Theory Challenging Einstein's View On Speed of Light Could Soon Be Tested (theguardian.com) 244
mspohr writes: The Guardian has a news article about a recently published journal entry proposing a way to test the theory that the speed of light was infinite at the birth of the universe: "The newborn universe may have glowed with light beams moving much faster than they do today, according to a theory that overturns Einstein's century-old claim that the speed of light is a constant. Joao Magueijo, of Imperial College London, and Niayesh Afshordi, of the University of Waterloo in Canada, propose that light tore along at infinite speed at the birth of the universe when the temperature of the cosmos was a staggering ten thousand trillion trillion celsius. Magueijo and Afshordi came up with their theory to explain why the cosmos looks much the same over vast distances. To be so uniform, light rays must have reached every corner of the cosmos, otherwise some regions would be cooler and more dense than others. But even moving at 1bn km/h, light was not traveling fast enough to spread so far and even out the universe's temperature differences." Cosmologists including Stephen Hawking have proposed a theory called inflation to overcome this conundrum. Inflation theorizes that the temperature of the cosmos evened out before it exploded to an enormous size. The report adds: "Magueijo and Afshordi's theory does away with inflation and replaces it with a variable speed of light. According to their calculations, the heat of universe in its first moments was so intense that light and other particles moved at infinite speed. Under these conditions, light reached the most distant pockets of the universe and made it look as uniform as we see it today. Scientists could soon find out whether light really did outpace gravity in the early universe. The theory predicts a clear pattern in the density variations of the early universe, a feature measured by what is called the 'spectral index.' Writing in the journal Physical Review, the scientists predict a very precise spectral index of 0.96478, which is close to the latest, though somewhat rough, measurement of 0.968."
Nature varies (Score:3, Interesting)
Why would anything in the universe be constant? Maybe the variability is beyond our ability to observe.
Re:Nature varies (Score:5, Insightful)
Anti-arbitrage rule. E = mc^2. If c varies, then you could find a moment where converting energy to matter and later matter to energy would produce surplus energy, allowing you to perform arbitrage against laws of thermodynamic, producing perpetual motion/free energy.
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This is a circular argument. To quote GP, why would energy be constant? Maybe the variability is beyond our ability to observe. Maybe thermodynamics is wrong, and free energy can be produced but only in very small quantities.
To an extent, it is circular argument as science does have some basic assumptions. One being that the laws of physics work everywhere and another being that they do not change, thus experiments are repeatable in any location. These are like the axioms of mathematics. They have served us well and have held up when we make predictions using them. It could be that they might not be quite true. In that case, it's not like everything we've known will cease to work, we'll just have to redefine some things. An exa
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... E = mc^2. If c varies...
Slashdot's quote on the bottom of the page: "In any formula, constants (especially those obtained from handbooks) are to be treated as variables."
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And it seems to me that if space isnt perfectly flat (and we know it isnt) then assuming "2" could be wrong.
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Not, that's just unit conversion stuff. Anyhow, real physics is done in units where c=1, so the exponent doesn't matter (as you'd expect, if it's just about the unit of measure).
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The varying of c could change the energy content of matter in the affected space, preventing the creation of "Free Energy" - or, there may be layers of the Universe of which we are not fully aware, and when the first successful perpetual motion machine is demonstrated, its "apparent free energy" may be being drawn from there.
Without Einstein's theories, a nuclear explosion certainly would look like the magical creation of large quantities of free energy.
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Anti-arbitrage rule. E = mc^2. If c varies, then you could find a moment where converting energy to matter and later matter to energy would produce surplus energy, allowing you to perform arbitrage against laws of thermodynamic, producing perpetual motion/free energy.
Doesn't sound like the Big Bang at all!
Re:Nature varies (Score:5, Insightful)
If there's no mass then E=cp (from E^2 = c^2 p^2 + m_0^2 c^4)
So you've still got a problem with infinities
You've asserted that Energy is still conserved so E=hf should still hold (for a photon). Assuming Planck's constant doesn't change then \lambda must become infinite if c becomes infinite which, in turn implies that the universe must be infinitely large.
The problem with all these hairbrained schemes is that people throw them around without working through all the consequences and explaining exactly how they are all dealt with.
When that is done it's almost always the case that there's something apparent that we already know to be false.
