stupid physics questions

[Darkflame]

If your not worried about "outside time", and only your own timeline within the craft....does the light speed mater ?
(that is, you could reach destinations pretty quick, but from your perspective the universe around you speeds up and thus to everyone else you took much longer to get there)

Or wait...have I got that time dilation the wrong way around?

So no object can exceed the speed of light relative to any other,

Its really more crazy when you think that no particle "knows" its speed, and certainly not relative to any other particle. Obvious no information can pass around to keep the limit in check, because if that was the case, then that information flow itself would exceed the speed.
So the only way that all particals are kept to just approaching this limit is with the medium they are traveling in...spacetime...is itself altering in weird ways. Which it apparently does.

It would, of course, be far more simple if it was just you could never observe something exceeding light speed, rather then you could never actually exceed it.

[Absolute_Zero]

If your not worried about "outside time", and only your own timeline within the craft....does the light speed mater ?
(that is, you could reach destinations pretty quick, but from your perspective the universe around you speeds up and thus to everyone else you took much longer to get there)

Or wait...have I got that time dilation the wrong way around?

No, you're correct... theoretically and experimentally so.

A photon, for an extreme example, travels from source to destination in zero time... from its point of view.

[disciple]

Fuck!!!

Do photons actually exist then?

[Darkflame]

No, its just an optical illusion.
--
Absolute_Zero - ah, thats good to know.

[zip accident]

A photon, for an extreme example, travels from source to destination in zero time... from its point of view.

Oops.

I don't think I've ever heard that one before. Can't get more virtual than that.

How does quantum mechanics view the existence time of photons?

[Absolute_Zero]

Fuck!!!

Do photons actually exist then?

Only if you look.

[Absolute_Zero]

A photon, for an extreme example, travels from source to destination in zero time... from its point of view.

Oops.

I don't think I've ever heard that one before. Can't get more virtual than that.

How does quantum mechanics view the existence time of photons?

Since you seem a little surprised, I've looked for a wackypedia ref

See in this entry.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_pa ... n_diagrams

As a majority of QM physicists seem to take the Copenhagen Interpretation quite literally, I'd rather ask my cat... currently in a superposition of states.

[zip accident]

Since you seem a little surprised, I've looked for a wackypedia ref

See in this entry.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_pa ... n_diagrams

As a majority of QM physicists seem to take the Copenhagen Interpretation quite literally, I'd rather ask my cat... currently in a superposition of states.

I may have heard it before I suppose, in fact it seems I must have. I probably filed it under impossible and promptly forgot about it.

Since it's only in space that light travels at c, and it can't be emitted or recieved in pure space, and the space between the galaxies is only approximately empty, I suppose the impossibility is only approximate too.

I was interested in what quantum mechanists said about the time because I've recently been reading in the context of astronomy, yes in Wikipedia, that quantum mechanics doesn't believe in time as a function of space, but as something real in it's own right, so that seemed like a possible point of disagreement with GR.

[Absolute_Zero]

I was interested in what quantum mechanists said about the time because I've recently been reading in the context of astronomy, yes in Wikipedia, that quantum mechanics doesn't believe in time as a function of space, but as something real in it's own right, so that seemed like a possible point of disagreement with GR.

Dunno... sounds like Einstein vs Bohr by other means.

Speaking of Bohr... disciple, I wasn't being facetious

"Nothing exists until it is measured."

Niels Bohr, 1930

[Orava]

A few years ago when I was a bit pissed I invented a machine that could predict lottery numbers. You just need this machine that can spit out one photon out at a time. Oh and a chain of command where your numbers go completely unobserved from the photon to the lotto machine and you, later, observing the resuls.

I tell you all the details, for a reasonable fee. Just PM me.

[zip accident]

This one is one of the many physics bogglers in Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzball_(string_theory)

I don't whether I find that, or GR, or quantum mechanics less believeable, but they can't all be right. Something's got to change as the Stranglers sang, I hope whatever comes out of it is more comprehensible than the current confusion. At times, it almost seems it might come down to whatever you expect is what you get, and if that's right then we're back to magic, which was a whole different game from physics.

