VS physics vs "real" physics

[safemode]

But that makes no sense because we can move freely in all three dimensions. I don't see how part of a projection could have such control over its movement in 3D space as we do (or how we could then even perceive of it, if we can't perceive of the supposed even higher dimensions), let alone seamless control (we don't notice any difference or require the use of any special techniques to move in a non-parallel direction to the 2D 'real' universe).

It is also worth noting that that article seemed to indicate that this was by no means a theory yet, rather a cutting edge explanation for what a cutting edge new research device had picked up, and that there was alot more testing to be done before this became something serious.

I know it's not a theory really yet. It's a new idea that i was inquiring about it's effect if true or substantial.

This projection isn't a visual trick. Unlike a hologram, what is being projected isn't an optical illusion created by our eyes. The hologram idea is just there to help people understand the type of thing they're talking about. data is encoded in 2d but is being projected into a 3rd dimension, but this projection is not a trick caused by light in our eyes, but is a projection of matter and energy. It's kind of hard to put your mind around but this projection is happening at the planck length scale level all around us. Since everything at that scale looks the same what is actually being projected could be simply energy, it's how this projection is organized that determines if it's matter or heat. So do we exist without being projected? That may be a moot point, since this is the way things are (if the as yet-theory holds true). Projecting into the 3d may be something that just always happens

The part that you may be tripping over is that forces and such exist in 3d, but if the 3rd dimension aspect of everything is a projection of something that really exists only in 2d, then we really should only experience things in 2d and 3d would be "fake". This isn't what the theory will likely say. The 3d aspect of things are real because the 3rd dimension of things are real and what is being projected gives rise to real particles.

The projection aspect is at a quantum scale. The result ends in real matter/energy/space, which exists in a real dimension (3d), giving rise to forces that work in all 3 dimensions, despite the info for everything being encoded in 2d.

not sure if that works for you, but that's my gist of it. It's not like your hand is being projected from 2d, it's the quantum makeup being projected from a 2d surface that causes 3d particles to exist and thus eventually make up your hand. Do you exist as a 2d image? not in the sense that you're thinking. not in any way recognizeable.

Heheh, excellent summary! It is even more sad that in alot of places, this also describes much of modern games, movies and tv not directly related to anime.

Yes, but it's mostly in horrible horrible horrible anime. which is basically most of it. That's not so much the fault of anime as an artform, as it is of the general audience they have to sell to.

There actually might be quite a few more exceptions depending on your definition of 'measure'. That is how theoretical physics can and does go off the deep end to me. First of all, many of their measurements are of things effected by the thing they want to measure, because the later is something they can't go around and measure (directly). Second, those measurements eventually or immediately turn out to be wrong because they are incomplete and don't explain everything, which leads to a new directly-indetectable (and thus directly-immeasurable) thing or definition of something being created to explain the new observations until that turns out to be a mistake too.

The measurements only turn out to be wrong in the sense of either A, equipment or human error. or B. the assumptions that the measurements are based on are found to be wrong or the conclusions from them are wrong. The measurements aren't ever usually erroneous in the sense that the ruler is measuring imaginary things that can't be reproduced.

So they are like a religion that can only measure its god by the effects of its actions (dark energy and matter, planck, etc., all not directly observable), and whenever new observed effects are incongruent with their earlier understanding, they either change it or consider it a mystery (rift between relativistic and quantum theories) for the present or forever.

The very fact that you can observe things that require new theories to replace old ones puts science in a totally different league from religion. In religion, nothing discovered or uncovered alters the religion's beliefs. Just because there is no end to this replacement does not make it in the same boat as religion either, because while we cannot say we have learned the absolute all there is to know about physics, we can say that if something is observed that conflicts, then we have to create a new theory that explains that. With religion, nothing new is ever needed to explain anything that has previously been unknown. In this manner, nothing religion supposes or states can be used to predict the actions of something previously not yet discovered to any useful degree. In science, this happens _all_ the time.

Do we know that SPEC is supposed to compress space though? I mean this as a totally honest question, I don't remember seeing it documented someplace that SPEC is supposed to warp space, but I could easily have missed it or forgotten. My impression was that SPEC was not explained at all, and that even the roots of the theory off of which it is based might not be conceived until hundreds of years from our present time on the VS timeline.

It's in the name. SPEC is an acronym.

How does that make a reactionless drive? I don't understand how warping space around you is going to directly cause you to accelerate.

