Reposting from /sci/, because /sci/ seems to be dead and maybe we could discuss potential ways in which FTL propulsion devices could work.
So, according to relativity, you either have causality, or you have FTL. Since throwing causality out of the window is something hard to conceive, since it would involve reformulating everything related to logic and throwing intuitivity out of the window which we already did with relativity, but whatever, we just decided to throw FTL under the train, probably because it's easier to ignore something we know nothing about, because of course relativity is correct.
But what if relativity is not correct? As in, it could be an incomplete theory that applies to most things within a "narrow" application space, more or less like Newtonian physics are applied nowadays to anything that isn't close to relativistic speeds. We know relativity does work according to many experimennts, but we don't know whether tachyons going FTL would have relativity applied to them, probably because nobody has ever seen tachyons and therefore can not test. Mathematically speaking, though, you should be able to describe the movement between two points as having infinite speed (teleportation), but this is not compatible with the way we think spacetime works, because that would open up a whole can of worms regarding time travel and event synchronization between different time frames.
So, is general relativity the be all end all theories ever devised where nothing could ever contradict it, or is this plain human "we could never be wrong" arrogance that could be "debunked" or superseded tomorrow?
You'd need something else than FTL for space travel, otherwise it's a one way trip since millions of years would have passed and returning to earth will have limited use.
Liam Davis
Why would you say there is arrogance on the subject? I would imagine most experts would agree that there could be natural phenomena that might change our view of the universe in a significant way, but since we don't know what we don't know, it makes sense to use the theories we have, since they do seem to work quite well within their limits. In practice, we haven't even colonized moon, so I wouldn't expect us to have FTL drives anytime soon.
Colton Sanders
Cold fusion when? Is the Electric Universe theory a meme?
James Adams
I thought they did find cold fusion but the output was so small they had trouble measuring it.
Jonathan Foster
Frankly I think that the assertions relating to the speed of light are bullshit. If you go somewhere at 80 m/s you travel at 80 m/s. Increasing to 85m/s your speed doesn't make you dissolve or explode, you simply travel faster.
There's absolutely no rational reason to assume that travelling at c+5 m/s is any different.
Henry Campbell
Probably not, there are still many things we don't know about.
Most likely never or at least until theoretical advancements will allow us to understand the process that might allow us to achieve it. We'll see normal fusion as power source long before that. Yes and unless those cranks provide valid theories backed by experimental results, it will remain a meme.
Reality is a lot more weird than that. As you approach c time slows down for you from the point of view of a stationary observer. When you reach c time stops, at c + 5 m/s you would arrive to your destination before they would see you left.
Maybe arrogance is not the right word, or at the very least in the actual scientific community. The "enthusiast" community is all about locking the relativity anus.
That said, I think scientists are certainly overly attached to relativity, not without a good reason. It seems to work, and we have been working on the axiom of relativity for the past decades, so outright debunking it would make a lot of theories blow up overnight. It would be like the most massive collective exercise in zen gardening, and it would probably hurt the confidence in physics real bad to the point they would risk their fundings, so any person attempting to contradict relativity is quickly scrutinized until it is shutdown and their career terminated, maybe in an attempt of self preservation. Thus, there is an incentive not to work against relativity, or many of the things Einstein once said.
David Sanchez
It's now called hydrogen-metal nuclear interactions.
Connor Cook
Special relativity can't be "debunked", as it's not just "an axiom we've been working on", but fundamental to the engineering of nearly every modern technology from atomic bombs to GPS. Much like quantum mechanics (vital to the engineering of semiconductors) there could certainly be theories that add to or modulate aspects of general relativity, but its core findings (gravity is spacetime curvature and visa-versa, lightspeed is an unavoidable function of mass energy, etc.) are foundational to every detail of how our modern technology functions so far as the people who design and maintain it understand.
Carter Turner
Fascinating webm, user I admire old documentaries like that one
Eli Barnes
Yes, but then again, in order for some gravity calculations to work, you need to assume some amount of dark matter, and some scientists disagree on whether it truly exists or not, so it seems some parts of relativity start to fail in certain domains, and we have had to put it on life support to keep using it on a galactic scale.
While the equations do work for our engineering, we may find them to be insufficient and inaccurate in the future, just like we did with Newtonian physics, which doesn't matter we will stop using them altogether, but that for big or small enough numbers we may need to consider using other different equations.
I only said it was intuitive, not that it was simple to discover.
Landon Gutierrez
You think Einstein came up with that on his own? You also think it accurately portrays gravity? A lot of those experiments that """prove""" it are flawed in assumption. Also, science today is nothing more than politics.
