How does it feel to be possibly wrong?

Postby burner59 » Mon Sep 17, 2012 3:37 pm

http://news.yahoo.com/smallest-thing-un ... 41798.html

First they said that there might be something faster than the speed of light, now they're saying this-this could possibly be junk.
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Re: How does it feel to be possibly wrong?

Postby Jason Toddman » Tue Sep 18, 2012 7:06 am

I was certain there was a mistake with the speed of light business from the start; the measured difference was too small (despite what they claimed about their margin of error) to be even remotely convincing.
With this concept of the limit of smallness however, they're not really saying much of anything new in this article. Planck's length has been considered a theoretical lower limit of size by some physicists for many years now; at least since *I* was a college student, though it perhaps gained wide acceptance only in more recent years.
One thing I haven't heard mentioned yet though is the implication (at least, to my POV) that there is a similar limit on vastness.
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Re: How does it feel to be possibly wrong?

Postby drawscore » Tue Sep 18, 2012 12:19 pm

There are more things in space beyond our comprehension, than we can imagine. But we know, or at least theorize, that space-time can be bent or "warped," hence the term "warp speed."

Is it possible to travel faster than the speed of light? Not with our current technology, but that doesn't mean that 200 or 300 years from now, we won't be as far ahead in technology, as we are now, from 1712.

For those that believe in a Supreme Being, it's hard to believe that God, in his wisdom, would confine life as we know it, to one tiny speck in this vast universe. For those that don't believe, consider that there are trillions of stars, but imagine for a moment, there are just 1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion). If just 1% of those stars have planets revolving around them, that's still 10 billion, and if just 1% of those have a planet in the right place, revolving around the right kind of "sun," that's still 100 million planets. One or more of them must have life forms that are similar to our own. Or even dissimilar.

Drawscore

Re: How does it feel to be possibly wrong?

Postby Jason Toddman » Tue Sep 18, 2012 12:40 pm

drawscore wrote:For those that believe in a Supreme Being, it's hard to believe that God, in his wisdom, would confine life as we know it, to one tiny speck in this vast universe.
Drawscore

Actually, maybe He would - as a temporary form of quarantine. In His wisdom, maybe He figures that by the time we have the wisdom and know-how to reach other stars, we'll also have the wisdom to get along with one another AND with whatever life forms we discover out there! Judging by current events, we certainly aren't ready to meet our interstellar neighbors yet (can anyone say religious extremist?)! Maybe, as indicated in Star Trek, we'll be enough wiser by the time we travel to deep space to make more friends than enemies.
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Re: How does it feel to be possibly wrong?

Postby Chris12 » Tue Sep 18, 2012 12:46 pm

I wonder.....Did Jesus die for the Clingons too? :big: The church would be in for a rough time if we encountered Alien friends with a vastly different religion.

Re: How does it feel to be possibly wrong?

Postby Jason Toddman » Tue Sep 18, 2012 1:50 pm

Chris12 wrote:I wonder.....Did Jesus die for the Clingons too? :big: The church would be in for a rough time if we encountered Alien friends with a vastly different religion.

Let's just hope that if we do that they do not go in for Islamic style proselyzing (IOW convert or die)
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Re: How does it feel to be possibly wrong?

Postby Vukk » Mon Oct 08, 2012 12:56 pm

Reading the material, I knew it was a mistake somewhere w/in an hour of reading about it the first time. They said something which travels only a few hundred miles went faster when there was a star went super nova and everything traveled here at the same time. It was many, many millions of light years away. Light travels about 10 million miles per minute. If what the initial report said was true, the star which went nova would have had an extremely big difference in what hit the earth when it did.

Re: How does it feel to be possibly wrong?

Postby drawscore » Mon Oct 08, 2012 3:39 pm

I made a mistake once: I thought I was wrong.

Drawscore

Re: How does it feel to be possibly wrong?

Postby sarobah » Mon Oct 08, 2012 5:41 pm

I realize this is an old thread, but it was not I who revived it :o)

drawscore wrote:Is it possible to travel faster than the speed of light? Not with our current technology, but that doesn't mean that 200 or 300 years from now, we won't be as far ahead in technology, as we are now, from 1712.

The problem is that faster-than-light speed is almost certainly a physical impossibility. Even the most advanced technology cannot accelerate matter to the speed of light (let alone beyond) without converting it to massless photons – i.e. electromagnetic energy. Since the second law of thermodynamics rules that energy cannot be reconverted to mass with 100% efficiency (some will invariably be lost as heat), this would be a one-way process.
Objects with mass cannot be accelerated to the speed of light – that would require infinite energy. So somehow achieving FTL speeds would require more than infinite energy – a meaningless concept.
Hypothetical particles, tachyons, may propagate FTL, but there is no conceivable way of converting ordinary matter into tachyons and back again; because it would mean crossing that infinitely high energy barrier twice.
So as much as I am a fan of Star Trek and science fiction in general, I’m afraid that future space explorers will be confined to subphotonic speeds.
For any of the above to be wrong, then almost all the physics and chemistry of the past 100 years has been wrong. There is not the slightest evidence of that.
Words, like Nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within.

Re: How does it feel to be possibly wrong?