Even in star trek, the center of the science fantasy universe, my assumption was that warp engines warped space, and hugely minimized the time it took a ship to get from here to there in the 3rd dimension, even though the 'impulse engine' thrusters were what actually moved the ship, whether it was warping space or not.

Nope, in star trek the warpage of space moved the ship forward. Not impulse engines. This is why the picard maneuver is possible. God i am a fucking geek that i know the name of that.


The rest i have to comment on later, end of work.

[RedAdder]

Regarding that the theory about 3D=hologram makes no sense:

The projection of lower dimensional space into higher dimensional is like a whip: the whip could be encoded in 2D waves that are travelling along the whip, but a single wave would not be represented by the current position/shape of the whip, but by wave functions that represent the change of the whip. If you would encode it in positions of the whip, you'd have to watch a movie of it to see the waves and the movie encoding would appear to contain more information(3d) than a set of 2d waves.

That is like the (infinite) fourier transform that allows one to construct most functions (graphs) very closely from a set of real numbers.

Now regarding the SPEC drive, assume that normal inertia is the result of having to calculate additional relationships when accelerating. This results in the slowdown of spacetime. The SPEC drive might compress spacetime that is ahead down to the size of a black hole, which results in a 2D surface with waves and fluctations on it (the whip, but in 3D). Since we already argued that the 2D surface contains less information than the entire 3D sphere would(if it had the same grainyness), we could just continue and argue that the SPEC drive results in less information to process and thus less of a slowdown in spacetime and less inertia. This also explains why the presence of matter slows down the SPEC drive: the more information is contained in the space ahead, the less space can the SPEC drive compress.

[safemode]

You still dont get around the "how do we get our ship across this compressed space" problem.

Conventional thought on gravity (space compression/expansion) drives is that you compress in front of you, so that you can expand behind you. The expansion provides a force against your ship driving you forward, in addition to the compression pulling you forward. The space the ship occupies is always neutral, neither compressed nor expanded. Thus, the speed of the ship is always still limited to c , and it's reference is the same as if a ship next to it was thrusting using conventional thrusters. That is, there is no relative FTL travel occuring.


If you want to compress space you have to do it non-destructively, so that when you relax it, things continue completely unaffected. Compressing things to create black holes does not accomplish that. While the information about the space that previously existed would be encoded on the event horizon, there is no way to reverse the process. It would take much much more energy if such a means was found to do that, completely nullifying the usefulness of SPEC as there would be no energy left to actually use for transportation. Additionally, you would have to have been included in the space to be compressed into a black hole in order to traverse this 2d surface on the event horizon. A situation i can only assume is obviously not going to work well for the ship.

The argument against spec has been and still is that
A. SPEC is destructive by nature. Compressing space yields the creation of new relationships between forces in the environment. Unlike the reactions towards conventional thrust and such, these relationships involve forces effecting the fabric of space itself.

B. SPEC does not allow FTL travel. Since the ship inhabits the space between compressed and expanded space, this space is in the same state as the rest of the space in the system. While it may be space that is pushing, or as some believe, space that is moving, the result is the ship is traveling across flat space, so it's acceleration is limited to the same c everything else is.


What is missing is what gene roddenberry figured out was needed decades ago (or whoever really thought of it). A bubble around the ship. This bubble is then what is pushed by the expansion and compression of space. Since space can move faster than light, and since the ship is not moving at all (the bubble creates a mini-universe in which the ship is totally still), and since the bubble is made of space (it's a subspace warp bubble, duh), the bubble is allowed to accelerate as fast as space will allow, with c not being a consideration.

[RedAdder]

Well I think of SPEC as working like putting the entire universe around you in a black hole, then stepping out of it.
Of course, no idea HOW this would be achieved.

[safemode]

another little tidbit of physics is the bose einstein nova (bosenova). basically, a condensate is put in the presence of a strong magnetic field, and it collapses onto itself (no longer detectable by instruments) and explodes. What is important is that the atoms shouldn't have the energy to explode since they are close to absolute zero. So this energy comes from somewhere other than the thermal energy available in the atoms. No non-fringe theory of physics can explain where the energy comes from. Also, many of the atoms disappeared, assumed to have combined with other atoms and escaped detection.

