What would happen if...
Lara Blake
This way, Einstein doesn't have a say here, and we could accelerate the
craft past the speed of light. (Or even if you couldn't, let's just say
the nullified craft is traveling FTL) Now if you were to suddenly
'un-nullify' the craft while it was traveling, at say, 3x c, (Where it
would regain it's mass) What would happen?
Would it keep traveling FTL, unable to go slower than c. (Like the
tachyon (If it exists) which is 'born' traveling FTL.
Blow up? Go back in time? Just curious.
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
Bilge
What would happen if... to usenet:
>Say you could nullify matter. It would be, for all purposes, massless.
> This way, Einstein doesn't have a say here, and we could accelerate the
>craft past the speed of light. (Or even if you couldn't, let's just say
Lara Blake
traveling FTL.
pusch
> In article <slrn8no1n...@radioactivex.lebesque-al.net>,
> dav...@david15.dallas.nationwide.net wrote:
>> Lara Blake said some stuff about
>> What would happen if... to usenet:
>>> Say you could nullify matter. It would be, for all purposes, massless.
>>> This way, Einstein doesn't have a say here, and we could accelerate the
>>> craft past the speed of light.
>>
>> Massless objects don't exceed the speed of light either.
>>
> Why not? And besides, I asked what if it regained it's mass while
> traveling FTL.
According to Einstein, Massless objects move at =EXACTLY= the speed of light:
no faster, and no slower. An example of a particle which is believed to be
massless is the photon --- i.e., a ``quantum of light'' --- which is believed
to always move at the speed of light when it is in a vacuum.
To move ``faster than light'' in un-warped space, one needs to have an
=IMAGINARY= proper mass, not a vanishing proper mass: Such particles are
called ``tachyons,'' and were first postulated by the physicists Gerald
Feinberg and E.C.G. Sudarshan over 30 years ago. They have never been
observed, and most physicists believe they can't exist, since they would
lead to serious problems with both causality and theromodynamics.
[BTW, even if tachyons *do* exist, they would not behave ANYTHING AT ALL
like their fictional counterparts on _Star Trek (tm)_...]
As for the second half of your question, is is something like asking
``What is North of the North Pole?,'' or ``Is it possible to create
a perfectly spherical cube?'' In the Universe we believe we live in,
such a question is a ``meaningless noise,'' because it is a string of words
forming a sentence that, while grammatical, describes something physicists
believe is physically impossible according to our current understanding
of the Universe.
-- Gordon D. Pusch
perl -e '$_ = "gdpusch\@NO.xnet.SPAM.com\n"; s/NO\.//; s/SPAM\.//; print;'
Jet Thomas
> dav...@david15.dallas.nationwide.net wrote:
>> Lara Blake said some stuff about
>> >Say you could nullify matter. It would be, for all purposes,
>> >massless.
>> >This way, Einstein doesn't have a say here, and we could accelerate
>> >the craft past the speed of light. (Or even if you couldn't, let's just
>> >say
>> Massless objects don't exceed the speed of light either.
>Why not? And besides, I asked what if it regained it's mass while
>traveling FTL.
I'll join in here. We don't know of any massless objects that exceed
lightspeed, and some theories predict that there shouldn't be any such
thing.
But that doesn't have anything to do with you. Once we say that you can
nullify matter so it's massless, and then we say that we can accelerate
massless matter past lightspeed, and then we say we can make it regain its
mass while it's going FTL, then from that point the sky's the limit. We can
say that if you look at massless matter while it's FTL it will look like
it's covered with green polka-dots, and if it gets its mass back while it's
in green-polkadot space it turns into a black hole -- only if it's too small
to be a stable black hole it then explodes, turning most of its mass into
cosmic rays but leaving some of it as fast neutrons and high-energy
particles.
So the military will be interested, if they can make it small enough they
can have FTL rocket-propelled-grenades that put out a *lot* of shock.
And if they can make something go back-and-forth quick enough, it's like
it's standing still but it still has all the advantages of going FTL, and if
you shoot at it and hit it it's likely to make such a big bang that you'll
wish you hadn't. So then they can put green polkadots on all the tanks etc
as a warning not to shoot at them.
Cool.
Bilge
>In article <slrn8no1n...@radioactivex.lebesque-al.net>,
>massless.
>> > This way, Einstein doesn't have a say here, and we could accelerate
>the
>> >craft past the speed of light. (Or even if you couldn't, let's just
>say
>>
>> Massless objects don't exceed the speed of light either.
>>
>>
>Why not? And besides, I asked what if it regained it's mass while
>traveling FTL.
>
Essentially, because the velocity of light is the same for every
observer and inorder for all observers to see something move at
the same velocity, regardless of their own motion, that object
must have no rest mass. It also can't exceed that velocity. However,
there is a perfectly allowable phenomeonon that occurs when particles
travelling very fast in vacuum enter a material which has a lower
value of c than vacuum and which the particle exceeds. It's called
cerekov radiation. It's responsible for the blue glow around a
reactor core sitting in cooling water.
Unfortunately, people won't beaming up any time real soon.
Gordon D. Pusch
> The reason I was wondering is because of the recent work of Dr. Fran De
> Aquino. There's alot of his work, and someone in the process of
> recreating it, at
>
> http://members.aol.com/jnaudin509/systemg/index.html
Both de Aquino and Jean-Louis Naudin are considered to be crackpots by
most of the physics community. I have read de Aquino's paper, and in
my considered professional opinion, it is gibberish: He starts from an
approximate formula applicable only in a certain limit, and apply it
to a situation that VIOLATES the limit for which said approximation
was derived --- of COURSE he gets nonsensical results !!!
