YES DEIGO ! you got it!

As we grow a learn more about different forces in our universe I know we will find a way to travel faster than light. It may take a while but we have to stay open to the idea.

The only thing that scars me is that as we look and learn more about our universe we as humans will not be here long. I.E. some major event on Earth that will reset life here or wipe out life all together. We know that this has happened before and it will happen again.

As we look at gravity I think gravity is a very strong force. You compare gravity to other forces, but it is not a fair comparison. There is much about gravity we do not understand. We just see what gravity can do.

All I say is this... We do not understand our universe fully yet. So how can you say faster than light travel is imposable.

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Cyrax_Darkmual@yahoo.com
Cyrax Darkmaul 94th Druid. Mob Killer
life is not measured by the breaths we take but by the moments that take our breath.

Accelerating to the speed of light barrier is impossible. Nothing has been found to contradict this law, with the exception of 'spooky action at a distance' where one of two entangled particles will flip its state in the same instant as its partner, regardless of where they are in the Universe. This is intriguing but nothing actually physically travels faster than light and this property can't even be used for communication, now or perhaps never.

Theories do allow for things travelling ftl, as long as they are always moving beyond ftl, but no evidence has been found for these yet.

Until we can play with neutron stars like a child plays with marbles and manipulate huge gravitational fields to create wormholes to connect remote regions together there is absolutely no chance of being able to beat the speed of light. I tend to think that there are now few surprises in physics waiting to be discovered, as all the really big ones have been made in the last couple of centuries. Any new discoveries will mainly help to perfect the models and have little effect on the real world. (I'm also hoping I'm wrong too!).

Gravity is strong to you because you can feel it and imagine the huge forces that hold the planets in their orbits, but their masses just bend spacetime. As far as orbiting bodies are concerned, they are just travelling in a straight line, it is the spacetime that is curved.

Physics does not obey wishful thinking.

Quote:
"I tend to think that there are now few surprises in physics waiting to be discovered"

Andy, with all respect, that sounds surprisingly short-sighted!

I recall something about some employee of some patent office resigning from his post 100 or more years ago, simply because he believed there was nothing else to be discovered. How wrong he was......

I think our knowledge of the laws of physics as they apply to us are fairly well defined, but I'm sure as we break free of our planetry confinement an awful lot of science awaits discovery.

At least (as you said) I hope so! :)

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Quote:
"I tend to think that there are now few surprises in physics waiting to be discovered"

Andy, with all respect, that sounds surprisingly short-sighted!

I agree with you, but this comes from having seen so much before.

I recall something about some employee of some patent office resigning from his post 100 or more years ago, simply because he believed there was nothing else to be discovered. How wrong he was......

That was then, and is not now. I'm mainly talking about physics, which is the basis of this thread - the big things have been discovered and less remains to find. Cold fusion might have overturned a lot of things and caused a new evolutionary spurt, but nothing came of it. (unless the oil companies suppressed it!)

However, the next Big Thing lies in the Very Small :) ie, nanotechnology and materials, biotechnology and genetics. We are still paddling in the shallows here, but all the physical processes are well understood. Understanding how they are put together and how to manipulate or create new materials or lifeforms or longevity is a process of experimentation and trial and error.

Eg, understanding how hormone feedback and protein synthesis works is a big achievement but it isn't a breakthrough in fundamentals. The processes are well understood, but figuring out the complexity of what it all means is another frontier. There are billions of these things waiting to be discovered, so the researchers will be busy forever working on these things. In due course we will be able to create life and direct evolution.

The next leap in fundamental physics may come with the discovery of the Higgs Boson whos existence is predicted but never observed, but then what? It won't help with going faster than light!

However much we would like to visit other star systems at FTL and trade with other civilizations, it can only happen in our imagination!

I think our knowledge of the laws of physics as they apply to us are fairly well defined, but I'm sure as we break free of our planetry confinement an awful lot of science awaits discovery.

