One to make your head hurt and go cross-eyed:


The Register: Is lightspeed really a limit?

Solving super-luminal Special Relativity without breaking Einstein...

... I freely admit that I was gasping to keep up during this interview. Strike that: I was failing to keep up. Mathematics is nowhere near as amenable to the metaphoric explanations that make physics sometimes accessible to mere mortals...


All very plausible apart from the minor details of (a) getting there, and (b) tripping over the mathematical singularity...


Keep searchin',
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Sounds like mathematical nonsense. But an entertaining story at the same time!

John.

Maybe we need Scotty to work on them engines..... & beam us up occasionally.

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I believe that information can travel faster than light, as in the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, but nothing having mass/energy.
Tullio

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But isn't the only way information can travel is on a medium, thus it has mass/energy and is also limited to the speed of light?

Cherenkov radiation could well be a good teaser onto faster things...


It's all relative...

Keep searchin',
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Maybe Kpax had the answer and thoughts can span the galaxy instantaniously.

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Bob DeWoody

My motto: Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow as it may not be required. This no longer applies in light of current events.

But isn't the only way information can travel is on a medium, thus it has mass/energy and is also limited to the speed of light?

Yes, but I was talking about entangled particles,
Tullio

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Tullio

See if you can transmit a message using entangled particles. I suggest that you could only tell the state of a faraway particle and not influence that state to send information. In other words you would not lessen the uncertainty of the information stream--hence no message and infinite signal to noise ratio.

Tullio

See if you can transmit a message using entangled particles. I suggest that you could only tell the state of a faraway particle and not influence that state to send information. In other words you would not lessen the uncertainty of the information stream--hence no message and infinite signal to noise ratio.

I am only trying to think. Suppose you measure qubit A and determine if it is zero or one. Would not the observer of qubit B, distant a million km, receive an information?

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I am only trying to think. Suppose you measure qubit A and determine if it is zero or one. Would not the observer of qubit B, distant a million km, receive an information?

He would receive the information any time that he looked at the spin state of the remote particle. He could not control the state and send the entangled particle across the universe faster the speed of light. I claim the state is determined--Just as Schroedinger's cat-- all you had to do was look. I don't believe the looking caused the state--I guess I need to revisit the two-slit experiment once again.

I know that a Qubit has three states and may be a more efficient coding scheme than binary. I still don't see the advantage of a quantum computer this yet--still looking for an explanation.

I know that a Qubit has three states and may be a more efficient coding scheme than binary. I still don't see the advantage of a quantum computer this yet--still looking for an explanation.

No. a qubit has two states, but 2 qubits have 4 states, 3 qubits 8 states and n qubits 2expn possible states. So the state space expands very rapidly. The people from D-Wave, a Canadian firm which managed the AQUA@home BOINC project and sold a so called "quantum computer" to Lockheed-Martin for a hundred million dollars, then disappearing from BOINC, have recently published a paper in a "Nature" publication titled "Finding low-energy conformations of lattice protein models by quantum annealing".
They have used a so called "quantum computer" built by them using up to 81 superconducting quantum bits.
I have published an article on this subject on the Italian edition of the MIT Technology Review in 1996, together witha friend. This is a very lively field of research.
Tullio

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I have always believed that things can travel faster than light, I just don't have the scientific knowledge to prove it. Until someone else does it is just simply my opinion which I cannot back up. I can happily live with that :-)

Nothing wrong with that Chris for I'm darn certain that there are things that
can travel faster too. There has been some from the science fraternity that
have stated that, "At one time past, light travelled at a faster speed than
it does currently today". There could be something out there that sets the
speed of light, at any time, hence the speed is a function of this "something".

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The Kite Fliers

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Kite fliers: An imaginary club of solo members, those who don't yet
belong to a formal team so "fly their own kites" - as the saying goes.

What happens then if we turn all this on it's head!!
At the point of creation of the universe no light had yet to be created
could all bodies have moved at infinite speed for a short period of time.
Hence to travel at speeds in excess of that of the speed of light we would
need to develop a system that removes or cancels the effect of light in
Einstein's equation???....Chris, have you still got your old Meccano set around??

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The Kite Fliers

--------------------
Kite fliers: An imaginary club of solo members, those who don't yet
belong to a formal team so "fly their own kites" - as the saying goes.

Chris, have you still got your old Meccano set around??

Sadly no, and I had a Set 4A motorised one as well. My parents gave it away ......

Sniff sniff

That's torn it then.... Lego's too flimsy can't mount an anti-light combative
motor on that!

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The Kite Fliers

--------------------
Kite fliers: An imaginary club of solo members, those who don't yet
belong to a formal team so "fly their own kites" - as the saying goes.

I think I have a very good question, they claim the universe is 13.7 billion years old. But surly we aren't sitting right smack in the middle so how do they derive 13.7 vs maybe 27.4 or something older.

I think I have a very good question, they claim the universe is 13.7 billion years old. But surly we aren't sitting right smack in the middle so how do they derive 13.7 vs maybe 27.4 or something older.

There's a few indicators that have made them come up with the 13-14 billion year old number.

Observation indicates that the universe is expanding. (Cue JG and his 'there ain't no such thing as red-shift' rant! ;0) ) If things are expanding then it follows that things were closer together in the past. Calculate backward in time and somewhere between 10 and 15 billion years ago everything would have been condensed to a point.

Assuming that science's best guess on stellar evolution is accurate (and I tend to think it is) then red dwarf stars can have very long lives. Some could last for hundreds of billions of years. Yet, we see no stars of any sort that are more than 10 – 12 billion years old.

There are some other reasons for the 13.4 billion year estimate but the reasoning is heavily mathematical, somewhat arcane and I'll let someone who is a better author that I am to explain.

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Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

Albert Einstein

The story generally being told is that the Universe is some 13.7 billion years old of age.

Is the reason for this assumption about the age of the Universe that we think that the Big Bang took place 13.7 billion years ago?

Should we then assume that the size of the Universe is 13.7 billion light years across from one end of it to the other?

I have read a couple of places that the estimated size of the Universe is some 80-85 billion light years across. Regardless of this size or number either being measured in "diameter" or "radius" - do we know which shape the Universe is having?

Earlier on I also came across a speculative particle known as a "tachyon" which was thought of as having the ability to travel through space beyond the speed of light. I have not looked up this particle yet so I have still to find out more.

Maybe the ultimate question is "Why is the speed of light fixed?" and then "What makes 186,000mps special?" Why not 200,000 mps?

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Bob DeWoody

My motto: Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow as it may not be required. This no longer applies in light of current events.

Albert Einstein's famous equation states that E=mc2.

But where is time in all of this? Are we able to assume t or T for time and if so, is it a constant?

Are we assuming all the time that the speed of light is a constant as well?

Or maybe c rather is dependant on its environment or surroundings?

We only know that time is known to be coming to a standstill inside the event horizon of black holes - the point where light or any other particles are unable to escape because of immense gravity.

Possibly it may be more to it than only this way of viewing things. Time has been shown to speed up within certain areas or spots where extraterrestrial crafts have been thought to have landed here on earth. Therefore time is only relevant to the observer as seen from his or her point.

We all have a sense of time as it is being generally described. For example the following question:

What is the definition of the length of a second?

You are always supposed to be late. Time is running when an important meeting is scheduled and you are in the morning rush and will not get there in time.

Never mind. Better relax and let time run its own course.