Postby Jason Toddman » Mon Oct 08, 2012 8:47 pm

Vukk wrote:Reading the material, I knew it was a mistake somewhere w/in an hour of reading about it the first time. They said something which travels only a few hundred miles went faster when there was a star went super nova and everything traveled here at the same time. It was many, many millions of light years away. Light travels about 10 million miles per minute. If what the initial report said was true, the star which went nova would have had an extremely big difference in what hit the earth when it did.

That is in fact the very thing that made me decide that the whole neutrino FTL thing had to be wrong right from the start. Otherwise, when we detected the neutrinoes from Supernova 1987A (about 150,000 ly away), we should have done so weeks before the supernova was observed by other means instead of mere hours. And as is that time was being spent in processing that an unusual surge of neutrino detection had taken place and alerting telescopes to look for the source, NOT in any gap between the supernova's neutrino emissions and the rest of its radiation emissions.
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Re: How does it feel to be possibly wrong?

Postby sarobah » Mon Oct 08, 2012 9:21 pm

At the time of the OPERA experiment, and again when the anomaly was explained, some media types were claiming that the FTL neutrino “fiasco” showed how shaky the foundations of modern mainstream physics are. In fact it did the opposite. Those physicists who stuck by their conviction that our theories are correct were vindicated (once more).
In 107 years, no experiment, no observation and no hypothesis has managed to dislodge even one brick from the bastion of special relativity.
Words, like Nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within.

Re: How does it feel to be possibly wrong?

Postby Jason Toddman » Mon Oct 08, 2012 9:33 pm

sarobah wrote:
In 107 years, no experiment, no observation and no hypothesis has managed to dislodge even one brick from the bastion of special relativity.

Further, many such experiments have actually helped to prove its validity.
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Re: How does it feel to be possibly wrong?

Postby sarobah » Tue Oct 09, 2012 12:35 am

I guess it’s only polite to address the original point brought up by burner59 :o)

The Planck length (1.62 × 10^–35 metres), Planck mass (2.17651 × 10 ^−8 kilograms) and Planck time (5.39 × 10 ^–44 second) are the smallest possible units. This has been known for many decades, and very few physicists would propose that anything of zero dimensions (singularities, pointlike particles) actually exists in our universe.
For example, subatomic particles were once thought of as dimensionless points, but that never made sense. A particle of infinitely small size would require an infinite amount of energy, to counteract the pressure exerted by the charge on itself (since like charges repel each other). Because the strength of the charge force is inversely proportional to distance, at zero distance it rises to infinity.
Words, like Nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within.

Re: How does it feel to be possibly wrong?

Postby Jason Toddman » Tue Oct 09, 2012 6:27 am

I've never been able to figure out how the incongruously high Planck's mass fits in with atomic weights. Just one reason why I've always been a science generalist rather than a physics specialist.
Dare to be different... and make a difference.
To boldly go where no one in their right mind has gone before...

Re: How does it feel to be possibly wrong?

Postby sarobah » Tue Oct 09, 2012 4:02 pm

Jason Toddman wrote:I've never been able to figure out how the incongruously high Planck's mass fits in with atomic weights. Just one reason why I've always been a science generalist rather than a physics specialist.

The Planck mass is the square root of ch/G where h is Planck’s constant, c the speed of light and G the gravitational constant. c is big and h is small, but G is very small, so the result is comparatively large.
Simple, really :o)

Actually, on second thoughts, I don’t think that’s what you meant.
You are puzzled about the difference in scale. No one really knows, but it may be that the Planck mass is, in this case, an upper limit. (And remember, it is a unit of measurement; it is really the particles that are large or small.) If a fundamental particle was large enough to approach the Planck mass (which is better defined in terms of density), it would “collapse” under its own gravity (which is insignificant at the actual atomic level). Since all matter hasn’t collapsed into a black hole, we live in a universe where – possibly by a happy accident – particle masses are extremely small.
So I should really not have included the Planck mass with the other Planck units, as it is really only significant in dealing with black holes and the very early universe.
Words, like Nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within.

Re: How does it feel to be possibly wrong?

Postby Jason Toddman » Tue Oct 09, 2012 8:48 pm

sarobah wrote:Actually, on second thoughts, I don’t think that’s what you meant.

You're right. It wasn't. :big:
But as I said, I don't understand this aspect of physics well enough to make it clearer. I understand many of the ramifications of the special theory of relativity, but quantum physics has always confused the dickens out of me.
I'm more of a Renaissance Man anyway; I like to understand the basic picture without getting too far into the minute details that are the provinces of the PhD specialists. So I have an excellent all-around grasp of science without having too detailed a comprehension of any one of them.
Dare to be different... and make a difference.
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Re: How does it feel to be possibly wrong?

Postby sarobah » Tue Oct 09, 2012 9:09 pm

No one can explain the WHY of quantum physics. All we can really do is describe.
If our brains were attuned to dealing with the quantum world rather than the macroscopic world, our ancestors would have all been eaten a million years ago.

My area of expertise is astrophysics, but quantum physics has been intruding into astronomy for the last few decades, so it’s hard to avoid. I blame Stephen Hawking.
Words, like Nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within.