I have not yet decided whether Naudin is just sincerely deluded or
an out-and-out fraud, but there is =NO= question in my mind that his
``aether electrohydrodynamics'' is dead wrong. Several experiments
Naudin claims positive results for (in particular, his claim of positive
results for the Trouton-Nobel experiment) have been performed to =MUCH=
greater precision than he could POSSIBLY achieve using his cobbled-together
styrofoam-and-tinfoil apparatii --- and the results of these experiments
have =ALWAYS= been negative, not positive. I have no reason to believe
Naudin has seen something that NO ONE ELSE can manage to observe, despite
using =MUCH= better equipment. (His belief in UFOs and ``overunity devices''
does not help the credibility of his case, either...)
> One of the pharagraphs caught my eye:
>
> Furthermore, due to the "cloud" of photons around the spacecraft its
> gravitational interaction with the Universe will be null, and therefore,
> we can say that its gravitational mass will be null with respect to the
> Universe. Consequently, the inertial forces upon the spacecraft will
> also be null, in agreement with Mach’s principle. This means that the
> spacecraft will lose its inertial properties. In addition, the
> spacecraft will/can reach and even surpass the speed of light because,
> as we have seen, a particle with null gravitational mass will be not
> submitted to the relativistic effects.
The above is a perfect example of the sort of gibberish I was talking about.
Gravitation and mass have =NOTHING= to do with ``clouds of photons.''
> He also has an ELF producing device, (when in the proper medium) has
> been shown to lose it's weight.
Excuse me: Which Naudin *claims* loses its weight. Since I consider it
highly likely Naudin is either deluded and seeing things which aren't
there, or worse, committing out-and-out falsification of his ``results''
(albeit perhaps motivated by ``sincere personal belief'' rather than
expectations of personal gain), I can't take =ANY= of his claims seriously
without independent confirmation from someone who does _not_ personally
believe in UFOs and ``overunity devices''...
Lara Blake
Aquino. There's alot of his work, and someone in the process of
recreating it, at
http://members.aol.com/jnaudin509/systemg/index.html
One of the pharagraphs caught my eye:
Furthermore, due to the "cloud" of photons around the spacecraft its
gravitational interaction with the Universe will be null, and therefore,
we can say that its gravitational mass will be null with respect to the
Universe. Consequently, the inertial forces upon the spacecraft will
also be null, in agreement with Mach’s principle.This means that the
spacecraft will lose its inertial properties . In addition, the
spacecraft will/can reach and even surpass the speed of light because,
as we have seen , a particle with null gravitational mass will be not
submitted to the relativistic effects.
______
He also has an ELF producing device, (when in the proper medium) has
been shown to lose it's weight. The reason I was asking is because I
think I found away to greatly improve the device, and I was wondering
what some of the properties of the craft would be, in respect to FTL
travel. Even if it can't travel at such a great velocity, however, I
think the device will still revolutionize space travel.
Bilge
Re: What would happen if... to usenet:
>Aquino. There's alot of his work, and someone in the process of
>recreating it, at
>
>http://members.aol.com/jnaudin509/systemg/index.html
>
an attorney before donating your bank book to (what may be
loosely called) science (by at least one person on this planet).
>One of the pharagraphs caught my eye:
>
>Furthermore, due to the "cloud" of photons around the spacecraft its
>gravitational interaction with the Universe will be null, and therefore,
>we can say that its gravitational mass will be null with respect to the
It's possible to do lots of things with a textbook, paper shredder,
scanner and tricky enough software.
>He also has an ELF producing device, (when in the proper medium) has
>been shown to lose it's weight. The reason I was asking is because I
Can they afford to lose weighht? ELVes are already pretty small.
>think I found away to greatly improve the device, and I was wondering
>what some of the properties of the craft would be, in respect to FTL
>travel. Even if it can't travel at such a great velocity, however, I
>think the device will still revolutionize space travel.
>
Deja vu! You aren't by any chance related to someone named ryan are
you? This has the same familiar ring of "I'll have a quantum field
theory of everything, but could someone help out with what they mean
by wavefunction", to it. In otherwords, if you have solved such a
problem, you already know the anwer to your question, because otherwise,
you couldn't proceed.
Mark Fergerson
>
> Say you could nullify matter. It would be, for all purposes, massless.
Congratulations! You've just rediscovered the Bergenholm! See E. E.
"Doc" Smith's Galactic Patrol Books (ancient SF). When Einstein
demonstrated mathematically that matter couldn't get to c, many SF
authors "invented" ways around the problem. Nullifying inertia is a
fine story device, except it would interfere rather drastically with
life processes, among other things.
> This way, Einstein doesn't have a say here, and we could accelerate the
> craft past the speed of light. (Or even if you couldn't, let's just say
> the nullified craft is traveling FTL) Now if you were to suddenly
> 'un-nullify' the craft while it was traveling, at say, 3x c, (Where it
> would regain it's mass) What would happen?
No, you can't get past c. You probably can't get _to_ c either,
because you don't "turn off" properties of matter in the real world
the way theoretical physicists do in gedankenexperiments. Such a thing
in RL would probably cancel only part of the inertia of matter, giving
you much better thrust-to-weight.
Smith's interpretation of such a device is that it "stores" the
inertial component of the ship's mass somewhere when you turn it on
(go free), and dumps it back when you turn it off (go inert) (Smith's
terminology).
> Would it keep traveling FTL, unable to go slower than c. (Like the
> tachyon (If it exists) which is 'born' traveling FTL.
Nullifying inertia doesn't get you past c. You must determine what
differentiates tachyons from bradyons (STL matter) and do a total
instantaneous conversion. Your craft's state should thus be stable
against power loss. You'd be in deep doodoo, though, if you couldn't
reconvert.
Mark L. Fergerson