Solid body motion faster than light?

If I had a satelite orbiting mars that was orbiting so that it always was on the side of mars facing earth, and another satelite orbiting earth that always faced mars.

Then I attach a laser and sensor to each. I also attach a taught nanotube string between the two satelites with a lever sensor.

I turn on the laser on earth, and the sensor on mars senses the earth laser 8 minuets later, yet if I pull on the nano string the mars satelite would sense it instantaneously right?

Would'nt the motion of pulling that string be traveling faster than light?

1, when earth and mars are at the opposite sides of the sun, what will happen to your string? ...

2, when earth and mars are on the opposite sides of the sun, what will happen to your laser beam?

3, just like an elastic, the nanostring won't move over its entire distance when pulled. There is always elasticity to be taken into account and taking it into acount, a, say, 1 meter pull on the nanotube might not even register at the mars side. The pull wil be dispersed over the entire length of the nano cord.

I think in such a scenario, where you have a chain much longer than 186,000 miles, you can send information faster than light--by tugging (intergalactic morse code? ) to send a signal to your buddy on the other end. However no individual link of the chain will move faster than your arm does.

But if the flash was pulling the chain...

[edit on 14-7-2005 by Zaknafein]

I think I see what Xeven is driving at with this thought experiment. Without addressing
the praticality of the set up, this would be the same as the " tie two tin cans together with a
string and talk to each other" thing we did as kids. (Some of us anyways.) Doesn't matter
what the "string" is made of, or whether you talk thru it or tug on it. It will generate a compression
wave, which will travel at the "speed of sound", not the "speed of light" at the "speed of sound"
rate for the medium in question. Most solids will allow for sound to travel much faster than in air.

There was an experience conducted where information was transmitted via a solid (a brick) at the speed of 1.4 times the speed of light. The information was transmitted via a compression wave (sic) through the solid.

Oooo, gonna have to ask for a link to that please before I start rejecting established theories such as relativity. Cheers

Originally posted by Silent Professional
There was an experience conducted where information was transmitted via a solid (a brick) at the speed of 1.4 times the speed of light. The information was transmitted via a compression wave (sic) through the solid.

I can find no such experiment on the journal searches.

i believe he is referring to quantum tunnelling.
for those yet unenlightened:

Quantum Tunnelling is the quantum mechanical effect which permits a particle to escape through a barrier when it does not have enough energy to do so classically. You can do a calculation of the time it takes a particle to tunnel through. The answer you get can come out less than the time it takes light to cover the distance at speed c. Does this provide a means of FTL communication?
ref:T. E. Hartman, J. Appl. Phys. 33, 3427 (1962).

the answer is of course no... right?
Claims were made by a group of physicists to have performed experiments which seem to suggest that FTL communication by quantum tunneling is possible.

They claim to have transmitted Mozart's 40th Symphony through a barrier 11.4cm wide at a speed of 4.7c. Their interpretation is, of course, very controversial. Most physicists say this is a quantum effect where no information can actually be passed at FTL speeds because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. If the effect is real it is difficult to see why it should not be possible to transmit signals into the past by placing the apparatus in a fast moving frame of reference.

but this was discredited (and rightly so later on).

Terence Tao has pointed out that apparent FTL transmission of an audio signal over such a short distance is not very impressive. The signal takes less than 0.4ns to travel the 11.4cm at light speed, but it is quite easy to anticipate an audio signal ahead of time by up to 1000ns simply by extrapolating the signal waveform. Although this is not what is being done in the above experiments it does illustrate that they will have to use a much higher frequency random signal or transmit over much larger distances if they are to convincingly demonstrate FTL information transfer.

The likely conclusion is that there is no real FTL communication taking place and that the effect is another manifestation of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

so whilst the signal may have traveled faster than the speed of light, heck its not really useful for the applications we want. Either that, or it was a misinterpretation of the Heisenberg unc. principle- make up your own mind

most references taken from:
math.ucr.edu...

a very useful site, check it out for more debunks of FTL travel, including the original one posted at the top, under section 4. Rigid Bodies.