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CERN scientists 'break the speed of light'
- Thread starter Don
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Like what?
Anyway, I think this could be a useful result in other ways. The speed-of-light thing probably indicates some kind of
vacuum energy interaction -- sort of the flip side of the
no-phase-twist for light. For example, electrons are assumed to spend some of their time as virtual photons and vice-versa. Possibly neutrinos spend some time as
something even less interactive than neutrinos.
I don't see what is supposed to be wrong with the basic big-bang scenario except that Don doesn't take it seriously and is that a bad thing for a theory?
It wasn't my theory...personally I like the big bang. increasing complexity seems built into cooling. works for me.
In Chaos Theory the idea of Chaotic Attractors however suggest that complexity may be pulled out of simplier systems.
I kinda of like both ideas, of course. Maybe both work in conjunction.
And the superluminal loopholes in QM I mentioned earlier are mostly informational, and not massive.
You also have the problem of the big bang requiring one of two things:
1) that all the laws of physics are evolving--which isn't something our science likes
2) that all the laws of physics were already existant in some sort of Platonic superdimension ready to go when needed.
Yes, but ironically enough, the ones I'm familiar with exist to prevent causality from breaking.
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Sorry, Maxx, I missed this one.
Quantum Entanglemnt, for example. I recommend Nick Herberts book, "Superluminal Loopholes..."
Yeah, no.
Take two electrons. Put them together. Then separate them. Take one to the other side of the universe and hold on to the other one. Change tthe spin on the electron you have. The other electron will change spin instantly. The laws of causality get bent by quantum phenomenon. This is a simplification of quantum entanglement, of course.
That's okay. I don't see how anyone can measure "instantaneously" unless "faster than lightby 60 nanoseconds over a distance of hundreds of kiliometers"
somehow means "instantaneously".
Hence the absurdity of measuring quantum entanglement:
if you have a measure of "instaneously" then entanglement is meaningless since you can somehow go faster than anything at all when you measure entanglement. I leave this as an excercise in special relativity. Hint: if you can violate causality in any way you want, why bother measuring anything?
I guess you get the big bang you are looking for. Lemaitre was a priest if IIRC and so the Church has been pro-big -bang for longer than most institutions.
But what is the point of the Big-Bang? Was it invented just to annoy Don?
Perhaps not. Maybe it solves things that otherwise make no sense such as primordial Helium. Just a thought. Anyway, I leave this as excercise in History of Science: are theories invented to be annoying or to solve problems that Don has never heard of?
I give you a proof of Bell's Theorem:
http://quantumtantra.com/bell2.html
Most scientists don't love the implications of quantum entanglement...too bad, so sad.
Dammit. I hate it when you explain a joke and people still think you're serious. 
But let me throw a serious question in there; at it's smallest, how small was the universe?
But let me throw a serious question in there; at it's smallest, how small was the universe?
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Yeah, this is probably just a statistical error in their measurements.
But modern physics has always been plagued with a problem. Out the big three qualites of the Universe -- Locality, Relativity, and Causality -- one of them has to be breakable. Entanglement proves that. We have been assuming that entanglement breaks Locality, but there's a slim chance that one of the others might be an illusion.
Break Locality and we get spooky action at a distance.
Break Relativity and we get FTL.
Break Causality and all hell breaks loose with it. Time as we know it ceases to have meaning.
If the CERN experiments hold up, it's evidence for Relativity breaking, and that could get fun fun fun...
But modern physics has always been plagued with a problem. Out the big three qualites of the Universe -- Locality, Relativity, and Causality -- one of them has to be breakable. Entanglement proves that. We have been assuming that entanglement breaks Locality, but there's a slim chance that one of the others might be an illusion.
Break Locality and we get spooky action at a distance.
Break Relativity and we get FTL.
Break Causality and all hell breaks loose with it. Time as we know it ceases to have meaning.
If the CERN experiments hold up, it's evidence for Relativity breaking, and that could get fun fun fun...
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This idea was used in SF by James Blish back in 1954, when he posited the development of a Dirac transmitter for FTL communication, named in honor of quantum pioneer Paul Dirac.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Dirac
Dammit. I hate it when you explain a joke and people still think you're serious.
But let me throw a serious question in there; at it's smallest, how small was the universe?
I think you are being thrown off by a catch in the inflationary model -- when the theory mentions "universe" it means "current observable universe". As far as we know this current observable universe is just a patch of the field that broke symmetry. So, maybe the current observable universe was once extremely small patch, but that doesn't mean that was all there was going on (there were vast expanses of symmetry-broken field right next to that patch). So what was once so small is now a matter of "as far as you can see (ie 14 billion light years or so)" BUT back when it was a tiny patch, it had only existed for a very tiny amount of time. 14 billion years later, its 14 billion ly in all directions (but again at a time of 300,000 years it was 300,000 years in all directions). So the tinyness of the patch relates to the tiny amount of time that had passed.
So the answer is: you can pick a time at which the current observable universe was any size. At about 9 light minutes it had a radius of about one AU.
It's true that if you use pre-1940s, pre-field-theoretic, pre QED formalisms, you can get some puzzling results. That's why physics moved on after the puzzles of the 1930s (though their problems were actually far more disturbing than the paradoxes of keeping particles in states and then moving them rather than propagating them). I suppose we could have been happy with the voodoo, but it is possible to work out actual field theories and avoid such stuff.
So Georges Lemaitre was right? How big was it at .00000001 light seconds? (Add as many additional zeros as you like.
) And at 9 light minutes all the matter in the observable universe was in an area the size of a sphere with a radius of the distance from the earth to the sun?
Just trying to understand something I've never fully wrapped my head around.
So Georges Lemaitre was right? How big was it at .00000001 light seconds? (Add as many additional zeros as you like.
Lemaitre was right enough to get his name into the
Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker metric
but wrong (it seems) about the primordial atom.
At .000000000001 seconds, the currently observable universe had a radius of .000000000001 light seconds.
On the other hand, the broken symmetric field may have expanded at a rate thousands of times that of the speed of light.
There were some theories in the early 1980s that something crucial happened when the current observable universe was about basketball size, but I don't recall any details.
The wikis on all this are quite good. see for example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker_metric