FTL paradox and time travel paradox

[Brian G Turner]

But they still have its speed constant throughout the universe, just not throughout time. Which means nothing about FTL changes.

But that's my point - if the speed of light cannot be assumed to be a constant then FTL becomes possible.

If you allow FTL, then all of physics falls apart.

Only physics as we know it - which we also know is woefully incomplete.

 

[chrispenycate]

If anything can travel faster than light, Einstein's theory needs modification (saying that the mathematics prove anything is ridiculous. The fact that the speed of light in a vacuum with no major gravitational anomalies is one of the bases the mathematics were trying to describe from). If your information arrives before the light saying it set out, while not exceeding the speed of light, there is no paradox, just a delay to factor into the equation. Theories, even those that have held sway for a long time, are open to modification - one of the fundaments os scientific method is that we will never know everything. Relativity might just have to edge over to make room for something else - it's had a good run. But a different means of getting from A to Z without being obliged to traverse the entire alphabet is also non-contradictory.

Faster than light travel only ends up as time travel if you accept the paradigms of relativity, and if anything can travel faster than light, these are wrong, and require editing.

No sweat.

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

All of physics does not fall apart. What is held is that a partical with mass increases in mass as its velocity increases towards the speed of light, and that it has infinite mass at light speed. But what is not held is that nothing can go faster than the speed of light. Only particals with mass. Which leaves two immediately obvious fudges possible for the writer. One is spatial dilation - worm holes / alcubierre warp drive etc where the object while viewed from an external perspective appears to travel faster than light but in actual fact does not in relation to the space around it. The second is of course if you can make particals massless. I know, sounds weird. But think about the Star Trek transporter.I know people / writers claimit works by breaking people down into atoms etc - but that's obviously completely crap. But what if instead it converts people etc into wave forms? Now suddenly we have a viable sounding transporter technology, FTL travel in the form of both jump drives, and actual superlight speed if we assume that to those converted into waves along with their ships, don't notice any difference between one state and another.

Cheers, Greg.

 

[psychotick]

Oohh! Forgot hyperspace!

Mostly hyperspace is envisioned as some sort of compressed space that correlates to normal space so it becomes like an entire universe sized Alcubierre space. But what if it isn't? What if instead it's simply a form of space completely contiguous with our own but where the same rules about the speed of light don't apply. Maybe the speed of light there is much greater.

Anyway, the point is that space opera doesn't have to be anti known laws of cosmology. Write it how you want to. Just make it sound plausible and have logical, consistent rules. Like if you use a massless conversion do you also have the possibility of instant acceleration / deceleration and instant ninety degree turning?

Cheers, Greg.

 

[Serendipity]

....
No, an old model explains entanglement and superposition (and maintains everything in the Standard Model): quanta as wave functions.

Um... getting out of the calm of my self-hypnosis to avoid talking about the subject...

Hate to say this, but when one particle changes state, so does its entangled particle exactly the same time despite the distance between between them. The entanglement change ignores the speed of light limitation through space between the particles, and they've proved this experimentally...

...now back to the calm of self-hypnosis.

 

[goldhawk]

Hate to say this, but when one particle changes state, so does its entangled particle exactly the same time despite the distance between between them. The entanglement change ignores the speed of light limitation through space between the particles, and they've proved this experimentally...

No, not at the exact same time. Here's a refresher.

The thing about entanglement that everyone seems to overlook is that entanglement does not have just two events, the measurements of the quanta but three: the measurements and the entangling event. All measurements of the entanglement must be in the light cone of the entangling event. Changing the property of one quantum causes a simultaneous change in the other but it is only simultaneous in the inertial frame of the entangling event.

 

[RX-79G]

No, not at the exact same time. Here's a refresher.

Which doesn't mean it isn't happening FTL, just that it doesn't apply to communication between two different inertial frames.

 

[Venusian Broon]

Which doesn't mean it isn't happening FTL, just that it doesn't apply to communication between two different inertial frames.

I believe, although I may be wrong so stand to be corrected, if assume the Copenhagen interpretation is correct, then from experiments the speed of the decoherence effect has a lower limit of 10^6 times the speed of light - which is I guess really a statement on the precision of the measurements that the actual experiments had.