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How fast do quantum interactions happen? Faster than light, 10,000 times faster.
That's what a team of physicists led by Juan Yin at the University of Science and Technology of China in Shanghai found in an experiment involving entangled photons, or photons that remain intimately connected, even when separated by vast distances.They wanted to see what would happen if you tried assigning a speed to what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance."
if the sun were to blink out of existence in a picosecond,
and light from the sun takes 8 minutes to reach earth,
then the earth would continue to orbit the missing sun for 8 mins untill the light stopped at which point the earth would leave its orbit.
SR differs from LR by having two very general postulates. This first postulate of SR makes the Lorentz transformations reciprocal in that theory; i.e., they work equally well from any inertial frame to any other, and back again. So it has no meaning to ask which of two identical clocks in different frames is ticking slower in any absolute sense. The speed of light is independent of the speed of its source, as is generally true for waves in any medium. But the second postulate of SR makes the speed of light also independent of the speed of the observer, a feature unique to SR. In LR, neither inertial frame reciprocity nor the speed of light postulate holds.
Today, many physicists and students of physics have acquired the impression that these two SR postulates have been confirmed by observations. However, that is not the case. In fact, none of the eleven independent experiments verifying some aspect of SR [[iii]] is able to verify either postulate. Indeed, no experiment is capable of verifying these postulates even in principle [[iv]] because they become automatically true by convention if one adopts the Einstein clock-synchronization method, and they become just as automatically false if one adopts a different synchronization convention such as the “universal time” postulate of Lorentz. Of interest here is the point that the Global Positioning System (GPS) uses the latter synchronization convention for pragmatic reasons.
your description here at the end is rather billiard-balls deterministic. but we know that the state function of a quantum system changes instantaneously across the whole system.
is there some characteristic of the solar system that merits a quantum theoretic description? gravity, you say? why? what would the consequences of quantum gravity be?
what is the functional difference between 10000x faster than light and instantaneous?
interesting thoughts, bro.
Originally posted by PhoenixOD
The main problem with your thinking is that you are thinking about gravity like it was a force of attraction in the way that magnetism is. Im not saying you are confusing the two but its clear you are thinking about gravity as if it was some kind of linear attraction force.
Gravity bends space and time , thats 4 dimensions. It distorts spacetime in a way that doesnt so much pull something as restricts its possible movements through 3 dimensions in relation to the energy of its own mass and movement.
There is no simple pulling an object from point A to B like your thought experiment describes.
Originally posted by winofiend
I don't think we'll ever really understand the weak force of gravity.
I mean, it affect things as large as planets and suns, as far out as Pluto (whatever it may be now) and beyond, yet it does not crush us on the earth, into smithereens if we jump up and down. It is that strong that it keeps the entire solar system in an orbit, yet not strong enough to decimate everything into atoms. Even the Sun is simply a part of the bigger swirling orbit. and right down to atoms.
It's a thought experiment to ponder if the sun were to blink out, how things would happen. I don't really agree that it would take 8 minutes for gravity to release. I would think it would release instantly, but the light would still take 8 minutes to reach us, plus the time added as we drift away.
I consider gravity to be like a fluid. But it exists outside of our perception. We only feel the effects of it, and can never actually measure it, itself. Like feeling the warmth of the sunlight on the inner wall of your house, if all you ever knew was the inside of that house.
The speed of light "in a vacuum" is a constant. Obviously it can be affected by things. We've slowed light down to see individual photons moving, giving way to innovative new theories for data transfer.
This is one topic that is so open ended in my mind it is easy to get lost in the what ifs... I wish I'd studied more as a youth. But then, I wonder if I would find it all so fascinating if I had. I know 99.99999% of the things I ponder are ignorance blessed with curiosity, so I can only ever wonder..
But I just feel that there is a fundamental law that we simply cannot discover in this state. We're not equipped with the cognitive ability to comprehend it because we've evolved in this environment. We can think really really hard and get no where but frustrated. At least in my case. No wonder people throw their hands in the air and just go "god."
Originally posted by PhoenixOD
reply to post by XPLodER
But again you seem to be imagining gravity as a linear attraction force rather than a distortion of a 3 dimensional matrix. Its not simply like a tow rope joining us to the object we are orbiting.
Originally posted by wtbengineer
reply to post by XPLodER
The premise of your experiment is what makes it so implausible and incomprehensble for most people. Of course, the sun cannot "wink out" in a picosecond. The sun's mass would take a defineable time to dissappear from its spot in space. That's the problem with this exercise, you can't start out with an impossible scenario. You can do the math, but it won't make sense in the real world.
But I agree that the affects of gravity would be felt instantaneously rather than being delayed by a travelling wave (or particle, or combination of both as we understand light to travel).
The consequence of this is that static fields (either electric or gravitational) always point directly to the actual position of the bodies that they are connected to, without any delay that is due to any "signal" traveling (or propagating) from the charge, over a distance to an observer. This remains true if the charged bodies and their observers are made to "move" (or not), by simply changing reference frames. This fact sometimes causes confusion about the "speed" of such static fields, which sometimes appear to change infinitely quickly when the changes in the field are mere artifacts of the motion of the observer, or of observation.
