Posted on 08/26/2013 4:29:42 PM PDT by LibWhacker
How are you going to generate 1.21 Gigawatts?
I like your quote too. I second the motion. We do see the same 1890’s thinking where back then they though that anything and everything that was invented and known was all there is but as we all see, it was not.
Then we know all there is to know about our four dimensional space-time we live in, right?
There is nothing left to figure out, right?
We know everything about that geometry, right?
There are no unexplained anomalies in that geometry, right?
I appreciate that. Thank you.
We don't know "everything" about even very basic things like energy, momentum, and of course, space-time. That doesn't mean these things can have arbitrary properties yet to be discovered, and it doesn't mean we know nothing.
One thing we know about this space-time is that the quantum numbers associated with material representations (mass, energy) if propagated faster than light must produce causality violations. Were this not so -- just for one singular but highly important example -- Maxwell's equations could not hold.
Now, you may doubt the consequences of arcane and still speculative areas in which we really can't achieve the energies we need for experimental verification, like cosmology or particle physics. But the universe is doing literally billions of little experiments with Maxwell's equations within the space of a few angstroms every nanosecond. And guess what? It's never found the electromagnetic field to be anything but Lorentz Invariant.
If you aren't convinced by that, and aren't convinced by the fact that macroscopic experiments involving electromagnetic fields show that all observers see the electromagnetic stress tensor in a way that obeys the special theory of relativity, I really don't know what else to tell you.
We live in the universe we live in, not in exciting, wonderful, but physically nonsensical universe of Gene Roddenberry.
We don't know everything about energy, but no one seriously believes that we're going to invent a Perpetual Motion Machine of the First Kind. Same for entropy, but again, you will find no serious scientist or engineer who will take up your challenge to create a Perpetual Motion Machine of The Second Kind. Our basic understanding of momentum could be improved. Does any physicist think we will discover that the Uncertainty Principle doesn't apply somewhere?
No.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
- Hamlet (1:5.166-167)
True and inarguable. But there are some things that are not in heaven and earth, and pretending won't put them there. I cannot profess to have even the most infinitesimal understanding of God's mind. But I know that he is not evil. And I know that superluminal travel is not possible.
What about that little quirk of entangled photons able to transfer their spin information instantaneously across billions of light years, you know, spooky actions at a distance?
What about a relatively near galaxy and a quasar billions of light years away interacting with each other gravitationally?
Again, spooky action at a distance, but another *flavor* of it.
When (for example) a star goes nova and masses on the order of many solar masses (10^31 kg) are blasted into space objects under its gravitational influence light years away do not suddenly start drifting free because of the (now) lighter mass of the nova remnant. That will take an amount of time equal to how many light years away they are.
The sun is eight light minutes away. If it suddenly disappeared earth would not immediately fly out of its orbit (it would take eight light minutes.) Pluto wouldn't tangent off into the galaxy for 5 1/2 hours.
In the quantum mechanical version, interactions are mediated by gauge bosons. No gauge boson, including the graviton, moves faster than light. So in the future, when we have a fully quantum theory of gravity, you will still be mistaken.
As for your first example, you were inattentive. I specifically said that the quantum numbers associated with materiality (like mass and energy) cannot be superluminally conveyed. Spin is not such a quantity.
The collapse of wave functions (more properly state vectors) in entangled states can produce apparently nonlocal effects, but these nonlocal effects do not transmit material, and they do not transfer any information. There is no way a remote observer measuring his "half" of an eigenstate can know that his measurement result was produced by the collapse of the "other half" of the system by a remote event, or simply by his own measurement. Thus spin flipping, while Über Kewl, transmits no information, and cannot be used to send FTL signals. [Google: "Quantum no communication theorem" if you're interested in details.]
Sorry. Still no cigar.
2.9979 x 108 m/s. Not just a good idea. It's The Law.
Exceeding the speed of light was not the purpose of that example sport.
The *spooky action* is the *great and observable* influence two objects are having on each other at billions of light years separation.
How does your space-time geometry hold up under those observations?
The collapse of wave functions (more properly state vectors) in entangled states can produce apparently nonlocal effects, but these nonlocal effects do not transmit material, and they do not transfer any information.
Apparently you say, LOL.
So you're saying that nothing, what so ever concerning their states, is transferred between distant entangled photons instantaneously at the point of wave function collapse, not talking in the least about using the phenomena for transfer of data or used for communication.
Sounds like if nothing gets transferred, the phenomena shouldn't exist and the results damn sure shouldn't be predictable, should be random, shouldn't it?
There's nothing spooky about it. Gravitons are being exchanged by the two masses, and it takes millions (or billions) of years for them to go from one to the other. It's no more spooky or mysterious than the little magnet I had that put iron filings on a cartoon guy's beard under a sheet of plastic in 1961.
How does your space-time geometry hold up under those observations?
It holds up just fine.
So you're saying that nothing, what so ever concerning their states, is transferred between distant entangled photons instantaneously at the point of wave function collapse
Actually, I said something quite the opposite. I said there are apparently nonlocal effects. Apparently means "evidently" or "manifestly." Quantum mechanics has nonlocal effects. Those effects always manifest themselves in ways that cannot be used to subvert Lorentz Invariance.
Sounds like if nothing gets transferred, the phenomena shouldn't exist and the results damn sure shouldn't be predictable, should be random, shouldn't it?
The results are not predictable. This is where you are mistaken, and this is why one cannot create a causality violating apparatus to send the information about the spin flip into the past.
There is also nothing "transferred" because the two photons in the EPR paradox are indistinguishable particles occupying a single quantum state. There is simply a state which consists of both of them. Were it otherwise, they would not be "entangled." When the state vector collapses, a measurement has been taken. Even though the state vector is now in an eigenstate of a particular spin direction, an observer watching the other particle at a different point in space time has no way of knowing that the state vector has collapsed without doing a measurement. That would have the same effect as collapsing the state vector himself, which is to say, there is no experiment a physicist could do (and equivalently, no material effect that could be demonstrated that would show) that the photon has in fact been tampered with by virtue of its entanglement.
This is all in the Copenhagen school. In the path integral formulation -- also favored by quantum field theorists -- there is a different interpretation of what is happening, but the ultimate result is the same. There is no exchange of information between the two photons. Again, if there were, we could use spin flipping to send boolean messages into the past.
Your belief that there is some "universal now" that all space-time points in the universe are sitting in "at this moment," leads you to a false conclusion because the concept of simultaneity is something which is very, very rigidly defined in the real universe. There is no "now" which consists of time alone. There is a now+where which defines a point in spacetime, and there is never a "now" without a specific "where." There is not an "instantaneous" collapse of the state vector at multiple places in the universe at the "same instant," because "at the same instant" has no meaning as applied to this event [in fact, it has almost no meaning as applied to any event, because different observers in different frames of reference differ on the question of events happening at "the same instant" even when the events are quite ordinary.]
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