At least (as you said) I hope so! :)

I know what you're trying to say, but our understanding of the laws of physics has nothing to do with our planetary confinement! They work everywhere in the Universe!

New environments will reveal lots and lots of interesting things, perhaps astrogenetics, but the physics will be the same!

I will be the first to say that there is still something fundamental missing in physics. But, saying that there are still problems with our overall understanding is not the same as saying that what we now know is blatantly wrong.

Right now, physics is in the uncomfortable position of having almost no experimental results that disagree with the most advanced theories (general relativity and the standard model of particle physics). This makes it darned hard to figure out the next step. But, there must be such a next step because the two major theories we have are incompatible with each other. It's simply that we currently have no way of probing the regime where both theories should apply.

All that said, the fact that the theories agree so well with experiment and observation means that it's pretty much blatantly impossible for either major theory to be outright wrong. Then again, it's pretty rare in the history of physics for any broadly accepted theory to be proven totally wrong. Relativity and quantum mechanics both reduce to standard classical mechanics in the right limits; and many ideas from classical physics (like conservation of energy and momentum) are still fundamental to physics.

So, the most likely picture of physics as a whole is that both general relativity and the standard model are what some ultimate theory of physics reduces to in the correct limits. And, one expects that much of the structure from these theories should carry over into the larger theory.

Since both GR and the standard model have the same sort of causal structure (and, it is precisely the causal structure which forbids ftl travel), it seems pretty clear that that, at least, is something we ought to expect to see in a broader theory.

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I once saw an NOVA special that made a good point on this question.


It said... you will have people that deal with facts that only can see and say that FTL travel is impossible. There are people that say that as man grows we can find ways around the impossible or mabe even break the laws of the Universe.

I know at this very moment in time we cant travel faster than light, but can you say that mabe in a thousand years from now will that hold true? I really think there are places in the Universe that may put our laws of physics to the test.

I think man can be very vain to even think we know almost everything there is to know about physics and the Universe. We have only been on Earth a very very short time and there are many things we need to know before we can even think about this question.

Evan NASA is asking the question....

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/research/warp/possible.html

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Cyrax_Darkmual@yahoo.com
Cyrax Darkmaul 94th Druid. Mob Killer
life is not measured by the breaths we take but by the moments that take our breath.

I'm not sure we will ever find out. If the north pole, not the magnetic pole, keeps on shifting the crust will flip before we can do the maths, or build anything to exceed light speed. When that happens,,,, blooey. Its over. In any case there are things that do exceed the speed of light, like the phase velocity of a electromagnetic wave in a waveguide. Which would depend on the frequency. The higher the faster. Or so I was told.
Max

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I'm not sure we will ever find out. If the north pole, not the magnetic pole, keeps on shifting the crust will flip before we can do the maths, or build anything to exceed light speed. When that happens,,,, blooey. Its over. In any case there are things that do exceed the speed of light, like the phase velocity of a electromagnetic wave in a waveguide. Which would depend on the frequency. The higher the faster. Or so I was told.
Max

The north pole has shifted by small amounts for a darned long time and, as far as anyone knows, has never flipped overall. I wouldn't be too worried.

And, yes, the phase velocity of modes of EM waves can travel faster than c. However, the speed of the waveform (i.e. the group velocity) cannot. And, it's the group velocity that carries real physical meaning, at least where causality is concerned.

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I once saw an NOVA special that made a good point on this question.


It said... you will have people that deal with facts that only can see and say that FTL travel is impossible. There are people that say that as man grows we can find ways around the impossible or mabe even break the laws of the Universe.

If there is a way to travel faster than light, it must come out of the laws of the universe for one simple reason - we are part of the universe, we can't operate outside it.

I know at this very moment in time we cant travel faster than light, but can you say that mabe in a thousand years from now will that hold true? I really think there are places in the Universe that may put our laws of physics to the test.

I think man can be very vain to even think we know almost everything there is to know about physics and the Universe. We have only been on Earth a very very short time and there are many things we need to know before we can even think about this question.

I've already said that I;m certain we don't know everything, maybe not even close to everything. However, the things that we do know seem to be capable of predicting almost all the phenomena we see (excepting neutrino oscillations and the identity, but not effects, of dark matter and dark energy). That suggests pretty strongly that our knowledge is incomplete, not incorrect.

Evan NASA is asking the question....

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/research/warp/possible.html

You might notice that (with once exception) nothing on that page is newer than 1996; and a decade is a long time in physics. Most of the ideas they're referencing there are speculative at best and some are downright silly. That said, I have no problem with the idea of people going out and testing ideas at odds with currently accepted physics. In fact, it usually ends up serving as added confirmation of existing theory, but sometimes adds a new wrinkle.

My problem with all the talk of ftl travel is the tacit assumption that almost always seems to be made that relativity must (for whatever reason) just be blatantly wrong, when it is already the best tested and confirmed scientific theory in human history.

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The north pole has shifted by small amounts for a darned long time and, as far as anyone knows, has never flipped overall. I wouldn't be too worried.

The magnetic pole has flipped completely several times based on evidence found in the magnetic polarity of rocks in the sea floor.

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BOINC WIKI

BOINCing since 2002/12/8

My problem with all the talk of ftl travel is the tacit assumption that almost always seems to be made that relativity must (for whatever reason) just be blatantly wrong, when it is already the best tested and confirmed scientific theory in human history.

I don't think that relativity is any more wrong than Newtons observations. They are true within the bounderies and limits that they is set in. It's absolute at best and incomplete in the worst case scenario. A reformulation might be necessary. Like you said, we don't know everything but it can be limiting if we make too many assumptions about the limits themselves because when it comes down to it, for example, we really don't even know what defines a charge.

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TEAM
LL

The north pole has shifted by small amounts for a darned long time and, as far as anyone knows, has never flipped overall. I wouldn't be too worried.

The magnetic pole has flipped completely several times based on evidence found in the magnetic polarity of rocks in the sea floor.

Quite true, but he said the geographic north pole.

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The north pole has shifted by small amounts for a darned long time and, as far as anyone knows, has never flipped overall. I wouldn't be too worried.

The magnetic pole has flipped completely several times based on evidence found in the magnetic polarity of rocks in the sea floor.

Quite true, but he said the geographic north pole.

Yes, a magnetic flip is survivable, but the geographic flip would mess up the seasons bigtime and confuse an awful lot of lifeforms while also shifting the icecaps around with a probable big change in sea levels.

Thankfully, we have the Moon which has helped to prevent this from happening and is yet another improbable thing that has helped life to arise here.

So, I think it ain't gonna happen for another good few hundred million years yet until the moon recedes far enough away such that its gravitational influence no longer contributes enough to keep the Earth stable.

Also, the Earth's molten interior and resulting oblateness helps to keep its rotational axis stable. This is quite separate from precession. Also in the far future as the Earth's spin slows down it will become less oblate and the core will eventually solidify as radioactivity continues to decrease and tidal forces from the ever receding Moon also reduce.

Perhaps then could be a chance of a georotational flip. We'll have to find a new planet anyway one day, but I won't lose any sleep over it now!

The north pole has shifted by small amounts for a darned long time and, as far as anyone knows, has never flipped overall. I wouldn't be too worried.

The magnetic pole has flipped completely several times based on evidence found in the magnetic polarity of rocks in the sea floor.

Quite true, but he said the geographic north pole.

Yes, a magnetic flip is survivable, but the geographic flip would mess up the seasons bigtime and confuse an awful lot of lifeforms while also shifting the icecaps around with a probable big change in sea levels.

Thankfully, we have the Moon which has helped to prevent this from happening and is yet another improbable thing that has helped life to arise here.

So, I think it ain't gonna happen for another good few hundred million years yet until the moon recedes far enough away such that its gravitational influence no longer contributes enough to keep the Earth stable.