(I'll leave it as an exercise to see what happens if Planck's constant also changes :-) I don't recall if it was Fantastic Voyage or Asimov's sequel but I vaguely remember that the basic theory was that they wanted to reduce h but it turned out that this actually increased c at the same time - so the idea isn't new, it's already been played with by SF authors. What would turn this from SF to science is working through all the implications instead of just handwaving them away)
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The problem with all these hairbrained schemes is that people throw them around without working through all the consequences and explaining exactly how they are all dealt with.
When that is done it's almost always the case that there's something apparent that we already know to be false.
I'm sure this never occurred to the authors of the work, given that they are actual theoretical physicists and all. (Theories with varying speeds of light, which are entirely consistent with relativity, have been around for many decades. )
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...Maybe the variability is beyond our ability to observe.
Uh yeah. This.
Even with all of our technological advances we can observe what, a sliver of a fraction of our galaxy? That's like predicting the temperature across the entire history of Jupiter's existence based off a single weather report from central Kansas last Tuesday.
Oh, and one more thing. Since we has defined the 'spectral index' down to the numerical gnats ass here presumably for accuracy, exactly how fast is "infinite" again?
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exactly how fast is "infinite" again?
It's considerably faster than half infinite.
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exactly how fast is "infinite" again?
It's considerably faster than half infinite.
So, I would assume somewhere between Ludicrous and Plaid, then?
Sorry to be such a bother, just trying to figure out if I need to change the combination on my luggage.
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Um, no. Much larger than that - more like a considerable way back to the Big Bang.
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Um, no. Much larger than that - more like a considerable way back to the Big Bang.
Mapping our historical universe is a bit different than defining our observable universe.
We're still doing a lot of this work in the dark, both figuratively and literally.
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Much of the observable universe is the historical universe. "Long ago" and "far away" are two ways of saying the same thing. We can directly observe the universe at different stages of history back to about 300k years old (everything before that, including everything inflation-related, is indirect guesswork).
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Much of the observable universe is the historical universe. "Long ago" and "far away" are two ways of saying the same thing. We can directly observe the universe at different stages of history back to about 300k years old (everything before that, including everything inflation-related, is indirect guesswork).
This is true, but since 300K years is essentially a sliver of a fraction of the age of the universe, I think we've both observed how much of this is in fact guesswork.
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We have some observational constraints on the speed of light.
11 billion years ago (when the universe was 2 billion years old), the speed of light was about the same as it is now. https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.087... [arxiv.org]
Otherwise, the light crossing certain objects would be different. This result is essentially independent of cosmology.
I guess that the cosmic microwave background also places limits. If the speed of light had been infinite at that time, I suspect the last scattering would be affected. This is ~300.0
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Pi is constant.
Zero is constant.
Both appear in the natural world an awful lot.
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"Pi" in Nature occurs very rarely, so rarely that I'm having difficulty thinking of just one instance.
Pi is everywhere. Circles are how pi is introduced to children. Pi is everywhere waves are, and since everything is a wave, well, it comes up a lot. Of course, the pi is often hidden in the definition of units, since it gets old writing 2pi all over the place (h-bar, the Coulomb constant, etc).
Even "Zero" is a convention,
No, not really. Math isn't about counting or computation, you know. And any sort of abstract algebra needs its 0 (and its 1, if you want a field).
He's been banging this drum a long time (Score:2)
I read his book back in the 90s when I was in school. Was an interesting enough idea, but going up against Einstein and Inflation at the same time - it's a looooong shot.
The summary crediting Hawking for inflation is a complete joke. Goes to show if you get a bit of fame in a field you get credited with everything.
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Re:He's been banging this drum a long time (Score:5, Funny)
It's 2016, not reading the summary is the new 'not reading the article'.
The Matthew Effect (Score:5, Informative)
Crediting Hawking for inflation is yet another example of the Matthew Effect [wikipedia.org].
More specific credit could have gone to Guth, Linde, and Starobinsky who won the Kavli Prize [wikipedia.org] for "pioneering the theory of cosmic inflation" but who's heard of them?
Don't forget all the options (Score:2)
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Is interesting to remember that may be possible that there has not even been a big bang to start (and therefore the answer may be that the universe has always been more or less uniform).
To quote 'Forrest Gump'; "Maybe...maybe it's a little bit of both?...both happening at the same time?"
