Many years ago when the CUSWE encyclopedia still existed on the Force.net they had an entry where scientists were called upon to find alternatives to the hyperdrive for faster than light travel. I know that the Gossam had the Tumbledrive and you can always use hypergates or wormholes; but what could a scientist use in place of a hyperdrive to move FTL? A warp drive is Star Trek and believe it or not; sometimes in Star Wars Legends; the hyperdrive was refereed to as a warp drive (no joke).
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Their Talking about Star Wars, Star Trek, and Portal(s).
+1.
But I am sure that OP just has rejected the idea of curing impotence as central premise for their book as they have rejected any other idea. The point of their threads is to reject ideas, I guess.
As for your question, OP: I think that you should make your starships speed to FtL by using a beam of Orgone particles. Yes, that's a real concept that has been seriously suggested by a person who was for some reason regarded to be an actual doctor by some other people.
On wiki you can find an already-built Orgone energy accumulator, but I find that model to be extremely primitive. I'd put in at least a bed.
Bistromathic Drive. Operates on the principals of Bistromath, which holds that the act of splitting the bill after lunch with friends is so complex that it opens a rift in space-time. When the bill is finally sorted, you may find yourself in a completely different location or indeed time than what you expected. Activating a bistromathic drive and designing a trajectory consists of ordering items on a menu and other lunch-related activites. One lunch is finished, you find you have arrived at your destination.
RIP Douglas Adams
Wouldn’t they have to have predefined routes and controlled/constructed worm holes/speed tunnels to do this?
You have to read OPs old threads about the book he's writing.
Quantum Entanglement doesn't need any of that as it is not needed by the nature of itself.
Quantum Tunneling basically only needs a straight line as you can't collide with anything. It's like traveling in absolute vacuum, your speed can become 'infinite' in theory.
But your mass also increases.
Quantum tunneling like Neutrinos have been proven to not be FTL
Quote from Wikipedia:
"Theoretical physicists Gian Giudice, Sergey Sibiryakov, and Alessandro Strumia showed that superluminal neutrinos would imply some anomalies in the velocities of electrons and muons, as a result of quantum-mechanical effects. Such anomalies could be already ruled out from existing data on cosmic rays, thus contradicting the OPERA results. Andrew Cohen and Sheldon Glashow predicted that superluminal neutrinos would radiate electrons and positrons and lose energy through vacuum Cherenkov effects, where a particle traveling faster than light decays continuously into other slower particles."
This means that it is - in theory - possible to have particles that can travel faster than light. It would be just destructive to itself. Maybe his scientist can do research on a way to make it stable. Don't forget we're limited to our knowledge and resources, that mustn't be true for him.
Here's the full article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_anomaly
As my highschool teachers would say after reading that statement "everything else is worthless to read after reading that."
Is this supposed to be funny or not? Wikipedia is a great place for knowledge even if not the best for stuff like that. And i'm no scientist at all, that's just a hobby but i find it interesting.
I may not be in school any more, but the reason we were given for not being allowed to use wikipedia was the fact that it is a peer edited source, so anything can be changed. But I would like to bring up Tosh.0. Our buddy Danny had his viewers chance the official Tosh.0 wiki page to whatever they wanted, and within a short time, the page was corrected and locked from further edits.
I do think it's very accurate and i haven't changed anything there just to make a thought experiment more plausible for sure.
Just to throw in my two cents about this last part of the discussion...
Should you use Wikipedia? Well. I have done a PhD in Physics and the answer is... no... ish. As in: Wikipedia contains mistakes and can be partial and tremendously incomplete, especially when you're investigating a very small field. Does that mean you should never go to the wiki? Of course not. Wiki is a very good place to get some general knowledge and - importantly - to get sources. For instance, looking at these supraluminar neutrinos investigation, one can easily find the important papers on the subject, such as this one: https://arxiv.org/abs/1109.5682
So, basically, you can use Wikipedia, but you can't be caught quoting Wikipedia
If I may correct you... what the quote you have highlighted means is that if superluminal neutrinos existed, then we'd expect electrons and muons to behave differently than they behave (their behaviour would be, every now and then, anomalous). Giudice et al argued that these anomalous behaviours can be ruled out (i.e. they don't exist), and therefore superluminal neutrinos don't exist.
And, just to specify, neutrinos don't travel faster than light. All of this story comes from an experiment called OPERA that measured the speed of neutrinos to be faster than light because of a fault in the electronics. Ever since, the electronics has been repaired, and the instrument no longer measures ftl neutrinos.
So: superluminal neutrinos? No, not in our universe.
In the Star Wars universe, though? Meh.
So those neutrinos doesn't exist for what we know right now. But that can't be the end, i don't think it is. Humans are an amazing race, look what we've achieved in such a short time. A hundred years ago we barely could fly in the air, now we're talking about colonizing Mars.
If something exists that's FTL we will find it. If it doesn't exist i'm pretty sure we will develop something that is, even if we need to break existence on it's own.
