Faster than light?

[Gota]

were screwed....

[zwzsg]

Years ago I saw a documentary where they made _information_ move faster than light with the result that the music (the transmitted information) arrived at the receptor _before_ being sent. I'll try to find the documentary and post it if I do.
Please don't argue with me about it until then - I really cannot remember much of it, and will not defend it in any way :)

There's lots of experiments like that, and they always work the same way: You make waves:

|||||||||||||||| ->
^^^^^^^^

And then you look at them sideway:
||||||||||||||||||||||/
|||||||||||||||||||||/
^^^^^^^^^^/

On the slash surface, the waves appears to move superfast!


Usually the article ends up with: But no information travelled faster than light, thus the regular physic law haven't been disproved. And if you think about it (I hope my doodle will be useful to you), you'll realise it's more a trick of perception, than about making anything travel faster light.

Nevertheless, magasines about science loves to publish articles about this every once in a while, cause titling an article "Team of scientist made stuff go faster than light!" is always sure to grab attention of the general public.

[dcore221]

the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light if that counts?

[zwzsg]

SpliFF: It's not like a car that hit max speed, but it's more like the law of physic change from your intuitive newtonian physic to strange land when you go near C. If you were to ride at near C, you could still accelerate, except instead of making you go faster, it'll make the time in the world around you go stiller. Of course human are not used to idea that time elapses at different rate depending at which speed to go, since it never occurs at the scale we live in, so it's pretty hard to wrap our head around that.

Basically, human intuition fails when considering what happens when going a relativistic speed. Same with considering what happens are super small scale. We were made to live at a certain scale, and we have a good graps of concept that are relevant in the scale we're in, but different laws applies at other scales.

I get the feeling this is a case where science simply deferred to Einstein due to his fame and the difficulty of proving him wrong (rather than requiring him to prove himself right).

Einstein was proved wrong on several counts. Most famous being:
- Einstein believed "God did not play dice", that is, that anything we deem random is just because we don't enough. Yet the whole quantum physic field is all about probability field.
- Einstein believed the universe was still and eternal. We know take expanding universe for granted.

Also I heard this has been debunked already due to evidence of light being slowed by gravitational effects.

Dude, you don't need a gravitational lense to slow down light, just take a pool of water or a glass! This is a common misunderstanding of physic really says. c is not the speed of light, it's the speed of light in vacuum.

I'm still waiting to hear of an instrument capable of detecting faster than light objects.

Meh, that is easy. All you need is two very precise clock along the track of the object.

Note that usually, to measure the speed of light, we make it go back and forth several time between mirrors, so it travel more, and takes longer, and it's easier to measure. Also, technically we don't just briefly switch on a flashlight, but instead use a laser, for its directionnality, its coherence, its singleness of frequency, and then we look at interference between the ray and its reflexion.

Hmm, well, what I wanted to say is that yes, we built instruments capable of measuring speed faster than light. You might have to get a coherent blob of that thing first, but eh, coherent blob of matter can be experimentally produced already.

The only known way to move macroscopic objects at higher than light speed is wormholes and changing topology of spacetime.

Unless there's been some recent advance I'm unaware of, I wouldn't call wormholes "known". They're still a fancy sci-fi theory. More sounds than most, but still highly hypothetical.

And of course entanglement action happens at higher than light speed too..

You need the particle to be close to entangle them, and particle can't move faster than light, and you can't choose which state they'll untangle to. So, what exactly is going faster than light? As I understand it, it's more about how you can open two boxes at same time very far apart, and surprise they'll contain the same thing, even if no one could guess beforehand what this thing would be. So that is still useless for any FTL application.

[Panda]

I'm still waiting to hear of an instrument capable of detecting faster than light objects.

Meh, that is easy. All you need is two very precise clock along the track of the object.

Note that usually, to measure the speed of light, we make it go back and forth several time between mirrors, so it travel more, and takes longer, and it's easier to measure. Also, technically we don't just briefly switch on a flashlight, but instead use a laser, for its directionnality, its coherence, its singleness of frequency, and then we look at interference between the ray and its reflexion.

Hmm, well, what I wanted to say is that yes, we built instruments capable of measuring speed faster than light. You might have to get a coherent blob of that thing first, but eh, coherent blob of matter can be experimentally produced already.

Are you talking about the Miller-Urey experiment? It produced organic material from inorganic material by simulating lightning (plasma a different state of matter that can derive energy from light: http://www.plasmas.org/what-are-plasmas.htm ) through a mixture of gasses. It produced amino acids and some more recent experiments have produced nucleotides. It was also found that organic molecules can be found in space when scientists discovered a meteorite in Murchison , Australia. I don't know a whole lot about this topic even though I've studied physics. We didn't really go into quantum physics or talk about space science.

[SwiftSpear]

the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light if that counts?

Not referent to any reference point within it. One side is going close to the speed of light away from us, and the other is going close to the speed of light in the opposite direction, but if you were to go to either of those points the opposite point is only going close to the speed of light away from it. That's just how relatitivity works.

[AF]

As mentioned before, wormholes would produce timelike curves.

A documentary I watched also claimed any wormhole would almost instantaneously collapse due to exponential feedback of energy, energy goes in, energy goes out, energy goes back in ontop of the first time ti went in, energy comes back out again, repeat.

[momfreeek]

Sometimes I think relativity is just some ridiculous mathematical trick to explain something we don't understand. But as Neils Bohr said; "If it doesnÔÇÖt shock you, you donÔÇÖt understand it.". I don't understand it and it still shocks me.

[Licho]

Meh relativity is like the least wierd thing in modern physics ..

[Panda]

As mentioned before, wormholes would produce timelike curves.

A documentary I watched also claimed any wormhole would almost instantaneously collapse due to exponential feedback of energy, energy goes in, energy goes out, energy goes back in ontop of the first time ti went in, energy comes back out again, repeat.

I always thought that it was neat how time is warped when an object goes really fast.

[TradeMark]

i always thought theres no such thing as time (dimension), i mean you cant go back in time, or forward in time... it just doenst make sense why would the universe work that way... sure you could go "back in time" to another identical universe, but its not the same thing really

[dansan]

There's lots of experiments like that, and they always work the same way: You make waves:

And then you look at them sideway:

Ah yes... I've read about that. But it wasn't what I meant. The experiment was about something similar to quantum tunnelling (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-tha ... nelling.29). But I didn't really understand it xD

With respect to "wormholes" the theory about the "Alcubierre drive" sounds well researched, just that there is no way to create it :D

[forest_devil]

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


star trek is my goto for science of D M