Calling all Physics people, break me off.

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Author	Topic: Calling all Physics people, break me off.
weis bonzi buddy	posted 11-17-2001 15:49 Maybe some people use relative as a copout Wiggin, but I meant it in a specific sense. Saying "I'm moving at X miles per hour" doesn't mean anything unless it's in relation to something. Like, if I throw a baseball out of a moving car, it's moving at X velocity compared to the car, Y compared to the Earth, Z compared to the moon, etc. So it makes no sense to say that a person would die or something unusual would happen if you were moving close to light speed. Fen said: As you get closer to C, lots of things behave very differently than they do at regular speeds, so it's pretty uncertain what would happen to a "person" moving at a high percentage of C. I imagine they'd die, at the least, but I'm not sure how. I'm saying, no, not necessarily. Imagine this - you're sitting at home on the couch, and some scientists launch a magical rocketship that can go 99% of the speed of light. Well, in comparison to the ship, you are now moving at 99% of the speed of light, but that doesn't mean anything special happens to you on your couch. Same thing in the rocket ship - as far as they can tell, they're standing still and the Earth is moving at 99% of c. So, the crew might be hurt by acceleration if the rocket's designers weren't safety conscious, but nothing's going to happen just because you're "moving" at close to light speed. The rule of thumb is, anytime you're talking about baseballs, you can assume that "velocity" means "velocity compared to the ground." But if you're talking about spaceships and light speed and such, and someone refers to "velocity", you need to ask, "compared to what?" To be fair to fen, I think he might have been talking about something different, but it's not clear from his answer. At the very worst, if you travelled in a space ship at 99% of c, you might appear dead to the people on Earth, but from your perspective, you would be fine and the people on Earth would appear dead to you, too. ------------------ With proper thrust, pigs fly just fine. --RFC 1925 IP: Logged
Vehementi Neophyte Pen	posted 11-17-2001 23:48 >So my friend has been reading a bunch of shit on the internet, and books and shit or whatever. He's trying to explain light, and how theres like 4 major subatomic forces, like, electromagnetism, light, nuclear weak, nuclear strong.. blah blah... im kinda lost. Im wondering though. >1) DId they >they is the scientists that i don't know< break the speed of light by exciting particles with some sort of gas? They didn't break the speed of light. They've slowed down light a LOT, but they've never made anything go faster than light (compared to the speed of light in that medium) >and 2.... >If your going the speed of light, is your body traveling in a wave pattern.?? You can't go the speed of light. >and 3.... >how does a black hole become a black hole. A star becomes too massive and collapses in on itself and it has a large gravitational force and pulls a lot of other crap in, and eventually its gravitational force is so great that even light can't escape. If we see no light emanating from it (the light that goes in doesn't come back,) it appears "black." >and 4.... >he was saying something about everything starting from Hydrogen and then shit would react(explode or whatever) and form new compounds.. etc. (what that other guy said) >BUT- it depends on your definition of "thing". Lots of things can move faster than c- for example, a shadow. if you shine light on a wall far away, and move your hand quickly through the light, then the shadow can "move" faster than c. But, a shadow doesn't have mass or carry information. Particles, in general, do, and thus cannot move faster than c. suspense... No. The shadow is not moving faster than light. Think of a waterfall. Pretend the water is the stream of light from your flashlight. Now, put your (big, mountain-sized) hand under the waterfall, and notice that when you block the stream of water, all the water under your hand (that's falling) doesn't instaneously and inexplicably disappear for no apperant reason. Similarly, when you block the light with your hand, the light in front of your hand (the unblocked light that's still traveling to the wall) doesn't mysteriously disappear. The shadow is 'lagged' in the same way that the pulses in the waterfall would be lagged if you blocked it. >As you get closer to C, lots of things behave very differently than they do at regular speeds No they don't. >so it's pretty uncertain what would happen to a "person" moving at a high percentage of C. I imagine they'd die, at the least, but I'm not sure how. As whoever said, "going" the speed of light wouldn't affect you in any way. It'd make you appear dead or whatever to everyone else (and them to you) but being at that speed wouldn't kill you - for all we know, our solar system could be going at .99c relative to the uhh... base of the universe... which could also be going .99c... yet we're not all magically dead :P Again, as whoever said, it'd be the acceleration that'd kill you, if anything. >So the big bang is complete fact now? No. Ask any christian IP: Logged