[Absolute_Zero]

This one is one of the many physics bogglers in Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzball_(string_theory)

I don't whether I find that, or GR, or quantum mechanics less believeable, but they can't all be right. Something's got to change as the Stranglers sang, I hope whatever comes out of it is more comprehensible than the current confusion. At times, it almost seems it might come down to whatever you expect is what you get, and if that's right then we're back to magic, which was a whole different game from physics.

I quite like this approach:
http://www.compukol.com/mendel/

An extension of GR employing extra rotational degrees of freedom. QM falls out as a linear approximation... as Newton does to GR. All four forces addressed at scales from femtometers to cosmological.

I agree that something has to give, and I'm hoping (entirely personally) it's the ludicrousness of popular QM interpretations. There was a fairly recent, very controversial variant of the double slit experiment, that if correct, refutes the Copenhagen/Many-Worlds interpretations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afshar_experiment

I find Cramer's 'spin' on this experiment more illuminating than the wikipedia article, but obviously he has a Transactional horse in this race. Nevertheless...
http://www.analogsf.com/0410/altview2.shtml

Spanner in the works, soon, please.

[gumboot]

When, in fact, some combinations had to come up,

Why?

If your saying why do we exist at all, thats quite a different question to saying "why do we exist with these precise constants".
My anaology is simply that if a lottery draw takes place at then some combinations of numbers come out of it.

Well, yes, I am saying the former; however, it's not known for certain that the whole question of existence isn't somehow entangled with specific universal parameters. That question would be completely outside of anything scientific, though.


I have, a while back, been vaguely considering writing a parameter-lottery universe simulation to see if I can get consistently interesting results... obviously with higher-level primitives to ensure that it runs in reasonable time. Thinking about it now, though, I think that had I run this universe we live in and had a look at the results I'd probably have been terribly disappointed at how mundane it was; because the vast majority of stuff out there appears, from this perspective, to be really dull. Just clumps of matter circling other clumps of matter.

There's some series of books by somethingorother Lyndon (or similar) called 'Something of the n Somethings' (where 'Something' and 'Somethings' and 'n' vary from book to book) which I found on my flatmate's bookshelf a while ago that touched on creating universes and failing to detect the interesting thing happening inside of them.

Oh, here we go. Lyndon Hardy


Anyway; parameter-lottery lightsynth and wallpaper... must get around to it.

[zip accident]

This one is one of the many physics bogglers in Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzball_(string_theory)

I don't whether I find that, or GR, or quantum mechanics less believeable, but they can't all be right. Something's got to change as the Stranglers sang, I hope whatever comes out of it is more comprehensible than the current confusion. At times, it almost seems it might come down to whatever you expect is what you get, and if that's right then we're back to magic, which was a whole different game from physics.

I quite like this approach:
http://www.compukol.com/mendel/

An extension of GR employing extra rotational degrees of freedom. QM falls out as a linear approximation... as Newton does to GR. All four forces addressed at scales from femtometers to cosmological.

I agree that something has to give, and I'm hoping (entirely personally) it's the ludicrousness of popular QM interpretations. There was a fairly recent, very controversial variant of the double slit experiment, that if correct, refutes the Copenhagen/Many-Worlds interpretations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afshar_experiment

I find Cramer's 'spin' on this experiment more illuminating than the wikipedia article, but obviously he has a Transactional horse in this race. Nevertheless...
http://www.analogsf.com/0410/altview2.shtml

Spanner in the works, soon, please.

I read about this one recently. If it is right, then it seems to me that the whole of physics becomes whatever the observer expected:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheeler%27 ... experiment

Also, why is the Einstein cross not a ring?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_Cross

I want to see the existing spanner identified, not a new one thrown in at random.

[zip accident]

Also, why is the Einstein cross not a ring?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_Cross

Answer? because the photons are polarised, and aren't affected by gravity at angles other than 0 degrees to the plane of vibration. Which royally stuffs bent space-time.

Or does someone have a reason why that doesn't work?