big bang theory states that spacetime is one of the things expanding. could could take this to mean that more inches and seconds are being added to the universe somehow, or that the things in the universe (object and events) are getting smaller - it's all relative.



that's really hard to say, because we didn't even know it existed until we were able to measure galaxies accurately. in other words, it doesn't have a significant affect on matter we can observe more closely - i.e., things that are close together and/or not very massive. we really can't be sure how it works until we know more about what's causing it.



oh yeah! how'd the graduation test go? are congratulations in order?

Hello all, i have a moment to continue where i left off last week.

Quote; The "ruler" anolgy falls apart as you just compared the universe to a number line, which is, by definition, measurable.

My analogy of the ruler is purely a symbolic thing which is designed to convey a concept which has been missed, and i do not know what else to say to solve that problem?

Anyway back to the question as to why light is exactly the speed of 'c'?

Time exists only as velocity and any other movement or activity and effects of atoms. distance only exists in how much time it takes for somthing to move somewhare else.
Time - distance - velocity is a singular mechanism governed by relativity.
As i mentioned before, the natural state of the universe is that time does not exist, only because of relativity do we 'percieve' from our perspective that it does exist. When i say 'percieve' this applies to the cause and effect perception of all atoms and their effects in our universe.

So in view of above, it is possible that faster than light speed does exist but it is beyont the relative 'perception' of our time-distance-velocity mechanism that rules our universe.

Our universe... its a fake!

Here is another weird concept to consider;

Imagine if the galaxy exists inside a ‘time bubble’. As you approach the time barrier, time slows down and you get stuck in space. Of course from your own perspective, nothing would be wrong! Infact even those communicating with your ship from Earth would also not know anything was wrong because light waves and radio signals eminating from your ship would give the appearance of great distances still being travled. And in every respect you are still traveling great distances, but not really, get it?

Now keeping that concept in mind, what if we are all stuck in a time barrier right now? What if we are all frozen solid in time right here right now? If we were, we would never know it! From our own perspective, everything would appear normal….. This is the cornerstone of my theory that time does not really exist!!!

almost sounds like a black hole.

i usually think life is a dream

Well that is another area of interest! I think we have allot to learn from the way black holes work.




Hehehe my theory seems to imply life is not real, which is true, but also at the same time it is not true! lol

Because we said so.

We created meters and seconds before we discovered light speed, and we defined light speed in the terms we knew. But it's not like light speed "is" c, we could easily put it in terms other than meters/seconds. This is the only way we are capable of describing such things.



There's actually an interesting theory, based in statistics, that our universe is a "virtual" reality. The short version: intelligent universes are capable of manifesting themselves within themselves. Being optimistic, we will eventually be able to create things like AI, and small "environments" for these AIs to exist in. As time goes on, our technology becomes more sophisticated, and we expand this universe and the AIs become smarter, more complex laws come into play...eventually, we have created a whole virtual universe filled with beings. Then these beings begin to be self-aware, and they start discovering the basic principles of mathematics, and explore their universe, and eventually they get computers and start writing their own AIs...you get the picture. We create a never ending cycle of AIs making AIs within themselves.

But who's to say we are not the AIs of a "higher" race? We could be part of the never ending cycle we helped create.

The short, short version: We're in the Matrix (sort of).

Anyways, we ask, "what are the odds that we are the true "real" people?" Probability responds: Very slim. Odds are we are just in another "virtual" reality. Interesting to think we may just be a hyper-dimensional Stardock's Galactic Civilizations, on crack.

that's a really superficial answer. it'd be the same speed regardless of what units we use to measure it. and that's part of relativity (the speed of light is constant regardless of the observer). it's not the digits in the number i'm interested in. we could also count in base 8 and the number would look different. it's (presumably) the same phenomenon, regardless of the units you use to measure it.

to put my preponderance another way, why is there a speed limit on mass at all? and why is it that limit, and not something else?



i've heard this thoery--in fact, maybe you even told me about it. or maybe it was someone at work. either way, maybe that's why the speed of light is there. no universe could simulate itself perfectly. you'd need some object to record each datum, therefore no system could simulate itself in its entirety within itself--but that's not simulation, it's replication.

but it could simulate--i.e., simplify. if you had the whole universe as a computer, simulating one little planet would be easy. so maybe we're 'trapped' in our solar system by the speed of light as a means to keep our simulation from getting too large.

