Why can't anything go faster than the speed of light?

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frenchmanflats
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15 Dec 2015, 6:52 pm

naturalplastic wrote:
frenchmanflats wrote:
michael517 wrote:
One day I got my spaceship going 0.99c (relative to Earth), turned on my Maglite and pointed it outside the window, and I'll be damned the light still came out at 1.00c. Sure confused the heck out of me.

/s

Technology in the future may us allow to surpass that.


Not the lifetime of anyone alive today. Wont even be equaled in that time.



You are a pessimist. 100 years ago if you said that they would land a man on the Moon you would be laughed at.



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15 Dec 2015, 6:54 pm

Edenthiel wrote:
frenchmanflats wrote:
Spiderpig wrote:
This thread is a testament to how many annoying conundrums and fruitless mental struggles Humanity could save if nerds like Albert Einstein were routinely bullied out of any inclination for science before they could make a career on it and dictate whimsical things like nothing can travel faster than light :jester:


There are things that we still do not understand in the Universe. Maybe 100 years from now, in the year 2115, we would have a different understanding of the Universe physical laws. We still do not know what new physical laws might come up. Some may be invalidated. It is lighting a match in a dark room. We can't see what wonders or terrors await us in deep space. Remember 110 years ago, the technology was rather primitive. We were still using the horse and buggy.


The pedant in me wants to point out that 110 years ago we were doing 75+ mph & could cross the USA in 3.5-4.0 days. We also were floating about in both lighter and heavier than air craft.




But they were still using horse and buggies. In the United States, hundreds of small companies produced buggies, and their wide use helped to encourage the grading and graveling of main rural roads, and actual paving in towns. This provided all-weather passage within and between larger towns.By the early 1910s, the number of automobiles had surpassed the number of buggies, but their use continued well into the 1920s in out of the way places. The United States did not have an extensive rail system or paved interstate road system.



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15 Dec 2015, 7:33 pm

Yes.

Frenchman is running together two different topics: what nature allows, and what intelligent creatures can do with what nature allows.

If it aint possible, it aint possible even if smart aliens work on it for a million years. If worm holes dont exist than even the smartest aliens cant exploit them, and neither could our own descendants in any future.

But yes- its quite possilbe that Einstein and Quantum physics will both be over thrown in the future. So down the road we might get new ideas for what nature allows. But for now those two theories are the best game in town to extrapolate to the future. Though you can never say never you can say "not likely" in the near future.

you're predicting interstellar space travel by human astronauts in 2050, or 2060? Thats only 45 years away. Forty five years ago we first landed humans on the Moon. That still as far as we have sent human travelers. We just now flew a robot flyer past Pluto at the edge of the Solar System. The Moon is one and half "light seconds" from the Earth. Earth is eight "light minutes" from the Sun. Pluto is about "five and a half light hours" from the Sun.

you're saying that we are going to vault from sending robots five light hours out to sending humans to the nearest star (four light YEARS away) in less than fifty years. Thats a lot to hope for in fifty years.



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15 Dec 2015, 7:42 pm

frenchmanflats wrote:
naturalplastic wrote:
frenchmanflats wrote:
michael517 wrote:
One day I got my spaceship going 0.99c (relative to Earth), turned on my Maglite and pointed it outside the window, and I'll be damned the light still came out at 1.00c. Sure confused the heck out of me.

/s

Technology in the future may us allow to surpass that.


Not the lifetime of anyone alive today. Wont even be equaled in that time.



You are a pessimist. 100 years ago if you said that they would land a man on the Moon you would be laughed at.



The physics they used to get Buzz Aldrin to the Moon was created by Isaac Newton three hundred years before. We dont have any a physics to break the light barrier yet. And you're asking us to break the light barrier in your lifetime? Thats many orders of magnitude more visionary than predicting a Moon flight in 1910.



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15 Dec 2015, 8:13 pm

Technology changes rather quickly. in the 1930s we using vacuum tubes. Computers took whole floors. In the 1950s their there seven intergrated chips in a radio. Now there are hundreds of intergraded chips in your smartphone. Just imagine what technology will be like in 2050-2060.



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15 Dec 2015, 8:27 pm

frenchmanflats wrote:
naturalplastic wrote:
frenchmanflats wrote:
michael517 wrote:
One day I got my spaceship going 0.99c (relative to Earth), turned on my Maglite and pointed it outside the window, and I'll be damned the light still came out at 1.00c. Sure confused the heck out of me.

/s

Technology in the future may us allow to surpass that.


Not the lifetime of anyone alive today. Wont even be equaled in that time.



You are a pessimist. 100 years ago if you said that they would land a man on the Moon you would be laughed at.


Again me being pedant and apparently not being able to help it:
Jules Verne, Paschal Grousset/André Laurie and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky all wrote fiction in the late 1800's that worked out plausible methods of traveling to and from the moon. Interestingly their ideas either have actually been used or such as rail gun launchers are still actively being explored. Chemical rockets occur in Arabian literature in the 1200's and in European lit in the 1400's. By the late 1700's they were already being used as weapons in India. In 1903, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky wrote a serious treaty on the practical implementation of building a manned rocket.


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15 Dec 2015, 8:31 pm

Newton discovered the physics that put men on the Moon; he did not create them.

The seven-transistor radio was common in the 1950s, while integrated circuits found the most use in hearing aids.

The laws of physics dictate that even matter teleportation must obey causality. That is, even though the trip might seem instantaneous to the traveler, he or she would still arrive at the destination no quicker than would a photon emitted from the point of departure and traveling through normal timespace.