Clme cake fiend	posted 11-17-2001 23:57 quote: You can't go the speed of light. See, now. You're just no fun. IP: Logged
Jimbo 1 dr3w j00 4 p1ggy!	posted 11-18-2001 08:16 quote: Originally posted by Vehementi: suspense... No. The shadow is not moving faster than light... The shadow is 'lagged' in the same way that the pulses in the waterfall would be lagged if you blocked it. He wasn't talking about the shadow "moving" from the light source to the shadowed object, he was talking about the leading and trailing edges "moving" across the surface of the shadowed object as an obstruction eclipses it. Yes, you'll get lag from the time the eclipsing object intrudes to the time the effects show up, but if the distance is right and the speed of the eclipsing object is right, the apparent speed of the leading and trailing edges of the shadow CAN be above c. Think about it. IP: Logged
Vehementi Neophyte Pen	posted 11-18-2001 13:00 I don't understand... do you mean if you had a really, really big flashlight and aimed it at a wall a few thousand KM away, with a massive spread on the flashlight, then waved your hand in front of it, that the shadow of your hand on the wall would be going "faster" than c? -V IP: Logged
Jimbo 1 dr3w j00 4 p1ggy!	posted 11-18-2001 13:40 Yes. It's pretty simple: if the flashlight has a 1 foot spread where your hand goes through it, and a ten foot spread where it hits the lit surface, your hand's shadow will appear to move ten times as fast as your hand does. So if your hand is moving at .2c, the shadow will move at 2c. And there you have it. IP: Logged
weis bonzi buddy	posted 11-18-2001 17:43 Another classic example of a "thing" going faster than light is the gigantic scissors. Take a suitable large (like say, a lightyear long) pair of scissors and cut a similarly titanic piec of paper with it, and you can make the point of contact between the scissors blades go faster than c. But, as with the shadow, the "thing" that's moving faster than c is an arbitrary distinction, not a physical object. If you want to make a physical particle appear to move faster than c, use quantum tunneling like everyone else. Oh, and that Vehementi post is pretty inaccurate, but I'm not gonna go through point by point explaining shit. Read a textbook or something, guys. ------------------ With proper thrust, pigs fly just fine. --RFC 1925 IP: Logged
fenomas argument nazi	posted 11-18-2001 19:45 quote: Originally posted by Vehementi: The shadow is not moving faster than light. Think of a waterfall... suspense... Way to read a post and interpret it to mean the precise opposite of what it meant. The point is that there are many "things" than can move faster than c, but none that have mass or carry information. Another example: Imagine a huge set of scissors. If the scissors are closed quickly, the point of intersection of the two blades can, indeed, go faster than c. But nothing is actually moving, as in the shadow example, except a conicidence that we attach importance to. The important part of the idea is that there is no way to take advantage of this fact to send a message from the handle of these scissors to the tip of the blade and have the message arrive faster than light would have made the trip. Similarly, if you shine light on a distant screen, the shadow can move from one end of the screen to the other faster than c, but that doesn't let you send a message the same way. quote: Originally posted by Vehementi: You can't go the speed of light. Yes you can. =P quote: Originally posted by Weis: A bunch of stuff about relativity Hm, you may be right there, I may have been drunk. But surely the acceleration could kill you? IP: Logged
zippy Member with a member bigger than the member with a member	posted 11-18-2001 20:35 fen, i wanted to reply to your post about teleportation. think about what "real" teleportation might entail. how could that possibly happen? i think the most likely explanation is that the state of each atom in the object being teleported is accurately and instantaneously read, and stored somewhere. the data is then streamed to some other location that recreats you using this data. have you really been teleported? what happens to the original? the matter is still intact in it's original form (unless you want to bring up uncertainty principal). you were never really teleported, you were cloned and i wont even start in on the metaphysical questions like "daddy, what happens to my soul when i get cloned?" i'm sure you've heard this argument before. i dont see how teleportation could work otherwise IP: Logged
Jimbo 1 dr3w j00 4 p1ggy!	posted 11-18-2001 20:44 If you could step into a wormhole and survive, the effect would be pretty synonymous with teleportation... leave where you're at and arrive somewhere else without traveling any of the distance in between. IP: Logged
