E=mc²? I think not. Theories must be re-written!! Must Read.

Check out this video. Lots of good information from matter being created from light to "free enegry". Could this be the cause of the next 9/11?

Secret of the Universe discovered!

I'd take a look at the parallax data before jumping to the conclusion that we don't know how far away some stars are.

Its true that for distant objects we make many measurements that rely on many models, including hydrogen column models, standard stellar luminosity models, etc, and so distances of distant stars in our galaxy are relatively inaccurate. (Although some astronomers will get mad at that assertion, they have to admit how many variables are in their calculations when they teach a class on astrometrics.)

But to my knowledge we have an excellent grasp of distance to our nearest neighbor stars where parallax and pure geometry can be applied. We just observe the stars at 6 month intervals, and use our our planets revolution about the sun to obtain the required parallax.

In general, space-time warp is minor enough that you can use plain old cartesian geometry to get the distance to the object. You can repeat the measurements every year to get finer and finer data.

Obviously, if space time between us and stars is far more complex than we imagine, then all bets are off, but we would need some evidence of that. Everything we see in the near universe appears fairly flat. That is, observed light wavelengths of nearby space stars seem to match with standard stellar thermodynamic models, with molecular absorption patters in the stars showing up at appropriate wavelengths to suggest there isn't any amazing light bending going on between those stars and our own.

Once distance increases you get the hubble constant red-shifting everything, and to me, that is where we can start to talk about how theory is just tentative.

As for the distant universe, I wouldn't even hazard a guess. Standard cosmology may be about to experience a paradigm shift.

I'm not here to shut down your thinking. On the contrary, I'd prefer if you keep it up. Just trying to provide an honest perspective.

[edit on 31-8-2007 by Ectoterrestrial]

Blue bird, the problem with your quote about the moon traveling faster than light is that your frame of reference isn't just what you can see. Your frame of reference is your location and your velocity. And I'm not so sure about that whole thing with a lamp either. Since technically a shadow is merely a dark area on a brighter surface, I'm not entirely sure you can say that it's a violation of relativity, since a shadow isn't actually anything.

Originally posted by ZikhaN

Um, what is that???

The ring of light that occurs around the black hole is called an "event horizon" It is the point at which light rather than bending around the hole actually begins to orbit the hole. Light that comes closer to the hole than the event horizon will be sucked into the hole and thereby increase its pointal mass. Orbiting light will, over a period of time, be pulled into the hole or dissapate into the universe. It is said that if one could stand at the event horizon and look out into the orbital plane with a powerful telescope, one would see the back of their own head. Of course the massive gravity flux makes this impossible.

Sri Oracle

Well, light is an always has been a mystery. They argued whether light was a particle or a wave for how long, only to come to the conclusion that it is both. Okay...

Light travels what, 186,000 miles per second? That is pretty fast. As far as measuring the distance of stars from earth and what not, from my understanding, most of the stars that we view in the sky have been "dead" for thousands of years. All we are seeing is the light that once issued from them.

reply to post by lonemaverick



A lot of experiments are done with light spots, shadows and the laser pointed at the moon - but, as was said in the link - there is no physical information/energy transmission and hence the speed of light in vacuum is not broken, no violation of Einstein Theory of special relativity.

If you shine a light on your moving hand, its shadow on a distant wall can move at a velocity greater than the hand itself. If you move the wall farther away and tilt it obliquely the shadow will move much much faster. The speed of light is not a limitation for such moving shadows. Indeed, faster than light motion is a rather common phenomenon yet is not a violation of relativity since mass/energy itself is not also moving at that speed. Therefore non-material points or features that do not transport energy are exempt from relativity’s prohibition. This is called the “motion of effects” (Steinberg, 2000) which includes other events like the moving point of intersection of a closing pair of scissors and a moving spot of laser light projected from the earth to the moon. In all of these examples there is no discrete object that is moving at that speed. There is no way to encode information in the speedy spot of light and there are no photons that are traveling greater than the speed of light as well. The same is true for the bizarre features of light in the cesium experiment. Wang and his colleagues themselves agree that fundamental laws of physics are not being overturned by their research.

reply to post by Ectoterrestrial


Well said, and very true. Just wanted to say that, the rest of my post is unrelated.

Special relativity is a house of cards, take a look into the history of it and consider the knowledge of the cosmos at the time, he was only talking about our galaxy because that was thought to be the extent of the universe.
Einstein began with aether then threw it out, although unproven, with it special relativity fails. The presence of any prevailing field would render it obsolete, magnetic fields could be considered currents or vortices within the ether, space is filled with magnetic fields.
More and more researchers are reconsidering the aether, after all what is exactly waving in an electromagnetic wave?
I think the idea of an aether is more logical than the concept of space time or space fabric.

