The description says it all.

Ill start with einsteins theories, take it away!


Thanks, GUNNARYSEARGENTHARTMAN

Hi GUNNARYSEARGENTHARTMAN, I have had it explained to me that Einstein said FTL Travel is not possible because the amount of energy needed to travel FTL would crush the objects mass to Atoms when it got close to the Speed of Light, but I have also heard of an Alternative idea that has suggested that if the Objects Mass was reduced to Zero then allot less Energy would be needed to move the objects mass to FTL speeds and the Mass/object would not be affected by the laws of Inertia as there were previously, I'm not asking if you think we can lower an objects Mass but do you think if it was possible to change an objects mass could pre-conceptions like the famous one below be re-calculated to support FTL Travel?

E=MC2

E=MC0?

Well, E=MC2 means ENERGY=MASSxSPEED OF LIGHT squared.


So, I think that maybe you could be onto something, I think your speculations on this are fine tuned, although, technically, itd b hard to lower an object, say a rockets mass to 0, so, a little fine tuning maybe?

Anyway, keep the posts coming and I hope that others can answer you better than I can



Thanks, GUNNARYSEARGENTHARTMAN

Sorry to rock your boat, but no. At least not as we know physics at the present. Only massless particles can obtain the speed of light (photons and the like), particles with mass cannot. And we can unfortunately not transform particles with mass into particles without. If we could, we would still lose the characteristics of the particles, which would kind of make the whole exercise moot. I.e., we could transform a spaceship into massless particles, but we'd have no way was of assembling it again (it is effectively a 100% annihilation) as we would have lost all information in the process.

I am sure startraveler et al could explain this a lot better than me, though

Cheers,
Badeskov

Thanks for replying, and I know your right. i even said itd be hard to turn a spaceship in 0 mass, didnt I


Anyway thanks for sayin your view

Thanks, GUNNARYSEARGENTHARTMAN

Yes, you certainly did!!! I just wanted to add my 2 cents



Always a pleasure

Cheers,
Badeskov

What about antimatter and partical acceleration schemes, I know its off the subject of einstein, but obviously its an intriguing subject.

Thanks, GUNNARYSEARGENTHARTMAN

I had a question but I can't take it serious when people think we are too stupid to see their username stands RIGHT to the left of the post... wtf is this the effect of too many comercials? o.o

It's a signature... He doesn't think you're stupid. Though.... :3

WTF? So, your saying that we shouldnt now be aloud to put our name on our posts, if you want to say something on this thread, either let it be about science or dont get involved in it. Please, type your question.


Thanks, GUNNARYSEARGENTHARTMAN

Sooo... we're suggesting that the universe operates around Gravitons (or Gravity Waves), which are massless particles (or waves), and yet produce the effect of Gravity.. hence Weight ?

So a Weightless particle - which is ALLOWED under this "privlidged" position - can reach the speed of light...AND YET PRODUCE THE 'GRAVITY' THAT WE HAVE TO WORK UNDER ?

But the WORKERS... who actually BUILT the LIDO detection system that proves the EXISTENCE of this particle are barred from this state ? And SUFFER under the MANTLE of FREE-MARKET GRAVITATION ?

Once more, we see the Capitalist inequalities in our society. Are you SUPRISED that BUSH and his FREE MARKET/BIG INTERNATIONALIST BUSINESSES can THRIVE on gravitons, whillst the rest of us are SHACKLED in TAXES and (continous for 35 pages, some of which are written in Crayson, and stuck together with spittle).

Well... you DID start it Gunny'

Meow Purr.

Lol, your right meow purr$, then again, what has particle acceleration got to do with george w bush???? lol hahahaha, stuck together with spittle, thats one of my favourites, lol. Well meow purr, I did say involve it in science, so keep em comin will ya lol

Nd all my buddies from the chat room, spread the word lol

Only messin, but visit from time to time wil ya lol


Thanks, GUNNARYSEARGENTHARTMAN

Here's a question Gunny.
Will String Theory eventually prove to be the ultimate theory? The reason I ask is this. I find it very difficult to imagine a universe that exists in anything upto 26 dimensions. Yet, mathematically speaking, String Theory needs Calabi Yau space to work properly. For some reason, I find it very difficult to get my head around this concept, which makes me think twice about String Theory. Yet String Theory is the only 'grand unification' theory that can and will include Gravity which is a major stumbling block for all the other unification theories.
Any ideas anyone?

For those of you who dont know, the String theory is an incomplete mathematical approach to theoretical physics, whose building blocks are one-dimensional extended objects called strings, rather than the zero-dimensional point particles that form the basis for the standard model of particle physics. By replacing the point-like particles with strings, an apparently consistent quantum theory of gravity emerges, which has not been achievable under quantum field theory. Usually, the term string theory includes a group of related superstring theories and a few related frameworks such as M-theory, which seeks to unite them all.

