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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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 
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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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.
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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 
Bastard Programmer from Hell
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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Thanks - but the explanation isn't for me; I'd refute it, where most people seem to agree that it is correct
"So, when we move, at whatever speed, time slows down relative to a stationary observer."
..means it doesn't slow down for you if you move at that speed. So, again, I do not see how a photon travels instantly; not even from it's own perspective.
Bastard Programmer from Hell
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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I don't know what you mean by your first line.
When they say "it doesn't slow down for you" they are clarifying that it means that it's not like your spaceship will be moving in slow motion around you, it slows down from the reference frame of someone looking at you from where you left. That said, it does *appear* to you like you are travelling faster than 300,000km/s if you accelerated close to the speed of light towards an object because time will be moving very slow for you. If you take the trip distance as measured from a stationary point, divided by the time measured on a time taking device on your ship, it will certainly work out to considerably faster than the speed of light.
Relativity is fascinating and kind of awesome. You need to rethink how you look at everything for it to make sense.
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Remember that there is also length contraction at close to the speed of light...so time slows, and length contracts to close to 0 as well. So the distance you have to cover when you are moving that fast, relative to your frame of reference, has now decreased to almost 0 as well. Perhaps that's an easier way of thinking about it from the perspective of the traveler.
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This is what most people that complain about the speed of light as a limit don't fully comprehend. It's not a speed limit, so much as it is the universe's infinity. It takes infinite energy to get there for a massful object because IT IS infinity from the perspective of that object. An outside observer watching their friend fly off in a spaceship at close to the speed of light will see a completely frozen person moving at 300,000km/s. The person in the space ship will see everything around them aging millions of years in an instant. From their perspective, they can travel millions of light years in an instant at that speed and no laws regarding faster-than-light information travel are being broken because of relativity - the object they are moving towards is aging fast enough that the information technically still took millions of years to get there.
So the good news is that it could be possible for us to reach the furthest stars if we want to, as long as we are willing to leave behind an earth that will age millions of years when we arrive there.
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Allow me to clarify for a second.
You see an awesome star you want to visit. You look into the night sky, and you see a supernova exploding. You want front row seats to this event, so you jump into your speed of light ship to go look at it.
You get there instantly, i.e. you have aged say 1 second, but when the ship stops at its destination you will have found that the supernova is gone. But how? You got there instantly!
Well that's simple...it's because the light you were looking at from Earth was 20 billion light years old, so the star actually exploded 20 billion years ago. You got there instantly, but "instantly" near the star is 20 billion years later than the light you are seeing from earth.
So if you don't believe in time travel, this is the fastest you can go. If the star exploded 20 billion years ago and it's now dead, you can't get to the star as it was 20 billion years ago. You can begin your journey now at infinite speed from your perspective and see how it looks NOW, 20 years after that supernova explosion that the light just got to you from.
If you have an alternate proposition, such as multiverse theory, then I'm all game, it's possible. But you can't have no time travel and faster than light travel, it just doesn't make sense. If you explain a theory of how that would work where I can picture it working then I'm all for it being possible, but as you've laid it out, it won't work.
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I get what you are say, of course the star won't be there, you're 20 billion years too late. I get that. I guess what my brain isn't getting the jump from faster than light to instantaneous travel. To me faster than light is just that, traveling faster than 300,000 km/s (I'm ignoring the limitations on speed here).
if (Object.DividedByZero == true) { Universe.Implode(); }
Meus ratio ex fortis machina. Simplicitatis de formae ac munus. -Foothill, 2016
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Well then you're in luck - get up to close to the speed of light and you will get there instantly. If someone on earth is looking at you as you make your journey then it will look like you are moving at the 300,000km/s, but at that speed space in front of you is compressed so much that you get there instantly, and space behind you expands so much that 20 billion years will have passed on earth. Hence why "everything is relative" - there is no "absolute" frame of reference in the universe, everything changes in relation to everything else.
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As interesting as this discussion has been, it's almost quitting time here so I'm off to enjoy the weekend. Have a pleasant evening.
if (Object.DividedByZero == true) { Universe.Implode(); }
Meus ratio ex fortis machina. Simplicitatis de formae ac munus. -Foothill, 2016
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You too!
I should correct a previous statement - I meant to say time is compressed/expanded in front/behind you not space. That's what they are talking about when they refer to "time dilation" in relativity.
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It's also important to note that for a given particle, ALL the parts of that equation are constants. A photon never changes the amount of energy it has - it gets absorbed and ceases to exist and then a new photon with more or less energy is emitted, but the energy lost in that transition is what adds or removes mass in the proportion identified in the e=mc^2 equation.