I have heard of that theory. who knows? maybe we are in a virtual reality. but personally, I don't believe it. No offense do the people that do.

But isnt that what we do on the computer everytime we play GC2? Maybe not on the level on which they have sentience, but it works.

If something travels at light speed, they experience no time change relative to slower objects, correct? Perhaps you could consider c to be equivalent to a "time speed" of zero, and other, less energetic things have a higher "time speed". From this perspective, there's nothing special about c. Doesn't really answer the question though.

In P-chem, a long time ago, our prof was sick, so a Guest prof came in and lectured about quantum aspects of the existance of molecules, or something like that. Now I won't pretend to remember or understand all of it, but one thing did stick out in his lecture, and your question reminded me of it.

According to this dude, Using E=mcc as a starting point, Matter and Energy are essentially the same thing. The only difference is that solid matter has a much lower wavelength. Matter and energy are diretly realted to eachother by light (c), which oddly enough is the only medium for energy (radition) aside from kinetic energy.

I would assume (this is rather nonscientific, btw) that there must be a relationship between all energies (kinetic and radiation) and would guess this relation involves c. C being limiting in the universe could be as simple as rearranging the equations so that the relationship between all energies and matter would be c . Most likely c would be the approachable limit as Mass decreases to nothing.

In a practical sense, I would gather that as you add energy to a mass, the most you could get out would be light, and vica versa.


Oh yeah, and in the world of reality, I did pass everyting!!(5th in my class) I was sworn in on the 5th and my 1st day is today. I start at 11pm (Yay 3rd shift! ). We had 4 hours of equipment distrobution on friday. My bookshelf is now covered in various chargers and I have other random do-dads all over the living room floor. I'm actually increably excited. Well, back to organizing stuff and caffinating my self. Take Care All!!

this is interesting, but first i should point out that light isn't more energetic than slower-moving things. the energy of a photon of visible light is about 4x10^(-19) joules, or about 2.5 electronvolts (eV). the mass of quarks is sometimes given in units of eV/c^2, which allows you to determine its energy simply by crossing out the c^2 (via E=Mc^2), and the mass of up quarks (the least massive kind) is between 1.5 and 4 mega electronvolts.

but you do raise an interesting point, something i ponder once years ago. "time speed" as you call it, and space speed (velocity) do seem to be mutually exclusive. in other words, the faster through space you go, the slower through time you go. i wonder if that means, if you could stand completely still (relative to what i don't know), would time dialate to infinity? in other words, would you "see" all time (assuming you were immortal) if you could "stop" in space?

but i think you'd run up to the same problem there. just as it's impossible to accelerate to the speed of light, it might be impossible to decelerate to zero velocity.

however, this does remind me, when danielost mentioned that Einstein was wrong -- he didn't have the right reason, but Einstein may well have been wrong/incomplete. photons have been experimentally shown to have a rest mass above zero, and general/special relativity assume photons have zero mass. of course, this doesn't mean they're wrong... they assumed photons have zero mass while at the speed of light, not while at rest--so it could mean that if you could somehow slow down a photon it'd have mass, but that it doesn't while it's in movement.



problem: c isn't light. c is a constant defined as the speed of light in a vacuum (and the speed of propogation in changes to a gravitational field). light itself is mass-energy, and c is a velocity.

also, "light" (photons) isn't the only media for energy. photons only mediate EM forces. the nuclear weak force is mediated by bosons, the strong force by gluons, and gravity (hypothetically) by gravitons (and what i'd like to know is who decided to name all these elementary particles "-ons" ... well, i guess quarks have a different-sounding name).

but...



your assumption is pretty much the holy grail of physics--unification. quoth wikipedia:

"Grand Unification, grand unified theory, or GUT is one of several very similar unified field theories or models in physics that predicts that at extremely high energies (above 1014 GeV), the electromagnetic, weak nuclear, and strong nuclear forces are fused into a single unified field.

Thus far, physicists have been able to merge electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force into the electroweak force, and work is being done to merge electroweak and quantum chromodynamics into a QCD-electroweak interaction sometimes called the electrostrong force. Beyond grand unification, there is also speculation that it may be possible to merge gravity with the other three gauge symmetries into a theory of everything."