So, in a way seffy, you could be right, but as I just said, it is an incomplete mathematical approach to theoretical physics, so therefore, until someone completes it we wont know, all we can do is assume. And also, work on string theory is made difficult by the very complex mathematics involved, and the large number of forms that the theories can take depending on the arrangement of space and energy. Thus far, string theory strongly suggests the existence of ten or eleven (in M-theory) spacetime dimensions, as opposed to the usual four (three spatial and one temporal) used in relativity theory; however, the theory can describe universes with four effective (observable) spacetime dimensions by a variety of methods. The theories also appear to describe higher-dimensional objects than strings, called branes. Certain types of string theory have also been shown to be equivalent to certain types of more traditional gauge theory, and it is hoped that research in this direction will lead to new insights on quantum chromodynamics, the fundamental theory of the strong nuclear force.

In responce, and I hope others can answer better, I would say that until the theory is completed, we wont know, but its gonna be difficult, seeing as complicated mathematics are involved.

Thanks, GUNNARYSEARGENTHARTMAN

I tend to have problems with the avenues theoretical physics has been taking. I think my discomfort can be summed up by a recent blog post by the cosmologist Sean Carroll (who's not uncomfortable with this) over at Cosmic Variance. I'm going to post some of what he said and comment on it, in an attempt to sort of, in a roundabout way, throw out my thoughts on your question.

Here's a little background on what the post was about:

Today’s Bloggingheads dialogue features me and writer John Horgan — I will spare you a screen capture of our faces, but here is a good old-fashioned link.

John is the author of The End of Science, in which he argues that much of modern physics has entered an era of “ironic science,” where speculation about unobservable things (inflation, other universes, extra dimensions) has replaced the hard-nosed empiricism of an earlier era. Most of our discussion went over that same territory, focusing primarily on inflation but touching on other examples as well.

You can judge for yourself whether I was persuasive or not, but the case I tried to make was that attitudes along the lines of “that stuff you’re talking about can never be observed, so you’re not doing science, it’s just theology” are woefully simplistic, and simply don’t reflect the way that science works in the real world. Other branches of the wavefunction, or the state of the universe before the Big Bang, may by themselves be unobservable, but they are part of a larger picture that remains tied to what we see around us.

This is a very interesting discussion to have and I think it ties directly into your question about string theory, seffy. But we'll get to that in a minute.

The most important point is that the underlying goal of science is not simply making predictions — it’s developing an understanding of the mechanisms underlying the operation of the natural world. This point is made very eloquently by David Deutsch in his book The Fabric of Reality. As I mention in the dialogue, Deutsch chooses this quote by Steven Weinberg as an exemplar of hard-boiled instrumentalism:

QUOTE

The important thing is to be able to make predictions about images on the astronomers’ photographic plates, frequencies of spectral lines, and so on, and it simply doesn’t matter whether we ascribe these predictions to the physical effects of gravitational fields on the motion of planets and photons or to a curvature of space and time.

That’s crazy, of course — the dynamics through which we derive those predictions matters enormously. (I suspect that Weinberg was trying to emphasize that there may be formulations of the same underlying theory that look different but are actually equivalent; then the distinction truly wouldn’t matter, but saying “the important thing is to make predictions” is going a bit too far.) Deutsch asks us to imagine an “oracle,” a black box which will correctly answer any well-posed empirical question we ask of it. So in principle the oracle can help us make any prediction we like — would that count as the ultimate end-all scientific theory? Of course not, as it would provide no understanding whatsoever. As Deutsch notes, it would be able to predict that a certain rocket-ship design would blow up on take-off, but offer no clue as to how we could fix it. The oracle would serve as a replacement for experiments, but not for theories. No scientist, armed with an infinite array of answers to specific questions but zero understanding of how they were obtained, would declare their work completed.

If making predictions were all that mattered, we would have stopped doing particle physics some time around the early 1980’s. The problem with the Standard Model of particle physics, remember, is that (until we learned more about neutrino physics and dark matter) it kept making predictions that fit all of our experiments! We’ve been working very hard, and spending a lot of money, just to do experiments for which the Standard Model would be unable to make an accurate prediction. And we do so because we’re not satisfied with predicting the outcome of experiments; we want to understand the underlying mechanism, and the Standard Model (especially the breaking of electroweak symmetry) falls short on that score.

