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Eddy Vluggen wrote:
The speed of light is a known physical limit of the universe.

That's not entirely accurate, depending on your point of view. The speed of light is a known limit to our understanding of the universe. Until someone explains why energy cannot go any faster without relying on 45 layers of other people's mathematical theories, I will still say that it is possible to go faster then light and that is our understanding of physics that is, well, incomplete.

I know that with e = mc² accelerating anything with more mass then a single elementary particle would need all of the energy of the universe but if you rethink what that equation implies, you begin to see that it might just be possible if we knew more.

if (Object.DividedByZero == true) { Universe.Implode(); }
Meus ratio ex fortis machina. Simplicitatis de formae ac munus. -Foothill, 2016

Foothill wrote:
That's not entirely accurate, depending on your point of view. The speed of light is a known limit to our understanding of the universe. Until someone explains why energy cannot go any faster without relying on 45 layers of other people's mathematical theories, I will still say that it is possible to go faster then light and that is our understanding of physics that is, well, incomplete.

AFAIK, it does not require any additional layers. Now, do come up with a theory were light goes faster and prove it with a repeatable experiment, and we'll talk Smile | :)

Foothill wrote:
I know that with e = mc² accelerating anything with more mass then a single elementary particle would need all of the energy of the universe but if you rethink what that equation implies, you begin to see that it might just be possible if we knew more.

No, it wouldn't, because all matter is still slower than light.

Bastard Programmer from Hell Suspicious | :suss:

If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]

Let me see if I can explain this little theory I've been mulling over in my head since back when I was taking physics at my local university.

First, I will start with your statement

Eddy Vluggen wrote:
come up with a theory where light goes faster

One of the central tenants of my idea is not to find examples of light deviating from it's set speed but to answer why does it always want move at that speed. What is it about the constant that makes it this way not just for light but all energy. So I started pondering the meaning of Einstein's famous equation and it's implications.

e = mc² implies that energy is a function of an interaction between mass and the constant. It implies that energy is irrelevant and only mass and C matter. Most of the widely accepted theories are rooted in this. If we switch things up, the equation takes on a whole new meaning.

m = e/c² implies that mass is a function of an interaction between energy and the constant. It implies that mass is irrelevant on only energy and C matter. More to the point, since energy is in a constant state of acceleration, the mass of a particle is a direct result of energy shedding velocity due to the C. The caveat is that if we could figure out what the universal principal is that causes all energy to shed velocity to make mass, we could figure out how to negate it, thus making faster-than-light travel possible.

I may be off my marks but I've asked several physicists about this without a straight answer; even emails to NASA and FermiLab got me nowhere. The answer was always make up a mathematical model and prove it. It's the same exact model they have now just a different way of looking at it. Never did get anywhere with it so far. The only nice thing is that it offers an explanation for electron quantum jumping. I've got theories on gravity too but I can never get any help from physicists on that one either. Not even a suggestion on where to start.

if (Object.DividedByZero == true) { Universe.Implode(); }
Meus ratio ex fortis machina. Simplicitatis de formae ac munus. -Foothill, 2016

The longer one practices physics, the more entrenched prevailing thought becomes. The "trap" of science is that eventually it becomes its very antithesis: a religion, one based upon perceived facts. The word "perceived" escapes notice, however, and the physicists become the acolytes of the "church" of science. Those acolytes then defend their religion to the death.

Your new idea is heresy.

It seems that perception is the key thought there. As I read about special and general relativity, one point was clear: everything you measure is based on your frame of reference. It seems like a lot of scientists took that and ran with it while they forgot that perception makes the measurement and not the other way around.

if (Object.DividedByZero == true) { Universe.Implode(); }
Meus ratio ex fortis machina. Simplicitatis de formae ac munus. -Foothill, 2016

Have you read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn? I think that you would like it.

Sorry for the late response, but I'm still digesting your post Smile | :)

Foothill wrote:
One of the central tenants of my idea is not to find examples of light deviating from it's set speed but to answer why does it always want move at that speed.

