Free Republic
Browse · Search
General/Chat
Topics · Post Article

To: FredZarguna
If superluminal travel were possible, we would already have been visited by races (possibly including our own) from our own future.

Who's talking about time travel?

The Alcubierre “Warp Drive” isn’t physics; it’s fiction.

So was heavier-than-air manned flight, until the Wright brothers did it. Landing men on the moon was widely ridiculed at one time, because it seemed so far-fetched.

You live in an age of technological marvels and breakthroughs. Things are yet to be invented that seem like pure science fiction to you today.

64 posted on 08/26/2013 5:34:11 PM PDT by Windflier (To anger a conservative, tell him a lie. To anger a liberal, tell him the truth.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 60 | View Replies ]


To: Windflier
Who's talking about time travel?

You are. And the fact that you don't know that you are tells anyone reading your posts why you don't understand what you're talking about.

The geometry of our universe is such that it is impossible to travel through space without also traveling through time. Moving from one point in space-time to another point in space-time faster than light always requires time travel from the original proper time of the traveler into his past; when he arrives at his destination, he is there before any simultaneous event seen in any inertial reference frame that includes his original location and his new location could be observed. In particular, this implies he could beam a message back to himself that arrives before he leaves.

Superluminal transmission of anything other than space-like quantum states always implies causality violations. Always. It's impossible to get around it, because the space-time we live in has this structure.

So was heavier-than-air manned flight, until the Wright brothers did it. Landing men on the moon was widely ridiculed at one time, because it seemed so far-fetched.

No.

Laymen say silly stuff like this all the time, and it just isn't true. Heavier than air flight did not violate the known laws of physics.

No serious scientist ridiculed the idea of landing men on the moon; the basic science of that feat was mundane -- even trivial -- it was a fantastic engineering challenge and accomplishment, but it did not in any way tax our basic understanding of physical law. We knew all the physics of it that we needed to know when Newton was still alive.

You live in an age of technological marvels and breakthroughs.

True. And despite that, in 107 years, no experiment has fundamentally challenged the truth of Lorentz invariance. None. All of our experiments have confirmed this to a fare-thee-well.

Things are yet to be invented that seem like pure science fiction to you today.

Maybe, but they will not violate the Theory of Relativity, and they will not make effects appear with their causes in the future.

101 posted on 08/26/2013 7:53:17 PM PDT by FredZarguna (CPVPV sounds like a very nasty STD virus. Just saying...)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 64 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
General/Chat
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson