The Speed Of Light isn't the universal speed limit after all

[Commander Trigg]

The thought has occurred to me that maybe these particles aren't travelling faster than the theoretical speed of light but that light itself actually travels slower than the "speed of light" due to being acted upon by some outside force (Dark energy or some such?)

Therefore the universal speed limit stays intact

[CommonSenseOTB]

Pehaps in a few hundred years the conclusion will be reached that everything is based upon our perception of reality, how our thoughts and senses tell us what is, is. Ever got so involved in a video game that there is nothing else in your reality but the game? How do we really know what reality is when we are in it and can't see the proverbial forest from the trees?

Imagine you were actually inside a simulation program as a character on a planet called Earth. How would you perceive the world? Your programmed senses would be limited by the program, the version of reality that you are allowed to see. Eventually, the characters in this program come up with unforseen methods to break it and we would call that a bug that needs to be squashed. We are not in the matrix but apply this way of thinking that we can understand to the fabric of reality that we live in.

To really see how reality really is, we would have to "break" the universe in an attempt to perform the ultimate "oxp workaround". In finding out how reality really is we may find that we are simply incapable of perceiving it because we are part of it and limited by its laws.

[SandJ]

Pehaps in a few hundred years the conclusion will be reached that everything is based upon our perception of reality, how our thoughts and senses tell us what is, is.

I think you'd have enjoyed a chat with Plato 24 or 25 centuries in the past about realism.

[CommonSenseOTB]

Pehaps in a few hundred years the conclusion will be reached that everything is based upon our perception of reality, how our thoughts and senses tell us what is, is.

I think you'd have enjoyed a chat with Plato 24 or 25 centuries in the past about realism.

...

[Selezen]

I'm one of those sceptics who think that Einstein is overrated. OK, I'm not a physics major or anything, but I use logic and history to debunk science.

My learned(!) opinion is that there is NO speed limit in the universe. Any speed is attainable as long as you have the technology to GET to that speed. It's just the speed of light. Einstein's THEORY is just that. A theory. Supposition until proven true. Scientists said that the speed of sound would never be broken. Yaeger did it, and he didn't turn into a pile of goo or transport to the fifth dimension. Same will happen if the light "barrier" is broken, and people x hundreds of years hence will laugh at the scribblings of 20th century scientists and call them fools and heretics.

My overall feeling on this news is that I'm glad someone else has worked it out. Now, of course, I'm on the edge of being insufferably smug for being right all these years.

For your viewing pleasure, some "scientific facts" from through the centuries that are now laughable howlers:

The sun rotates around the earth
The earth is flat
The speed of sound will never be broken

Hmm.

[Disembodied]

Einstein's THEORY is just that. A theory. Supposition until proven true.

Hmm ... except you can't prove things true! Not if you're going to be scientific, anyway: all you can ever do is prove that a theory is wrong. The theory makes predictions; you test those predictions by experiment. If the experimental results differ from the theoretical predictions, then the theory is wrong.

Einstein's theories of relativity have made many predictions. So far, all those predictions have checked out. it's a really good theory. Eventually, though, we'll find things that are wrong with it – or ways to work around it, or bits that need refining. Science is, at best, an asymptotic approach to the truth, and a constant work in progress. There are a great many reasons for believing that Einstein's theories are correct (i.e. "correct to the limits of our abilities to test them"), and so far one dubious set of figures that don't quite fit – yet.

The speed of sound has never, I don't think, been believed to be an absolute limit. A technical and engineering challenge, maybe, but bullets, cannonballs, tips of whips, light and so on have all been travelling faster than sound for some time. The speed of light is a whole different ballgame. I'm no physics expert either, but I get the idea that, if you break that, then ideas like our notion of causality start to fall apart ... It's a biggie. This is not just some guy's opinion: there's a whole lot of stuff around Relativity that works, and has been shown to work: time dilation, for example. Einstein worked out that time stretches depending on how fast you're going ... he did that with a pencil and a few bits of paper! Then, decades later, when we'd invented jets fast enough and clocks accurate enough, we checked and good golly the man was spot on.

Personally, I think the likeliest explanation for the discrepancy is experimental error. The next most likely is that there's some unusual, probably quantum-jiggery-pokery process which will require a tweak to the theory. Way, way down the list is the idea that the theory is fundamentally wrong, to the same degree as notions of a geocentric universe or a flat earth.

[Selezen]

<does some reading>

B***** me, you're right! Sorry about that.

Something about relativity just feels...wrong. I think it's the inherent contradiction in that some people claim that time is constant and not relative, where others believe it to be relative.

Maybe it's all down to some kind of lensing effect - light is slower through media other than vacuum so maybe time is too... It might be possible to bend time through a prism of quartz.

