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The arguments against HQT are merely dogmatic... as good scientists ought
These statements are, considering the subject, contradictory.
the theory has predictions
Not true, its inventors claim that it makes predictions.
it seems incredible to me that a fake formula from a bogus theory that artificially predicts (say) the mass of the proton in terms of the fundamental constants of nature
If the theory is bogus then they can make it say whatever they want it to say, just throw in some constant or correcting factor, and include some "(constant)^0*K=mass of particle" or something like that.
Is it any more incredible that they came up with such an awsome leap forward in physics then it would be for them to fake it?
Incredible claims do, as Ciclops says, require incredibly concrete and irrefuteable proof. But more then that, before money should even be spent and an expensive experiment undertaken, some peer review as to the quality (and veracity) of the theory should also be passed. "They don't understand because they're too dumb" is not a good excuse to skip this accepted process.
[i]"The power of accurate observation is often called cynicism by those that do not have it." - George Bernard Shaw[/i]
[i]The glass is at 50% of capacity[/i]
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General Relativity wasn't peer reviewed..........until it was peer reviewed.
Meanwhile, light still bent round the Sun and Mercury had an orbital precession.
And there are people I meet every day who WILL NOT believe that relativity is a real effect despite using things like GPS sets (that have to be corrected for relativistic time dilation).
On a philosophical note, it's generally accepted (due to the influence of Popper et al) that physical theories cannot be proved, only disproved. There's a wealth of supporting evidence for the Standard Model of particle physics, yet we know that in its current form it is wrong or, at best, incomplete because it gets some things wrong. And that's enough. If gravito-photons were shown definitively not to exist, well, the HQT "fanatics" would have to go away and stop bothering the sane people. But what if they are real.........?
A better description of the quantum world than is currently popular would have to be radical and "new" (although HQT has been 50 years in gestation).
It seems to me, from the lofty position of complete non-involvement, that the most ferocious opposition to the mere thought of it comes from those with something to lose (like big research budgets).
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A better theory to compare the HQT nonsense with would be Cold Fusion, but at least that provided experimental results.
BTW Popper's insights were about scientific theories generally not just physics. He proposed that in order for a theory to be scientific it must contain falsifiable predictions. Yes a million experiments do not prove a theory but one can disprove it. What does HQT predict that can be tested?
Being "radical and new" is neither sufficient nor necessary in order for a theory to be a better description; for example it can encompass more phenomena or just be more accurate as the result of adding one assumption or an extra term or just through reinterpretation.
The standard model is extremely good, almost all of its predictions agree superbly with experiment. To be "wrong" it would need to be in major disagreement with experiment. Where?
Yes it does exclude gravitational interactions and contain all those pesky particle masses, but the theory acknowledges this. And then of course GR does describe gravity superbly well, after nearly a century of testing this is still the best theory (pending GP-B results)
So what is left ... just another conspiracy theory asserting that "opposition to the mere thought of it comes from those with something to lose (like big research budgets)" - sorry that's just not good enough to overthrow the standard model
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It seems to me, from the lofty position of complete non-involvement, that the most ferocious opposition to the mere thought of it comes from those with something to lose
So which is more plausable, that everybody else besides the HQT inventors has an agenda, or the inventors themselves?
It is possible that HQT is right, but the standard for any sort of multi-million-dollar experiment is not simply that is could be right, but that the math makes sense. If it doesn't, or if the HQT advocates can't explain it, then its a bad investment.
[i]"The power of accurate observation is often called cynicism by those that do not have it." - George Bernard Shaw[/i]
[i]The glass is at 50% of capacity[/i]
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You both obviously have opinions about the veracity of the theory.
Ah, if only I could be so certain about things.
There's enough stuff out there for either of you to read up on what are the predictions of HQT and what may or may not be verified by experiment. Believe any or none of it as you will. Time and experimentation will provide the requisite answers.
We here certainly won't.
