What If We Can Never Travel Faster Than Light?

Discussion in 'Science and Technology' started by relaxxx, Oct 28, 2015.

  1. Mountain Valley Wolf

    Mountain Valley Wolf Senior Member

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    Here is one problem though---a paradox if you will----motion is perceived only by a relative change in position to everything else. But all light travels at the universal constant (there are certain things that will slow it a bit---traveling through crystal for example, but generally speaking all light travels at the universal constant which is to say that light relative to all light is not in motion.

    So we are already moving at the speed of light, and it is light that is standing still. In this sense then, the question becomes in what direction are we moving?----the answer being, in every direction from which light appears to come at us.

    Put that in your pipe and smoke it...
     
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  2. hotwater

    hotwater Senior Member Lifetime Supporter

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    [SIZE=11pt]True, which is why the 1960 George Pal film The Time Machine is entertaining but scientifically inaccurate. [/SIZE]


    [SIZE=11pt]Hotwater [/SIZE]
     
  3. relaxxx

    relaxxx Senior Member

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    The OP video talks about more scientifically realistic ways that humanity could populate the galaxy with only 1-10% light speed travel. However, most of the discussion has been about light speed or warp speed travel. Perhaps this hints to the largest obstacle to interstellar humanity. That we will never likely invest huge resources into a project that we will not benefit from in our lifetimes. The dream of warp driving to Alpha Centauri and experiencing it yourself is so much more appealing, than sending some fertilized human eggs off to be raised there thousands of years from now.
     
  4. Asmodean

    Asmodean Slo motion rider

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    Voyager was send off to outer space with the intention to may be picked up some time after our lifetimes. Perhaps not the most expensive space project (then again: it also doesn't have the greatest chance on success) but still.
    If commercial space travel becomes a success it could trigger new investments and projects. On the other hand it could also just make a couple of people very rich.
     
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  5. Asmodean

    Asmodean Slo motion rider

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    And not just that one :p

    :dizzy2: [​IMG]
     
  6. DarkSideOfTheMoon94

    DarkSideOfTheMoon94 Members

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    Not one point of my post said I think they exist. Everything I said is true according to Einstein, not me. Do time machines exist, no. Does Einstein's theory say its possible, yes.
    Same thing with wormholes, do they exist? Who knows. Is it possible, hell yes its possible, as strange as this universe is. Einstein would bitch slap us both with his intellect, so I tend to trust him.
    Could he be wrong? Could everything we've ever put a name on or theorized be wrong throughout human history be wrong? Hell, human history as we know it could be wrong.
     
  7. Kick Frenzy

    Kick Frenzy Members

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    On the other hand...

    How a fleet of tiny spaceships could 'sail' to Alpha Centauri
     
  8. Hilander

    Hilander Members

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  9. Hilander

    Hilander Members

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    I was trying to just take out the two things I wanted to talk about that supports your idea of a subconscious self being outside our bodies, but I am new and it moved the whole post. Just wanted to mention quarks were found in the hydron collider scientists have studied them two ways. One there are no observers and they follow a fairly set pattern based on statistics making patterns that resembled each other; however when the observers were present they acted completely different and even collapsed. So #1 our consciousness was powerful enough to change the habits of sub atomic particles just by looking at them or #2 the particles had an awareness of its own existence. Either is mind boggling. Also a group of scientists including Albert Einstein were doing experiments, I couldn't find the quote where he said he was almost convinced the scientists themselves were changing outcomes just by being there, but he hated quantum ideas so probably not among the top 300. Also quarks follow us,everything, in wave patterns with information for every possible outcome. They have visually seen them. They also make matter. Nothing else can. Higgs Boson makes mass. This to me sounds like the entire universe is waiting for us to make a free will move which Eisenstein did not believe in. He thought everything was determined ahead of time. So these waves wait until we turn right and all the information in the wavelength where we turned left collapses because it didn't happen. It is our reality. Is this evolution at work? I am not any religion but science right now however this wave of information is I think the fabric of space waiting on events to turn into reality. Maybe dark matter and energy are just codes of information holding everything together. Did the Big Bang create this moving thinking information filled matter making particle? Maybe but I don't believe in the Big Bang theory. Also Albert didn't believe entanglement was far away, it just appears that way to us, makes sense. Maybe they just look faster than light from our prospective since we have no idea how far anything is except by judging it by our primitive standards. Light seems consistent in this universe but what about another place and time with different laws of physics. The black hole colliding a couple of weeks ago was cool too. At least we know Mr. Albert was a genious he predicted the waves it would cause and just like he said it did just that, just stubborn in his old age.lol sorry to high jack your whole post I am on mobile and the whole website isn't visible. Peace out and have a great Mothers Day!
     