If I learnt anything from programming is that all constants*) are variables. If C holds, then faster-than-light travelling would equal time-travelling.

Foothill wrote:
It implies that mass is irrelevant on only energy and C matter. More to the point, since energy is in a constant state of acceleration, the mass of a particle is a direct result of energy shedding velocity due to the C. The caveat is that if we could figure out what the universal principal is that causes all energy to shed velocity to make mass, we could figure out how to negate it, thus making faster-than-light travel possible.

Shedding velocity, or lacking velocity? And if you can vary the C, does that make faster-than-light travelling possible, or does it change the point at which energy 'solidifies' into mass?

Foothill wrote:
I may be off my marks but I've asked several physicists about this without a straight answer; even emails to NASA and FermiLab got me nowhere.

I'm just a programmer, never been to a university. From what I know, if some professional can give you a good explanation, they're usually rather fond of giving it. This forum is built on that premise Smile | :)

Foothill wrote:
It's the same exact model they have now just a different way of looking at it.

Doesn't mass come from the God-particle? I remember some 'yo mama so fat' yokes about it Roll eyes | :rolleyes:

Foothill wrote:
Never did get anywhere with it so far. The only nice thing is that it offers an explanation for electron quantum jumping. I've got theories on gravity too but I can never get any help from physicists on that one either. Not even a suggestion on where to start.

Not a suggestion, but a request - jot it all down. Notes are better than nothing (which means loosing the train of thought), and notes become scripts after some time. First thing to do with an idea is to capture it on paper, so it can be transmitted and multiplied.

If you can explain it in simpeler terms than academic speech then you'd have me as additional audience, and I'm pretty sure there are more people interested in the subject.

*) with the possible exception of human stupidity

Bastard Programmer from Hell Suspicious | :suss:

If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]

Thank you for not attacking the idea but, instead, asking for clarification. Let me expand on some of your points.

Eddy Vluggen wrote:
If C holds, then faster-than-light travelling would equal time-travelling.

It's just a personal belief but I don't think that time travel is possible. When it comes to Einstein's theory on relativity, time dilation is really about the rate that information, which is traveling at the speed of light, arrives at a specific frame of reference (which can be moving or stationary). It's basically describing the Doppler Effect at close to the speed of light and has nothing to do with the actual passage of time. I don't know where this time travel tangent arose but, while it makes for some very interesting stories, isn't really possible in my eyes.

Eddy Vluggen wrote:
And if you can vary the C, does that make faster-than-light travelling possible, or does it change the point at which energy 'solidifies' into mass?

In the theory, everything that has energy has mass and I tend to think of C as a universal drag coefficient. By lowering the amount of drag, particles would, in theory, lose mass and could travel faster. Even light would travel faster.

Eddy Vluggen wrote:
Doesn't mass come from the God-particle? I remember some 'yo mama so fat' yokes about it

The Higgs Boson (i.e. the god particle) is still just a theory. They found evidence of particles in the energy range they were looking for at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe but it could be anything really. They don't know where mass comes from yet.

I have this written down at home but I do not have the academic credentials to get anybody in the field of physics to listen. I just tell it to people who might be interested to hear. With so little in the way of resources, I wouldn't be able to prove a word of it in a lab. It doesn't help that I'm not really very good at any mathematics above college algebra which is why I stay clear of graphics programming and security algorithm design. Sorry if some of this is academic speech as I don't know of any other way to describe it.

if (Object.DividedByZero == true) { Universe.Implode(); }
Meus ratio ex fortis machina. Simplicitatis de formae ac munus. -Foothill, 2016

I think you are misunderstanding part of what happens when you travel at the speed of light. Faster than light travel necessitates time travel, unless you don't actually move through space and go through a wormhole or something of the sort.

