Achieving light speed?

Originally posted by Biigs
reply to post by CynicalDrivel

 

how does the vibration create any thrust?

Was not covering that. Was pointout that vibration would likely kill the living mass being transported, so it's a no-go in that direction.

How does it actually propel itself alone by just vibrating.

Finding a way to ride any energy wave is interesting (as in lightwaves move through space, can we hitch a ride? plausible even?). Throwing "exploded" fuel out the rump of a space shuttle gets it to move through space just fine. Could we move by hooking up a powerful enough "speaker" on our rump? Don't know. But if part of the mess is vibrating, I'd find it much more likely to be very self-destructive to use this as a means for propulsion. That doesn't mean that it couldn't be done. I wasn't weighing in on that aspect at all.

Its like saying a loudspeaker is a source for thrust, just fire sound waves out the back!!! But theres no air to vibrate and no waves would come out the back. (not that it would move forward if there was any air to move anyway!)

It is a little preposterous, isn't it? Let them practice tihs in a vacuum chamber, with no gravity. Should lay the issue bare for everyone with questions on if it would work.

Originally posted by TechVampyre
Let me ask you a question. "If you are in a spaceship that is traveling at the speed of light, and you turn on the headlights, does anything happen ?"

yes i think the beam of light will still come out of the headlight and be seen. The light is relative to you on the craft traveling at such speed.

I think what confuses this matter is:

In everyday usage, "mass" is often used interchangeably with weight, and the units of weight are often taken to be kilograms (for instance, a person may state that their weight is 75 kg). In proper scientific use, however, the two terms refer to different, yet related, properties of matter.

Wiki

When talking about a fighter jet pilot and G force, we're talking about how his body tries to respond to Newton's 3rd Law: kid terms? statement: It is not gravity that can cause the pilot to black out, but the force applied by the movement of the jet at it's acceleration in terms of Earth's Gravity's force as a unit of measurement. You've got to keep the acceleration below what humans can tolerate, if they are to travel at high speeds:

The human body is flexible and deformable, particularly the softer tissues. A hard slap on the face may briefly impose hundreds of g locally but not produce any real damage; a constant 16 g for a minute, however, may be deadly. When vibration is experienced, relatively low peak g levels can be severely damaging if they are at the resonance frequency of organs and connective tissues.

Wiki, again It would take forever to get to the speed of light, or to slow down, with a human safely on board.

Now, if the Mass is enormous at the speed of light, it likely follows that something happens to the weight of the structure--the body can only weigh so much before it gives out. The assumption (educated conclusion of a guess) could be pure bollux or not, I'm not worried about it, but if the majority of scientist and armchair scientists are correct in their belief, it would not be practical to subject humans to it. But then, at one time, they thought 1 atomic bomb would set off a chain reaction that would consume this whole world. So it's not like I've got a thing with challenging the conclusion drawn from the data we have.

My question has always been why in the world is the speed of light the upper limit? Is it because the math used for everythin below or equal to it is doable, and everything above that speed is rediculously astronomical, or is it an assumption? Mat is not the universe, but a map of it. Even the best maps can be wrong--although it's generally foolish to travel without a map.

reply to post by CynicalDrivel


The speed of light is a "limit" because the gamma function - 1-(v²/c²) - is 0 when v = c. This makes mass dilation, time dilation, and length contraction infinite at the speed of light. Since infinity can never be reached by any real object, the speed of light can never be reached.
The only thing that goes the speed of light is the one thing that exists eternally at that speed - the photon, which has no rest mass and no definable size.

reply to post by CLPrime


It doesn't really change much, but for the sake of accuracy...

I just noticed that all of my gamma functions are missing the square-root. they should, of course, look like this:

sqrt[1-(v²/c²)]

In trying to make the equation not look so messy, I guess I accidentally left that part out. But the effect is the same.

the reason light speed cant be breached is because a moving object forms a pressure wave in the ether*(see below) in front of it like a plane does in the atmosphere. the only way to do it is to use electromagnetic means to create an etheric 'vacuum' so the moving object can slipstream through it, and by-passing the time dilation effects which are caused by a higher density of etheric 'granules' for want of a better word. higher density in front of a moving object, higher density in a strong gravitational field. vibrations dont make any difference really, all vibration does is create a wave in the medium it is vibrating in, in this case space.If you think of space as being like under the sea, your on the right track.

* the laws of physics is basically the laws of fluid dynamics, only on a infinitesimal scale. mass is a vortex in the ether spinning in 3 dimensions. gravity is the pressure of the ether moving to fill the gap that a mass (vortex) has sucked in by a spin cohered spinning core of a planet, and the subatomic repulsion is the ether being blown out of the back of the vortex. electromagnetism is caused by these vortexes vibrating. the zero point field is because the ether is under great tension and creates semi-stable vortexes all the time which dissipate rapidly.


now bear in mind, i have had a drink and probably aint explained this well. when im sober, ill post a copy of what i wrote in my notebook if anyone is interested.

reply to post by Cito


Let's just assume E=mc^2 is not correct for a minute. Nobody's perfect, right?

