Hahaha, glad to have the honor.Errol_Summerlin wrote:@chuck ah, at last I have met my counterpart, one who can match my long-windedness.
My gut feeling is that it would apply to particles as much as it does for waves; BUT, you'd have to take into account that refractive indexes are not constant; they are in fact VERY non-linear. Even for vacuum I'm not sure n would prove to be constant for ALL wavelenths... That's why prisms split light. It's also why if you calculate the refractive constant for water as the square root of its dielectric constant, you get a large number, but the refractive constant is actually pretty small.. !?!?! Why? That's because dielectric constants are usually measured at around 1 MHz, whereas refractive constants are mostly (if not universally) measured using visible light, at least for tables for practical uses.I don't think you need to qualify that with "I believe". Mu and epsilon determine the speed of light in a given medium. This is true for all materials. Changing them is obviously the key to changing the speed of light in a vacuum, but there is some question as to whether or not the maximum speed of massive objects would be changed by this. For example, air has a different speed of light than vacuum (n=1.0008). For highly energetic particles entering the atmosphere, they are traveling at speeds> c/n but still <c and they produce cherenkov radiation. However, the air slows the particle down to sub-luminal speeds very quickly. The question is, if the air was not there to slow it down, but the refractive index was somehow still 1.0008, would the incoming cosmic rays be slowed to c/n. When a light wave leaves a material with refractive index >1 and re-enters vacuum, it resumes traveling at the speed of light. This does not appear to happen for massive objects.chuck_starchaser wrote:Therefore, I believe that to change the speed of light in vacuum, you'd have to affect its dielectric constant
and/or its magnetic permeability, which may or may not imply a change in energy level; but I'd simply say
that energy level is a secondary issue at best. The trick is figuring out where these constants are produced,
or set, and find a way of tweaking them.
If you compute the wave function of a Grayhound bus moving at 100 km/hr, you get a very short wavelength (tons of energy), and I doubt that n for air would read 1.0008 at that energy level/wavelength.
I'll check it out.The "absurdest" is pretty much exactly what this paper showed http://arXiv.org/pdf/hep-th/9810221.Energy level is too broad a concept. At its absurdest, it would imply that for waves to travel faster on the
surface of a lake, you have to kill all other waves. I don't think it would affect the speed of your waves
much, to have perfectly still water to begin with; though you would get a tiny benefit, I believe, from
some non-linearities in wave mechanics on water, which may very well apply to EM waves in space.
Ah, some anisotropic modulation of n... Interesting.It is the paper referred to in the quote in my earlier post. Equation 10 is the relevant equation showing that the refractive index perpendicular to the mirrors is < 1. I am not an expert on QED, but it was accepted to a reputable journal which means that somebody who knows QED said this result was valid. Between the plates, the speed of light should be > c. If you are talking about water, this wouldn't work. Water molecules have mass and the molecules themselves are in excited energy states with far more energy than the vacuum. They also experience physical collisions rather than wave interference. Basically, the analogy that has worked well so far breaks down when you start talking at the quantum level.
There was an article in SciAm, about a year or two ago, about observations about the behavior of light-waves near the horizons of black holes that would seem to support the concept of space being made of "space particles"; --IOW, the article proposed that space has "structure".
That's what I'm told every time. My counter-question is are those "working equations" necessary? Or simply may-be's, like Euclid's Fifth Axiom?I feel hinky about time being a "dimension" in cosmology as well, but the math works out and explains observations, so there must be some truth to the equations if not, necessarily, to their interpretation.
Okay; I'm with you; but I think we'll be able to come up with a number of plausible models; and it may still boil down to game convenience. Just to go out on a limb, as a way of example: We don't know what causes inertial mass. Higgs particles?This is where I have to differ. Yes, MANY of the theories are contradictory. None of them explain everything, and most of them cannot be proven in any way shape or form. But rather than just make some "mumbo jumbo" up, I prefer to find a theory that COULD be right and run with it to its logical conclusion.And where does all this tie with Vegastrike?
Nowhere. I was just trying to say that current theories are full of shit baggage and conceptual confusion,
and that in their present form they can't hope to point the way to a workable solution for FTL. We're going
to have to wait for a new generation of scientists more capable of critical thinking, IMNSHO.
What I would propose for Vegastrike, in terms of FTL, is some mumbo jumbo
These guys will have none of them: ag-physics: The Origin of Mass
Ever heard of the "kinemassic field"? Some guy (not a scientist by title or profession) supposedly built a machine to experiment with a theory he had about the strong force being related to the spins of the nucleons involve. So he built a big, heavy machine... A [] -like, square frame of copper, about 200 kilos. On the sides of the frame, he made cylindrical cut-outs, like ( ) turned 90 degrees, cutting through the sides of the frame. Inside those cylindrical spaces on both sides, he put precision fitting copper cylinders: one (on the left side) rotated around its axle by a motor that rotated it very slowly, like one turn per hour. On the right side, the cylinder could rotate freely. Each cylinder was actually made of two quasi-half cylinders with a one-inch gap between them. Inside those gaps he had precision-machined disks of copper, tightly fitting in the slots, and made to rotaty very fast by air-jets.
