Roll over Einstein: Pillar of physics challenged

I never really understood this. They say speed is limited to the speed of light. But why? Is it simply because we don't know of anything that has traveled faster? Personally, I don't see why, or how, speed is limited by anything. With the right "thing" and the right conditions...speed should be limitless. And even if that "thing" doesn't exist...it doesn't mean there is a limit to speed. In my mind, saying that speed is limited is like saying distance is limited. Sure...we can say you can go no further than the end of the universe...but what do we know? If the universe is never ending, or there is something past that...and past that, etc...then distance isn't limited. So why would speed be limited?

Feel free to educate me, but...I think it is simply our small and self-important minds that make us say that anything is limited. The only real limitation...is our confining mentality. But then again, if we believe that nothing is limited...that would make our lives and our creations extremely small and unimportant. Again...our pride and ignorance make us say the most stupid things.

Neutrinos have a negligible mass, so they CAN'T exceed speed of light.
It's like 2x2 equals 4.

Einstein special relativity theory was proven many times, so it's either we will throw away a pillar of physics or develop a special "add-on" to STR.
The second solution is most likely to occur, as with Newtonian dynamics and special relativity. It just expanded previous theory.

well it just did so your models wrong.

seriously, its time to stop clinging to dogma and redo the damned math =/

ed: the electric universe model is looking more accurate by the day, if I had to think of a reason WHY its not working to plan

Lets call it

BOBSPEED!

I honestly can't understand why anyone puts the words "physics" and "can't" in the same sentence. ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE. we've barely scratched the surface in physics..we really don't know much at all..

Originally posted by FOXMULDER147
The reputation of Albert Einstein hangs in the balance...

Not really. That's like saying that the reputation of Isaac Newton hung in the balance during the quantum physics revolution. Newton's description of what he knew correctly predicted the physical laws as the world at the time could perceive them. Even though quantum physics proved Newton's laws don't always apply, his reputation as one of the greatest scientific minds ever remains intact.

Just like Newton before him, Einstein theories correctly predicted physical laws as the world at the time could perceive them.

Just like Newton, Einstein's reputation will remain unscathed, even if our knowledge of physics goes beyond Einstein's ideas.

Originally posted by DragonFire1024
This is really exciting if it's confirmed. This could change a lot of things. I always wondered if this would be achieved at CERN. Now if we could just find a way to harness such a power in such a small space, then the possibilities for space and energy could be nearly endless. I am eager to view the results.

Speed-of-light experiments yield baffling result at LHC

"....The results will soon be online to draw closer scrutiny to a result that, if true, would upend a century of physics."

hosted.ap.org
(visit the link for the full news article)

edit on 22-9-2011 by DragonFire1024 because: clarify

edit on 22-9-2011 by DragonFire1024 because: typos

People have been theorizing this concept since the day Einstein published his theory.

Some, cannot even wrap their arms around the notion of anything going faster than what we can see to be almost instantaneous....light

Others, like H.P. Lovecraft concocted horrifying stories, saying Einstein is wrong and these awful monstrous things that come from the stars are doing so by means of faster than light technology.

Makes one wonder....after all, this adds credence to the bizarre notion of teleportation, or instant travel.

The reason that the universe is expanding faster than Light is because Space is expanding faster than Light.
It can do that because Space itself is not a "thing," and in fact, in order for something to qualify as a "thing,"
it has to exist "inside of Space"(keep in mind that mass is defined as "something"(string of energy that curves) and occupies Space.) It is not subject to the laws of our universe because the laws of our universe apply only to the things "inside of Space." IMO, in order to see how FTL travel is possible, we need to better understand just what exactly "Space" is.

So what IS Space? Suppose that we were to visualize Space as a balloon, and apply that to the atom, then one can see that anything that exists "inside the wall of the balloon" can move faster than Light, as the balloon/Space itself expands and carries those particles along with it(keep in mind here that "inside the wall of the balloon" is very different from inside the balloon. Supposed that the skin of the balloon is 2-D, then anything within the skin of the balloon is trapped within its own dimension, and subject to its laws, just like how we're 3-D trapped within 4-D). Perhaps what they've just detected here is not really a particle moving faster than light, but rather an expansion of space at the micro-level that we can't detect with our senses.

Now if a particle is trapped within its dimension, then there is no way it can curve the other areas of the balloon, Its mass(by our definition) would automatically be 0.

Another way to travel faster than light is if Space itself is an illusion. This implies that every particle is everywhere at once and Space is just an illusion to give us the appearance of 3-D(Space, Forces and Energy combine to give us color, feelings of solids, etc.)

Actually, since Space is expanding on a macro-level, perhaps we ARE already moving faster than the speed of light (we don't feel it the same way we don't feel the Earth or galaxy rotating or moving. The universe is a very strange place indeed.)