Hmm.

[Disembodied]

The conclusion that the ability to move faster than light would bugger up causality, of course, isn't a guarantee that you can't go faster than light... straightforward acceleration seems to be out, given the whole mass-increase thing, but maybe there are ways around that ... it might be that our notions of causality need a swift kick up the behind. I'm a believer in the idea that we live in a rational universe, i.e. one which can be understood via rational processes – but I appreciate that this is often a very different thing from a universe which conforms to human notions of "common sense"!

Bending time is (relatively – ho ho ) easy: any mass will do. To speed up time, climb some stairs: the further you are from the earth's centre of mass, the faster time will go. If you took a pair of twins, and sent one of them upstairs, when they met up again the twin who'd gone upstairs would be older than the twin who'd stayed on the ground floor, by a gazillionth of a femtosecond – although they would both have experienced the same amount of time. It doesn't meet with ideas of "common sense' (not my common sense, anyway) but it is experimentally verifiable. You just have to have really accurate twins.

[CommonSenseOTB]

I have an idea for a workaround to the speed of light barrier. Feel free to shoot it down. What if you take a spaceship travelling 1kps below the speed of light and you head into a slingshot trajectory with a star like our sun. Gravity has the power to cross this barrier. Blackholes are an obvious example. In my example, you only need to add 1kps to your speed to be at the speed of light and 1kps more to be over it. So what would happen in this case? It is my theory that the light barrier is crossable with gravity providing the infinite energy needed to do so. Now, if we could find a way to project an artificial gravity well ahead of our ship then we would keep falling towards it and be able to acheive any speed we wanted. Relativity effects might make it a little tricky to control our trajectory as over the speed of light we would be outracing time and to us all would be going backwards. Perhaps all one needs to do is travel either just under or just over the speed of light. The first half of the trip across the galaxy takes a few hours to us as we are just under the speed of light. The last half of the trip also takes a few hours as we are just over the speed of light. The relative effects of going forward and then backward in time cancel out. We have now arrived at the other end of the galaxy at the same time we left it. If we can project a gravity well ahead of our ship then we probably can project a huge one. Massive accellerations can be given to the ship with no harm to the crew. It would appear as being weight less to use gravity to accellerate the ship and crew. This would make virtually instantaneous travel possible. Now that one can imagine a workaround the next step can be taken to figure out how to do it. My theory is that rotating superconductors are the key. At least as a gravity shield. Anecdotal observations from at least one scientist whose pipe smoke suddenly shot upwards when it passed over the rotating superconductor he was working on could be the starting point of a proper scientific investigation of this phenomina. If we can figure out how it works(if it does) then maybe we can find a way to project an artificial gravity well ahead of the ship as well making this idea possible.

Just a passing thought.

As for causality, I find we are all usually the cause of it.

[Disembodied]

OK, bearing in mind that my academic qualification was in Medieval History ... I don't think a slingshot would work because a gravitational slingshot doesn't get energy from gravity: it gets it from the angular momentum of the mass. When the Voyager probe got a speed boost from Jupiter, it did it by slowing Jupiter down. The mass difference between the probe and the planet meant that while the probe sped up significantly, the angular momentum of the planet dropped infinitesimally. So to get a slingshot to carry you faster than light, you'd need an object with infinite angular momentum ...

A Kzinti-style gravitational sled, where you project a gravitational field in front of the ship and perpetually fall towards it, veers into the science-fictional: even there, though, to exceed lightspeed you'd need to be able to project your gravitational field faster than the speed of light, otherwise you'd catch up with it. There's nothing more embarrassing, when you're lifting yourself by your own bootstraps, to catch up with your bootstraps in mid-air.

There's more mileage in bending spacetime, I think, as per an Alcubierre drive: for some more developed ideas (and, frankly, a much less ropy grasp of physics), see
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/fasterlight.php

[DaddyHoggy]

Einstein did actually carefully leave the door open on the old particles going faster than light thing - he suggested that it might be possible that particles at the time the Universe was created to already be going faster than the speed of light, but they can't be slowed down to sub-luminal speeds. And so we have the tachyon (Star Trek favourite for detecting anomalies in the spacetime continuum).

Perhaps the neutrinos in question are already going super-light and their detection is a side effect of the experiment which is releasing another undetected/undiscovered particle in the LHC collisions...

Given how many experiments I did and exam questions I answered on General and Special theories of relativity in my first degree - I would be somewhat miffed to discover that there may be a hole in the theory!

[CommonSenseOTB]

OK, bearing in mind that my academic qualification was in Medieval History ... I don't think a slingshot would work because a gravitational slingshot doesn't get energy from gravity: it gets it from the angular momentum of the mass. When the Voyager probe got a speed boost from Jupiter, it did it by slowing Jupiter down. The mass difference between the probe and the planet meant that while the probe sped up significantly, the angular momentum of the planet dropped infinitesimally. So to get a slingshot to carry you faster than light, you'd need an object with infinite angular momentum ...

