Things you want science to know

tkingdoll said:
What an unusually optimistic outlook you have there. If you proved God does not exist, billions would continue to believe in him anyway. For reference, see Homeopathy and Uri Geller.
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:( sigh.
 
Initiation of "life" from raw chemicals. C'mon, it's only handful of nucleotides....
 
Discoveries/theories I want to see:

A standard model of gravity, hopefully from new supercolliders finding gravitons.
A theory of the universe without the idea of spacetime as an object.
A stronger theory of evolution, using physics to break down and explain statistics in mutations/evolution of genes and an average timeframe of how we could alternatively evolve.

Inventions I want to see:

Tissue farms.
Fully realized quantum computers.
Radiation-nullifying devices.
Chemical and biological nullifying devices.


Progressions I want to see:

Food cloning and hybrid plants finally allowed to grow in deslate, third-world countries.
Colonization of Mars and our Moon.


Some people say I am a dreamer...
 
If by "hybrid plants" you mean F-1 hybrids, there's a big problem with using them in desolate third-world countries. You can't keep seeds from this year's crop and expect them to grow true. That means farmers become beholden to their suppliers -- they have to buy seeds again every single year. Goodbye self-sufficiency, hello dependency. Better to encourage renewable agriculture (yay composting!) and the most suitable heirloom varieties.
 
It's been said.

AI, FTL Travel, Clean-abundant energy, space colonization, sex robots.

So, basically, artificially intelligent sex-robots hosting an FTL colonization ship, and access to tons of clean-abundant energy when we get there :)
 
Nanotechnology.....

I want tiny little reproducing robots floating around in the atmosphere like dust that relay weather data to make better forecasting models. Which ofcourse pose as much of a threat to living creatures as common lithometers would.

I'd like to write the model.
 
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mercuryturrent said:
Faster than light travel is just silly, people.
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I've been trying to demonstrate this to my own satisfaction, just to test my wishful thinking.

I don't know if I understand enough about relativity to do so, however... is it possible to generate contradiction by supposing a ship arrived at a nearby star faster than it would take for light to arrive? Regardless of the method.
 
mercuryturrent said:
Faster than light travel is just silly, people.
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of course, wormholes (if they exist) would allow you to traverse between two points in such a time as to make it seem (relative to linear travel between the two points) that you had travelled faster than light (even though you hadn't)

i'm adding wormhole travel to my list of things for science to crack :D
 
gnome said:
I don't know if I understand enough about relativity to do so, however... is it possible to generate contradiction by supposing a ship arrived at a nearby star faster than it would take for light to arrive? Regardless of the method.
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Yes. Travelling faster than light has the same effects as travelling back in time, i.e., you break causality. If you could travel at a sufficiently fast speed, you could go back in time and prevent Lincoln's assassination, for example.

This has to do with the fact that simultaneity is relative. Imagine two events:

A: John Wilkes Booth arrives at the theater.
B: A spaceship is travelling through a distant galaxy.

The time in our reference frame is 1865 for A and 2006 for B. But for the spaceship those two events may very well be simultaneous. Then, all the spaceship has to do is cover the distance in less time than it will take Booth to kill the president.
 
andyandy said:
of course, wormholes (if they exist) would allow you to traverse between two points in such a time as to make it seem (relative to linear travel between the two points) that you had travelled faster than light (even though you hadn't)

i'm adding wormhole travel to my list of things for science to crack :D
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Black holes might be proven to be in a form that doesn't allow this.

I'm not just talking about Bose-Einstien Condensates either. The dimensional flip that happens in a Black Hole that helps allow this could just be a superimposition of almost-accurate math.

Aiding now in Yllanes explanation:

I don't know if I understand enough about relativity to do so, however... is it possible to generate contradiction by supposing a ship arrived at a nearby star faster than it would take for light to arrive? Regardless of the method.
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+
The time in our reference frame is 1865 for A and 2006 for B. But for the spaceship those two events may very well be simultaneous. Then, all the spaceship has to do is cover the distance in less time than it will take Booth to kill the president.
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= paradox.