Clme cake fiend	posted 11-18-2001 20:52 tesseract. IP: Logged
zippy Member with a member bigger than the member with a member	posted 11-18-2001 21:13 what say you, clme? jimbo, are wormholes just sci-fi creations, or have any actually been detected? is there any reason to believe that they could be created? is there anything claiming that wormholes are impossible? IP: Logged
Clme cake fiend	posted 11-18-2001 21:22 Tesseract = "A Wrinkle In Time" (Madeline L'Engle). and I think I may be able to answer your questions too! 1) Yes. 2) Yes. 3) Most definitely. 4) Absolutely. IP: Logged
krizzorocks PenIsite	posted 11-18-2001 22:57 http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/p08.htm faster then what? read this shit then read this http://phoenix.akasha.de/~aton/SuperPHI.html IP: Logged
Jimbo 1 dr3w j00 4 p1ggy!	posted 11-18-2001 23:03 relevant link another relevant link [This message has been edited by Jimbo (edited 11-18-2001).] IP: Logged
fenomas argument nazi	posted 11-18-2001 23:08 quote: Originally posted by zippy: i dont see how teleportation could work otherwise Don't feel bad.. Einstein couldn't understand the advantages of an xml client-server model over simple request-response. Anything approaching teleportation presupposes technology far beyond what is around now-- not just faster and more precise, but fundamentally different. Consider a few theoretical machines not yet made, or indeed proven to be makeable: nanites (ultra-small machines), a quantum computer (using superimposed quantum states for storage instead of binary bits), and a universal constructor (capable of assembling atomic structures). Just guessing, I'd imagine that any two of these three things would be sufficient to create something approaching what we think of as teleportation. But it would depend on the nature and limitations of the machinery involved. Guessing is just pissing in the wind, really. IP: Logged
Clme cake fiend	posted 11-18-2001 23:09 You are all absolutely correct in every way. Every single one of you. Especially since even complete contradictions can sometimes be "proven". I just like to think its possible. IP: Logged
Jimbo 1 dr3w j00 4 p1ggy!	posted 11-18-2001 23:17 Find out what Steven Hawking thinks about this stuff. IP: Logged
LaMFear Dutch Pen - Cock sucking champ of 1999	posted 11-19-2001 02:42 It's a damn quiet day at work, so I've read some of them, and I must say, I think it's very interesting. I'm thinking of buying Hawkings book "A brief history of time". Do any of you physics people know if this book is readable for someone who knows next to nothing about the subject? IP: Logged
fenomas argument nazi	posted 11-19-2001 18:04 As far as I know, it was widely acclaimed as among the most readable introductions to modern physics since Feynman. IP: Logged
weis bonzi buddy	posted 11-21-2001 10:45 A Brief History is excellent, yes, I didn't know any physics when I read it. Zippy, the problem with your teleportation idea is the "accurately observe the state of every particle..." part - not gonna happen, for reasons that are probably explained in depth at that Heisenberg link I didn't read. If you wanna teleport somebody that way, you're going to need to recreate their body's molecules without knowing what state they're in. Fen- of course acceleration could kill you, but you don't need to go anywhere near light speed to demonstrate that. As far as I know, and feel free to prove me wrong, you can accelerate to an arbitrarily high percentage of c without anything special happening (disregarding acceleration stresses, obstacles, etc). ------------------ With proper thrust, pigs fly just fine. --RFC 1925 IP: Logged
krizzorocks PenIsite	posted 11-21-2001 11:37 after reading hawkings book, I found that this joint: http://shop.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbninquiry.asp?isbn=0553342533 Explained the quantum world much more in depth. it has a sequel also, something to do with kittens. IP: Logged
Clme cake fiend	posted 11-21-2001 15:52 So... I have a completely bogus made up theory, that states as follows: 1) We are currently moving at an extremely high percentage of C. 2) When we 'accelerate', we're really decelerating. 3) Time is really the inability of our minds to percieve everything at once. 4) Cake is really the inability of our minds to percieve all baked goods at once. 5) Duck billed platypus's are proof of the non-existance of God 6) Mr. Boo is proof of the existance of God. 7) Moo. IP: Logged
MightyMon s0m30n3 s3t up us the m0n	posted 11-21-2001 16:50 Damn Clme...what a way to ruin a nice, serious conversation. Moo this. ------------------ Another thread killed by MightyMon. IP: Logged
CapnBiggles clmesdad. stopplease sirmyass is bleeding	posted 11-21-2001 19:40 quote: Originally posted by Clme: 6) Mr. Boo is proof of the existance of God. What? This is news? [This message has been edited by CapnBiggles (edited 11-21-2001).] IP: Logged

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