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  10. Mountain Valley Wolf

    Mountain Valley Wolf Senior Member

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    Hi Hilander,

    No you did not hijack the post, and thank you for contributing. This is very interesting:

    By the way---the way I posted just that is that I did it in html, and to do that I had to turn off the little light switch in the far left corner of the menu bar in this reply box. Otherwise it shows as a box with the quote inside it. The quote begins with a header which is in brackets and starts, "quote name=."

    The quote ends with "/quote" in brackets. you can quote any part and make multiple quotes by putting that header with the brackets above the paragraph or paragraphs you want to quote, and putting the quote with brackets at the end. You just want to make sure you have a quote in brackets with every header. My computer screws it up and sometimes I have to go back and edit it and see that the computer put a quote right after the heeader, which I then delete and return to the end of the quote. And so forth...


    Anyway---that is really cool about quarks----do you have a link to a news source on that? I have not had time to follow all the developments in Cern, and I was unaware of that one!

    I have posted extensively on the double slit experiment which has produced similar results----light is run through two slits which produces an interference pattern on a screen, just like the waves of water would make at the back of a harbor with two openings if the waves entered through these openings interfering with each other. When this was first done almost 200 years ago it was concluded that light was a wave. But then scientists observed the photelectric effect and realized that light must be a particle, so they decided to measure how many particles were going through the slits, and when they did, the interfeence pattern suddenly became a pattern of two slits. The immediate reaction was that the observer determines reality. This was demonstrated by the problem of Schrodinger's cat, where a cat in a box is either dead or alive but not until observed, at which point one of several quantum states is determined. This was scary to scientists because, among other things, 'who is the observer, when man is not around? (God?)'

    This was followed by the multiple universe theory, that there is no need for an observer because in every situation a universe for each possible quantum state is created----there therefore is infinite universes because, in a ridiculous manner there are infinite potential quantum states, and the number of universes increases at an amazing exponential state, as each universe has its own set of new quanta, which are created based on only one quantum state of one quanta...

    Then came the argument that it was the measurement itself that caused the light to collapse from a wave to a particle. This would mean that the observer was not necessary to cause the collapse. But the experimental evidence does not provide proof of this. The experiment has been done over and over and with all kinds of variations, yet it still yields the same results, along with some other surprising insights.

    We have had some major arguments over this experiment on Hipforums. My argument is that the observer does cause the collapse, or actually that the observer shapes how the collapse happens. My philosophy uses decoherence to demonstrate that there is always a collapse, because we can only understand it from a physical standpoint which always depends on a collpase to a particle. I posit that the wave is a nonphysical aspect of the wave-particle duality of the 4th dimension. No one on this forum has yet to answer to that. But the implications of my argument are that, yes the conscious individual does create and change how reality happens, but that there is also a natural course to how reality manifests---the unaltered decoherent path.

    Recently there have been some additional experiments that have demonstrated the impact of the observer----namely confirmation of the Zeno Effect---that continuous observation can retard or even stop the movement of quanta.

    I would love to have the information on the quarks as well.
     

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