So, that equation has very little to do with our ability to move faster. M is mass in a restful frame of reference. It has nothing to do with your speed or energy in a moving frame of reference. All that equation is saying is that if you absorb e energy, something has to gain e/c^2 mass. Likewise, if something loses m mass, you have to emit mc^2 energy. It goes both ways and gets applied both ways. It isn't an interaction, it's the static state of a particle during it's lifetime from the perspective of rest mass / rest energy.
Adding kinetic energy to a particle to move it doesn't change it's parameters of e, m, or c from its frame of reference.
[EDIT: sorry fixed my equations had it all mixed up]
modified 10-Feb-17 12:59pm.
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Foothill wrote: It's just a personal belief but I don't think that time travel is possible.
I surely hope so. Imagine children of the future having to learn 25 alternative histories that all happened.
Foothill wrote: 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.
It comes from multiple places, including the idea that time-space warps around a black hole. Hollywood has a need for time-travel to be possible.
Foothill wrote: 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.
..which might be also a better explanation than the hyperexpansion of the early universe. If the velocity (or drag, depending on your viewpoint) can vary, then there is no longer a need for a rapid expansion.
Foothill wrote: By lowering the amount of drag, particles would, in theory, lose mass and could travel faster.
Yeah, same sentence quoted twice, but just wondering; how much "particles" are there in a human that has no mass?
Foothill wrote: The Higgs Boson (i.e. the god particle) is still just a theory.
Yes, but I haven't come up with anything better yet 
Foothill wrote: 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.
Are you familiar with open source? If you can describe your ideas and distribute it (in whatever form), it will be built upon by others. You can fill up any current gaps using "fairy dust", as lots of theories are incomplete.
My math-skills are at the level when I left school; junior second level education. That did not stop me from doing graphics programming, and I learned that you can do a 3D effect in a 2D environment by varying colors according to a set pattern. It was a painter that explained how to do that, not a maths-professor.
Describe what you think happens, and let someone else worry about the actual implementation. And explain it like you would to your kid - that way your audience is a bit larger than those who want to ignore it. Imagine you spending 10 years on learning something and meeting a passing travelling salesman who goes "that's all wrong actually" - I can image that it strikes them as "unlikely". And I can also imagine them being wrong 
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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Yea, you have to be jovial while exploring lines of thought that run counter to established beliefs.
If you want proof that time travel is impossible, thank history. Do you think for a second that if time travel were possible somebody would have already traveled back in time and assassinated Hitler in the trenches of France during WWI? We're human and I am certain some American would have done it just to prove that it could be done. 
I also don't think that black holes exist or at least not in the way that we currently think that they do. The point is that we use math to describe the universe but it doesn't work in reverse. While Hawking is a brilliant mathematician, just because you can prove something exists on paper does not mean that it exists in reality. I find it far more probable that the phenomenon that we think are black holes are really just the dead cores of the very first stars. Since black holes where accepted in mainstream physics, some people have gone to great lengths to try and prove it and thereby preventing other avenues of thought. I see them as very large bodies of normal matter with large proportions of radioactive material. The radioactivity will keep them very hot for a long time, continuously spewing radiation into space but other then that they behave like any other celestial object. Until we get close enough to one to take real-time measurements, it is still an educated guess either way.
if (Object.DividedByZero == true) { Universe.Implode(); }
Meus ratio ex fortis machina. Simplicitatis de formae ac munus. -Foothill, 2016
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Foothill wrote: We're human and I am certain some American would have done it just to prove that it could be done.
Who said Hitler is not the result of that time-travelling?
Foothill wrote: I also don't think that black holes exist or at least not in the way that we currently think that they do. The point is that we use math to describe the universe but it doesn't work in reverse. While Hawking is a brilliant mathematician, just because you can prove something exists on paper does not mean that it exists in reality. I find it far more probable that the phenomenon that we think are black holes are really just the dead cores of the very first stars.
The simpeler explanation is the more probably one. Doesn't sound as exciting though.
Foothill wrote: I see them as very large bodies of normal matter with large proportions of radioactive material. The radioactivity will keep them very hot for a long time, continuously spewing radiation into space but other then that they behave like any other celestial object. Until we get close enough to one to take real-time measurements, it is still an educated guess either way.
In that case, I'll rather go for the romantic view that there is an entire universe inside every black hole
Bastard Programmer from Hell
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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OK, let me come at this from a more philosophical angle.
Which came first, energy or matter? AFAIK, current mainstream cosmology would have to say that energy came first, at least if you hold with the Big Bang Theory. You can convert energy to mass and vice-versa, but when you look closely enough matter is fundamentally a product of energy (think of what an atom truly is). So is the everyday material world even "real" then, if solid matter is merely an "illusion" created by tiny energy clusters sparsely distributed through vast quantities of empty space?