Maybe there was a 'Big Bang' but what actually happened was that it exploded into tiny bits of space-time+matter+energy which, being essentially pieces of space-time, had no limits regarding 'velocity', and then some time later coalesced into a single fabric forming our universe. In fact, it may still be coalescing and is responsible for what we interpret as 'expansion'.
Strat
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Maybe there was a 'Big Bang' but what actually happened was that it exploded into tiny bits of space-time+matter+energy which, being essentially pieces of space-time, had no limits regarding 'velocity', and then some time later coalesced into a single fabric forming our universe. In fact, it may still be coalescing and is responsible for what we interpret as 'expansion'.
Apologies, don't normally respond to my own posts, but it also occurred to me that these pieces of space-time that have not yet joined may be where scientists find that 'missing mass'/'dark matter'. It's out there, it just hasn't joined the rest of us yet in this meta-bubble of space-time. There are likely other cosmological/astrophysical/physics phenomena, observations, and properties of the universe this might explain as well.
Strat
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Is interesting to remember that may be possible that there has not even been a big bang to start
Only in the same sense that it's possible dinosaurs never really existed and all the bones were put there by God.
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Yikes, settle down. Just trying to give a simple analogy for how strong the evidence is for the Big Bang.
What I am saying is that we should not disregard other possibilities such as the universe simply be far, far, far bigger than we can see.
We already know it is. But we're also pretty damn sure it puffed itself up about 13.8 billion years ago.
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This said, I assure you that I know perfectly well the big bang theory and
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Ah, found the on-topic thread.
Look, we know from direct observation that the universe was much smaller and hotter when it was 300K years old. You might argue "we don't know that there was a singularity", and that's a strong argument. You might argue "we don't know the universe keeps getting smaller or hotter the farther back you go", but that's not a scientific argument unless you have an alternative that explains all the same stuff (as Penrose has with his cyclic cosmology). But to claim everything might
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Am I "fighting" you?
Very well, I shall insult you again. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of elderberries.
Curious how did you respond in minutes to a comment that was not addressed to you :shrug:
Or, you know, I happened to be reading the thread at that time, as you can tell by my other comment with an earlier timestamp. Though honestly given your delusions about physics, I am not surprised you have paranoid delusions about me too.
I said before go bother someone else.
Why should I? It turns
Re: Don't forget all the options (Score:2)
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All this time to be able to think a excuse?
oookaaay. You're as delusional about me as you are about physics. Tell you what when the EM drive works and we have free energy forever, I'll start stalking you as an AC. Deal?
go bother someone else.
Nope!
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ah, the /. friendly discussions! * I'm a different AC, not the GP
Too right. As if I'd be caught dead starting a sentence with a lower-case letter or forgetting a closing full stop, the very idea...
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sounds totally backwards (Score:5, Interesting)
If the speed of light is dependent on the strength of the gravity field, as we seem to measure today, then the early universe, with all of the matter/energy (yes. that is redundant) should have had such a deep gravity well that the speed of light should have been about 0 for the first few milliseconds of the universe' existence, if not longer.
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And one reason why it was so hot - no radiation of heat until the energy overcame the massive gravity well.
Speed of light is not affected by gravity (Score:2)
If the speed of light is dependent on the strength of the gravity field
It's not. Speed of light is a constant. Gravity affects its trajectory but not its speed [nasa.gov].
should have had such a deep gravity well that the speed of light should have been about 0 for the first few milliseconds of the universe' existence
All that matter would affect its path but (so far) there is no evidence that gravity affects the speed of light at all or that it ever did. The reason light cannot escape a black hole isn't that gravity is pulling on the photon so hard but rather because gravity warps spacetime so much that there is literally no path for light to take which can get beyond the event horizon. It's kind of like being in a maze with no
That Einstein's name? Albert Einstein (Score:4, Informative)
according to a theory that overturns Einstein's century-old claim that the speed of light is a constant
Did Einstein ever make any claims about the speed of light being constant over time, or has a journalist just assumed he must have in order to shoe-horn his name in?
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No, because relativity is more about the measurement of the speed of light being constant between observers in different places/states regardless of how fast/what direction you're moving relative to each other. I don't recall ever reading about an observer in the future and the past being a consideration, but I've been out of the loop for a while.