This is where relativity blends the lines between physics, math, and explanation. If an event already happens, according to the math, it still "hasn't happened" to observes who have yet to have a spacetime realization of it (since spacetime's maximum speed, and the extending of spacetime itself, is the speed of light; anything slower than light, according to the math, effectively "didn't happen yet" to a waiting observer). This isn't a problem of the math so much as it is a problem of understanding what the math implies. The math here assumes that it is an axiom that "Faster than light = impossible," which follows this logic:

Faster than light is impossible.
"Going back in time" means going faster than light.
Therefore, going back in time is impossible.

A non-mathematical, but more layman's definition is that once an event has happened, it can not "unhappen," in that you can't practically erase or alter the event by inserting a new cause/effect before it. But that event's fastest possible effect on all other matter is the speed of light. Going faster than light is absolutely impossible, yes, but even if you could, by the power of "wormholes," and beat the speed of light, you're still arriving after the event.

(Stephen Hawking talks about this possibility, which might make it seem like I'm challenging him, but it's not so; Hawking is actually musing about Quantum Physics and Special Relativity, without any sheer math to answer himself. That's ok with me. I can get romantic too.)

The math of General Relativity doesn't cover what would happen with a wormhole in this instance because going faster than light is denying a core anticedant axiom of the theory itself. A wormhole then, to fit with General Relativity, must not be defined as a way to "beat light." I'm not sure how it would be theorised. I wouldn't worry about it either; I doubt wormholes are possible.

I think a better way to understand "why we can't go faster than light," is to get straight to the fact of it: photons (packets of light; even though I'm sure I don't need to explain what a photon is to the people here anyway) move so fast because they do not move through the 4th dimension -- the time dimension. If an object was trying to accelerate to the speed of light, how could it accelerate itself if in order to do so, if every process that is both accerlerating it, and it itself, must remain completely still? The question is basically saying in order to move at the speed of light, it is not allowed to accelerate itself or have something else accelerate it. It's either already light, and moving at that speed, or it never will be.
 
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mercuryturrent said:
photons move so fast because they do not move through the 4th dimension -- the time dimension.
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I'm having trouble comprehending this statement. As I understand, photons move at the speed of light because they are massless. Neutrinos move very close to the speed of light, but slightly slower, and they have very little mass.

How can photons not move through time. They are created in the Sun and reach Earth in a few minutes. They exist continuously throughout that time.
 
Kaarjuus said:
How can photons not move through time. They are created in the Sun and reach Earth in a few minutes. They exist continuously throughout that time.
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Photons do not experience time. Think about time dilation. If you travel very fast, time goes slower for you. If you travel at the speed of light, time doesn't pass at all.

This is very interesting, because it is related to the neutrino problem. Until recently, neutrinos were considered massless. Then it was discovered that they oscillated: a neutrino could change its type during its voyage from the Sun. If they could change it meant that they experienced time, so they couldn't travel at lightspeed, so they couldn't be massless.
 
Yllanes said:
Photons do not experience time. Think about time dilation. If you travel very fast, time goes slower for you. If you travel at the speed of light, time doesn't pass at all.

/../
If they could change it meant that they experienced time, so they couldn't travel at lightspeed, so they couldn't be massless.
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But what about redshift? Photons change their wavelength and frequency.
 
Yllanes said:
Yes. Travelling faster than light has the same effects as travelling back in time, i.e., you break causality. If you could travel at a sufficiently fast speed, you could go back in time and prevent Lincoln's assassination, for example.

This has to do with the fact that simultaneity is relative. Imagine two events:

A: John Wilkes Booth arrives at the theater.
B: A spaceship is travelling through a distant galaxy.

The time in our reference frame is 1865 for A and 2006 for B. But for the spaceship those two events may very well be simultaneous. Then, all the spaceship has to do is cover the distance in less time than it will take Booth to kill the president.
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Maybe I'll understand better if I rephrase my example... and someone can embellish it. A beam of light leaves Earth in 2006, to arrive at a star 5 light years away, in 2011. I use an unknown method to arrive at the star in 2010. What can I do that would violate causality?
 
gnome said:
Maybe I'll understand better if I rephrase my example... and someone can embellish it. A beam of light leaves Earth in 2006, to arrive at a star 5 light years away, in 2011. I use an unknown method to arrive at the star in 2010. What can I do that would violate causality?
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Kaarjuus said:
But what about redshift? Photons change their wavelength and frequency.
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Dragonrock said:
I wish science would discover a way to keep threads on topic.
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Dragonrock is right. Apologies to Mercuryturrent. I'll start a new thread to try and answer those two questions.
 
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