Well, it's as real as real gets, from the experiential viewpoint, because there's no "more real" world that you can visit. However, that doesn't mean that matter is the foundation of reality itself, it's just the foundation of our experience of reality. But what is it that experiences this reality?
There is one truly undeniable statement in philosophy, one statement that is more certainly true than anything else that can be said. It was famously stated by Descartes as "I think, therefore I am." In other words, the fact that I am able to contemplate being proves that, in fact, being is a thing and that I exist. Importantly, the only thing that we can be so certain that exists is consciousness. Consciousness is the only thing that experiences reality, and so in some sense reality is always defined in terms of consciousness (even for materialists, who have to deal with the sensory problem). You cannot, in good intellectual faith, ignore the question of consciousness if you seek an accurate understanding of reality.
[I'm going to beat on Daniel Dennett a bit here because his book Consciousness Explained has become like a bible for naive materialists, so I have to deal with him in order to argue my case, because a lot of people think that the title of this book wasn't a lie.]
But science ignores the question of consciousness all of the time, mainly because it's so hard. When scientists do consider it, many of them go with a tortured materialist explanation a la Daniel Dennett. But when they do so they have to wrestle with the problem of mind/body dualism (Idealism doesn't have this problem, but Dennett seems ignorant of that and considers an assault on mind/body dualism enough to dismiss all non-materialist views). More importantly, materialists have to explain how consciousness exists at all in a materialistic universe. The idea that consciousness is an emergent property of matter is mystical magical BS, the very thing that materialists work so hard to steer clear of. It reminds me of that Far Side cartoon where a scientist has written a long formula on a chalkboard with "and then a miracle happens" in the middle.
Dennett tries to side-step this with a hilariously convoluted theory of consciousness though evolutionary biology, never mind the fact that we can't see any evidence of consciousness or its evolution in biology at all: it's not in the fossil record or DNA or anywhere that we can examine it. Nevertheless, Dennett uses his imagination to come up with an evolutionary explanation in the absence of evidence, and then concludes this theory by arguing that consciousness is completely illusory and unreal, a mirage created by material biology, and therefore only the material universe is real and we can safely ignore consciousness because there's no such thing. This is his biggest philosophical mistake: it's equivalent to saying "I think, but I am not." That's about as logically wrong as wrong can be. You can say that consciousness isn't real, but the very act of doing so proves you wrong.
So where am I going with this? Well, it could be that the missing piece of the puzzle in physics is the one bit of the universe that physicists largely ignore: consciousness. Could it be that the material universe is a product of consciousness, rather than the other way around?
If you look closely at physics you find strange things that defy our common-sense view of the world, especially in quantum physics. But quantum physics is the bedrock of our understanding of the material world, isn't it? So if strange things like entanglement and the observer effect defy our ordinary understanding of reality, wouldn't it be right to say that quantum physics has the more accurate picture and that our ordinary understanding of the physical world is skewed and wrong in its assumptions?
This all makes sense if you view the material world as a product of consciousness. Now, I don't mean individual consciousness, this isn't about solipsism. If consciousness is the bedrock of reality then it exists in not just people, but is the actual fabric of the universe itself. If this is true, then we will never have an accurate picture of the universe until we understand consciousness.
But how in the world can science get at consciousness? The very difficulty of it is the main reason why scientists steer clear of this question. But if I'm right and consciousness creates the material universe (in real time), then there must be some intersection, some interaction between consciousness and the material world at a fundamental level. Where might we find this? I'm hopeful that as quantum physics digs deeper into the mystery of the fundamental nature of reality, it will actually find consciousness as a measurable entity that can be observed through its interaction with matter, much in the same way that we can detect dark matter by its effects even though we can't observe it directly.
So why is this important for technology and the future? If the material universe is a product of consciousness, then it might be possible to develop technologies based on an understanding of consciousness that can interact with the universe at the most fundamental level. This would be the ultimate in technology and would potentially allow us to do absolutely anything that doesn't truly violate the fundamental laws of the universe (there are obviously some pretty hard-and-fast rules to reality, otherwise it would fall apart when gravity changed its mind about how to work).
Tl;dr: The missing piece of the puzzle in physics may turn out to be consciousness, and if physics can crack that nut then all things possible through technology may become possible. Matter may not be able to move through space faster than the speed of light, but that's not the only way to get from point A to point B. In fact, consider the possibility of transferring consciousness faster than the speed of light, physics has no prohibition on that (yet)
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