We've heard that the speed of light is not achievable with our current level of technology (or "theoretically impossible"), and I think that gives both a challenge and a whole bucketload of wiggle-room. I think we've coming at the problem all wrong, if we can't see a solution to it.

I like the idea of an "area of effect". Depending on the medium through which light travels, its speed can be different. I'm not going to go find the fastest medium at the moment, as I'm writing and can't be bothered. What are the properties of this fastest medium which cause the speed of light to be faster? What makes it more "slippy"?

Let's say we take an area of space 30 times the volume of a craft, and compel it to accelerate in one direction as fast as we can. Being of this space, let's assume the craft at the center is compelled along with the space it occupies. Further, let's accelerate the craft itself (relative to its medium) as quickly as we can stand. Perhaps within a space already being accelerated, the speed of the craft itself is less consequential. The mass of the craft (relatively) is not out of proportion to its surrounding space, which is similarly not too far out of proportion to the space around it.

In order to avoid destroying the entire universe, let's not bring this entire area of effect up to c. Let's simply accelerate the area around the ship wherever it is (so the contents of this buffer zone are constantly being replenished from the "space" ahead of the craft). Maybe, relative to the space immediately surrounding it, the craft is not really going that fast... or at least not fast enough to create an infinite mass.

In think the key is in the term "Relativity". If we can find a way to counteract the relative differences (in mass, in speed, etc) then we can overcome the barriers to FTL travel.

So... some key ingredients:
1) A method to compel a large region of immediately adjacent space to accelerate (this would likely have to be housed on...
2) A craft capable of accelerating within the affected space.

This brings up some obvious issues:
1) You will be leaving a wake. Much like how a ship leaves a wake in the water, you would be leaving a current in space at least 30 times (using the previously stated example) the size of the craft (this is assuming only the area we've directly affected is involved in the wake, and not the adjacent areas that would get pulled along). This is typically the reason sci-fi has a "minimum safe distance" for warp speed, hyperdrive, hyperspace or what have you. It would not be good to be close to a planet with an atmosphere when you spark this engine up.

2) Your measurements and interactions with the universe outside of the area of effect would get weird. Since the bubble around you would be accelerated to various fractions of the speed of light, you would get into relativistic temporal impact. Time would appear to be progressing at a different rate depending on how deep into the area of effect you are. That could make sensors, and direct observations...well...weird.

If we're going to speculate, let's speculate. What else have we got? (Can you tell this is my "area of interest"?)

reply to post by CrikeyMagnet


hehe, interesting thoughts

Your explanation sounds almost how "Star Trek Warp Speed" works.

see here: en.wikipedia.org...
(interesting read for the real trek nerd types...like me hehe)

warp drive does indeed create a bubble of space-time around the ship; however, it is explained that the ship is surrounded by a bubble of subspace — another universe where the speed of light is much faster than in ours; furthermore, the alternate universe is attuned with our own, such that planetary bodies are in exactly the same place, which simplifies navigation — thus the book leans toward the theories of superstring-manipulation, rather than those of warping normal space-time.

The transwarp device invented by the Hamalki uses a different approach to the same idea; in this case, it creates a field around the ship which allows it to enter De Sitter space — a space in which there is infinite energy, zero mass (with exceptions) and no absolute laws of physics. This essentially allows the Enterprise to enter De Sitter space and travel millions of times faster than light. In the narrative, the Enterprise succeeds in reaching the Small Magellanic Cloud (200 years away at warp 8), a dwarf galaxy in orbit around the Milky Way galaxy.

sounds similar to your theory.

reply to post by Cito


The one thing that kills most sci-fi's enjoyability is when they try to explain it too much. That said, much of the Star Trek-related stuff was actually quite well explained... at least on cursory examination, it will sound reasonable. Even with all this being said, I am far from a physicist. I'm more like a Philosophysicist. I like to speculate on what would be a good thing for someone more math-capable than me to either prove or disprove. Left to myself, I have to settle for Truthiness.

Despite what I just said about Star Trek sticking to reasonable theories, I think the idea of moving to an envelope of "different universe" is a little bit of a cop-out. (Sort of like a Heisenberg Compensator.) It shifts the focus from "light speed is not achievable to an object with mass" to "Look over here! Shadow puppets!!". Besides, doesn't the concept of "multiple universes" interfere with the concept of a "universe"?

Dimensions provide some interest. Not all dimensions are spatial (by which I mean in a way similar to length, width, and depth) (going with the 11 dimensions of reality ideas), but what would linear travel along one of these non-spatial dimensions look like? Folks have talked about dimensional folding, with respect to the spatial dimensions, and with the basic idea being "if you want to go from point A to Point B in the shortest possible time, then make Points A and B adjacent". But would it be possible to trick a spatial dimension into acting like a non-spatial dimension? (Random-Access Length, Width and Depth)

Or to put it in terms of storage media, since I brought up random-access... Compare a hard drive to a RAM chip. With a hard drive, you have physical components that need to move to various parts of a disc to access data. In RAM, you only need to logical identifier of the memory location. No moving parts.

Could the problem be that we are trying to move faster... not smarter?