So, these fast-spinning copper torts were like gyroscopes, opposing having their axis being rotated; but they were suspended inside slots in the middle of beefy copper cylinders that, on the left side, forced the axis of the gyro to rotate slowly; and on the right side simply allowed the axis to rotate, if for some mysterious reason it wanted to.
He reported long tables of measurements.
Essentially, forcing the axis of the gyroscope on the left to rotate, seemed to cause the axis of the gyroscope on the right side to oscillate on its own, with a cycle matching the rotational speed of the gyro on the left; but this effect took several hours to travel from the left side of the frame to the right side.
Why copper? To rule out magnetism, and because according to his calculations, odd atomic number and an even number of neutrons would make it highly permeable to this force he postulated and claimed to have demonstrated.
He claimed that "shorting" the frame top-to-bottom with iron or steel had no effect; but that shorting top to bottom with a bar of copper completely killed the coupling between the gyroscopes.
I don't know if I believe it or not; just something I read and I "shelved" in my mind. And I'm not sure if it would relate to mass.
Now, let's assume it were true...
Perhaps rotational inertia has something to do with the random orientations of counter-spinning pairs of nucleons, and if we could force them all to line-up, perhaps with a very strong "kinemassic filed", maybe rotational inertia might become anisotropic?
Perhaps as rotational inertia vanishes around one axis, linear inertia might go away along that same axis? I think that to postulate such a thing for game purposes would probably be good enough, with a whole book's worth of history full of imaginary experiments to go with it.
There was also the physicist that lectured at a convention I attended in Atlanta, many years ago, who presented an entirely new understanding of what a particle IS. To him, a particle was essentially a trapped wave. Trapped in what? In a tiny relativistic bubble. He was saying, paraphrasing, "if I'm standing in the middle of a circular platform that is spinning so fast that the perimeter is going at the speed of light, and I step away from the center, I start to accelerate towards the edge; but once I reach the edge I start moving backwards...", or something along the lines. He classified fermions, bosons, by the number of wave-lengths within the trap, and he obtained consistent figures for spin, charge and... yep, mass. To him inertial mass was simply a consequence of wave-pressure differentials on the "walls" of the relativistic trap, as the particle is accelerated.
Exactly.The only requirement for this theory is that A) it has not been proven obviously and catastrophically wrong and B) its logical conclusion works for gameplay.
Keep in mind that scientists are forever terrified of getting a bad name by "going too far". Essentially, they can question up to 1.25 assumptions of the Standard Model, or accepted cosmology, but not question anywhere nearly 1.75 assumptions in one paper. But I suspect that many suspect assumptions come in pairs; and, anyways, that makes it difficult to find very imaginative theories, however plausible and sound they might be. Lots of self-censorship.In essence, I selectively picked one of the theories out there to suit my gaming needs instead of just making one up that suits my gaming needs.
Doesn't the speed of light slow down a great deal in bose-einstein condensates? Yet there's no huge energy concentration in them; in fact they are near 0 degK. I'm not doubting casimir; I'm just not sure that "energy" is the key. I'd be more inclined to suspect refractive index anisotropy. Wonder if anyone's measured the speed of light in pyrolytic graphite...The casimir effect and its implications for the local speed of light are a proven effect. If we could find a way to kill off all the harmonics and not just a few in the perp direction, we could substantially change C within that medium. Our manipulation of em waves is getting pretty good now. The invisibility cloak is coming along nicely. (They have light travel around the wearer and come out exactly on the opposite side instead of hitting the wearer.) I used the analogy of the sound-canceling technology on cars by way of explanation. Obviously any sort of em harmonic killing emissions would be substantially more complicated, but based on the same principle.
Well, I would agree it would be super-cool if people in the 3rd millenium study in school about a game called Vegastrike which postulated a theory that turned out to be true and allowed humanity to travel to other stars. Failing that, I'd look for some believable AND plausible mumbo jumbo to explain inertial mass reduction.If we are just making up "mumbo jumbo" anyway, it is best not to put too much physics into it. Just multiply deltaX by some factor X every time step when the thing is on, eat X times as much power while it is on and be done with it.that allegedly allows us to
reduce the inertial mass of a ship, but leaves its gravitational mass untouched. Whether that involves
producing "anti-dark-matter that disperses through the ship cancelling mass", I don't care, but the benefits
of inertial mass reduction are just too great to ignore:These, I say, are too many advantages to mass-reduction-based FTL to ignore it.
- Increases acceleration per unit of impulse
- Increases SPEED without spending energy!!! --conservation of momentum dictates that speed must go up as mass is reduced
- with non-modified gravitational mass, gravity would be stronger relative to inertia/centrifugal force, so ships would use sling-shot maneuvers and stuff in spite of great FTL speeds, making the over-all effect similar to time-compression, but without the game-busting implication of years of planet time having elapsed during your short trip.
If the relativistically trapped waves guy is right, we could "jump" TO the speed of light, I reckon, simply by accelerating all particles to the speed of light at once in a given direction.
That would necessitate that we first colinearize and synchronize all the trapped waves, so that they all move forward and all move back in unison. As the wave of every particle is passing through the middle of the trap in the forward direction, with very small energy (>>zero) we can accelerate the whole ship forward to the speed of light. The waves and their relativistic traps move forward together as if frozen. IOW, time stops. Which is what travel feels like to a photon. Now here. Instantly elsewhere (12 billion years later).