I type wearily and with low morale once more knowing that so many good points might not make it from my memory. I know I said this before but,"NOOOO!"  *sigh* *sob*


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The sound barrier and the speed of light are two very different things. You can't breach the speed of light in normal spacetime. It just can't be done. Put it like this, the speed of light is a speed limit for anything and everything that moves(which is everything) with the exception of anything that does not consist of mass. i.e. energy.

The cops on this highway are gonna tear you to shreds which, technically, don't exist before you even come close to the speed of light. These guys don't stop for donuts and they ain't bothering with the ticket giving paper work.


What you're refering to as FTL doesn't exist. Ok, lets go crazy. Lets say that this guy invents a type of...er... spacetime bending thingy that allows you to...well... escape spacetime by opening a magical blue "window" portal to another universe type thing which doesn't follow the same rules. What then? You might go faster then light(maybe you might not) but you must understand the same concepts dont apply.

Light might be a liquid which emits sound through pulling everything around it via thermal energy and uses radiation to create the electromegnetic spectrum which gives it its chemical structure. Thats totally crazy but it is "outside". The most obsurd idea may be reality and the most basic principal might be non-existant.

Folding space you say? That is not breaching the speed of light but merely reducing the distance. This is the kind of unbreakable speed limit which you can't break even if you have a brand new Lamborghini and are just itching to go past that bloody limit. But the cops at this here road ain't gonna let you pass. They'll rip your lamborghini apart before you even come close!

So, FTL does not exist! What you're refering to is a different matter entirely. The laws of physis forbid "FTL". Reducing the time used taken to travel is a different thing then FTL. It simply can't be done by anything unless it has zero mass. Folding space is not that easy either. Don't forget. You're in that folded space. It affects you too. Lets suppose you're protected. with "Sheilds" are also in folded space. Energy will also be folded and will react to folded space as any other. Maybe you can send something. What would its effects on living thing or even an object would be?

Would artificial gravity stay the same? Would you even go back to normal after you exit?

And the sound barrier wasn't deemed impossible. Maybe that is the case with most comman people of the time but more learned minds knew that all is needed is more energy to go faster. It wasn't deemed impossible. It is just the popular word that went "around".

this is wrong. when the French hit the sound barrier they did it with cannon balls. no matter how much powder they put in the cannon the ball wouldn't go any further or faster. remember bullets at the time were going faster than sound.


it isn't energy it is shape that breaks the sound barrier.


and i never said that sound and light barriers were the same in fact i said that they weren't. i just used sound as an example.

We've already seen FTL existing, but only in the form of elementary particles going FTL via 'quantum tunneling'. They don't accelerate to the speed of light at all. Instead they just go from a sublight speed to an FTL speed without passing through all the speeds 'in between' like you have to do when accelerating normally. No one said you can't go faster than light. You just can't accelerate/decelerate to light speed. Provided you never achieve C, you can be going faster or slower without a problem, just as quanta can do.

Of course, seeing photons and electrons randomly go FTL instantly for no known reason by 'illegal' means(not accelerating) isn't going to help us build spaceships that go FTL. Yet.

if you see a natural process breaking a so called law of nature. all that means is you don't understand that law.

Evil. Downright evil. I hate you now.


As for breaking the speed of light in the lab, no, we haven't yet.
We've created illusions that seem like we have, and more importantly we've made light in tests travel faster than light in the atmosphere, but we have never broken c (the speed of light in a vacuum) and, as of now, there is no theoretical way of doing so.

Note that the theoretical warp drive often talked about results in a space displacement over a time period that suggests faster than light travel, but it isn't because the spatial displacement is not the displacement that the object in question moved. (Since the warp drive curves space, the ship in question flies in a straight line, as in cutting through a wave, and ends up on the other side. Flatten said wave out and it seems like the ship travelled very very very fast.)

Dear Lord.... how frecking old are you sir?

Anyhow, back to the whole FTL debate. Naturally we are all way out of our depth on this one. But I did reading a really interesting article in New Scientist recent about how the fundamental laws of physics don't work (on a math level) unless you start adding extra dimensions. The article was suggesting that there may be another time dimension and possible several other space dimensions.

It was suggested that what we perceive as our universe. i.e. 3 space dimensions and 1 time dimension are not really there. But a 4 dimensional shadow of the real 6 dimensions. In much the same way a 3D object gives off a 2D shadow. Maybe the real universe gives off a 4D shadow and that all we have evolved capable of experiencing directly.

If through a greater understanding of the whole 6D universe we where able build an engine that traveled more efficiently across the real universe it would appear to an observer in the shadow we are capable experiencing as FTL travel. Even though it was not doing it the hard way.

Either way, sci-fi will fill in and I expect to be long dead by the time anyway actually figures out FTL, and even if they do in my lifetime I won't understand it anyway.

What you're saying is not at all disproving what I said. I challenged the basic principle of DanielLost's statement.




Do photons and electrons have mass? No they don't, sunshine!
Now tell me the elementary particle of light. Photons you say? Correct!

They don't need to accelerate. There is nothing to pull against. They have no mass and thus they are immune to gravity. Completely.

