Reactions that happen faster than light?

[GrandMasterK]

I was watching that show about einstein on the science channel and there was a sentence on there that said something to the effect of "why does what happen to one atom in one place, happen instantly to another atom a million light years away". Is that or something related to that true?

 

And about the reaction thing. Lets say a giant planet, say 10 million miles in diameter, crashes into another giant planet a couple million miles in diameter. Could the reaction to that impact be felt 186,000 miles away faster than a second? Or would it all from a distant eye seem to just be happening in slow motion as everything is so frickin big yet the effects of those causes can't happen any quicker than say if a small planet smashed into another small planet.

 

Or lets say the impact displaced the planet. Could the far end of the planet that got nailed start moving away in just a couple of seconds when the thing that's making it moved nailed it in the ass 10 million miles away on the otherside? I say a couple of seconds keeping in mind that light takes alittle less then a minute to cover 10 million miles.

[Klaynos]

I suspect they where talking about entanglement. In entanglement 2 entangled things (say electrons) are 'linked' if you measure an observable of one of them, you instantly destroy the wavefunction of the other electron, so you know what the result would be if someone else measured the observable on it. Causality (and relativity) is maintained as no information is transfered, as someone with the second electron cannot know what the result is from you faster than light and cannot tell whether the wave function has been collapsed without measurement.

[[Tycho?]]

As for the example of things crashing into eachother, no, nothing travels faster than light, including compression waves. If a planet crashed into a moon or something, people on the opposite side would feel the smash later than those right under it.

 

Here is the classic example: You have a long, rigid metal bar. This bar is a light year long, lets say. You nudge one end of the bar. Does the other end of the bar thats a light year away move instantaneously? No, it does not. The minimum time it would take is equal to the speed of light. In this example it means that the other end of the bar would not move for at least a year, since this is how long it would take for light to travel the distance. And its impossible to have anything that is totally uncompressable.

[Farsight]

And to back that up, the nudge travels at the speed of sound in that rigid metal bar. For steel this is about 5000 metres per second. Way less than the speed of light.

[YT2095]

Cerenkov radiation is faster than light.

[Klaynos]

Cerenkov radiation is faster than light.

 

No, Cerenkov radiation is EM radiation traveling AT the speed of light, that is created when a particle travels through a medium faster than the materials speed of light.

 

This is nothing to do with the speed of light in a vacuum.

[YT2095]

no one Mentioned `c` though

[Klaynos]

no one Mentioned `c` though

 

It was implied by my mention of causality and the context being relativity.

[Farsight]

Nothing can go faster than the "speed of light" in a vacuum because c is not a speed. It's not a speed because speed is distance over time, and time is not a fundamental component of the thing we call spacetime. What is fundamental is space, and it can only be quantified by distance. You can measure this distance by looking at some distance travelled by a photon. When you try to measure time to calculate distance / time = speed, what you're actually measuring is the distance travelled by the photons within your body, brain, and clock. The constant you call c is how you relate the real Dimension of distance to the mathematical, subjective, imaginary dimension you call time.

 

See this paper descibing A New Interpretation of Special Relativity:

 

A New Interpretation of Special Relativity

[Lekgolo555]

^^^^^

 

So time is imaginary? it does not really exist, but is a concept developed by humans?

[swansont]

^^^^^

 

So time is imaginary? it does not really exist, but is a concept developed by humans?

 

Don't take too much of Farsight's discussions on the topic as being generally accepted by the scientific community, nor confuse this issue with science. "Is time just a concept" is a philosphical/metaphysical discussion. It's not germane to relativity. If you want to discuss it, try the speculations/metaphysics section.

[Norman Albers]

Don't take too much of Farsight's discussions on the topic as being generally accepted by the scientific community, nor confuse this issue with science. "Is time just a concept" is a philosphical/metaphysical discussion. It's not germane to relativity. If you want to discuss it, try the speculations/metaphysics section.