So unless this article is claiming that two observers in the initial universe would measure two different speeds of light I don't see this overturning 'Einsteins V
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Exactly. Einstein was simply saying that observations were always consistent for any one observer in very certain ways (and not necessarily consistent in other ways we might naively expect). Many of his thought experiments used two observers, in order to elucidate the consistencies and apparent inconsistencies. But the underlying physics is about what is true about any one observer.
There is actually nothing in physics that says so-called physical constants were always the same over time. In fact, there h
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Did Einstein ever make any claims about the speed of light being constant over time, or has a journalist just assumed he must have in order to shoe-horn his name in?
There's simply no difference between saying the speed of light changes over time, and saying the universe expands or contracts, except to make the math harder.
It much like how the "tired light" idea turns out to be mathematically equivalent to existing physics, just expressed in a way that makes the math harder.
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While that line is taught in intro quantum mechanics, it was presented before we knew that light changed speed going through a gravity well.
Theory or hypothesis? (Score:2)
When a theory is really very well supported by evidence, as evolution is.
But can we really complain when something like this, which is clearly an hypothesis, is called a theory.
"String theory" seems the biggest offender to me.
No wonder people tend to describe any idea they have as a theory.
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Christians often get criticized for saying evolution is only a theory.
When a theory is really very well supported by evidence, as evolution is.
But can we really complain when something like this, which is clearly an hypothesis, is called a theory.
"String theory" seems the biggest offender to me.
No wonder people tend to describe any idea they have as a theory.
Huh?
"Theory" is simply the name given to the second step of the Scientific Method. That's it.
Christians are criticized because they don't understand that the method doesn't stop there, that there's still a couple of steps to go ("prediction" and "experiment"). It's these other two steps that make the difference between proper science and woo-woo.
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I would like to expand on your point; it's not wrong, it's as Science Wonks like to say, incomplete:
""Theory" is simply the name given to the second step of the Scientific Method. That's it."
So: Theory, Hypothesis, Research, Experiment, Conclusion
Not to nitpick, but ... "Theory" is the second step. The first step is "Observation".
Also, what happened to "Prediction"? A theory is worthless unless it makes predictions about the outcomes of future experiments.
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I partially agree, but the underlying issue is that many words have multiple definitions and which meaning should be clear from context. Scientists cannot police every journalist's and every layman's language, or they will get dinged for being even more highfallutin' than they already are. In this case, the meaning is adequately clear, even if the language is imperfect.
In this context, String Theory and Fast Light Theory are understood as speculative theories, that are more developed than simply a hypothe
1bn km/h (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, because when I think of physics and the speed of light km/h is the unit I work with the most. And yet we wonder where Brexit and Donald Trump came from.
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Depends on what continent you're on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Trillion (short scale) (1,000,000,000,000; one million million; 1012; SI prefix: tera-), the current meaning in both American and British English
Trillion (long scale) (1,000,000,000,000,000,000; one million million million; 1018; SI prefix: exa-), the former meaning in British English and current usage in some non-English-speaking countries
Well.. (Score:2)
Creation proven? (Score:2)
Not plausible (Score:2)
In fact, wouldn't that make Biblical creation very plausible?
No. There is nothing that would make creation as "described" in the bible plausible. The bible is a man made fable with no evidential support whatsoever made in a time when man lacked the technological capacity to make necessary observations. The bible makes no testable predictions nor does it describe any observed events. Any similarity to actual observations and scientific theories is purely coincidental.
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My first thought was that yes, it would throw off pining down a date for the Big Bang.
As for Biblical creation, do keep in mind that the story starts with "the face of God moving over the deep". The earth, formless and void though it be, existed before day 1. The universe was created, and was in place for an undetermined period of time before the 7 days of creation.
If you consider the frame of reference, the surface of the earth, the 7 days of creation play out logically. You can't see the sun or moon un
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Does this account for dark energy? (Score:2)
I'm trying to understand how this affects the redshifting of extremely distant objects.
Pretty much any distant stars / galaxies we look at from earth are redshifted, which indicates they are moving away from us. However we know we aren't the center of the universe (where the big bang happened), but that any observer at any other point would see the same affect we see - everything far away is redshifted. This is why we think the universe is expanding - because everything distant is redshifted. Further, the
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The theory here is that the speed of light was infinite at the start of the Big Bang, not that it is slowing down. The speed of light is not slowing down, and this has already been proven.