Also can special relativity live with quantum entanglement or as Einstein says, spooky action at a distance?

Here's a another good link about some problems with special relativity and a little history.
What's Wrong With Relativity?

While we officially can't say it is false, their are considerable cracks emerging. It's only a matter of time.

Originally posted by Electro38
Sorry if this might be slightly off topic. Can gravity bend time (or slow time)?

If so, since speed is dependent on time, couldn't the speed of any partical be influenced by gravity? Light is made of particals (quanta), so then couldn't the speed of light be influenced by gravity, hence in a vacuum such as space?

I don't study physics, maybe some of my assumptions are completely wrong, that's why I add the questions marks, I really don't know.

Here's something I found interesting:
www.geocities.com...

[edit on 31-8-2007 by Electro38]

Can gravity bend time? I'm not sure what you mean by bend, but gravity DOES slow the passage of time, relative to another observer. So, for instance, if you were falling towards a black hole of 1,000,000x the mass of our sun (which would be huge), what would happen to you? Normally a black hole's tidal forces would stretch you out, which is called "spaghetification" (not related to Pastafarianism). Your body would literally be pulled apart, into a long string-like tube of biological-waste. What a horrible fate it would be, for every nanometer of your body to be ripped apart . Fortunate for us, I made the black hole super-massive, so the tidal forces' wont spaghetify you.

The closer you got to the event horizon, which is the point where not even light can escape a black hole, you would see the universe speed up, more and more. In fact, if you could sit a few inches away from the event horizon, you would see the universe kick into hyperdrive, as galaxies collide, stars burn out, new stars begin burning, and they too burn out -- all in the blink of an eye. If you spent a day just above the event horizon, you could watch the entire universe fade out of existence (At least that's how the universe is envisioned to exist after trillions of years).


To answer your follow up question, speed is not dependent on time.

You're correct, gravity does influence every particle.
Just how much it influences that particle depends on the mass involved, and how close it is to the mass' center. The relationship is actually logarithmic, meaning that as you move away from a massive body, the effect gravity has on you decreases exponentially.

Light is both a wave and a particle. In fact, so are electrons, protons, neutrons, even whole atoms. That is beside the point.
(This has been experimentally confirmed)

Is light affected by gravity? YES. Although it does not slow down or speed up, it instead packs-on and sheds energy. To clarify: As a photon moves towards a gravitational field, the amount of energy that photon carries increases (This is represented by the photons frequency. The amount of energy in a photon is determined by its frequency. The higher the frequency, the more energy. The less energy, the lower the frequency.) As a photon moves away from a gravitational source, it loses that energy.
(This has been experimentally confirmed)

Gravity is thought to be the curvature of space-time, which, may sound crazy, but a direct result of this notion is gravitational lensing, whereby a photon will bend around a massive, gravitational object, such as our sun.
(This has been experimentally confirmed)

In summery:
Time is relative, it can slow down or speed up. It is important to know, however, that TO YOU, time does not change. Time will always seem to pass at the exact same "speed" for you, at all times.
Gravity affects the energy a photon has, depending on whether that photon is moving towards, or away from, a gravitational source. It has no affect on the photons speed, however.
Gravity also causes light's path to bend, following the topology of space-time.

I hope this helps

Originally posted by squiz
Einstein began with aether then threw it out, although unproven, with it special relativity fails. The presence of any prevailing field would render it obsolete, magnetic fields could be considered currents or vortices within the ether, space is filled with magnetic fields.
More and more researchers are reconsidering the aether, after all what is exactly waving in an electromagnetic wave?
I think the idea of an aether is more logical than the concept of space time or space fabric.

Michelson - Morley experiment which has been repeated many times ( also with updated equipment and variable): NO aether was found!



Legend:

A: the theory agrees with experimental results
D: the theory disagrees with experimental results
N: the theory is not applicable to the experiment

1: Aberration, 2: Fizeau convection coefficient; 3: Michelson-Morley; 4: Kennedy-Thorndike; 5: Moving sources and mirrors; 6: De Sitter spectroscopic binaries; 7: Michelson-Morley, using sunlight
8: Variation of mass with velocity; 9: General Mass-Energy equivalence; 10: Radiation from moving charges; 11: Muon decay at high velocity; 12: Trouton-Noble; 13: Unipolar induction, using moving magnet.
Experimental Support for Einstein's Theory

Also, I am not aware that GPS instruments have detected any anisotropy in the speed of light.

Originally posted by blue bird
Michelson - Morley experiment which has been repeated many times ( also with updated equipment and variable): NO aether was found!

