Science!! Fucking magnets, how do they work?

TheBeagle

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Someone's seriously butthurt that their childhood dream of top NASA scientists combing the skies in search of alien soap operas for the last 40 years is crashing down around their ears.
 

mkopec

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It seems to me that most scientific breakthroughs are often hinted at ahead of time. Observable phenomenon which are currently unexplained hinting at an answer that lies ahead. Is thereanythingsuggesting that something can travel Faster Than Light or is it just our desperate hope?
Some scientists have theorized bending space-time around the craft. Therefore folding space. so its not like you are traveling at the spped of light or faster, tis just that you are folding the space-time around the craft. But from my rudimentary understanding is that htis would take inordinate amount of energy to pull off.

Alcubierre drive - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 

The Ancient_sl

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Beagle's answer was better. I forgot about quantum entanglement. My understanding is Big Bang inflation doesn't prove FTL travel because while 2 objects can move away from each other faster than the speed of light this doesn't indicate either of them are moving faster than the speed of light.
 

Narac01

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^ then you accidentally travel to a hell dimension which haunts the ship and leads to the death of everyone on the rescue team except Lawrence Fishburne (iirc).
 

Tuco

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It seems to me that most scientific breakthroughs are often hinted at ahead of time. Observable phenomenon which are currently unexplained hinting at an answer that lies ahead. Is thereanythingsuggesting that something can travel Faster Than Light or is it just our desperate hope?
There's a lot of stuff I don't understand that physicists say about bending space-time, but observable phenomenon? I dunno. I've heard black holes could be fucked enough to be a portal but it's a mystery I don't think we're close to solving.

edit: beagles answer is better
 

Asshat wormie

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Inflation during the first few nanoseconds of the Big Bang, energy traveled faster than light before it coalesced into matter and since E=mc^2, energy and matter are interchangeable so there's one hint. Another hint might be quantum entanglement in which information is able to move faster than the speed of light. And then of course there's always the big question of wtf happens past the event horizon of a black hole.
Energy traveled faster than light? Are you sure about that? I thought that the space expanded faster than light, not that any sort of particles moved faster than.
 

TheBeagle

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Actually no, I worded it wrong and Ancient had it right. During inflation, spacetime itself expanded faster than light, not energy.
 

BrotherWu

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My understanding was that space could expand FTL but Relativity states that nothing can move through space FTL.
 

iannis

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Not only could space expand FTL but it pretty much -has- to in order for what we observe to be true. Not only during initial inflation, but the leading edge can't go slower than FTL. Or else we would be able to see it. But we don't. We hit a wall which is both philosophical and physical.

So either space is getting bigger or everything that we think we know is wrong.

The big bang is still happening.
 

iannis

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As I said before, expanding faster than light does not mean anything is traveling faster than light.
No it doesn't. But what I said doesn't imply that anything has to. It implies something much more bizzare than that.

It would seem to imply, to me being a trained astro-quantum-physicist, that there is a physical location in the universe where conservation of energy is not the most fundamental of physical laws.

Edit: Hence, you know, the whole zero point energy quackery thing. But gravity doesn't work without dark matter, the same way that expansion doesn't work without dark energy. There are mysteries yet! It doesn't have to be a thing, or a place, or anything with any physical presence even. Maybe it's just a set of contextual interdependancies that we are currently ignorant of. Maybe there's a way to explain it without unobtainium.

Look at what the simple notion (coupled with the very not simple proofs) of "the speed of light is constant, everything else is relative to it" did for us. Maybe light isn't as unique as we assume.

I dunno. Shits weird.
 

Lithose

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^ then you accidentally travel to a hell dimension which haunts the ship and leads to the death of everyone on the rescue team except Lawrence Fishburne (iirc).
Then you'd need Laurence Fishburne to do the most logical, and rational thing I have ever seen in a horror movie.


Another hint might be quantum entanglement in which information is able to move faster than the speed of light. And then of course there's always the big question of wtf happens past the event horizon of a black hole.
Entanglement, imo, is the most fascinating thing in Quantum Physics. Between that, and tunneling, it lends a lot of weight to the multi-dimensional theories that help explain gravity. Really crazy to think that there are dimensions layered on ours, that might be one dimensional in nature; and so once you slip into them, you can exit at any point in our space time.
 

Running Dog_sl

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If you somehow colonised planets outside your own star system, "radio" communication might not be what you use:

Engineering Planetary Lasers for Interstellar Communication

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1992lbsa.conf..637S

Turns out Venus might have a use after all...
wink.png
 

Tuco

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Entanglement, imo, is the most fascinating thing in Quantum Physics. Between that, and tunneling, it lends a lot of weight to the multi-dimensional theories that help explain gravity. Really crazy to think that there are dimensions layered on ours, that might be one dimensional in nature; and so once you slip into them, you can exit at any point in our space time.
yeah maybe I don't understand it well enough, but the entanglement stuff gives incredible credence to interdimensionality or ftl travel or just reality h4x.
 

Cad

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No it doesn't. But what I said doesn't imply that anything has to. It implies something much more bizzare than that.

It would seem to imply, to me being a trained astro-quantum-physicist, that there is a physical location in the universe where conservation of energy is not the most fundamental of physical laws.

Edit: Hence, you know, the whole zero point energy quackery thing. But gravity doesn't work without dark matter, the same way that expansion doesn't work without dark energy. There are mysteries yet! It doesn't have to be a thing, or a place, or anything with any physical presence even. Maybe it's just a set of contextual interdependancies that we are currently ignorant of. Maybe there's a way to explain it without unobtainium.

Look at what the simple notion (coupled with the very not simple proofs) of "the speed of light is constant, everything else is relative to it" did for us. Maybe light isn't as unique as we assume.

I dunno. Shits weird.
I think a lot of this points to the fact that our understanding of the universe is fundamentally flawed.
 

Itzena_sl

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Nasa validates space drive (Wired UK)
Nasa is a major player in space science, so when a team from the agency this week presents evidence that "impossible" microwave thrusters seem to work, something strange is definitely going on. Either the results are completely wrong, or Nasa has confirmed a major breakthrough in space propulsion.

British scientist Roger Shawyer has been trying to interest people in his EmDrive for some years through his company SPR Ltd. Shawyer claims the EmDrive converts electric power into thrust, without the need for any propellant by bouncing microwaves around in a closed container. He has built a number of demonstration systems, but critics reject his relativity-based theory and insist that, according to the law of conservation of momentum, it cannot work.

According to good scientific practice, an independent third party needed to replicate Shawyer's results. As Wired.co.uk reported, this happened last year when a Chinese team built its own EmDrive and confirmed that it produced 720 mN (about 72 grams) of thrust, enough for a practical satellite thruster. Such a thruster could be powered by solar electricity, eliminating the need for the supply of propellant that occupies up to half the launch mass of many satellites. The Chinese work attracted little attention; it seems that nobody in the West believed in it.

However, a US scientist, Guido Fetta, has built his own propellant-less microwave thruster, and managed to persuade Nasa to test it out. The test results were presented on July 30 at the 50th Joint Propulsion Conference in Cleveland, Ohio. Astonishingly enough, they are positive.
What thefuck?An actual, working, reactionless drive?
 

The Master

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Welp, that is the solar system. Constant boost ships are now possible, their one drawback was the amount of propellant you had to carry with you.