In such cases, nothing actually changes infinitely quickly, save the point of view of an observer of the field. For example, when an observer begins to move with respect to a static field that already extends over light years, it appears as though "immediately" the entire field, along with its source, has begun moving at the speed of the observer. This, of course, includes the extended parts of the field. However, this "change" in the apparent behavior of the field source, along with its distant field, does not represent any sort of propagation that is faster than light.
We know this all works out because this is the physics that we use to send rockets into space and get probes to land on other planets. If any of it was wrong we would not be able to navigate Cassini , send satellites into space or get the Mars lander to the red planet with amazing accuracy etc..
You can always tell its a public holiday when someone thinks that Einstein was wrong with relativity or the speed of light. Its almost like clock work..i call it spooky theories on a day off
For example in GPS, all atomic clocks aboard satellites with a variety of orbital planes, and all atomic clocks all over the rotating Earth, are all synchronized with one another, and remain synchronized, despite being in many different inertial frames. This appears to be a practical realization of Lorentz’s universal time. But SR points out that the clocks had to be adjusted in rate to achieve this synchronization, and that the measured speed of light is then not constant in frames other than the local gravitational potential field. If the two postulates of SR are adhered to, the clocks must be reset in rate and adjusted in their initial time setting so that the speed of light is measured to be the same in all frames. Then the clocks in all frames would behave just as predicted by SR, albeit at the cost of adding considerable complexity to the system. Every satellite-receiver pair would have unique and time-variable clock corrections. That is avoided in GPS by synchronizing each clock (in epoch and rate) to an imaginary, moment-by-moment co-located clock always at rest in the local gravitational potential field, the Earth-centered inertial frame. But that is precisely what LR specifies as the method of synchronizing to Lorentzian universal time.
You can always tell its a public holiday when someone thinks that Einstein was wrong with relativity or the speed of light. Its almost like clock work..i call it spooky theories on a day off
Fact: Gravity Has No Aberration
1. The effect of aberration on orbits is not seen
As viewed from the Earth’s frame, light from the Sun has aberration. Light requires about 8.3 minutes to arrive from the Sun, during which time the Sun seems to move through an angle of 20 arc seconds. The arriving sunlight shows us where the Sun was 8.3 minutes ago. The true, instantaneous position of the Sun is about 20 arc seconds east of its visible position, and we will see the Sun in its true present position about 8.3 minutes into the future. In the same way, star positions are displaced from their yearly average position by up to 20 arc seconds, depending on the relative direction of the Earth’s motion around the Sun. This well-known phenomenon is classical aberration, and was discovered by the astronomer Bradley in 1728.
Orbit computations must use true, instantaneous positions of all masses when computing accelerations due to gravity for the reason given by Eddington. When orbits are complete, the visible position of any mass can be computed by allowing for the delay of light traveling from that mass to Earth. This difference between true and apparent positions of bodies is not merely an optical illusion, but is a physical difference due to transit delay that can alter an observer’s momentum. For example, small bodies such as dust particles in circular orbit around the Sun experience a mostly radial force due to the radiation pressure of sunlight. But because of the finite speed of light, a portion of that radial force acts in a transverse direction, like a drag, slowing the orbital speed of the dust particles and causing them to eventually spiral into the Sun. This phenomenon is known as the Poynting-Robertson effect.
If gravity were a simple force that propagated outward from the Sun at the speed of light, as radiation pressure does, its mostly radial effect would also have a small transverse component because of the motion of the target. Analogous to the Poynting-Robertson effect, the magnitude of that tangential force acting on the Earth would be 0.0001 of the Sun’s radial force, which is the ratio of the Earth’s orbital speed (30 km/s) to the speed of this hypothetical force of gravity moving at light-speed (300,000 km/s). It would act continuously, but would tend to speed the Earth up rather than slow it down because gravity is attractive and radiation pressure is repulsive. Nonetheless, the net effect of such a force would be to double the Earth’s distance from the Sun in 1200 years. There can be no doubt from astronomical observations that no such force is acting. The computation using the instantaneous positions of Sun and Earth is the correct one. The computation using retarded positions is in conflict with observations. From the absence of such an effect, Laplace set a lower limit to the speed of propagation of classical gravity of about 108 c, where c is the speed of light
Originally posted by Bleeeeep
reply to post by XPLodER
I'm starting to think that what we see as chemical reactions, subatomic particle movement, and everything, is nothing more than energy's reaction to information; Information that is, itself, instant/from the future.
Think like super strings have an ability to change appearance of top level matter, based on their vibration; which is based on their received information; but the strings don't actually change location or form, themselves.
Or think of it like a 3d block of pixels, and information is instant, but the reaction, and speed of reaction, in each pixel, is what makes time, gravity, chemical reactions, and everything - and the changes we see aren't because the pixels are moving, but because they are changing their appearance.
Sort of like saying matter doesn't really move, it only changes it's perceived shape.
tbh I think God is messing with us because we've become too arrogant. What we thought we knew of reality is just coming completely undone.
quantum entanglement and wave collapse function are like