Reducing time to travel and reaching the speed of light are very different things.

yes they do

where do you think the mass of an atom comes from. protons and neutrons and a very little from electrons.

Well, Electrons have mass, yes, as do protons and neutrons.

PHOTONS (NOT a typo from Protons) do NOT have mass. Photons happen to be the particle/wave things that propagate light.

Ok, I retract what I said about electrons but granted electrons did not have much to do with the following statements. I was wrong about the electrons. Sorry.

But you mentioned PROTONS daniel. I was talking about PHOTONS.

sorry

Again out of my league here, but how can Photons not have mass. As I understand it the total sum of energy and matter in the universe is fixed although the universe can vary the proportion of each as Einstein proved with E=MC2. Energy is Mass in another form. So if Photons (the shiney things that let me see where I'm going) are energy they by default have a mass, albeit a tiny tiny one. I think i read somewhere once that assuming E=MC2 holds then every second the earth is hit by 3Kg of sunlight. Which I assume to be 3Kg worth of Photons unless I'm confusing what sunlight is.

Actually**I seem to recall that photons having zero rest mass is a necessary pre-req of the standard model. Yet a photon is not necessarily light, it just can be if it carries energy. So I think your right, and I'm making assumptions about light=photons which is not the exact same thing.

I'll mumble elsewhere.

Photons are 1 of 4 gauge bosons that mediate interactions between fermions(normal particles like electrons, protons and neutrons). Photons propagate electromagnetic force(light). Gluons propagate strong nuclear force. The W and Z bosons propagate weak nuclear force. The particles mediating gravity - 'gravitons' and the Higgs boson - haven't yet been discovered outside of theory, although the Large Hadron Collider is supposed to generate Higgs bosons when it enters operation next year. Of the 4 known gauge bosons, photons and gluons are massless but W and Z bosons have mass. Photons, electrons and pions(a two-quark fermion) have been observed quantum tunneling.

Since electrons can hit 0.99999999995c and photons normally travel at c itself, tunneling by them can easily hit FTL speeds(always in case of photons). I don't know if pions have been recorded going FTL however.

Also, photons, while being massless do have momentum and they are affected by gravity. That's how black holes are... black. We only know about their existence by observing what goes on just outside their event horizon.

if it is affected by gravity it has weight. if it has weight it has mass.


oh and the speed of light is not constant

I've never heard this law before. Weight is a force. Force = Mass * Acceleration. Gravity is (in this case) acceleration.
Therefore, a Photon (Mass 0): Force = 0 * Gravity therefore Force = 0 N
Interestingly, when looking at it with this tool, Acceleration = Force / Mass. Mass is 0, therefore acceleration is undefined (which fits, because a Photon doesn't accelerate in any manner we can define).

The point of the matter is, when one looks at gravity the way it's supposed to be looked at (based on current theories), it is only a curve in space time. Photons, though they aren't accelerating, are moving. If you put a ball on a trampoline and push it along, it will travel in a straight line. Now stand ahead of and to the right of the ball. The ball will curve towards you, and depending on how fast it's going, it may hit you. You, in this experiment, are a representation of gravity. The bending in the trampoline is the curve that gravity creates in space-time.

Only in Newtonian physics is mass entirely a pre-requisite of being affected by gravity. Though in modern physics, having mass still makes gravity's effect more obvious.



Also not quite true. Light travels at different speeds, yes, however:
c (299,792,458 meters per second) is the speed of light in a vacuum.
In any vacuum, light will travel at c.
When you change the medium (say, to a pure oxygen environment), the speed of light will also change. Coincidentally, if you go anywhere else in the world (I'll even say the universe), and measure the speed of light in a different pure oxygen environment, you'll find the same speed as you did with the first pure oxygen environment.

no this is the speed of light in a vacuum on the earth. last time i looked earth had a gravity well.

The speed of light and other fixed numbers (called constants) that scientists rely on to explain the universe and its formation mathematically may not be so constant, according to a new study conducted by an international team of researchers.

The finding involves what physicists and cosmologists have considered a basic law of nature involving the strength of attraction between electrically charged particles.

Studying how light was absorbed by metallic atoms in gas clouds some 12 billion light-years away, researchers found that the fine structure constant, as it is called, may be changing subtly as the universe grows older. The universe is thought to be roughly 13 billion years old, so the light observed in the new study was emitted when the universe was roughly a billion years old.

The research was met with caution by many scientists, who also said that if it is accurate, then the adjustment to theories would be significant and far-reaching.

WWW Link


this is not what i was looking for but it will do .

light is effected by gravity wells. Its how we found most of the planets, by looking through gravity wells. Also light is sucked into blackholes.

Umm...no...
Space is distorted by a black holes' immense gravitational grip. Light is affected by that distorted space.

in other words light is sucked into blackholes along with anything else that gets to close.

Not exactly but close.

How is it completely immune to gravity if space distortions effect said light?

Because light travels through said space.

ok but if the light goes with the space then its not immune to the effects of gravity. Even if its a secondary effect its still DOING something to the light.

from the dictionary

it is responding to an effect of gravity hence it is not immune.