Allow me to explain. Say you accelerate to 99.9999% the speed of light towards a star that is 3 million light years away. You will get there INSTANTLY. The star will be 3 million years older, but you will be at it's location instantly from your perspective. Your travel time will be almost zero, the star will just age very quickly. You can't get there faster than instant. Likewise, if you turn around right away and come back to earth at 99.9999% the speed of light, you will get back to earth INSTANTLY, but earth will be 3 million years older.

Unless you're travelling through wormholes, there is no way around this. Your comments about the Doppler effect and time travel make me think that you feel like passage of time is independent of your motion through space. It isn't. Faster than light travel moving through space is just non-nonsensical. If you want more speed, time passage on the things you are moving towards elapses faster and the time passage on the things you are moving away from slow down from your frame of reference. What does it even mean to move faster than instantly towards a location from your perspective? Or if you look back at the earth you are moving away from at the speed of light, what does it mean for less than zero time to have passed since you left? It's completely implausible.

Now, that said, I VERY STRONGLY argue with everyone that anything is possible, we might just not know it yet. That includes faster-than-light travel through something like a wormhole, or faster than light travel with really messed up multiverse stuff going on or whatever. Your imagination is the limit, but that is exactly why faster-than-light travel moving through space without time travel is impossible...because I can't imagine something that takes less time than an instant and I can't imagine how I can look at something and less than zero time passes by.

Think about it this way - the reason it takes infinite energy to move at the speed of light is because you just INSTANTLY propelled yourself from one location in space to another. To instantly move any distance requires infinite energy. You can't move faster unless you input more energy and to input more energy you need more time, hence why the "speed of light" is always a moving target and no matter how much energy you put in, you'll only get a little closer to it...because you can never get from A to B instantly, you need time to do that. And if you took any time to release that energy to get you moving, well then you haven't moved at the speed of light.

Wrap your head around this - time doesn't move from the perspective of light. Light just moves around in a static universe. That's why light "captures" what things looked like from the location the light came from...because light IS a timeless snapshot of the universe, at the time it was created.

Last reply I promise Smile | :)

Just wanted to give you an example of something I do strongly argue against...people that think we are doomed to end with some catastrophic ripping apart of the universe.

Firstly, to make any long-term prediction with any certainty about what will happen to a bubble of mass-energy where you literally have NO IDEA what 95% of it is or where it is coming from is insane. We live in but a tiny sliver of time of the universe and our predictions of where it is going and what it is going to do keep coming up wrong time and time again. We don't even know if the universe is a closed system. Given dark energy, it may not be. To decide we are doomed to explode from all this energy accelerating the universe that we know nothing about is insane to me.

Secondly, look at the scientific advances in the last 100 years. Can you even begin to picture what scientific advances will look like in 500 years? 10,000 years? 1,000,000 years? Yeah...no. The current physical arrangement and makeup of our bodies may cease to be possible, but who's to say that in a million years we won't be able to discover tech that will continue to work and exist and persist our minds in a universe with much different physics than now? Nobody can.

I love talking about this kind of stuff though haha. I was always trying to work out the whole faster than light travel thing in my head until I had an "aha!" moment one day while thinking about it and suddenly relativity, speed of light, time dialation, etc just clicked on a much deeper level than before and it started making sense. I was always relatively (pun intended) well-versed with relativity and how it worked, I could answer any question you wanted about what would happen if X, but that one aha moment was mind blowing, and I began to look at the universe entirely differently.

I know how those ah-ha moments feel. I had mine when I was trying to figure out why we couldn't define gravity and what gives particles their mass. That is when it struck me that it's not the science that is wrong, it is our perception of the science that is wrong. I have always acknowledged that when a problem looks impossible, it's time to shift your point of view and approach the problem in a different direction. I'm not saying that any of the discoveries of the last 40 years are wrong. I'm am attempting to point out that human failings have fixed our view point to a specific set of base hypotheses which limits our scientific flexibility of thought.

