http://news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=16902006
Interesting article, I wonder if anything comes of it.
Interesting article, I wonder if anything comes of it.
Interesting, but I doubt we'll have something like that for a few hundred years. I don't know how they come up with the different dimension thing because we're still trying to see how many possible dimensions there are.
Sorry, just having a bit of a what if? moment here.bouy said:It probably be cheaper to propel spacecraft with nukes or something instead.
As I said in a different thread on this subject, the laws of physics are not a matter of technological advancement. That's Star Trek Think.Natoma said:Given the rate of technological advancement from the beginning of the 20th century to the beginning of the 21st, I don't think this is something that is centuries away. It wouldn't surprise me if we saw feasible travel within our solar system, and to other stars, within our lifetimes.
Ali said:(since gravitys action is FTL AFAIK)
Ali
nutball said:So FTL is either possible, or it isn't. Full stop.
london-boy said:I'm quite sure it was proved some time ago that the speed of gravity is the same as the speed of light.
AFAICT, the considerations that have been done around the so-called Planck units (of which light speed is one) seem to suggest that if light speed was cut by, say, a factor of 2, as seen from a god outside the universe, the inhabitants of the universe would be utterly unable to tell any difference (change of light speed => change of the distance perceived as "one meter" and/or of the time span perceived as "one second" => light speed in meters per second stays the same => not observable).Bouncing Zabaglione Bros. said:But there are a couple of theories that the speed of light has been different in the past because the gravitic density of the universe has been different while it was forming ie, the speed of light is not constant and does seem to be affected by environmental factors.
String theory predicts the existence of gravitons and their well-defined interactions which represents one of its most important triumphs. A graviton in perturbative string theory is a closed string in a very particular low-energy vibrational state. The scattering of gravitons in string theory can also be computed from the correlation functions in conformal field theory, as dictated by the AdS/CFT correspondence, or from Matrix theory.
An interesting feature of gravitons in string theory is that, as closed strings without endpoints, they would not be bound to branes and could move freely between them; this "leakage" of gravitons from our brane into higher-dimensional space could explain why gravity is such a weak force, and gravitons from other branes adjacent to our own could provide a potential explanation for dark matter. See brane cosmology for more details.
there is, according to Heim, no “big bang“ with an infinitely dense energy.
Instead, matter appears only after very long evolution of a world without any physical
measurable objects, which only consists of a dynamics of geometrical area quanta.
Sounds like you've been reading Terry PratchettBouncing Zabaglione Bros. said:Heck, it wasn't that long ago that everyone thought time was constant, and now we know it changes all over the place depending where you are and what you're doing.
Simon F said:Sounds like you've been reading Terry Pratchett
nutball said:As I said in a different thread on this subject, the laws of physics are not a matter of technological advancement. That's Star Trek Think.
It doesn't matter how fast our technology advances, if something isn't physically possible then it will remain physically impossible until this Universe gets reset and we start all over again with a different set of laws of physics.
So FTL is either possible, or it isn't. Full stop. It's up to the laws which govern the Universe, it's not up to us. Our rate of scientific/technological advancement determines the time-frame on which we might achieve FTL *if* it's possible, that's all.