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.
SpliFF wrote: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.
SpliFF wrote: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.
SpliFF wrote: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.
Licho wrote: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.
Licho wrote: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.