So the speed of light was infinite, but now it is not. That is the very definition of "slowing down" is it not? At which point did it slow down I suppose is my question. If this theory can replace the concept of expansion, then it also must explain the acceleration of the expansion, which is what dark energy is theorized to do. So this theory must somehow take into account dark energy as well, which infers that the speed of light must still be changing since expansion is still accelerating.
Another part of
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This assumes an even distribution of mass / matter / energy. If the distribution weren't even (because another unstable force, like gravity, caused it to collect together) you would see vast swaths of "empty" space and clumps of matter / energy as it collected together.
Also consider that "speed" is a function of distance over time and "time" i
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However we know we aren't the center of the universe (where the big bang happened)
In the Big Bang picture, the universe has no center, and the Big Bang did not happen in it. The Big Bang happened everywhere in space at once.
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The big differences in the speed of light presumably occurred in the first picoseconds of the universe, long before there was anything like a galaxy (or even a stable atom). Very likely, almost all the slowing down of the speed of light occurred within seconds of the beginning of the universe. But the redshift numbers we seen from the most distant galaxies galaxies record events from a several billion year old galaxy.
BTW, there has been some ambiguous data about very distant galaxies that could be interp
Black holes in early universe? (Score:2)
So a black hole forms when matter is condensed into a sufficiently small space so that even light cannot escape because gravity bends spacetime so much that there is no path to get outside the event horizon. Assuming the big bang theory is plausible, early in the universe the universe would (presumably) be incredibly dense with matter for some period of time. So how is it that having all that matter so close together didn't results in nothing but a bunch of black holes? How does the big bang theory get a
Re Inflation (Score:3)
Always safe to credit Hawking for cosmological theory, but a gratuitous mention might have better used Alan Guth
Relativity deniers!!!! (Score:2)
Science is about consensus, not challenging dogma?
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Science is about consensus, not challenging dogma?
If you look at Maguejo's theory, you will find that it is consistent with everything we knew before about relativity. It is not: "ZOMG! Einstein was WRONG!", rather "We noticed it is possible to extend relativity theory in a way which accommodates a variable speed of light, yet reproduces other known physics perfectly." Look up dilaton theories, for example.
Overturned? More like explaining an edge case. (Score:4, Insightful)
c as a constant is derived from Maxwell's equations, held as invariant in a vacuum.
If that were true everywhere we wouldn't be looking at trying to find a GUT.
Would not in the least surprise me that relativity doesn't hold at the beginning of the Universe, considering I can't imagine Maxwell's equations used in that derivation being true there either.
What if the speed of light ... (Score:2)
What if the speed of light is related to the size of the universe? However perception and size is also related.
So the universe is expanding. What affect does that have on perceived speeds?
What if the speed of light is relational to size of the universe? Would it cover more distance in a smaller universe? If so, does that mean C was faster? This is where the normal brain starts to spin wheels a bit.
But it's a lot of fun. And I'll be highly amused if their experiment bears support for their theory. As I first
I always expected this (Score:3)
Re:If it works (Score:5, Informative)
Temperature is a measure of the vibration rate of particles - it's not found in vacuums. I suspect the article/summary is oversimplifying or just using temperature as a convenient layman's analogue for heat (unless it refers to the vibration rates of particles in the early universe).
EIther way - do you have any idea how much energy it would take to build a beam that could heat anything up that much ? The amount of energy needed to heat something up depends on the specific heat of the substance, the amount you are heating up and the starting temperature. The last one doesn't much matter considering how huge the heat-up here is - it will be immeasurably small a factor. If we use water then 1g takes 1 calorie to heat up by 1 celcius. A calorie is 4.2 joules of energy.
So you would need 42 thousand trillion trillion joules of energy to raise just one gram of water that high. Just about any other substance - the number goes up.
As of 2012 Humanity produced 155105 TW/H of energy. That is just over 5 .5 trillion joules.
No problem, we just need to multiply the total energy production on earth by about ten thousand trillion times and we can do the experiment you're proposing.
But as the summary explains - we don't need to. The theory makes predictions about the universe which will be true if it holds, and false if inflation is correct - all we need to do is develop sufficiently good measurement technology to see if the prediction is true or not - which we should have fairly soon, and the fact that we are close to being able to do sufficiently accurate measurements to test it is literally the story you are commenting on.