You aren't wrong for certain
That said... no neutrinos were never measured as moving faster than light. And supraluminar neutrinos would have a QM effect on other particles, such as electrons - an effect that we could detect but don't see. This, for a physicist, is enough to discard supraliminar neutrinos.
Could there be FtL particles? Sure, I guess, in that sort of "GRT says no but GRT can't be quantized so we have no idea really". There could be dozens. But it is... extremely unlikely that it's going to be neutrinos. Could be anything else
Not being a theoretical physicist myself, I wouldn't know. But I only bring up Tosh.0 to give an example of how something on wiki could be made factually incorrect and how it is changed, didn't mean to imply anything else. Personally I thought it was absurd to prevent Wikipedia being used as a reference.
My issue is that everything measured is on a subatomic scale. How would that translate into something larger, such as a space shuttle? The idea behind faster than light travel would be to transport cargo and passengers extremely large distances and I know I don't fit into an atom. lol.
On the one hand, General Relativity Theory is not measured on subatomic scale, we have measured it on intergalactic and universal scale. Several results from GRT, including "nothing goes faster than light", have been confirmed on a universal scale.
So no, this "everything measured is on a subatomic scale" is just wrong. We have measured anything we could on any scale we could access.
On the other hand, you ask "how would that translate into something larger", and obviously physics has an answer for that. I'll boil down the answer for you: "if a universe-defining rule applies to a subatomic scale, then it applies to all scales". That includes shuttles.
However, once again, you seem to be missing my point. I am not claiming that FtL is absolutely impossible and will be impossible forever. I am however stating that it is currently not possible and not supported. We have checked all the candidates we had and we have concluded: "no, not this one" for each candidate. Neutrinos are one such candidate.
Please send your money to CERN in Switzerland to sponsor our research into even more candidates. "lol".
But how are they measured? It seems like anything can be proven mathematically if you sit and play with the numbers enough. Myself I have difficulty with theoretical math. I have to have something tangible for me to truly grasp the concept. Like trig, didn't do well in high school but when I got into a field that I had to apply it, I got it.
Well, each measurement is different. Some require a level of math that I can't grasp (I don't specialize in particle physics, and while I have done a course on Quantum Field Theory it is not enough to really get all of it), others are really simple.
But let's take the speed of Neutrinos, which was mentioned here previously.
The way they measured was actually really, really simple. They set up a machine CERN to create neutrino pulses (very intense flashes, or bunches, of neutrinos).
They then put a neutrino detector (basically, a camera that is sensitive to neutrinos... a huge, huge, huge camera) in the Gran Sasso, in Italy.
So, neutrinos travel through 732 km of solid rock (they have no problem in going through rock like it doesn't exist) and if you measure how much time this trip requires, then you know the speed. If neutrinos travel at the speed of light, you expect them to require 2.44 ms to do the trip - a short time, but perfectly measureable by modern equipments. If they travel slower than the speed of light, you expect a "longer" time (say, for instance, 3 ms). If they travel faster than light, you expect a "shorter" time (say, for instance, 2 ms).
So, it might sound complicated, but the difficulty is just technical. You just create neutrinos in a controlled fashion (so that you can identify them in the detector), then you make them fly a certain distance, and find the speed by dividing distance by time.
For reference, during this experiment, neutrinos were seen travel at the speed of light within error bars. That is to say: even with the best equipment we have, we can't tell the speed of light and the speed of neutrinos apart. The difference between these speeds is so small that it is smaller than one part in a million. As we get better equipment and better technology, this result will become preciser and preciser.
Wow! I understood that explanation. Thanks for that.
They shoot these neutrinos through solid rock? Why not a vacuum or air? It seems a bit weird to be testing if faster than light speed is possible by doing the experiment with some other medium than what we would be traveling through. Perhaps it's to contain them?
Great question!
Truth is... it's more of a necessity. Basically, we need to put a certain distance between the neutrino source and the detector because if they are too close then things will happen too fast for our measurement equipment: it is best to put some distance so that we can reliably measure time - and we need the measure of time to be as reliable as we can because our calculation of speed is wonky otherwise (I could offer some maths to support this, but... yeah, let's not for now...).
Having the neutrinos only travel through air would mean that the detector has to be closer than the horizon, which is roughly 5 km away, which is way way way too close. Having a detector that is further away means you'll have to contend with Earth curvature and therefore shoot neutrinos through rock.
Actually found a nice schematic of it (the aspect ratio has been distorted to make everything clearer):
Having neutrinos travel through a vacuum would require us to do the experiment in space (which we fully intend to do when it's feasible) or to dig really long a tunnel through the Earth crust (which is unfeasible, but which the Italian education minister, who was an ****, though we had done).
So... yeah. Our understanding is that the medium should not influence the speed of neutrinos by much, but the result that we got - neutrinos and light moving at the same speed - is understood as rather unambiguous: the speeds kind of must be equal.
Interesting. Perhaps for the next phase of experiments, use the moon. For a math wizard, it shouldn't be hard to factor in all the variables. Looks like the first job for the Space Force!
"That's no moon..."
... it is a scientific laboratory waiting to happen!