To expand on how human perceptions play into scientific research I start with e = mc² and how this formula influenced thought processes. Not many think much about this formula but it usually is one of the first physics formulas that we are exposed to; usually as children through TV and other media. Once we learn about what it means, it becomes a base for other thoughts. It's the rigid adherence to the formula's structure that could be the problem. By only looking at the formula, and the universe by extension, from one singular point of view, we have limited ourselves to functioning within that narrow space.

By limiting ourselves to such a narrow point of view, science can only progress along one line of thought. Previously when I said that e = mc² implied that energy was a function of an interaction between mass and the universal constant, I was attempting to make the point that, when you look at the formula like this, our brains interpret its meaning in that all particles are defined by their mass. All of the mainstream accepted science to this date is predicated on the idea that a fundamental aspect of particles is that they have mass. What if that were not true. With simple algebra, the formula can be rewritten to m = e/c². Now, anybody with mediocre math will shrug at this and not see past the surface but it could be that if Einstein had written the formula this way our approach to physics would be completely different now. That is the line of thought that I like to explore. What the formula now implies is that all particles have energy and that mass is a function of energy and the universal constant. That means that particles are defined by their energy. When you approach it from the side of all particles have energy, the limitations caused by mass do not seem so insurmountable.

I don't necessarily disagree with anything you mentioned, well except when it comes to time Big Grin | :-D

. I still say that even when traveling faster than the speed of light, time still ticks by at the same rate as if you were standing still. The real fact is that, until we actually accelerate a human being to relativistic velocities, we really don't know how time will behave and that our understanding right now is still just theory.

if (Object.DividedByZero == true) { Universe.Implode(); }
Meus ratio ex fortis machina. Simplicitatis de formae ac munus. -Foothill, 2016

But that's not rewriting the formula or looking at it differently. There isn't an "interaction" between mass and a constant...that formula is saying that mass IS energy. Don't look too much into the c^2 part...it's a constant. It's just a normalizing factor between mass and energy. All it's saying is that mass is directly proportional to energy.

That formula is also not the full expanded formula, it's just the main part of it.

There are particles with no mass. It's called light. Photons are exactly what you are saying - particles with energy. They have energy because of the part of that equation that you're missing, but that isn't rest mass. What happens from the perspective of a particle with no mass? Exactly what I described - it moves at the speed of light! No matter how much energy you give it, it still just moves at the speed of light, it just has a different amount of energy. That amount of energy defines the wavelength of the light. Low energy = radio waves. High energy = gamma rays.

When a particle that has no mass is created, i.e. a photon, it's universe LITERALLY stands still. Photons live in a uniquely different life than particles with mass - their life is defined not by time, but by distance. Time literally stands still for a particle of light during its journey, and then it is instantly over as it hits it's destination (from the perspective of the photon).

You really gotta work with the full equation to get any use out of it. m=e/c^2 without factoring in the missing part doesn't actually work.

See here for a somewhat better explanation: energy - Does $E = mc^2$ apply to photons? - Physics Stack Exchange[^]

modified 10-Feb-17 12:25pm.

The user's response to the question only reinforces the point I am trying to make:

Quote:
So formally one can still talk about the photon having a relativistic (or effective) mass $m = E/c^2$. But this concept of mass runs in all kinds of problems so its usage is discouraged.

Here is an example of the lengths that science will go to avoid the fact that the way they may be looking at physics isn't quite right. Two different ways of examining the exact same thing are available but one is accepted and the other is avoided because it causes trouble. By causing trouble, I more suspect it means that if it is accepted as priciple their life's work will be invalidated.

To me, it smells of hypocrisy. Here is light which, by saying is a massless particle, breaks their own fundamentals so instead of admitting that a photon has an infinitesimally small mass, they just call it zero and tell the rest of us to drink the cool-aid so that they don't have to go back and perform decades of rework.