And while "wormholes" may be predicted by some physical theories, the same maths that predict them also predict their collapse the moment matter transits their event horizons.

The only FTL principle that might eventually be exploited is quantum entanglement; this would be a long shot.


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15 Dec 2015, 9:48 pm

Jules Verne, Paschal Grousset/André Laurie and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky fiction proved to be fact in the 1930s-1940s with the development of the V-2 rocket. Today's fiction will be tomorrow's fact



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15 Dec 2015, 10:23 pm

frenchmanflats wrote:
Jules Verne, Paschal Grousset/André Laurie and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky fiction proved to be fact in the 1930s-1940s with the development of the V-2 rocket. Today's fiction will be tomorrow's fact
Past performance does not predict future results. Stating the opposite is expressing the "Gambler's Fallacy".


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15 Dec 2015, 10:57 pm

Fnord wrote:
frenchmanflats wrote:
Jules Verne, Paschal Grousset/André Laurie and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky fiction proved to be fact in the 1930s-1940s with the development of the V-2 rocket. Today's fiction will be tomorrow's fact
Past performance does not predict future results. Stating the opposite is expressing the "Gambler's Fallacy".



Quite the contrary. Nobody thought that nuclear fission was possible until the Germans attained it in the 1930s. Nobody thought you can split the atom and create the most destructive force in mankind's arsenal until July of 1945. I once visited a nuclear missile bomber base as a judge for missile and bomber competition and I could not believe that this small warhead could devestate a city and kill millions of people in a flash. I even wrote on the warhead "To Ivan, with Love,Uncle Sam".



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16 Dec 2015, 2:15 am

I think, perhaps that what it comes down to, is that advances in Science seem to come in one of two forms:

- slow, steady advancement that results in what looks like an upheaval in retrospect pop-culture but in fact was not. Relativity and Evolution come to mind.

- serendipitous discovery that changes everything. Röntgen's discovery of X-rays & Becquerel's discovery of radioactivity. Plunkett's teflon. Perkins' synthetic dye. The list goes on. But in each case, the current state of science had to be such that the conditions were ripe and the observer already had a baseline structure in which to place and understand their discovery - or even to recognize that it was a discovery at all.

I think it is safe to say that for either form, FTL travel currently is not at that point.


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frenchmanflats
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16 Dec 2015, 3:36 am

Edenthiel wrote:
I think, perhaps that what it comes down to, is that advances in Science seem to come in one of two forms:

- slow, steady advancement that results in what looks like an upheaval in retrospect pop-culture but in fact was not. Relativity and Evolution come to mind.

- serendipitous discovery that changes everything. Röntgen's discovery of X-rays & Becquerel's discovery of radioactivity. Plunkett's teflon. Perkins' synthetic dye. The list goes on. But in each case, the current state of science had to be such that the conditions were ripe and the observer already had a baseline structure in which to place and understand their discovery - or even to recognize that it was a discovery at all.

I think it is safe to say that for either form, FTL travel currently is not at that point.


Not Yet. You will be surprised what DARPA has developed or developing out there in the deserts of California.



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16 Dec 2015, 7:18 am

I like to think about it awesome kind of Cosmological speed limit. You can however go 99.999...% of the speed of light just not 100% of it itself. This is one of my interests.


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izzeme
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16 Dec 2015, 7:37 am

frenchmanflats wrote:
Edenthiel wrote:
I think, perhaps that what it comes down to, is that advances in Science seem to come in one of two forms:

- slow, steady advancement that results in what looks like an upheaval in retrospect pop-culture but in fact was not. Relativity and Evolution come to mind.

- serendipitous discovery that changes everything. Röntgen's discovery of X-rays & Becquerel's discovery of radioactivity. Plunkett's teflon. Perkins' synthetic dye. The list goes on. But in each case, the current state of science had to be such that the conditions were ripe and the observer already had a baseline structure in which to place and understand their discovery - or even to recognize that it was a discovery at all.

I think it is safe to say that for either form, FTL travel currently is not at that point.


Not Yet. You will be surprised what DARPA has developed or developing out there in the deserts of California.


Not FTL travel in any shape or form.
Any form (from opening/stabelizing wormholes to warp speed and subspace) requires ungodly amounts of energy, in the order of whatever-the-earth-uses-in-a-year every minute orso of travel.
If DARPA (or anyone for that matter) has managed to develop something that gets even a percentage of that, all the worlds energy concerns would be over, so we'd have known about it.

This is simple science, due to time/distance dilation. The heavier an object, the more energy you need to speed it up more, and the faster an object travels, the heavier it gets, almost quadraticly...



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16 Dec 2015, 9:29 am

frenchmanflats wrote:
... You will be surprised what DARPA has developed or developing out there in the deserts of California.
Oh, do tell us all about it!

:roll:

And provide reliable, fact-based references, if you please ... something other than the latest conspiracy theories from talk radio.

:lol:


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16 Dec 2015, 1:56 pm

frenchmanflats wrote:
Fnord wrote:
frenchmanflats wrote:
I once visited a nuclear missile bomber base as a judge for missile and bomber competition and I could not believe that this small warhead could devastate a city and kill millions of people in a flash. I even wrote on the warhead "To Ivan, with Love,Uncle Sam".


There are 'missile and bomber' competitions?!?!
8O :nerdy: 8O :nerdy:

Who are the competitors?
What happens during the competition?

I was unaware that such competitions existed.