Re:If it works (Score:5, Funny)
So you would need 42 thousand trillion trillion joules of energy to raise just one gram of water that high.
I knew there was something special about that number being the answer . . .
Next you will tell me that the energy can be generated by a guitar amplifier that goes up to 11 . . .
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I just mulitplied the 4.2 joules by the 10 starting number in the target temperature - which was simpler than writing
4.2 * 10 thousand trillion trillion.
Re:If it works (Score:5, Informative)
Temperature is a measure of the vibration rate of particles - it's not found in vacuums.
The early universe was not a vacuum. It was an extremely dense, high-temperature plasma.
In any case, vacuum can in fact have a temperature, due to virtual particle production.
Re:If it works (Score:4, Interesting)
>The early universe was not a vacuum. It was an extremely dense, high-temperature plasma.
Agreed, but I was referring to the GP's suggestion to heat up a beam and send photons through a vaccuum.
I can see how my post could be ambiguous though.
>In any case, vacuum can in fact have a temperature, due to virtual particle production.
True again, but not really relevant to the point I was making. I am NOT going to try and calculate the energy required to heat up a vaccuum's virtual particles to the temperature of the big bang...
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What he is proposing it to use it to send a spacecraft to a distant star so he and his buddies won't have to live life here on Earth with the rest of the common folk.
Also, we want to have sex with green Orion slave girls. We aren't having much luck with Earth girls.
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Troll he most certainly is. Look at his posting history: it's filled with random nastiness.
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It's interesting how you can invent complete lies about someone and they get modded up.
But go on, I'll bite. Provide a link to back up your accusation of space nuttery. 50 bucks says you can't.
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I totally agree. Modern physics luminaries like yourself and I understand that nothing that we know ever changes, that chemical propellant is the pinnacle of universal space flight technology, that Newton had everything correct, and since Newton had everything correct then Einstein was wrong in the first place and therefore this story about his so-called "theory" being challenged is fundamentally flawed. Einstein was a space nutter and should have stuck to the stupid patent office. I don't know who this
Alternate theory (Score:3, Funny)
God placed lamps everywhere in the universe so he could see as he was building it.
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This was my thought... a photon is a particle, that travels in a wave. It has some pressure when it shines on an object (see light sails, NASA [wikipedia.org]). If light were to travel at an infinite speed, anything it encounters would be given an infinite amount of energy in the form of momentum. We can then deduce that this was not the case, since most of the sky is black and not full of stars (see Olbers' Paradox [wikipedia.org]). An infinitely fast beam of light would have come into contact with "stuff", and given off an infinite amount of mass/energy (matter), and generated an infinitely dense universe with an infinite amount of energy.
E=MC^2 is dead. Long live E=MC^2!
No. A photon is a quantized amount of energy which can exhibit particle like and wave like properties under different observations. It is not "a particle" that travels "in a wave"
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Absolutely correct. At its core, this crackpot theory doesn't even seem to understand what the Big Bang was. The whole point of Big Bang cosmology is that everything was, at the initial moment of the Big Bang at the same point. As to differences in CMBR temperature, those, along with the large scale structure of the observable universe are explained by quantum fluctuations in the early universe.
What this "theory" purports to explain has in fact been explained for decades. There are lots of mysteries in cosm
Particle wave duality (Score:5, Insightful)
This was my thought... a photon is a particle, that travels in a wave.
Stop right there. Your understanding of particle wave duality [wikipedia.org] is incomplete. Go back and study before you continue. MinutePhysics [youtube.com] has some excellent videos [youtube.com] on the topic.
Re:If it works (Score:5, Informative)
> a photon is a particle, that travels in a wave
No. This is just wrong. Completely. You need to make your brain unlearn this.
Here is a toy model you can use on your journey... Think of the photon as a cheshire cat. You cannot see the cat, if you try to perceive it completely, it will vanish. You can, however, ask it questions. If you ask it "what is your gizifa", it will say "10". Or in this case, you can ask "what is your momentum", and it might say "5".