This is something I can't agree with. Physics will always produce Deutsch's oracle; we can ask it a question, give it a scenario, whatever and it will respond. If we've put it together correctly, it'll spit out something that agrees with what we really see. But that idea that we're on the road to building some conceptual masterpiece on anything but a superficial level is laughable, particularly since we're talking about this in the context of extraordinarily esoteric mathematical theories. The best we can ever do is discover sorts of mathematical formalisms work at describing reality (i.e. give us the "right" answers when we ask). Our oracle gives us very good answers if we treat space and time as some sort of malleable manifold that responds to energy. Does that mean space and time are indeed unified as some sort of 4-D rubber sheet? I don't know. I can't know. Certainly we can smugly declare that it does and we now "understand" gravitation, even if we can't quite tell you what energy is in a physical way. But in reality, the conceptual part of it (which Sean, and many others, apparently believe to be the single most important part of science) is not scientific. There's no experimental test for an interpretation or a conceptual understanding. Meaning has to come from outside the scientific process.

In that first block I quoted above, Sean specifically mentions "other branches of the wave function" as things that remain unobservable but are "part of a larger picture that remains tied to what we see around us." What are the other branches of the wave function? What do they correspond to? Conceptually, what does their existence mean? We don't know. We know that they exist because the mathematics indicates that they do and the math produces an extremely good oracle. So it's difficult to remain unconvinced that these other branches of the wave function are real and do have some concrete meaning. But that doesn't mean we get to know what it is. The whole issue is open to interpretation. In fact, that's the source of the many famous interpretations of quantum mechanics: Copenhagen, Many Worlds, Transactional, etc, etc. And guess what? We can't experimentally determine which way of understanding the formalism conceptually is correct. It's a personal choice (I've gravitated toward Many Worlds, as of late).

When Max Planck originally came up with the idea of quanta to solve some experimental puzzles at the turn of the last century, he did so believing it was a mathematical trick. It "worked" (i.e. made the oracle spit out answers that matched experiment) because, for whatever reason, the universe acted as if certain quantities only came in discrete chunks. When Murray Gell-Mann wrote of hypothetical new particles--quarks--that would have fractional charges, he wrote "It is fun to speculate about the way quarks would behave if they were physical particles of finite mass (instead of purely mathematical entities as they would be in the limit of infinite mass)." Gell-Mann encouraged experimental searches for quarks because they "would help reassure us of the nonexistence of real quarks." Today, of course, it's been 14 years since the last hold-out, the top quark, was discovered and it's common knowledge that quarks are real and make up particles like protons and neutrons.

But there must be a point were we stop and ask what we're talking about. When does the mathematics become the reality? I have no doubt the mathematics is, in some way, the reality. What I do doubt is that the interpretation of this fact is straightforward. Or even possible.

The next thing to understand is that all of these crazy speculations about multiverses and extra dimensions originate in the attempt to understand phenomena that we observe right here in the nearby world. Gravity and quantum mechanics both exist — very few people doubt that. And therefore, we want a theory that can encompass both of them. By a very explicit chain of reasoning — trying to understand perturbation theory, getting anomalies to cancel, etc. — we are led to superstrings in ten dimensions. And then we try to bring that theory back into contact with the observed world around us, compactifying those extra dimensions and trying to match onto particle physics and cosmology. The program may or may not work — it’s certainly hard, and we may ultimately decide that it’s just too hard, or find an idea that works just as well without all the extra-dimensional superstructure. Theories of what happened before the Big Bang are the same way; we’re not tossing out scenarios because we think it’s amusing, but because we are trying to understand features of the world we actually do observe, and that attempt drives us to these hypotheses.

Ultimately, of course, we do need to make contact with observation and experiment. But the final point to emphasize is that not every prediction of every theory needs to be testable; what needs to be testable is the framework as a whole. If we do manage to construct a theory that makes a set of specific and unambiguous testable predictions, and those predictions are tested and the theory comes through with flying colors, and that theory also predicts unambiguously that inflation happened or there are multiple universes or extra dimensions, I will be very happy to believe in the reality of those ideas.

This leads into your question, seffy. Is string theory the ultimate theory? I'm certainly no expert on it but at the moment--as far as I know--it's useless as an oracle. It doesn't tell us anything we don't already know; at best, it offers the most enraging of the Magic 8 Ball answers: ask again later. It's real value at the moment, I think people like Sean would say, is conceptual. Finally we "understand" what the deal is with the universe--it's all about vibrating strings! Except creating that tidy picture requires some feats of mathematical gymnastics--"by a very explicit chain of reasoning"--that leaves us with some pretty heavy conceptual baggage. Ten or eleven dimensions, compactified dimensions, etc. We're left in a situation where a theory doesn't tell us anything new but requires a number of extra dimensions to do so. Of course, I'm not being fair. It has unifying potential (which is, I think, what you mean by "ultimate theory," seffy); it allows us to understand things in an exciting new way. And yet, as I've said, I don't believe understanding is possible. Comprehension and understanding can't be done by committee. We can't get together and decide we like one quantum interpretation or one framework like string theory and declare that this is, in fact, how the universe works, conceptually. Well, we could do that (in fact, that's not far from what was actually done for the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics for many years). But that doesn't mean we actually know anything. We just collectively pretend to.

