E=MC2...the debate

[Acrylic]

Originally posted by murta

 

Raven: What's to say that it's impossible to travel faster than light? Fair enough it would be damn near impossible to navigate, as you'd have passed through something before you saw it. I don't believe that travelling at, or beyond, the speed of light would affect your place in time, it's just based on an outside perspective of the body in question's movement through space. So, say if a ship did possibly move faster than light, therefore meaning that nobody outside of the ship could actually see it until it slowed down, but it is still simply moving between points, albeit at a vast speed. It's kind of like Scientist's trying to reach Absolute Zero, they're never going to get there, because no matter how close you get, you can always half the gap between your status and your target. In the case of Absolute Zero the molecules will always be moving, no matter how infinitely small the movements are. So I believe thatthe opposite is true, and that speed is also infintely large. Light isn't the fastest possible thingy, particles out in space affect it and what not and even if they didn't, there's still something out there that will eventually go faster than light. Light is just something that moves incredibly fast, it isn't the be all and end all of speed limits. In my crazy little mind I believe that time has a speed and that has the ultimate limit, since it will be impossible to move faster than time itself, although it would be possible to come incredibly close to breaking the time barrier, it could never actually be achieved, which is why time travel is impossible. Plus as mass/energy cannot be created/destroyed, if a body were to 'jump' through time it would royally screw the universe up. I'm tired so this is probably amazingly random and stupid

 

Oh and perpetual motion is kinda the same, no matter how close you come, it can never be achieved, because the nothing in the universe is perfect, so they'll always be something acting on the 'device' or the energy being converted somewhere

 

When did Raven post in this thread???

[Feral]

Go up to Raven's post...I think it's around there somewhere.

[Drunken_Sailor]

The term e=mc2 means energy = mass times the speed of light squared. This is important beause the key element in nuclear physics is energy and mass, and their relativity to each other.

 

Originally posted by Neil Joshi

i believe that time travel will never be possible because quite frankly, the universe could not put it into rational explanation.

 

consider the ant if you will.

 

thousands of years ago, you an ant bites the leg of a horse. this horse gets infected with a disease and isn't able to walk (i'm not saying an ant could do this, but basically something small. the rider of the horse has to get a message to somewhere fifty miles away using his horse and if he doesn't do it in time, there will be a terrible battle. of course, he now has to find a new horse. he doesn't send the message in time and battle comenses, killing hundreds of people.

 

now lets say that you wen't back in time and accidentaly stepped no that ant or small creature. what would happen. well first of all, there would be no battle, and many people wouldn't die. this has already changed the course of histoyr. second of all, what if one of teh people who was meant to die, but didn't because of you, went along, and killed your ancestor. well then, you wouldn't have lived.

 

now the universe can't explain this. if you weren't born, you wouldn't have been able to go back in time and killed the ant, in which case history would have been right again and you would have been born, and therefore killed the ant. gettit. that's why time travel will always be impossible.

 

plus, if it was possible, wouldn't someone have done it in the future and come back into the past to tell us about it? no history of it so far, no history of it at all.

 

What you outline here is just another version of the famous "grandfather paradox". I guess it makes sense but it's one of those things that is hard to logically justify. There have been suggestions that it could happen, but that involves alternate realities or universes etc. which don't make much sense either.

[Drunken_Sailor]

I liked Neil's last paragraph no matter that I've heard it before. I like that episode of STAR TREK where Kirk et. al. got caught in a time warp/rip/whatever and wound up stuck in orbit above Earth in the year 1960 (?) It was fun. Naturally the USAF scrambled a jet to investigate. Well, the Enterprise didn't much care for that and froze the jet in time and beamed the really confused pilot on board. Cool. You can imagine his amazement. Well, end of story. The pilot was "returned" to his aircraft and he didn't remember a thing. Consequently he radioed back that the "bogey"/UFO had turned out to be nothing.

[Joshi]

Originally posted by Drunken_Sailor

What you outline here is just another version of the famous "grandfather paradox". I guess it makes sense but it's one of those things that is hard to logically justify. There have been suggestions that it could happen, but that involves alternate realities or universes etc. which don't make much sense either.

 

ah yes, alternate realities, the basic idea that if something could physically happen, it will, in another reality, happen. so don't think of an alternate reality as a place where maybe people could fly because all laws of physics says that we can't, be say in history, england didn't for some reason win the spanish armada, or the declaration of independance wasn't signed for some reason or another. this is possible and could have happened, but didn't. that is not so say ti couldn't though, and this is where the idea of alternate realities come from. and this would be a good reason for the grandfather paradox (anyone see futurama when fry goes back in time, kills his grandfather and sleeps with his grandmother, sick, but he's basically become his own grandfather. cool). but there is another version of this.

 

in a book i'm reading (actually i'm cheating, i bought it on CD, but never mind) a captain of the guard goes back in time along with a criminal he was pursueing. when all this happened, this captain (named Vimes) got his eye cut and it was nursed and then had an eyepatch put on it. now many things happened. in the past, when this man first joined the watch (or police) he was mentored by a man named john keel, who just so happened to have an eyepatch and cut eye. after this john keel avvied in his town, he was mugged by two muggers, but was able to defend himself (how he got the patch) and stay alive. but now, these two people have come back. this time, the criminal vimes brought back with him helped the two muggers and killed john keel. now without his mentoring, the young vimes will grow up to be lowsey, or dead and so now the older vimes must pretend to be keel and tutor himself. so already this is a parralell universe created by time travel.