...

the assumption itself, that everything in the universe can be summed up and rearranged in an equation, might not be true. have you ever heard of Gödel's incompleteness theorems? basically he proved using formal logic (which itself is very similar to math) that mathematic systems cannot make sense and describe everything at the same time. by 'make sense' i mean remain consistent.

even Stephen Hawkings was persuaded by Gödel's theories and no longer believes a theory of everything is possible, not in a finite number of equations anyway. wikip's closing paragraph on the article on the theory of everything is interesting in these regards:

"No physical theory to date is believed to be precisely accurate. Instead, physics has proceeded by a series of "successive approximations" allowing more and more accurate predictions over a wider and wider range of phenomena. Some physicists believe that it is therefore a mistake to confuse theoretical models with the true nature of reality, and hold that the series of approximations will never terminate in the "truth". Einstein himself expressed this view on occasions. On this view, we may reasonably hope for a theory of everything which self-consistently incorporates all currently known forces, but should not expect it to be the final answer."

you assumption might not be wrong, but it might be impossible to exhaustively prove. but then again, exhaustive proof isn't realistically possible in science anyway, since real exhaustion would involve testing everything possible. my personal view is that the universe is far too complex for us to boil it down to math. we make all this hoop-la about what we've observed, but we (humans) often put aside serious consideration of just how much we might not know. figuring out what you don't know is probably the hardest part of learning, IMO. we currently know of 4 fundamental forces in phsyics. what if this mysterious dark energy (whatever's accelerating the galaxies away from each other) turns out to be a whole new force?

in any regard, major congrats on passing! late shift... not my gig, but sounds like you're really excited, and that's good. not that i assume police work is nearly so exciting, but have you ever seen The Wire?

Please excuse me for not jumping in on the exact discussion going on right now.

One thing I and several friends have done is develop our own scifi continuity for gaming. We don't deal with the steps to develop a drive based on modern technology. In fact, if you stop and think about it, any such drive developed would use physics that are simply beyond our current capacity to think up and would likely use equations that we can't even understand anyway. So, I deal with the issue of how it relates to Einstein's theory by going under the assumption that Einstein's theory missed something important that we can't even begin to observe until we get into exploring interstellar space. Possibly requiring us to study black holes extensively.

The other thing I do is that I don't bother trying to explain it. Most of the characters don't understand either. The technology is very advanced and the characters are, mostly, not engineers who specialize in FTL drives. They're commanders, soldiers, medics, travellers... Basically, most of these people are no smarter than anyone you might find on the street of just about any city. They don't understand it because it's not their job to understand it, and frankly they have other things on their mind than learning a bunch of physics that most of them will never need to know. Besides, if the engineering crew is all dead, then you're probably going to die shortly anyway or are already dead yourself. Not exactly like the vast tracts of nothingness that make up space are that forgiving when accidents happen.

To solve the issue of massive-scale power systems, I decided to use the concept of perpetual motion devices. Now, I'm not saying these are perfect. They require other devices (typically fusion reactors or the like) tom give them the jumpstart of energy. They're also, unlike true perpetual motion devices, not truly self-contained. Perpetual motion means perpetual entropy, and there is no system which can be designed to contain perpetual entropy and keep the perpetual motion device still operating. Thus, to deal with the issue, they have two of these devices. One is online while the other is not. To deal with the issue of the built up entropy, they simply flush the contents of the device into space and refill it.

Interestingly, they also use true perpetual motion devices as weapons. Imagine how much damage can be done to a ship when, suddenly, its massive armor right over its expensive engine core suddenly gets exposed to a massive amount of entropy. As such, it could be said that these people are, in war, shortening the lifespan of the universe. I have to admit, weaponizing entropy is appealing.

The FTL travel part is fun. Since energy isn't as big of a concern due to the above idea and other high energy drives, you see everything from a gravity version of warp drive to wormhole drives, StarGate-like portals, and even one type where they shift physical dimensions into a version of the universe where time has stopped, each complete with its set of mathematics so complex that most engineers don't want to look at them. And which, luckily, I don't have to create.

