Thread: Well, he did say it was only a theory....

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    Master Apprentice phantomotap's Avatar
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    and the hat of int overfl Salem's Avatar
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    Perhaps neutrino's are not restricted to travelling solely in Spacetime.

    You can make a lot of progress going from A to Z, if you don't have to visit the whole alphabet along the way.

    Fire off a few billion neutrino's, and detect a handful at the other end.
    Then blindly assume there was "no cheating" going on in the race.
    If you dance barefoot on the broken glass of undefined behaviour, you've got to expect the occasional cut.
    If at first you don't succeed, try writing your phone number on the exam paper.

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    That article is misquoting Einstein's theories, specifically Einstein said nothing can accelerate from < c to past c. Particles can in fact be created at faster than the speed of light. As for those experiments, we would have to see what the parameters were exactly, the detectors in use, blah, blah, blah.
    Quote Originally Posted by anduril462 View Post
    Now, please, for the love of all things good and holy, think about what you're doing! Don't just run around willy-nilly, coding like a drunk two-year-old....
    Quote Originally Posted by quzah View Post
    ..... Just don't be surprised when I say you aren't using standard C anymore, and as such,are off in your own little universe that I will completely disregard.
    Warning: Some or all of my posted code may be non-standard and as such should not be used and in no case looked at.

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    Registered User VirtualAce's Avatar
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    I just heard about this earlier today. Very interesting stuff and most of it far above my head....but interesting nonetheless. So if the speed of light is no longer the speed limit of the universe does this mean we may actually be able to attain it in the future. I've also heard that it would theoretically require an infinite amount of energy to travel that fast but do not know enough about it to agree or disagree.

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    Quote Originally Posted by VirtualAce View Post
    I just heard about this earlier today. Very interesting stuff and most of it far above my head....but interesting nonetheless. So if the speed of light is no longer the speed limit of the universe does this mean we may actually be able to attain it in the future. I've also heard that it would theoretically require an infinite amount of energy to travel that fast but do not know enough about it to agree or disagree.
    Even Einstein said it was only a theory...

    Personally I don't see how it's realistic to think there is a hard limit to how fast we can go... Think about this one...
    You are in a rocket ship heading along at half the speed of light. Inside your ship, control signals are flowing around as needed. Since electrical signals generally move at some significant fraction of the speed of light ( Wave propagation speed - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ). Does it not strike you as entirely possible that a signal travelling from the back of the ship to the front exceeds the speed of light by quite a significant margin?

    We see this effect all the time in 2 way radio communications. It's called the "Doppler Effect" where a signal from a source travelling toward you is shifted slightly higher in frequency and one travelling away is shifted lower... If you have a high velocity source (like a satellite) travelling toward you, broadcasting a signal, is the signal travelling at C*VF + Vsource? Yes it is, that's how the doppler effect works... That radio wave might well be exceeding the speed of light...

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    (?<!re)tired Mario F.'s Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by VirtualAce View Post
    So if the speed of light is no longer the speed limit of the universe does this mean we may actually be able to attain it in the future.
    I'd only have to assume so. But this discovery can put us back in pre-Einstein times and would destroy basically most of what we know about the laws of the Universe. The limit on the speed of light was "artificially created" (I support that to be the correct term) so the formulas we use today don't break.

    Quote Originally Posted by VirtualAce View Post
    I've also heard that it would theoretically require an infinite amount of energy to travel that fast but do not know enough about it to agree or disagree.
    That conclusion is inferred from the complete formula devised by Einstein which reads:

    E = mc²/√(1-v²/c²)

    Where:
    E = Energy
    m = mass
    v = velocity
    c = speed of light

    The formula we usually see (E = mc²) is a simplification that assigns 0 to v. That is, the formula we all know only demonstrates the attributes of E, m and c for resting objects.

    Now, with the complete formula, you'll notice that as you increase the velocity, the object mass keeps increasing. With that comes the need to increase energy for the object to keep travelling at the same speed. As your velocity increases you have greater and greater demands for energy, ad infinitum, without ever breaking the speed threshold.

    So you need infinite energy because you gain infinite mass.
    Originally Posted by brewbuck:
    Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.

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    Personally I don't see how it's realistic to think there is a hard limit to how fast we can go... Think about this one...
    You are in a rocket ship heading along at half the speed of light. Inside your ship, control signals are flowing around as needed. Since electrical signals generally move at some significant fraction of the speed of light ( Wave propagation speed - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ). Does it not strike you as entirely possible that a signal travelling from the back of the ship to the front exceeds the speed of light by quite a significant margin?
    I believe it is argued in special relativity that speed of light is the same for all observers.

    (Please correct me if I am wrong. I have only taken an introductory course in theoretical physics, many years ago)

    When you are traveling at half the speed of light relative to some inertial frame of reference (let's say ground), time passes slower on your rocket than on the ground. So say if you are moving at 0.75c, and you fire a bullet in the same direction at 0.75c, in your frame of reference (on the rocket), the bullet is moving at 0.75c.

