»
Main Forums
»
Passions in Prose
»
Faster than light
| Passions in Prose |
|
Faster than light |
|
|
rad802 Member
since 2008-04-19
Posts 279KY U.S.A. 
|
Einstein did not know when he penned his famous theories that space was stretching. In fact the universe is strething or expanding from the three dimensions we know into a higher dimension. We can not visualise this but we can visualise two dimensions expanding into three. It would look like the skin of a balloon and if you put little dots all over it to represent the galaxies and you blow this balloon up you will see the dots are moving away from each other just like the galaxies are. Now lets say this balloon has a north and south pole. If you are standing at the north pole and you look out accross this two dimentional surface you will notice that the universe has no edge, if light were infinitely fast and you had a powerful enough telescope you could see the back of your head. But light takes time to travel. Let's imagine that the universe is 5 billion light years around and the light leaving a star at the south pole would take two and a half billion years to reach us if the universe were not expanding. But because it is expanding, by the time the light reaches us six and three eighths billion light years later the universe is now twenty billion light years around. If you graph this out on a sheet of paper, you will notice that space was stretching out so fast that it was actually faster than the speed of light. There is also another situation that causes space to swirl faster than light. Around a spinning super massive black hole the space around the black hole is being spun by the immense gravity at a rate faster than light. Rick Delmonico |
||
| © Copyright 2009 RAD802 - All Rights Reserved | |||
|
Bob K Member Elite
since 2007-11-03
Posts 4208 |
Apparently I still have problems mastering my revisions. [This message has been edited by Bob K (04-21-2009 11:14 PM).] |
||
|
Bob K Member Elite
since 2007-11-03
Posts 4208 |
I believe my text seems trickier than my revisions. [This message has been edited by Bob K (04-21-2009 11:16 PM).] |
||
|
Bob K Member Elite
since 2007-11-03
Posts 4208 |
Interesting thought. Wish I understood physics. My understanding, which is probably wrong, is that C is a constant. You can approach the speed of C, but never reach it, and Light will always travel at C. Nobody said that you can't travel faster than C, only that C is a constant and a limit, so that you may not be able to go faster or slower than C without some serious consequences, but it may possibly be some way to move faster than C. Of course, I may simply be off in science-fiction land here, having no understanding of math or physics and being a non-science kind of guy, and I know of no exception to the nothing-father-than-light generality that folks speak about. But this is what I think is the case. I look forward to enlightenment from those who have math and science to correct me. My understanding of the paradox that you present in your prose piece is that you are running the assumption that there is only a single reference frame to deal with in which to measure the speed of the light. This is one of the things that often gets in the way of folks trying to find their way around Einstein. While you may in fact experience time dilation on one side of the equation and have a sort of time machine effect from the travel, this may not be the case from p.o.v. of the beam of light itself. Time contraction and dilation may occur on either end of the journey, though. If I understand my Relativity correctly. Again, I may not. There are at least three clocks running here in your spacetime problem. In fact, the stretch and contracting of spacetime is predicted by Relativity, and Einstein was quite aware of it. It simply took a long time for folks to come up with experimental data to support his conclusion. |
||
|
rad802 Member
since 2008-04-19
Posts 279KY U.S.A. |
When Einstein penned his famous theories, the steady state universe was the prevailing theory. The fact that space can stretch at a rate faster that light does not violate any laws because all observers exist within space/time and relative to the observer the stretching out of space cannot be measured. Recent theories describe faster than light space travel by compressing the space in front of your ship while expanding the space behind it. |
||
|
|
⇧ top of page ⇧ |
|
| All times are ET (US). All dates are in Year-Month-Day format. | ||