You don't say! well I did say it was unproven, kind of funny when you consider the amount of money spent looking for dark matter, the only difference is that the dark matter fairy dust is used in the math for the current model without a shred of proof, it's taught and spoken about like it's a reality.
How did dark matter come about? well Einstein's field equations didn't add up, they needed to put a + something or other on the end to make it work, just happened to be about + 96%, the fudge factor of galactic proportions.

Any proof for a fabric of space?

Don't right off the Michelson, Morley experiments so fast.

Latest Miller Ether Light Speed experiment

The developments reported herein hae enormous significance for fundamental physics - essentially the whole paradigm of 20th century physics collapses."

Sagnac and Michelson - Gale - Pearson experiments
www.evert.de...

Also, I am not aware that GPS instruments have detected any anisotropy in the speed of light.

Years after Einstein’s death, decision is still in favour of Sagnac and the absolute nature of rotation. When satellite clocks are synchronized, corrections are made using speed of light either greater or less than c. And today spaceships, satellites and airplanes all carry Laser-ring-gyroscopes that use the non-relativistic Sagnac effect to tell the speed between the plane and the rotating Earth, with accuracies down to nanoseconds

blog.hasslberger.com...

So no lightspeed is not constant. As I've tried to say several times.



[edit on 3-9-2007 by squiz]

It is well known that light can be slowed. Einstein's equation makes reference to the speed of light in a vacuum. The point of e=mc2 is that c represents a sort of cosmic speed limit for any object in the universe, and light in a vacuum happens to travel at that speed. Today this is understood to express a sort of cosmic speed limit for any information-bearing transmission.

Phenomena such as quantum tunneling which seem to violate this cosmic speed limit are actually predicated on a different set of physical assumptions. Einstein's theory was very much in keeping with Classical mechanics, which holds locality, causality, and determinism. In quantum mechanics, subatomic particles aren't individual and differentiable in the same way that Einstein described.

Is there any links (unles sI missed them) on that whole shadows move faster than light explanation? Right now its not passing my giggle filter, since especially with the oblique wall part, all I'm seeing here is that you're playing with angles and optical illusions, especially if you're talking about a fixed light source.

or am I misinterpreting something here?

great post!

physics theories are exactly that... theories that are not proven. For example, some people believe aliens have not visited earth because it would be impractical for a civilization to travel great distances to get here. Well.. what if it is possible to bend space-time shortening the distance? What if the distance is actually shorter than we think it is? How do we even know that the current physics theories are correct?

Another thing to remember is that our scientific theories are based on calculations and observations from our 5 senses. We can't actuallly see true reality with our eyes because everything we 'see' is just a visual interpretation of electrical signals recieved by our brain. Maybe true reality is different than what the human eye perceives it to be. In fact, we can't even prove that we exist because we could be living in a simulated universe... (there is actually some plausability to the movie, The Matrix)


[edit on 4-9-2007 by curiousbeliever]

Originally posted by curiousbeliever
In fact, we can't even prove that we exist because we could be living in a simulated universe... (there is actually some plausability to the movie, The Matrix)

To quote Rene Descartes, Cogito, ergo sum -- "I think, therfore I am."

I exist, believe you me. And The Matrix was an awesome movie, but did you watch The Thirteenth Floor? That was something to think about.

reply to post by electronQM


Hey guy do your research the poster had a lot of scientific reason to it and yours did not. Einstein knew General Relativity was flawed he envisioned that strings were the answer and he also thought of string theory. Just remember that there are people that believe and this is pretty big although people don't realize it. I love to think of the right universal equation or the reason but I might find it hehe who knows.

Originally posted by Motion-Man
Apparently light can be slowed down and sped up. So if it can be altered, then how can scientists be sure that stars are as far as they say they are? To my understanding, evaluating how distant a star is depends on the light coming from it. So if it can be sped up or slowed down, then perhaps stars are merely pinpoints of light, or are MUCH more massive than estimated. Stars could even be in different positions because the light could be bent and curved to fly in another direction, by obstacles or even gravity. Light is definately not a constant, therefore many of our theories involving the constant of the speed of light are wrong and must be scrapped or re-written with something that works. As far as we know, all the light coming from the heavens could be part of one giant light "source" that is being fragmented by "environmental conditions". So tell me, do you agree that we may be wrong about many, if not all, distances between us and other heavenly bodies, and using the distance of stars (according to the speed of light) to prove theories is wrong?

Check out these links:
www.eurekalert.org...
www.ldolphin.org...
www.physlink.com...
www.khouse.org...

or go search for it on google.

kudos , one of the best posts on ATS ,you proved that einstein theory