 

I feel this is not how we are going to get our theoretic butts kicked. How can you say interpretation of time is not central? I am screwing with Schwarzschild metrics; I do not know the posts you speak of from FARSIGHT......In my GR text by Adler,Bazin,Schiffer, they construct the exterior metric so the far-field is Lorentzian. Be careful, do not use the word 'flat' here. In the differential equation solving it is useful, as often, to try a form that you think is useful. We adopt an exponential as 'positive trailing off to unity, or zero', and get a nice solution that proceeds to blow up in our face as we go inward.......Maybe I will find different assumptions for the metric form of quark stars.

[swansont]

How can you say interpretation of time is not central? I am screwing with Schwarzschild metrics; I do not know the posts you speak of from FARSIGHT

 

Without reading them, then, perhaps you should not comment. You are free to read them and draw your own conclusions. Farsight was not doing anything close to doing anything with Scwarzschild metrics.

[Norman Albers]

Fair enough.

[wilgory]

the faster than light reaction was probably gravity.

gravity is thought to be a warp in the fabric of space-time.

this fabric is warped by mass.

sense particles aren't involved, faster than light reactions do not violate relativity.

i've recently heard that gravity is currently believed to react at the speed of light.

not having higher education, i can't say for sure.

[Norman Albers]

There are phase fronts that can advance at arbitrary speed. Consider a very large sphere impinging on a "wall" or another large sphere. This is simple calculus: at the moment of first connection, the velocity of the locus of contact, sideways, is infinite.

[Farsight]

Don't take too much of Farsight's discussions on the topic as being generally accepted by the scientific community, nor confuse this issue with science. "Is time just a concept" is a philosphical/metaphysical discussion. It's not germane to relativity. If you want to discuss it, try the speculations/metaphysics section.

 

It was however germane to Albert Einstein during his Princeton years:

 

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/articles/050228crat_atlarge?050228crat_atlarge

[Norman Albers]

I read that article and it is beautiful. Thank you, Farsight. In 1969-70 I'd bicycle the half-mile down to the Institute to play a little Mozart on a poorly kept little grand piano. They all donned robes to eat lunch together. One reaction I might offer to the questions of "time", is that the freedom that exists in slicing the "spacetime cake" from different frames of reference should not automatically extend to processes in time. Indeed gen. relativity is couched in the language of differential intervals, fundamentally. A process compared by observers at two points in a gravitational potential will have their time intervals related by the ratio of the metric terms at the sites. The fun starts when you see the loopy (ha ha) solutions possible and realize you have no physics but an excess of possible mathematics! Thus I look for vacuum physics to decide. I said to Puthoff I think the idea of proper time has been shockingly abused. In Kip Thorne's lovely book on Black Holes, we are falling through the event horizon in proper time, just fine if it's larger with small tides. I said now wait just an eternity here. This does not happen in finite time on our clocks. I challenged Xerxes on another forum, saying it is one thing to describe a possible future but quite another to say which ones get to happen! To my surprise, Puthoff simply agrees! Simple, really, he said!!! In his Dark Gray Holes there is no outer horizon, but there is infinite time dilation as you approach the singular center. Either his model pertains and the matter field collapses in a 3_D fashion, or my Schwarzschild elaboration pertains by virtue of the nature of dimensional collapse of the quark field, I guess. Time is change, oscillation. What if it is disallowed partly? What does it mean if the sign is negative??? Thinking to the OP, Klaynos has given me food for thought. Chew slowly.

[Norman Albers]

For further thrills let's wiki on 'transactional interpretation'. I do see that the receiver has been sitting there broadcasting its nature, as well as the emitter has done its thing. "It's nature" is the literal vibration in which are implied possibilities.

[Farsight]

I thought the infinite time dilation happened when you approached the event horizon, Albers. Which takes us back to the old "frozen stars". No collapsing star has finished collapsing yet, and never will. Result = no singularities. Black holes have no hair, and no heart. I don't know much about the dimensional collapse of the quark field or transactional interpretation. Or truth be known, black holes either. But I offer what I can.

[Norman Albers]

Farsight, You speak correctly of the Schwarschild solution. Puthoff assumes identical metric properties radially and transverse (isotropic) so his solution has no horizon. The metric blows up (or goes to zero) at his center so I call this a degenerate horizon, as if it had been shrunk to zero.