A Kzinti-style gravitational sled, where you project a gravitational field in front of the ship and perpetually fall towards it, veers into the science-fictional: even there, though, to exceed lightspeed you'd need to be able to project your gravitational field faster than the speed of light, otherwise you'd catch up with it. There's nothing more embarrassing, when you're lifting yourself by your own bootstraps, to catch up with your bootstraps in mid-air.

There's more mileage in bending spacetime, I think, as per an Alcubierre drive: for some more developed ideas (and, frankly, a much less ropy grasp of physics), see
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/fasterlight.php

No fakedrives, just using gravity(which I believe is infinitely powerful) to pull the ship across the threshold of the speed of light. Are you saying that an object moving at the earth's escape velocity and moving towards it won't at any point have a velocity greater than the earth's escape velocity? My example was only to show that breaking the "light barrier" might be possible, if only for a brief moment. And if that's possible then a workaround could be found, eventually. Until we try, how can we know? Now, if only there were a way to break the "thought barrier" entrenched in nearly all learned men. I leave you with some words of wisdom from the master.

http://youtu.be/FDezrybpuO8

[ClymAngus]

He did do a lot. Let us remember he went to his death bed still trying to unify the quantum world with classical physics. A bringer of absolute truth is a god and gods are worshipped as infallible. They also tend to be strangely silent, after an early plethora of publishing.

A scientist presents explanations of phenomena, (usually through the medium of mathematics) that can be rigorously tested (ie repeated). At any point they can be contradicted but those contradictions need to be proven through observation and (eventually) experiment that produces observable results that support the conflicting explanation over the existing one.

Usually this process generates more questions that it solves.

Be sceptical of everyone, BUT the onus is on you to prove that scepticism with a adequate experiment. There is a problem however; humans. We are imperfect creatures trying to conduct an art that is partially beyond us, we don't have the senses, intelligence, will or dedication for it. But still we try.

I have confidence that we will evolve better abilities to conduct scientific endeavour. We are taking our first ponderous steps out of the warm pools of ignorance onto the shores of reason.

I'm one of those sceptics who think that Einstein is overrated. OK, I'm not a physics major or anything, but I use logic and history to debunk science.

My learned(!) opinion is that there is NO speed limit in the universe. Any speed is attainable as long as you have the technology to GET to that speed. It's just the speed of light. Einstein's THEORY is just that. A theory. Supposition until proven true. Scientists said that the speed of sound would never be broken. Yaeger did it, and he didn't turn into a pile of goo or transport to the fifth dimension. Same will happen if the light "barrier" is broken, and people x hundreds of years hence will laugh at the scribblings of 20th century scientists and call them fools and heretics.

My overall feeling on this news is that I'm glad someone else has worked it out. Now, of course, I'm on the edge of being insufferably smug for being right all these years.

For your viewing pleasure, some "scientific facts" from through the centuries that are now laughable howlers:

The sun rotates around the earth
The earth is flat
The speed of sound will never be broken

Hmm.

[Commander Trigg]

The theory of relativity states that as you get closer to the speed of light, the amount of energy required to accelerate increases exponentially, so to reach the speed of light you would need an infinite amount of energy. However, since it has been established that time is elastic, it may be possible for an object travelling at near-light speed to appear to be travelling faster than light to an observer.

Another possibility is that, since space time is curved an object could "short-cut" across the curve so that, although it remains under C, it appears to reach it's destination at FTL speeds.

[Eric Walch]

Einstein's theories of relativity have made many predictions. So far, all those predictions have checked out. it's a really good theory. Eventually, though, we'll find things that are wrong with it – or ways to work around it, or bits that need refining. Science is, at best, an asymptotic approach to the truth, and a constant work in progress. There are a great many reasons for believing that Einstein's theories are correct (i.e. "correct to the limits of our abilities to test them"), and so far one dubious set of figures that don't quite fit – yet.

Problem with Einstein's theory is that its based on Newtons work. And newton based his observations on an apple tree and apples falling straight down. But, is that true?

My neighbor has a walnut tree in his garden that is at least 50 meters from our border. Still, I found several walnuts in my garden over the past days. They shouldn't be there when Newton was right and apples fall always straight down. Walnuts are not apples, but Newtons theory is wrong here from my personal observation. I think it was the fifth walnut I found out of place today. Maybe Heisenberg can help me here, but 5 walnuts out of place, when one would already be extreme unlikely?

Anyhow, this is more puzzling that neutrinos arriving a few femto-seconds to early.