exploded 20 billion years ago. You got there instantly, but "instantly" near the star is 20 billion years later than the light you are seeing from earth. So if you don't believe in time travel, this is the fastest you can go. If the star exploded 20 billion years ago and it's now dead, you can't get to the star as it was 20 billion years ago. You can begin your journey now at infinite speed from your perspective and see how it looks NOW, 20 years after that supernova explosion that the light just got to you from. If you have an alternate proposition, such as multiverse theory, then I'm all game, it's possible. But you can't have no time travel and faster than light travel, it just doesn't make sense. If you explain a theory of how that would work where I can picture it working then I'm all for it being possible, but as you've laid it out, it won't work.
I get what you are say, of course the star won't be there, you're 20 billion years too late. I get that. I guess what my brain isn't getting the jump from faster than light to instantaneous travel. To me faster than light is just that, traveling faster than 300,000 km/s (I'm ignoring the limitations on speed here).
if (Object.DividedByZero == true) { Universe.Implode(); } Meus ratio ex fortis machina. Simplicitatis de formae ac munus. -Foothill, 2016
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I get what you are say, of course the star won't be there, you're 20 billion years too late. I get that. I guess what my brain isn't getting the jump from faster than light to instantaneous travel. To me faster than light is just that, traveling faster than 300,000 km/s (I'm ignoring the limitations on speed here).
if (Object.DividedByZero == true) { Universe.Implode(); } Meus ratio ex fortis machina. Simplicitatis de formae ac munus. -Foothill, 2016
Well then you're in luck - get up to close to the speed of light and you will get there instantly. If someone on earth is looking at you as you make your journey then it will look like you are moving at the 300,000km/s, but at that speed space in front of you is compressed so much that you get there instantly, and space behind you expands so much that 20 billion years will have passed on earth. Hence why "everything is relative" - there is no "absolute" frame of reference in the universe, everything changes in relation to everything else.
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I've read up a little on the conscious angle. It's an interesting blend of physics an philosophy and I think I could attempt sum it up as "the universe exists the way I observe it because I am the one observing it that way." The point that I am trying to make with this sub-thread is that there could be some fundamental flaw in our current perception of physics but time has turned theory into doctrine and it has become nearly impossible to change direction due to the 100+ years of momentum that has built up behind it. To me, a lot more things make sense when you boil the entire universe down to three things: natural energy (the stuff that makes up particles), kinetic energy, and some still undefinable force that keeps the natural energy from existing everywhere simultaneously.
if (Object.DividedByZero == true) { Universe.Implode(); } Meus ratio ex fortis machina. Simplicitatis de formae ac munus. -Foothill, 2016
If you haven't done so already, you should read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. It's about exactly what you're saying about science and resistance to new ideas.
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Well then you're in luck - get up to close to the speed of light and you will get there instantly. If someone on earth is looking at you as you make your journey then it will look like you are moving at the 300,000km/s, but at that speed space in front of you is compressed so much that you get there instantly, and space behind you expands so much that 20 billion years will have passed on earth. Hence why "everything is relative" - there is no "absolute" frame of reference in the universe, everything changes in relation to everything else.
As interesting as this discussion has been, it's almost quitting time here so I'm off to enjoy the weekend. Have a pleasant evening.
if (Object.DividedByZero == true) { Universe.Implode(); } Meus ratio ex fortis machina. Simplicitatis de formae ac munus. -Foothill, 2016