    However, to the ground frame of reference, the bullet is not moving at 1.5c, because time is faster. Speed is distance / time. Observer on the ground will see that the bullet moved the same distance, in longer time. They will see the speed of bullet as something between 0.75c and c, say 0.85c. The effect gets more pronounced the closer you are to speed of light. If you are at 0.99999c, your 1 second could be years on the ground. If you are moving at c, your clock is stopped compared to clock on the ground. This is why it's a popular concept in science fiction that if you can travel faster than speed of light, you can go back in time.

    This effect is called time dilation, and has been experimentally verified, even at just human speeds. If you take 2 atomic clocks, make sure they are synchronized, and take one of them around the earth in a jet, when you compare them later, the stationary one would be ahead. The amount of time dilation measured also agree with predictions made decades ago before such measurement is possible.

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    Time dilation only makes sense if you believe there is a limit to the speed you can travel... the speed limit only makes sense if you believe the time dilation theory... it's circular logic... not science at all.

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    But time dilation has been experimentally verified, with very real clocks and very real jets.

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    (?<!re)tired Mario F.'s Avatar
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    And time dilation is in fact what the second part of Einstein formula describes:

    D = √(1-v²/c²)

    The idea here, to demonstrate the challenges of travelling at the speed of light is to assign the speed of light to v. The result will be 0. Which means, if you are travelling at the speed of light time will stop, and with that, any chances of ever slowing down again.

    Incidentally, because space and time are a continuum, the dilation of space is also a consequence demonstrated by the same formula. To any outside observer, the faster an object moves the more it seems to shrink. At the speed of light, D becomes 0, which means the object disappears forever.
    Originally Posted by brewbuck:
    Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.

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    Registered User gardhr's Avatar
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    Nah. Probably due to an error in measurement. Wouldn't this be fairly simple to confirm or refute by, say, comparing relative fluctuations in neutrino activity originating from the direction of the sun's core and the visible appearance of solar flares, perhaps? A distance of ~90-million+ miles would more than sufficient to produce a noticable gap, methinks.

    Quote Originally Posted by CommonTater View Post
    You are in a rocket ship heading along at half the speed of light. Inside your ship, control signals are flowing around as needed. Since electrical signals generally move at some significant fraction of the speed of light. Does it not strike you as entirely possible that a signal travelling from the back of the ship to the front exceeds the speed of light by quite a significant margin?
    A radio signal sent from the rear to front of the vehicle would still be clocked at C, no matter what the speed or acceleration of the ship is (including 99.999999999999999999% C).

    Quote Originally Posted by CommonTater View Post
    We see this effect all the time in 2 way radio communications. It's called the "Doppler Effect" where a signal from a source travelling toward you is shifted slightly higher in frequency and one travelling away is shifted lower... If you have a high velocity source (like a satellite) travelling toward you, broadcasting a signal, is the signal travelling at C*VF + Vsource? Yes it is, that's how the doppler effect works... That radio wave might well be exceeding the speed of light...
    Doppler shift is a change in frequency, not propagation.

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    Lurking whiteflags's Avatar
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    Personally I don't see how it's realistic to think there is a hard limit to how fast we can go...
    Even if there is something faster than light, it's important to remember that black holes can still grab anything at light speed.

    Infinity welcomes careful drivers.

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    (?<!re)tired Mario F.'s Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by gardhr View Post
    A radio signal sent from the rear to front of the vehicle would still be clocked at C, no matter what the speed or acceleration of the ship is (including 99.999999999999999999% C).
    To add to that:

    if I'm inside a ship moving at 100 km/h and I move from the back of the ship to the front of the ship in a car doing 20 km/h, I'm moving at 20 km/h relative to the ship and 100 km/h relative to space.

    My body (and this would also be true if I was being dragged by a rope attached to the ship and tried to pull myself inside) is a part of the mass required to move the ship at 100 Km/h. Ship and occupant constitute a single body of mass.

    Similarly, If I'm driving my car at 150 Km/h and my daughter reaches out from the back seat, she didn't just yanked my right arm off my shoulder at 150 km/h plus whatever speed she applied to her gentle tapping.
    Originally Posted by brewbuck:
    Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.

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    Registered User gardhr's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mario F. View Post
    To add to that:

    if I'm inside a ship moving at 100 km/h and I move from the back of the ship to the front of the ship in a car doing 20 km/h, I'm moving at 20 km/h relative to the ship and 100 km/h relative to space.
    Or rather, 80 km/h with respect to that particular reference frame (notice I didn't say "space", which implies an absolute coordinate system).

    Quote Originally Posted by Mario F. View Post
    My body (and this would also be true if I was being dragged by a rope attached to the ship and tried to pull myself inside) is a part of the mass required to move the ship at 100 Km/h. Ship and occupant constitute a single body of mass.

    Similarly, If I'm driving my car at 150 Km/h and my daughter reaches out from the back seat, she didn't just yanked my right arm off my shoulder at 150 km/h plus whatever speed she applied to her gentle tapping.
    This has less to do with physical contact than an equivalence in velocities, though. If you and I were traveling perfectly alongside eachother, in a vacuum, windows open, travelling at say 99% C, then we could play a game of toss just as if we were stationary (and in a relativistic sense, we would be).

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