I admit, the idea may seem unrealistic to some. But, honestly, when a lot of people can't even say how a home computer works, what makes anyone think that information on FTL drives would be commonly available? Especially considering how easy it would be to make FTL terrorist strikes using such information.

everything you need to know to make thermite, napalm or an atom bomb can be found online; and all the ingredients or the first two can be easily obtained (though to ignite thermite you need a magnesium strip, which is a taller order).

that said, it sounds like a fun game. i miss playing D&D a lot sometimes, and i've never been able to get a stable group together as an adult.

when it comes to writing fiction, you raise a good point. it's often better not to explain much. it's best to avoid explantion but have one in your mind as you write. that way you remain consistent.

however, you may have missed my original point: i don't want FTL travel. not for my story setting anyway. it'd ruin the very thing i'm drawn to (which is that human history, culture and biology will diverse after we colonize at subliminal speeds).

I had also considered zero velocity. I would wonder if zero velocity has any relation to absolute zero temperature? Since when we speak of velocity, we also have to consider the velocity of the vibration of atoms because of heat?

Another curiosity is the way mass increases with speed, so therefore it should also decrease with less speed right? So somthing at absolute zero speed may loose all its mass, and become somthing like light? like a complete circle - absolute zero brings you right back to the maximum velocity of the speed of light? Also somthing at absolute zero could well drop out of time and, as i theorised before, the universe has a natural state of being without time. Since time is basically movement, if you have no movement, then there is no time, so it all makes sense.

this will take place anyways

Very fun group. Though, our game is better compared to DnD mixed with SR and Firefly. You have the extremely ancient and uberpowerful races, the sentient forces of the universe that are pretty much gods... but, honestly, most of the idea behind it is that you're not them. You're Joe Blow #13692 who's just trying to live your life. Sometimes, Joe Blow #13692 does the right things and turns out to be the next Alexander the Great or something like that (one of my own characters rose from being a random soldier just trying to get away from home to founding her own empire). Fun game, but I doubt anyone would publish it.



Actually, part of my discussion relates to that. The people themselves will still be the same, to some degree. There will be things they simply don't understand about the technology around them. I wouldn't be surprised to see that humans end up even more specialized in the future.

In any case, these people will likely have a narrow focus for the most part. They don't care about what's outside their field of expertise. A few will, and a few always do, but the majority will just focus on their small section of the planet or even the planet. Not on the entire civilization as a whole. And the ones who do focus on the civilization as a whole will likely have some agenda or political belief they back to some degree. If I were doing it, the people would either be ignorant of other planets or even have unrealistic views of them. They certainly would be far from informed.

Either you aren't aware that magnesium is commonly available in camping stores, or I am unaware that there is an easily accessible way to obtain thermite ingredients. If the latter, PLEASE INFORM (particularly iron oxide).



Building on that: movement is induced when two particles exert a force (attractive or repulsive) on each other, right? Therefore, if there were such a particle that was absolutely motionless, that would mean that it is not interacting with any other particles in any way. Which would mean that we would have no way to detect such a particle, if there was no way to react in a predictable way with it. Such a particle would be, essentially, massless; it might as well not exist, it has no interactions, no effects on its surroundings. Ghost matter, if you will. But then, how do we distinguish it from nothingness? Perhaps this is only more proof that one simply can't reach absolute zero; to do so would be self-annihilation.

Wow, thats amazingly similar to how i thought/felt about god as a child...interesting.

Can of worms; don't open it.

i am, er, was. pure magnesium? cool! now if i ever need to melt through a small block engine, i'm set!



this touches on some interesting ideas i've heard. one of them are WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles). they were thought up to help explain the dark matter problem, but there's no evidence of them. also with reaching absolute zero energy, quantum mechanics predicts that anything with zero energy actually has zero net energy, which means there's negative energy balancing out the positive. if that negative energy could be harvested (how, we don't know), it'd be very useful in creating artificial wormholes or warp fields.

something i have heard is that if you could become completely motionless the universe would be gone in a second.

you don't by any small chance remember where you heard that, do you? i've been intrigued by this idea for years, but i've never been able to find anything much on it. i guess i should look again.

Probably since you're not interacting with anything, it would be a period of time infinately short.



Not nessesarily. There is no law of Physics that says motion represents existence(which I've heard of anyway) and the exert of force does not completely rely on motion.

What is absolute zero is non-existant and therefore not a factor to begin with(10 points to who can figure this out).

International law is a paper tiger. The U.S. and other governments have looked into weapons based on Satelites, even if some or all of them dont have them. A pox on international law.