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You both obviously have opinions about the veracity of the theory
avoiding the points of debate by resorting to personal comment
Ah, if only I could be so certain about things
"... the theory itself seems to me to be a work of towering genius. Alone of all the theories of fundamental particles, not only does HQT predict their masses, but gets them correct to 7 places of decimals! "
There's enough stuff out there for either of you to read up on what are the predictions of HQT and what may or may not be verified by experiment. Believe any or none of it as you will.
failing to respond to reasonable questions, hand waving and unable to quote sources.
[color=darkred]Let's go to Mars and far beyond - triple NASA's budget ![/color] [url=irc://freenode#space] #space channel !! [/url] [url=http://www.youtube.com/user/c1cl0ps] - videos !!![/url]
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You both obviously have opinions about the veracity of the theory
avoiding the points of debate by resorting to personal comment
Ah, if only I could be so certain about things
"... the theory itself seems to me to be a work of towering genius. Alone of all the theories of fundamental particles, not only does HQT predict their masses, but gets them correct to 7 places of decimals! "
There's enough stuff out there for either of you to read up on what are the predictions of HQT and what may or may not be verified by experiment. Believe any or none of it as you will.
failing to respond to reasonable questions, hand waving and unable to quote sources.
I deleted the long and detailed response I originally wrote to you as I realised that I was bored and that you clearly have made your mind up anyway.
My opinion of the authors of the theory remains, irrespective of the success or failure of the theory itself. I don't care if you think they are deluded fools.
Further, I don't wish to enter into any more debate with you regarding this matter as it is pointless.
No doubt you will want to have the last word.
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I was hoping this would become an interesting discussion, but again, alas.
Been doing some reading up on the original scientist, and one thing struck me: he's German, and that fact alone makes him less credible in scientific circles, because he published in German
Before you all go laughing at me, there has been a study not so long ago, proving that scientists that do not publish in English get less attention, less peer reviews... Less credibility. French scientists in particular seem to be affected.
Publish (In English) or perish, heh.
His stuff still seems to be 'in the balance' re: credibility, so far no-one has refuted him per se, though there are some pointers, if the still hypothetical Higgs-Boson particle proves to be existant, his theory falls. But as yet, there is no H-B... And some people argue H-B is a construct to make the current theory 'work' (saying it is flawed)
Hey, and he was on talking terms with Heisenberg!
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I was hoping this would become an interesting discussion, but again, alas.
Been doing some reading up on the original scientist, and one thing struck me: he's German, and that fact alone makes him less credible in scientific circles, because he published in German
Before you all go laughing at me, there has been a study not so long ago, proving that scientists that do not publish in English get less attention, less peer reviews... Less credibility. French scientists in particular seem to be affected.
Publish (In English) or perish, heh.
His stuff still seems to be 'in the balance' re: credibility, so far no-one has refuted him per se, though there are some pointers, if the still hypothetical Higgs-Boson particle proves to be existant, his theory falls. But as yet, there is no H-B... And some people argue H-B is a construct to make the current theory 'work' (saying it is flawed)
Hey, and he was on talking terms with Heisenberg!
A very good post Rxke. Although it is easy to dismiss the theory because few can follow it I don’t know of any alternative well known theories that successfully unified the forces of nature and hasn’t been proven logically inconsistent. Isn’t that what physicists have being trying to achieve with their grand unifying theory.
The theory even predicts the repulsive force of gravity at large distance otherwise known as, “Einstein’s greatest mistake”. People can be skeptical and say it needs more peer review first. Edison tried 100 times before inventing the light bulb. Sometimes discoveries take trial an error. I do not fault a government that will risk large sums of money when the pay off is so large. We spend hundreds of millions on experiments to try and prove the existence of gravitational waves. Surely we can do one experiment to try to prove or disprove this theory.
I also do not think the theory is so out to lunch. Other experiments have been done that purported to observer anti-gravity. These results have been difficult to verify. However, now we have a mathematical basis for the purported. Consequently we know now it is not just about spinning the disk but also about the current in the disk. We know exactly what we need to do to get measurable results. Hence, we have a good method of verifying the validity of the theory.
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I was particularly impressed with him predicting the mass of neutrinos, years before it was actually measured.