Asking certain questions will upset the cat and cause it to change all the other values just to piss you off. So if you ask it what its momentum is, the answer you *might* have got for its gizifa will now change. These values also change on their own over time. So even if you know that its location is 2,7 now, when you ask it again later you will get a different answer. No, this is not *because you asked* (another common misconception), this is inherent to the way the cat works. Some of these values are conserved (like electric charge), others are not (like location) and others are linked together (like momentum and location).
Photons are not particles. There are no particles. "Particles" is the term we use when we refer to these things when you keep asking them what their location is. If you do that, they will give you nice answers like 2,7 and then 3,7 and then 4.7, and you'll go "oh, this thing is travelling along positive X, and it's a point, so it must be a particle!". But the problem is that if you ask it different questions, like its position and the location, then any semblance of particle-like behaviour will vanish. You were fooling yourself, ITS NOT A PARTICLE. Neither is an electron or a proton, or anything else. They're just quanta. It's all quanta.
> It has some pressure when it shines on an object
This is also incorrect.
Newton thought momentum had something to do with mass because he only had large objects to work with. Shotputs have a lot of momentum, and so do planets. But in the "real world" of quantum, momentum is just a number. It's a number like any other, like energy. It's not related to mass. You ask a quanta a question and it will give you an answer. If you ask a photon its mass it will say zero. And if you ask it its momentum it will say 5. These questions are orthogonal, they don't have anything to do with each other.
So why does it LOOK like momentum has something to do with mass? Because the momentum of any one quanta is tiny, so in order to be measurable at macro scales, you need a WHOLE LOT OF QUANTA. It's very easy to make a ball of protons and electrons, because they attract each other. So you put a bunch together and call it a shotput and notice that it has a lot of momentum. But the fact that it has a lot of momentum isn't because it has a lot of mass - it has a lot of mass AND momentum because it *has a lot of quanta*.
It is much harder to make a big ball of photons, they don't attract each other. If you did such a thing, you'd find it had just as much momentum as a ball of matter, but still has no mass.
> and given off an infinite amount of mass/energy
No. Energy is also a measurement of the same sort, it's just a number you can ask for. It has nothing to do with "speed". Some of these values you ask for are more interesting than others because they are concerned, but that's not due to quanta, that's due to the shape of the universe.
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totally wishing I had a mod point now. Thanks!
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The thing your post misses is, why is a quanta not a particle? You say that repeatedly and effectively, but you don't say why.
Because it doesn't behave like a particle.
Using the previous poster's question analogy, you ask a quanta particle-based questions, and you get answers that look like a particle. And those answers make it impossible for that quanta to be a wave.
But if you ask that same quanta wave-based questions, you get answers that look like a wave. And those answers make it impossible for that quanta to be a particle. (For example, the classic double-slit experiment [wikipedia.org].)
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This kind of physics is not physics, It's maths.
Maths has no problem with infinities. Hell, we classify different types of infinities and apple actions to them in different ways. An infinity doesn't scare a mathematician.
The problem is then applying that to a real-world interpretation as "infinite" anything - space, time, energy, matter - is hard to conceive and generally impossible. However, infinities themselves can cancel out, present only in impossible situations anyway, and so on. Same with quantum
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Just curious, do we ever pear actions to them? Or even apricot actions to them?
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Just curious, do we ever pear actions to them? Or even apricot actions to them?
No. Pears and apricots aren't suitable for actions against infinities due to the extra cost associated with shipping them.
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Just curious, do we ever pear actions to them?
Quantum entanglement is all about particle pears!
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It's related to pi.
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Faster than light travel is possible! We will be visiting far flung star systems soon. All you need to do is recreate the Big Bang in a local region of space then travel through it. This is the logical conclusion. Signed, Mr. Space Nutter
Nah, what fun is a Big Bang when you can create a black hole instead? Sure, everyone will say your party sucked but still...
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Yabutt that still doezn't explain Penny.
Just sayin...
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Bullshit. The EmDrive nutters just haven't woken up yet.
'fraid they have. One particularly delusional one is busy arguing with an AC he's convinced is me. Hi TheDarkMaster if you're reading.
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Is this the young earth creationist wet dream, that would make it possible for the earth to be 5000 years old?
Definitely not new. I remember reading an article back in the late '80s that followed that line of thinking: that C is constant now, but was faster when first measured, allowing a magical curve that placed earth's age between 5,700 and 10,000 years old.
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Information (light) travels more slowly around dense objects.