Don't get me wrong here. I am not attacking you or the information you have provided. I don't think we are discussing the same thing. You have been providing the results of research while I am trying to examine the thought process that led to those results to determine if the human element has led us to a misunderstanding of the results or that our very base assumptions of physics are fundamentally incorrect. To me, physics has hit a brick wall of sorts which has led me to question everything I have been taught.

if (Object.DividedByZero == true) { Universe.Implode(); }
Meus ratio ex fortis machina. Simplicitatis de formae ac munus. -Foothill, 2016

I'm not sure what you mean. It's not infinitesimally small, it's zero. The equation measures rest mass. They are saying if you change the definition you can use it the other way but you've changed the definition into something that makes a mess of things, not because the equation is correct and we just don't understand it, but because if you use that definition of mass then now you have to carry the second part of the equation that you left out into EVERYTHING ELSE to make it work. And the second part of that equation is messy.

There's no conspiracy here.

I'm not calling a conspiracy. Recent discoveries have led me to a questioning of fundamentals. Take the EM Drive for instance. The experiment has repeatedly shown that the drive is creating thrust from electromagnetic energy in a vacuum but that shouldn't be possible. I really goes against convention. The EM Drive is basically saying that a vacuum is not empty and there is something there for the EM Drive to push against. Since we might have gotten the concept of what's in the space around us wrong, what else have we gotten wrong?

if (Object.DividedByZero == true) { Universe.Implode(); }
Meus ratio ex fortis machina. Simplicitatis de formae ac munus. -Foothill, 2016

I completely agree, all I'm saying is that faster than light travel doesn't make sense because speed of light travel is actually INSTANT. So, you are going to have to define what you mean by faster than light travel, because I don't know how you can get somewhere faster than instant.

True, there is no shorter distance then zero. To me, FTL is traveling in excess of 300,000 km/s.

if (Object.DividedByZero == true) { Universe.Implode(); }
Meus ratio ex fortis machina. Simplicitatis de formae ac munus. -Foothill, 2016

Yeah but....you are. You are travelling infinitely fast from your perspective. If you are travelling at the speed of light, your rocket ship can instantly arrive anywhere in the universe INSTANTLY. I think that's what you are missing about the whole relativity thing.

Pick the further thing in the universe you can think of. If you get your ship up to 99.99999% the speed of light, you will literally get there in a second.

Would you mean instantly from my point of reference or from an observer's point of reference?

if (Object.DividedByZero == true) { Universe.Implode(); }
Meus ratio ex fortis machina. Simplicitatis de formae ac munus. -Foothill, 2016

Mike Marynowski wrote:
Pick the further thing in the universe you can think of. If you get your ship up to 99.99999% the speed of light, you will literally get there in a second.

So, if you go slower than light, you travel further than light itself travels in a second?

I'm going to re-read this thread later on again, I must have missed some things Thumbs Up | :thumbsup:

Bastard Programmer from Hell Suspicious | :suss:

If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]

Haha...the closer to the speed of light you go, the slower time becomes in your frame of reference. Very close to speed of light travel will get you anywhere in the universe instantly from your perspective because of time dilation. The faster you go from Earth to say Planet X, the more "slow motion" you look to someone observing you from Earth or Planet X, and the more sped up everything on Earth and Planet X looks to you. When you move at the speed of light relative to something, from your perspective you get there instantly, and that thing ages the amount of light-time away it is.

I get how time may appear relative, but not how that means you move instantly.

Mike Marynowski wrote:
When you move at the speed of light relative to something, from your perspective you get there instantly, and that thing ages the amount of light-time away it is.

So, accelerating to lightspeed means time stands still from your own point of view?

I kinda doubt that Smile | :)

Bastard Programmer from Hell Suspicious | :suss:

If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]

Yes.

Read the last section here for an explanation:

Time Dilation[^]

Some more reading if you are interested:

Time Dilation[^]

Q: If time slows down when you travel at high speeds, then couldn’t you travel across the galaxy within your lifetime by just accelerating continuously? | Ask a Mathematician / Ask a Physicist[^]

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