Maybe I'm reading him wrong, but Sean seems to be saying in that last bit that a few experimental confirmations ("hits" from the oracle) of a broad, largely conceptual framework serve to validate the conceptual framework. Well, I don't think so. Verification of every minute detail predicted by the mathematical formalism doesn't even do that. All it can tell us is that the framework--the oracle--we're using is damned good. It cannot say "the way you understand or conceptualize that oracle, the meaning you assign to it, is correct too!" Experiments don't do that. Nothing does that. So I tend to think that even if somehow string theory eventually became a useful theory (an extraordinarily useful theory at that, assuming it really does unify the forces) I don't know that we'd have a final understanding of the universe. We'd just have the best damn physical theory we'll ever need. But we'll still be pretty blind.


P.S. Gunnary, it's customary to use block quotes or quotation marks or something and cite a source when you provide text lifted from somewhere else.

Yes, its also customary, not to hog the whole of the page you know startraveler. I said in my first post, not a lot when using copy and paste to put down your view. What do you do simply defy the rule? Yes, you do.

Thanks, GUNNARYSEARGENTHARTMAN

Startraveller,

I can see why you are frustrated, perhaps, with much of the theorising that seems to be replacing the practicing of science in physics today. Perhaps scientists in Galilleo and Kepler's day were of the same mind.

We don't have the techniques/instruments to show many of the things theorised by physicists - especially those in working in the quantum and cosmological fields. However that doesn't mean we never will have and it is important for the imaginations of scientists to be allowed to epound on theories so that we may, one day, be able to test these. It is something that I live in hope for, though I think it not likely to be discovered in my lifetime.

Apologies; I didn't realize there was a word-limit rule in this thread. I just feel there's quite a bit to be said about these questions regarding string theory and the nature of physics/physical knowledge.




I don't mean to give the impression that I have a problem with theory itself. Theorizing is hugely important, I wouldn't argue against that. But theorizing divorced from experiment is, frankly, useless. Self-correction is, as I always understood it, the hallmark of science. Otherwise you might as well just be one of the old Greek natural philosophers, making up conceptions about the natural world with little connection to reality.

Richard Feynman once gave a talk to the National Science Teachers Association called "What is Science?" in which he gave a rough sort of definition:

This phenomenon of having a memory for the race, of having an accumulated knowledge passable from one generation to another, was new in the world--but it had a disease in it: it was possible to pass on ideas which were not profitable for the race. The race has ideas, but they are not necessarily profitable.

So there came a time in which the ideas, although accumulated very slowly, were all accumulations not only of practical and useful things, but great accumulations of all types of prejudices, and strange and odd beliefs.

Then a way of avoiding the disease was discovered. This is to doubt that what is being passed from the past is in fact true, and to try to find out ab initio again from experience what the situation is, rather than trusting the experience of the past in the form in which it is passed down. And that is what science is: the result of the discovery that it is worthwhile rechecking by new direct experience, and not necessarily trusting the [human] race['s] experience from the past. I see it that way. That is my best definition.

I believe now we're, in some ways, failing to weed out those prejudices and odd beliefs. And that's a very unsettling thought to me.



I'm not saying string theory shouldn't be pursued; too be honest, I'm not sure exactly what I am saying. I don't think it should be called physics (or, more generally, science) since it seems more akin to pure mathematics and I'm very torn about the idea of selling it to the general public in popsci books as the prevailing picture of how the universe is. But it also goes deeper than that, as I tried to get across in my previous post--more generally, I have issues with the entire notion of conceptual understanding in physics and this sort of strikes at the heart of that.

Perhaps, Startraveler, it is a symptom of our ability to think outstripping our ability to investigate that thought?

I do agree with you that it is frustrating, knowing all these wonderful theories abound with no way to test them and the passing off of these theories as 'scientific fact' is unwise and scientifically unethical. The problem being information is so freely available to such a mass of people these days, people untrained to recognise the difference between scientific speculation and solid theory and there also seems to be many more scientists falling into the 'celebrity of science' and using this freedom of information to boost their egos rather than improve science in general.

That's definitely it. I suppose it was inevitable at some point but it puts us in a very dangerous situation. Again, I want to make the comparison to the Greeks two millennia ago. A cosmology based on crystal spheres might be beautiful and elegant but if there's one thing I thought the scientific process had taught the world, it's that pure aesthetics and "damn, that'd be cool" do not a successful description of nature make. By a "very explicit chain of reasoning," it became clear centuries ago that more epicycles would be needed to make an otherwise very cool model work. If we need extra dimensions or extra epicycles, does that mean we should just toss them in? I tend to think that's very dangerous. Maybe string theory really will be the final answer. But it doesn't strike me that what's happening now is sufficiently different (more sophisticated, certainly) from what happened millennia ago.