Also, the Earth's molten interior and resulting oblateness helps to keep its rotational axis stable. This is quite separate from precession. Also in the far future as the Earth's spin slows down it will become less oblate and the core will eventually solidify as radioactivity continues to decrease and tidal forces from the ever receding Moon also reduce.

Perhaps then could be a chance of a georotational flip. We'll have to find a new planet anyway one day, but I won't lose any sleep over it now!

Even ignoring all damping factors, it would be pretty hard for the Earth's rotational axis to flip. Such a process would fail to conserve angular momentum twice.

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Off topic, I know, but pole slippage...
I don't think the axis of rotation could ever shift, unless caused by a huge impact.

I also don't think the magnetic poles reverse - I see no convincing mechanism by which this would happen.

My own thinking on this is that the magnetic poles stay at more or less the same place, but the Earth's crust slips occasionally. It could be due to weight build-up at the poles causing a centrifugal force or some other reason, but I think it's happened in the past.

This would account for apparent magnetic pole reversals, when in fact I think it was the crust which moved within the field.

We still haven't explained the very sudden deaths of flora and fauna in Siberia and other related regions - the frozen mammoths still with food in their mouths - and we haven't explained why forests once existed in Antartica. No matter how warm a climate may become, it is still going to be very, very cold at the poles, certainly too cold for trees.

Crust displacement explains all three problems, and the ice at the poles is getting very thick now.....

'Be prepared...'

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Crust displacement

Are you talking about Plate Tectonics, or something else?

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Join TeamACC

Sometimes I think we are alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we are not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.

Off topic, I know, but pole slippage...
I don't think the axis of rotation could ever shift, unless caused by a huge impact.

I also don't think the magnetic poles reverse - I see no convincing mechanism by which this would happen.

Contrary to most popular explanations, Earth's magnetic field is neither the result of the planet being a giant bar magnet or simply the rotation of the planet's core. The best understanding that we currently have places the source of the fields in the bulk motions of the liquid outer core. Unfortunately, this means that a full description of the dynamical processes involved requires a solution to the equations of magnetohydrodynamics, which are ugly to say the least. Even so, a good amount of work has gone into numerical magnetohydrodynamic simulations, which have shown that the pattern inferred from crustal magnetization seems to be a characteristic of the magnetohydrodynamic model - that is, that the magnetic poles stay mostly near the rotational poles, wandering about a bit and, every once in a while, wandering all the way to the other rotational pole.

My own thinking on this is that the magnetic poles stay at more or less the same place, but the Earth's crust slips occasionally. It could be due to weight build-up at the poles causing a centrifugal force or some other reason, but I think it's happened in the past.

This would account for apparent magnetic pole reversals, when in fact I think it was the crust which moved within the field.

We still haven't explained the very sudden deaths of flora and fauna in Siberia and other related regions - the frozen mammoths still with food in their mouths - and we haven't explained why forests once existed in Antartica. No matter how warm a climate may become, it is still going to be very, very cold at the poles, certainly too cold for trees.

Crust displacement explains all three problems, and the ice at the poles is getting very thick now.....

'Be prepared...'

I see several problems with this idea. First, Earth isn't perfectly spherical. For the crust to partially rotate about the rest of the planet like this, it would have to change shape significantly. Given that the crust is relatively rigid, there would be some pretty profound geologic remnants.

Second, Earth's crust is not really a single rigid body. It consists of a whole bunch of plates which move somewhat independently of each other. The entire crust rotating would put a huge strain on the boundaries between the plates, which we would expect to see evidence of. (Incidentally, the fact that the plates do wander explains the remnants of forests in Antarctica. The plate it sits wasn't always at the south pole. In fact, if you go back some 225 million years or so, it was part of Pangaea.)

Even worse, though, the faster such a rotation happened the worse the effects I've mentioned would be. So, if it were fast enough to explain animals dying with their mouths full, it would also be fast enough to pretty much tear the Earth's crust apart. We'd see mountain ranges that fell over, worldwide nearly simultaneous volcanic activity, etc.

