distant planets

[shamrock_uk]

A nice BBC article for y'all [img]smile.gif[/img]

[Vaskez]

Originally posted by Hivetyrant: quote: Originally posted by Vaskez: Why, what did he say about black holes that was wrong?

I agree, what did he say that was wrong? [/QUOTE]You can't agree with a question! LOL

[Iron Greasel]

How exactly can he know what space-time looks like from a fith dimension unless he looks himself? And if he can see five-dimensional things, why bother riding in that wheelchair when he could just fetch an upgraded model from the future?

[Link]

Travelling faster than light proposes a new problem/concept: you'd be travelling ahead of time. After all, our current conception of time is based on light. Just think about it:

At the current moment, light is fastest travelling form of, well, anything we know. So what happens when we travel even faster than that? We'd be travelling in time, right? Well not quite, because looking at it this way makes travelling both back in time as well as travelling further in time a no-go. The only thing you can accomplish is travelling ahead of time/light. If you'd have a magnifying glass capable of seeing infinitely far, then by travelling faster then light, you'd be able to see things that happened earlier than the time you're living at that moment, once light catches up with you.

Just remember, the light of the big bang is at the end of the (ever expanding) universe right now, as it will be always (taken that the universe won't stop expanding at one point).

I think I had this discussion before, but I was drunk at the moment. We really got some good ideas back then

Of course, this whole idea is only valid if light is, indeed, the fastest travelling "thing" in the universe.

[Iron Greasel]

I've never understood why travelling faster than light would make one travel though time. It just doesn't make sense. Can someone please explain it further?

[Vaskez]

Originally posted by Iron Greasel: How exactly can he know what space-time looks like from a fith dimension unless he looks himself?

Sorry, but this is a very silly statement. 99% of what we know is not from "looking ourselves" but from inferrance, observation of consequences etc. You think we know about the structure of an atom from "looking"? etc.

[Vaskez]

Originally posted by Iron Greasel: I've never understood why travelling faster than light would make one travel though time. It just doesn't make sense. Can someone please explain it further?

It all comes down to how we define time again. I can't explain that. But if you think about what Link said a bit further...
When we see light from a star, say 3 light years away, you're actually seeing the light that the star emitted 3 years ago. That's kinda travelling back in time. Now if YOU travelled faster than light then you'd reach places before the light that reflected off you does so you'd be there in the future as far as everyone else is concerned (because they haven't seen you yet). As far as you're concerned you're still in the present in your own timezone, though. So I think you only travel in time relative to everything else. Or you might say, you're not actually travelling in time only seeing things from a different time?

Now of course you can say "but won't the people in the place where you travelled to faster than light, be able to feel you physically?" and they might but my understanding or at least thinking hasn't stretched that far yet. According to Einstein, approaching the speed of light increases your mass to near infinity (IIRC) so funny things start to happen... lol dunno how helpful that got towards the end...

[ 04-13-2005, 11:16 AM: Message edited by: Vaskez ]

[Thoran]

The speed of light as we're discussing it is only mangled up with time as a recordkeeper, light holds a record of an event that happened at a certain time.

If you look through a telescope at a star you're looking back in time to how that star looked when the light you're viewing was sent on it's way... say 50 years ago.

If you could see how that star looks today using some new technology, it'd still take the light 50 years to reach earth, so you could think of it as looking at what we will see in our telescope in 50 years... today. It's not time travel but rather instantaneous information travel.

This sort of thing is not yet possible on a macro scale (I seem to recall that it has been done using quantum entanglement at a very small scale)

[Iron Greasel]

Travelling through time to present? How calculatingly confusing.


Vazzy, when I said "look", I meant all ways someone can use to pry information out of something. Seeing how it acts, poking it with a stick, bombing it with neutrons. But as we can't reach the fifth dimension or even be sure if it exists, there is no way to find out what space-time really looks like.

[Vaskez]

Vazzy is a stupid name [img]tongue.gif[/img] And if you don't mean look, then don't say look [img]tongue.gif[/img]

Who said through travelling time to the present? I think we all said travelling back in time or to the future...