FTL Currents May Power Pulsar Beams 236
thomst passes along news out of the recent AAAS meeting of a new explanation for pulsar beams that involves faster-than-light currents. Here are Los Alamos's press release and three related papers on the arXiv. "The new model explains the beam emissions from pulsars as products of superluminal currents within the spinning neutron stars' atmospheres. According to the authors' model, the current generated is, itself, faster than light, although the particles that compose it never individually exceed the universal speed limit, thereby preventing Einsteinian post-mortem rotation. The new model is a general explanation of the phenomenon of pulsar beam emissions that explains emissions at all observed frequencies (and different pulsars emit everything from radio waves to x-rays), which no previous model has done."
Re:FTL Information? (Score:5, Funny)
Clearly you have already perfected this FTL information transmission and used it to get a firstpost with a topic uncanningly similar to mine. ;)
Google (Score:3, Funny)
Short answer (Score:5, Funny)
No.
For a detailed explanation, see the next guy's post.
Re:FTL Information? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Google (Score:5, Funny)
Has Google filed its patent yet on "Method and Materials to Power a Pulsar Beam Using a Faster-Than-Light Current"?
Not in China..
GJ slashdot... (Score:1, Funny)
GJ Slashdot for making me search for "Einsteinian post-mortem rotation" [google.com]. Well played.
Taking bets on how long it takes to come up on Google Trends.
Re:FTL Information? (Score:5, Funny)
no physical laws are being broken and that Special Relativity is not violated
You know there's a problem with the world when someone has to *explicitly clarify* that Special Relativity isn't being violated.
I can see the signs that will replace "no smoking" 20 years from now: "This is a physics-abiding zone, please do not exceed light speed. Thank you."
Re:FTL Information? (Score:5, Funny)
Yours was the anti-correlated part of the singlet.
Somehow this sounds so much better than "-1 Redundant".
Re:FTL information (Score:2, Funny)
Well done. Pretty cool, really.
Now make an analogy using a cow, 5 bags of salt, and the Pacific Ocean. :)
Re:FTL Information? (Score:3, Funny)
My next door neighbor asked me to not let my kids use computers between 7pm and 8pm because she doesn't want them to be able to watch her in the bath (wtf?).
Did you check your computer room for an unobstructed view of her bathroom? Perhaps she should install better curtains.
Re:Replies to the thread vs. Time (Score:5, Funny)
As General Relativity tells us, information cannot travel faster than the speed of light, and the closer you get to the speed of light the more energy you need. I'm a civilian, so I don't usually have to obey generals, but this Relativity dude seems to speak with some authority, so I'll listen to him.
Anyway, it's also pretty inherently obvious that theoretically infinite amounts of information can be kept perfectly still with no energy expended. You just need a stable medium.
It stands to reason, therefore, that there is an inverse relationship between the speed of an object and the amount of information that may be carried on that object with a given energy input.
As a thread accelerates, the amount of useful information that can be put on it decreases. Eventually, it reaches a velocity called the "speed of blight" where the number of informationless posts like this one exceeds those with useful information.
Also, as objects move, they are affected by exterior forces, such as chaotic movement, gravity wells, etc, and that effect is proportional to the amount of force applied, and inversely proportional to the speed of the object being affected. This is why a troll (known to hang out at gravity wells, and may in fact cause them) can have a more diversionary effect on a thread when it has yet to gain velocity - the troll's black hole has more mass relative to the velocity of the thread. As the thread reaches speed, the troll can (at best) tear a small chunk off the thread and scatter it, because the thread is moving too quickly but also lacks the information necessary to maintain its integrity any more.
Re:FTL Information? (Score:5, Funny)
> Did you check your computer room for an unobstructed view of her bathroom? Perhaps she should install better curtains.
I can't tell from here, my telescope is blocking the view.
Re:FTL information (Score:4, Funny)
Now make an analogy using a cow, 5 bags of salt, and the Pacific Ocean. :)
So, near Hawaii, we have a cow and 5 bags of salt. Force feed the salt to the cow, which promptly dies (sorry PETA). The rotting cow corpse expands and finally detonates (sorry cDc), at, for example, the speed of light. Flaps of leather strike SFO, nothing unusual, but it is odd that they strike LA at about the same time. Scientist watching from a satellite says its as if leather was smeared in a line thru SFO and LA however the line must have moved at about a zillion times the speed of light, like the Enterprise had an accident while transporting some steers at full warp speed. No, scientist has it wrong, because the direction of motion is actually perpendicular to the line between SFO and LA, the motion was actually from Hawaii at merely light speed.
The difference in time of impact and distance between SFO and LA are just a math abstraction which by no means implies the leather moved along that path at a zillion times the speed of light.
Re:FTL Information? (Score:3, Funny)
The difficult thing about being a quantum comedian is that your jokes are both funny and unfunny at the same time.
Re:FTL information (Score:3, Funny)
Well done. Pretty cool, really.
Now make an analogy using a cow, 5 bags of salt, and the Pacific Ocean. :)
Assume a spherical cow in a vacuum...