As to why the speed of light is the limit, that's a good question. Technically, an object of true zero mass should have infinite speed. There must be virtual particles(and the virtual particles within those virtual particles, etc.), each wrapped within their own dimension, that are undetectable in our dimension, that are slowing the speed of light down to a quantifiable number. You may argue, if there are an infinite # number of dimensions, and the speed of light is infinite, then shouldn't the speed of light still be infinite in every dimension? Well, no. The speed of light can be a quantifiable number(the same way how you can't accelerate mass to the speed of light in our dimension. One could even argue it's the Creator's trick to work around an infinity), in an infinite # of dimensions. It can go 300,000,000, 300,000...3000...3, .003, and so on.

Another way to look at it is that the speed of light has a limit because it would not be able to interact with "objects" otherwise.

scientists already did teleportation experiments years ago, and to a degree it worked, I don't see why everyone thinks everything they've never heard of it so bizzare, am I the only one who googles 'science' every other day or what?

The team - a collaboration between France's National Institute for Nuclear and Particle Physics Research and Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory - fired a neutrino beam 454 miles (730 kilometers) underground from Geneva to Italy.
hosted.ap.org...

As we see above an intelligence has created the speed. It did not happen on its own it happened in a controlled environment all the way from the gun to the target. That is something that does not happen in nature.

"You could say it's peanuts, but it's not. It's something that we can measure rather accurately with a small uncertainty," Ereditato told The Associated Press.
hosted.ap.org...

60 billionth of a second seems to be a small uncertainty??

I do believe we can make things go faster than light, I do not believe that we have or may never find anything traveling faster than light naturally, that is without intelligence added to obtain the speed.

I think the solution is an error in measuring time during the experiment. Time is not constant. How fast time runs greatly depends on gravitation and thus where it is measured. Gravitation varies across earth, so does time. The experiment has sent neutrinos through a mountain from Switzerland to Italy - the error could be in where time was measured.
If there is no error, great. But I won't get too excited just yet.

ETA: Just read the paper, I don't think there is some trivial failure
arxiv.org...

Originally posted by ACTS 2:38
I do believe we can make things go faster than light, I do not believe that we have or may never find anything traveling faster than light naturally, that is without intelligence added to obtain the speed.

Seems like you have watched star trek


CriticalCK you could be right. Such heavy land mass definitely influenced gravity force in this region, so maybe they miscalculated something in their equations?

Originally posted by dragonseeker
I honestly can't understand why anyone puts the words "physics" and "can't" in the same sentence. ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE. we've barely scratched the surface in physics..we really don't know much at all..

You are correct. Its because mainstream teaches to think inside the box and not outside it.
Anything ouside the box is termed as pseudoscience.

Einstien introduced the E=mc2 equation sure, but as with all science, he did not have as deep an understanding of the universe as we do now and there is always room for correction or alteration of what was known back then and what is being learned now.

I read another thread also that could join GR and SR with quantum phisics quite well if research was done with the ideas within, maybe even create a new branch of science should any of the information be verified. www.abovetopsecret.com...


Could it be even slightly possible for a partical to naturally produce more energy than it uses? This could mean that a particle can travel at any speed under certain conditions, a zero point energy particle for instance.

reply to post by Harte


does a photon of light have mass
2nd line to keep in the rules

reply to post by CriticalCK

as i understand it they measured light then the neutrino particle
neutrino won the race

Originally posted by maryhinge
reply to post by Harte

 

does a photon of light have mass

A photon has no rest mass. When a photon is travelling at the speed of light (which is always), it has relativistic mass, which gives it momentum and allows light to exert pressure. This is one of the forces behind the concept of solar sails.

2nd line to keep in the rules

You don't have to do that. As long as your one line is all you need to say, you don't need a second line. The one-line rule is only to keep people from saying things like "S&F" or "I agree," or pointless things like that.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought Quantum particles did not conform to STOR anyway?

reply to post by Angelic Resurrection


No it's not like that.
The laws of physics define limits of reality. For instance you can't abuse the law of momentum in compton scattering. There is a finite "amount" of momentum in every frame of reference.
Saying everything is possible is misleading. Again for instance let's take critical temperature. You can't condensate a gas above this temperature, no matter how high pressure you apply.
There are laws which are unbreakable, given the conditions they apply. Of course there could be some special condition where it can't be applied, but it's same like with Newtonian dynamics. It describes movement of objects well within a certain speed.
Anything which move faster than few % of speed of light, fall under STR. So it's like Clapeyron law and Van der Waals law. You can apply both to any gas, but in specific situation, one of these will fit better.

reply to post by antonia


Of course they do. Why wouldn't they?

In fact, it wasn't until Quantum Mechanics and Relativity were combined that we were able to get a full picture of just how many particles truly exist. It was only after Dirac modified the Schrodinger equation to include Relativity that antimatter was first predicted... and, soon after, it was experimentally confirmed.