Jaxson Scott
Considering time and space are ine and the same is everything but intuitive. Fuck, regarding gravity, I would say anything that's not the graviton is obtuse.
Carter Brooks
The only hint of anything at all in the universe that could be acting FTL is entanglement and that might turn out to be something much more mundane like time flowing backwards that isn't actuallly FTL.
Joshua Cruz
Entanglement appears to be simple "synchronization" between particles. It doesn't actually allow FTL.
Alexander Carter
Absolutely, just like prior advances in physics, there are many areas that hold the potential to let us bypass limits seemingly imposed by current theories, given sufficiently exotic novel contexts.
"Simple" would be a quite valid description for general relativity, however it's anything but intuitive.
Robert Sullivan
Simple enough OP. Become a Christian, die like everyone else, be born into the new creation where electromagnetism and basically all of this current universe's physics will no longer be needed to restrain evil.
In the new creation (cf. the book of Revelation) things will be much, much better than this universe.
Ian Rivera
What happens if we build a gigantic line of mathematically perfect gears, where any motion causes movement because the dents are designed to always make contact in at least one point, made of extremely resistant, uncompressable unobtainium, from here to Proxima Centauri? Don't gears have practically instant transmission speeds? Does that mean the last gear in the line responds with superliminal speeds?
Gavin Sanders
It's not a matter of politics here, no one is saying that they get to decide how things work. Arrogance doesn't enter into this. Experts could be wrong, but they've spent a lot of time investigating and it's currently their best bet that it can't be done. That's different from saying it's impossible, there are proposals like the alcubierre drive that might be able to exploit physics as we understand it, but no physicist would say our current picture is complete.
Henry Sanchez
Cold fusion never ever. The energies required to overcome nuclear repulsion directly equate to huge temperatures, and the output of a fusion reaction is majorly thermal - it's that simple.
Thomas Nelson
Nobody ever said relativity was correct, not anyone credible anyway. They only said "the closest approximation of observable physics, and the degree of approximation is exceedingly close".
Also nobody said that causality cannot be looped. Time travel in sci-fi sense is basically impossible because the universe would have to lose some weight when you depart and gain some weight when you arrive, which it of course can't. You can however take pre-existing energy and reconstruct it into a quantum clone of yourself on arrival, and annihilate yourself on departure - that way you preserve the energy quantity in the universe. You would die in the process though.
Non-swartzchild black holes should act like wormholes into a different universe. The path from outer horizon to inner back to outer takes you to an entirely different region of timespace and the two timespace paths don't even overlap - the infalling region and outshooting region of black hole are in different regions of space. Because if they did then any black hole's mass would increase to infinity instantly due to collisions of infalling and outshooting matter at superluminal relative velocities, producing enormous amount of energy on collision which contributes to black hole's mass thus making it bigger, further increasing the strength of collisions as well as amount of matter colliding at a time - exponentially ad infinitum - which of course doesn't happen. You of course wouldn't survive falling through black hole long enough to reach inner event horizon. But such timespace geometry modified to be human-friendly could be constructed artificially, with sufficiently good technology. Or it could at least be used to transport data and power through it.
The principal problem with FTL travel is that it breaks proper timespace intervals. Again, it's all about relative state of the universe. If you depart from a location at FTL velocity and fly back to it, you can trace timespace paths that arrive both before and after your departure, which couldn't be happening, you can't be both there and isn't there. However that only applies to physically traveling through space at superluminal velocities. The space itself however can travel at any velocity (inside black holes it's infalling faster than light, outside of observable universe its runaway speed is faster than light), so if you can create a pocket of space that's stationary inside but is rapidly moving on the outside, then you can travel at such velocities without physically moving through space of the bubble interior. This is what warp drive aims to achieve. Note that the equations for warp drive are started with solution and work back to the initial conditions, which is not guaranteed to work under incomplete frameworks (which physics is).
Landon Cooper
The collapse of entangled particles occurs simultaneously. It's just you wouldn't be able to tell to which state it had collapsed, or even if it had collapsed at all, at a remote location. In a double slit polarizer setup (see quantum eraser), there is simply a solid bell curve without distinguishable features regardless of circumstances. If the wavefunction is undisturbed then at remote location there are simply two interference patterns overlapping each other to produce a solid bell curve. If the wavefunction is collapsed then at remote location there are simply two vertical bars overlapping each other to produce exactly the same solid bell curve. You wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the two unless you had the data from origin location in beforehand.
Adrian Garcia
Turning a gear would require an infinite amount of force
Camden Anderson
Same idea as huge pole to the moon. The wave of motion would propagate at the speed of sound in material of which it is made.
