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More space news!


tkdguy

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Re: More space news!

 

For my own contributions here for the kind of stuff I dig up and use in my own sci-fi games:

 

Stuff about Quark Stars

More stuff about Quark Stars

 

Stuff about Star Collisions

More stuff about Star Collisions

 

Black Hole creation

 

Magnetars

 

The kind of insane stuff I whip out when someone in-game acts blasé about a supernova or something. :P

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Re: More space news!

 

http://universesandbox.com/ - Simulates astrophysics in an easy and intuitive GUI. Pretty neat. Also' date=' if our galaxy wasn't going to hit Andromeda, if the simulation I ran was correct, the arms will lengthen and get absorbed into a disc.[/quote']

Might have to snag that little widget, would make a nice companion toy to Astrosynthesis.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Re: More space news!

 

Well it would just invalidate the Special Relativity Theory, the basis of our entire physical knowledge since 1905. But then again, it would not be the first fundamental 100-Year old theory that is in danger in the 22th century.

 

But we certainly first have to see if nobody miscalculated/misconfigured something important.

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Re: More space news!

 

One thing that stuck me was that despite (apparently' date=' and also not yet reconfirmed) traveling faster than the speed of light, the particles *didn't* travel backward in time like I've heard some say would happen.[/quote']

 

Well, as with most things in that realm of Physics, the time reversal at FtL speeds is merely theorized by the mathematics. It has thus far been impossible to prove, for obvious reasons. Also, if there's something wrong with one equation here, there are bound to be errors in others, in as much as they all relate to each other. Also also, this stuff. :P

 

In short, the two ojects (the particle and the observer) only see an apparent slowing affect on the time experienced by the other; it's not actually happening.

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Re: More space news!

 

Time dilation is a separate phenomena from particles-that-travel-faster-than-light-travel-back-in-time. Somewhat. You can use the same spacetime geometry to demonstrate that FTL travel is necessarily time travel, but that geometry shows that the time travel is very much real. Go to Zeta Reticulus faster than light and come back, and you will arrive before you left. No room for different frames of reference here. It's an observation within that one frame.

 

Besides the hinky bits in the algebra where objects travelling at the speed of light or faster have imaginary mass, this is the argument presented in special relativity classes for regarding FTL travel as "impossible."

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Re: More space news!

 

Well, if FTL travel is possible, it's got to be because of some loophole. We've accelerated particles to a very high fraction of lightspeed, and the energy requirements are enormous (and in general conformity with the relativity equations), with no reason to think it doesn't take an infinite amount of energy to propel a mass at light speed. So there'd have to be some hitherto undiscovered phenomena or mechanism to explain the "workaround".

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Re: More space news!

 

Well it would just invalidate the Special Relativity Theory, the basis of our entire physical knowledge since 1905. But then again, it would not be the first fundamental 100-Year old theory that is in danger in the 22th century.

 

But we certainly first have to see if nobody miscalculated/misconfigured something important.

 

You don't toss a perfectly good theory with hitherto excellent predictive properties just because of a tiny glitch. It could turn out that the neutrinos never exceeded light-speed-in-vacuum at any point, they just took a little dimensional shortcut. Which would be a whopper of a discovery in its own right.

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Re: More space news!

 

You don't toss a perfectly good theory with hitherto excellent predictive properties just because of a tiny glitch. It could turn out that the neutrinos never exceeded light-speed-in-vacuum at any point' date=' they just took a little dimensional shortcut. Which would be a whopper of a discovery in its own right.[/quote']

 

Exceed lightspeed or skip through a dimensional shortcut. Potato, potahto. Either way it's the same end result!

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Re: More space news!

 

Well' date=' if FTL travel is possible, it's got to be because of some loophole. We've accelerated particles to a very high fraction of lightspeed, and the energy requirements are enormous (and in general conformity with the relativity equations), with no reason to think it doesn't take an infinite amount of energy to propel a mass at light speed. So there'd have to be some hitherto undiscovered phenomena or mechanism to explain the "workaround".[/quote']

The problem is that the closer you get to lightspeed, the higher your mass get's and thus the more energy you need. Since the increase is exponential the closer you get to actual lightspeed the closer your mass get's to infinite.

So our only chance at FTL travel is not trying to travel fast at all. Move the universearoudn your ship (Futurama), compress the universe on the path to the target (Star Trek) or using another dimension in wich different rules apply (Star Wars, B5, Stargate, most others) seem to be the only option right now.

 

You don't toss a perfectly good theory with hitherto excellent predictive properties just because of a tiny glitch. It could turn out that the neutrinos never exceeded light-speed-in-vacuum at any point' date=' they just took a little dimensional shortcut. Which would be a whopper of a discovery in its own right.[/quote']

So in either way the information travels faster than light between point A and point B. The way it did that is irrelevant.

Relativity states: Nothing can move fast than the light. No information, no energy, no particle, no "huertz" and no "hrung" (whatever those later two are). That asumption is all over our other theories including Quantum Theory and superstrign theory. Pick any theory of modern science, it self or any of it's prequisitory theories will require "nothing is faster than light".

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Re: More space news!

 

 

I'm reading the preprint now (link) -- I am on page 12 of 24 so I'm not even through it yet -- but I'm not a particle physics person. The abstract says |v-c|/c = 2.48 * 10^-5.

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Re: More space news!

 

The abstract says |v-c|/c = 2.48 * 10^-5.

This is only a guess but:

v = velocity (of the particles)

c = speed of light in a vacuum

v-c calculates the positive difference to the speed of light. That it is divided by the speed of light and gives us 2.48 * 10^-5 or 0,00248 % above the speed of light.

 

And apparently Raven Kor started a seperate Thread about it:

http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php/87110-Science-Particles-seen-moving-at-FTL-speeds-(CERN)

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Re: More space news!

 

I'm reading the preprint now (link) -- I am on page 12 of 24 so I'm not even through it yet -- but I'm not a particle physics person. The abstract says |v-c|/c = 2.48 * 10^-5.

I seem to recall reading -- somewhere -- that some of the more puzzling properties of neutrinos would make more sense if they were actually tachyons. Seem to recall this was a think piece, not a serious hypothesis, but maybe someone needs to think that through.

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Re: More space news!

 

It looks like they've been making these measurements for three years' date=' so if it is a glitch, it's probably not instrument error. I'm not going to be holding my breath, but I'm definitely looking forward to Fermilab's results when they try to replicate the phenomenon.[/size']

http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897

 

Probably not an instrumentation error, but possibly something about the instrumentation is poorly understood. Either that or perhaps they're not correcting for something--frame dragging from the Earth's rotation, perhaps. Or currents in the luminiferous ether. Or dark matter.

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