What we can do is use the idea to explain how we open worm holes. Wormholes can exist in extremely localized areas of space where the temperature is near 0 Kelvin (there are nebulas that have been measured close to this temperature). What explains these localized areas of cold could be magnetic flux intersections. Throughout the galaxy, these lines of flux intersect to isolate a very small region of space, reducing it's temperature to near absolute zero. Opening a wormhole could be something similar to venting gas picked up by the ship as it travels within this cold region and using the jump engine to focus a magnetic field to start the collapse of the now condensate within the region. The condensate collapses inward, and the ship proceeds to follow it, enveloped within the intense magnetic field created by the jump engine. What happens then is a 1 way trip along the flux lines that particular region is connected to. The ship, like some of the atoms in the condensate are treated as quantum particles on a macro scale, allowing the ship to undergo the same type of transportation that the atoms are. This results in an expulsion of material on the other end (next joint in the flux paths).

The first wormholes may have been witnessed by probes around quasars, activating these localized cold areas. Studying the methods for which the wormholes occured, allowed humans to develop engines capable of generating the same conditions, sending probes through at first and once they realized the probes were unharmed, ships. It was only after some exploration did they realize that there was too much order in the underlining organization of the areas of flux intersection (cold spaces that wormholes form). This led to the theory that the placement of the wormhole areas are synthetic and the result of an ancient alien race. Other races may have been taught by previous races about how to use the wormhole system, humans discovered it independently.

This can very nicely explain wormhole travel in-game. It also allows us to explain why wormholes have to be one way. It can explain why wormhole travel is instantaneous, with no means of stopping while inside one like B5 hyperspace. It can also allow for hiding the locked wormhole gates, by altering the magnetic flux lines that create connections between areas (destroying multiple star systems / magnetars etc). It also allows for the evolution of the galaxy not totally destroying the transit system. Since the galaxy evolves together, the system remains mostly unchanged, though some unforseen things will alter it. This could explain why certain connections across the galaxy that may have existed in the ancient past no longer exist today, allowing humans to exist unmolested by any alien influence for their entire existence prior to the recent times. Etc etc.

[RedAdder]

I guess that makes no sense to someone who would really know about wormholes, but I like your idea.

How about this line of reasoning in addition to yours: As the area the ship is moving into is cooled down, it begins to strongly resemble the area that is at the other end of the flux line crossings, so much that both areas become the same. Then, due to the same lucky "bug" that makes the universe prefer matter over antimatter, it is possible for the ship to appear at the other end, resulting in teleportation.

[safemode]

The magnetic field could be strong enough to keep the ship from imparting or recieving any energy from the local cold area in space. So the ship is not cooled down when it enters the region, but it enters a bose einstein condensate, which might allow the surface of the field to behave in a quantum manner, like the condensate is. This might allow the ship to ride the collapse of the condensate and teleport along the flux line to the next nexus.

It's a wormhole in a different sense, not in the traditional gravitational subspace type sense. This is more along the lines of quantum teleportation. Something that wasn't proven in the experiment where the collapse of the condensate occured (and the resulting missing matter) but with no other explanation for the missing matter, why not? Basically, wormholes in game have no transit period because there is none. You are teleported to the next flux nexus, via BoseNova's. These occur naturally sometimes, but the vast network in-game would be discovered to have been artificially created by an ancient race (this is in line with canon).

It also explains why wormholes can exist near planets and such despite them being a gravitational anomoly that would produce all kinds of nasty radiation. Since they're not gravitational, and dont require the use of all kinds of radioactive high energy particles, such magnetic nexus' can exist pretty much anywhere the flux lines intersect in the correct manner. They are harmless to the environment around them. There is even a way to map possible locations of them since they are very cold, any matter trapped in the region could be detected as being within the correct temperature range.

There would be no visual connection between one area and the next, because until you cause the BoseNova, the area is just very cold. It's always very cold. The pre-existing magnetic nexus keeps it cold. Your ship introduces hydrogen (eg) (which it collected as it traveled in space) and a powerful magnetic field which wraps the hydrogen and your ship. This allows the BoseNova to occur. Your ship is collapsed with the hydrogen condensate, allowing it to teleport with some of the hydrogen to the next nexus. It's a one way teleportation. No physical tunnel is created. Your ship and the hydrogen is recreated from pseudo temporary particles in the vacuum of space (within the area of the next nexus) just like regular quantum teleportation. Basically the same way hawking radiation is created.


So really i'm saying that wormholes in the game would be replaced with maybe a deep red flash as your ship disappears and re-appears. They would not remain open and spinning vortexes. They would be absolutely novel, no other sci fi game, movie, book, does FTL travel via BoseNova quantum teleportation. It can be ours.