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It is true that if such an event as a crust displacement did occur, the effects would be horrific, and that is why we should consider this amongst the possible 'mass extinction' events.

"....worldwide nearly simultaneous volcanic activity, etc."

There are suggestions that a high level of volcanic activity did take place at about that time, as volcanic debris of a similar age has been found in many different areas of the globe. Could be evidence perhaps?

As you say there are several problems with this theory, but I still consider it a possibility. We, as a race, don't appear to have been on this planet for long enough really to have recorded past movements of the crust, if indeed they occur at all, but I believe it would be easily detectable simply because of the vast number of amateur astronomers we are lucky to have; They would immediately spot a discrepancy in the position of the stars, which would be the first sign of anything on the move beneath our feet.

I recall reading of an ancient map dating from about 1500 - 1600, but certainly based on far, far earlier drawings, showing Antartica without the ice cap, but I can't remember quite where for the moment - I believe it to be amongst those many unexplained artifacts which have been unearthed. If this map is genuine, it indicates that something may have moved in more recent times, because as I mentioned earlier, Antartica, as long as it is positioned at the pole, will always be inhospitable and darned cold, but plate tectonics is too slow a process to have moved that continent from an ice-free latitude to where it is now in that kind of timeframe.

Earth mysteries - I love 'em!

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No mysteries here.

Only thing now that would make 'large crustal movements' in such a short timeframe would be a large meteorite impact of a few hundred km diameter and that is unlikely at the moment. If it had happened in the recent past, we really would not be here to wonder about it.

Volcanically, the Earth has settled down and nowhere near as active as it used to be. I don't see that future large eruptions on prehistoric scales will happen in the future with the Earth in its present state, unless large and devastating meteorite impacts churn up the mantle and get things cooking again.
Volcanic activity and plate techtonics are just moving at normal 'background' levels, and slowing down over a period of hundreds of millions of years as the Earth cools. The energy driving this comes mainly from the Moons gravitational influence and radioactive decay, as the Earth's core is part nuclear reactor as well as magnetic. The Earth's rotation is slowing down, and the Moon moving further away at a few cm a year. In time, there won't be any seismic or volcanic activity, or magnetic field :(

The crust is recording the magnetic history of Earth's core as lava is formed and cools on the surface. We can date this and see the direction of the then local field lines. I imaging that the core is a pretty chaotic environment and that magnetic fields are constantly interacting and being deformed. One just has to look at the sun to see how incredibly complicated and dynamic its magnetic structure is. The Earth's core is much much more viscous and so such changes happen over many thousands of years.

The map you refer to is probably genuine, but the information certainly mistaken. There is no evidence whatsoever that Antarctica had no ice just a few hundred years ago, and impossible that it could have just "moved" like that.

GPS can and does already measure the movement of plate techtonics, so I won't lose any sleep over Europe moving overnight to the Arctic... :)

Yes Soloman you are very right. Relativity is the best tested and the most accepted theory we have today. I am not saying it is right or wrong. I am just saying that there may be more ways that we do not know yet to achieve FTL travel.

If there is a way to travel faster than light, it must come out of the laws of the universe for one simple reason - we are part of the universe, we can't operate outside it.

That may not be all together true. What we know of the Universe is very small and I know how we see the Universe will change, as we grow and so will our Laws.

Yes we are apart of the ( known ) Universe and we have to opreate with in it. I am willing to say, far in the future there may be a way to change the forces of the Universe to achieve the impossable. ( FTL ) I really feel given enough time we will find a way. And mabe even prove Relativity at the same time. I am open to the idea.



Now talking about the magnetic field of the Earth. Would a flip happen quickly like in a year or will it take several years?

Also I think that a magnetic field is key to life anywhere.

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Cyrax_Darkmual@yahoo.com
Cyrax Darkmaul 94th Druid. Mob Killer
life is not measured by the breaths we take but by the moments that take our breath.