I'm far from an expert on these things, but sometimes I feel the current widely accepted theory is fishy, I mean, they have to tinker with it too occasionally to make it fit whenever something new is discovered. Sometimes it feels like they too 'invent' 'magical numbers' to slap onto the theory to make it gel with observed phenomena. It isn't proven 100% either (Higgs-boson, for one...)
Of course, some of his extrapolations feel totally 'out there' but I'm pretty sure, for some fields, we thought the same, until stuff got observed to say, yes this stuff is really happening. Other stuff that's being observed sometimes seems to be dismissed, because it doesn't fit, then one claims it is an unknown factor making the readouts wrong, making it sound like the method of measuring is to fault.
Who said: great discoveries are oftentimes made when someone says (after an experiment): 'hey, now that's funny...'
I often get the feeling, this doesn't happen much anymore: the reactions seems to be, 'sh**, the experiment is faulty, let's start over again.' or discard it completely.
We often claim science is objective, but we're fallible humans, and our ingrained preconceptions sometimes hamper us to see things.
I clearly remember, late 80's our physics teacher telling us a whole new age has dawned, because we were getting there with 'hot' superconductors and cold fusion. One year later he raged about the kooks that falsified the cold fusion experiment, fair enough, they were kooks, in a way, but also the whole world an its dog claimed to have duplicated the results and didn't find radiation. It couldn't be.
Now I quote: "The (18 ) researchers presenting their review document to the 2004 DoE panel on cold fusion said that the observation of excess heat has been reproduced, that it can be reproduced at will when the proper conditions are reproduced, and that many of the reasons for failure to reproduce it have been discovered." but no-one said they were able to find it in their experiments, because, it couldn't be...
Because they didn't want it to happen, I think. Because it would throw out everything they knew. Now it works, but the effect is merely shrugged off as 'weird'.
That's not good science, IMO.
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I was hoping this would become an interesting discussion, but again, alas.
Been doing some reading up on the original scientist, and one thing struck me: he's German, and that fact alone makes him less credible in scientific circles, because he published in German
Well, maybe he didn't speak English, isn't it enough that he's a scientist, does he have to be a liguist too?
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http://news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=16902006
If it does work, I guess grandfather paradoxes will just have to be lived with. The sun doesn't revolve around the earth, after all, and life didn't come to a crashing halt when the apparently logical nature of things was shaken up in the Renaissance.
Of course, it's more likely that the experiment will fail. However, if it succeeded, it would mean that the Pluto Express's speed record is very short lived. Probes to the stars, anybody? Of course, if FTL is possible, this *really* raises big questions about the Fermi Paradox, and puts a new wrinkle on them. If FTL flight is possible, why aren't *we* already everywhere? ^_^
FTL travel would answer the Fermi paradox quite nicely. If you could travel into the past, why would you bother going to other stars? The past is certainly more hospitable to humans than planets orbiting other stars as humans evolved to fit the conditions on Earth. If you could travel into the past, you could colonize 1776, and quickly bring their technological standards up to our own. You could of course make sure the American colonists win the Revolution, and then you could pave highways, and build houses for migrants from the 21st century. There is lots of cheap land to be had here, and if 1776 gets full, there is still 1775, and then 1774. If you keep going further into the past you will enounter vigin territory. I think quite literally, 1776 will cease to be 1776 once time travelers from the future arrive there, the timeline will likely follow a different historical track once they arrive their. If people continuously travel into the past, their numbers in the present will dwindle down to nothing or almost nothing, there is no reason to expand outward to the stars when all these hospitable past Earths await you, this is one solution to the Fermi paradox. Also if the timeline keeps on splitting due to all of this time travel activity, very few of a member of any single species will ever be seen in any single reality. As seen from the point of view of someone who doesn't time travel, members of the species will just seem to disappear as they go back into time, and since they create their own historical branches, no evidence of their activities in the past will ever be found. In fact there will be no evidence that time travel exists at all if the multiple history theory of the universe holds, time travelers will simply disappear, never to be seen again. Only the people who actually undertake the journey will ever know if time travel is possible.
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[In regards to Heim theory], from the observer's point of view, the spacecraft is travelling FTL because the spacecraft is traveling in a dimension where the speed of light is 'nc' (n=integer). Locally, the spacecraft is travel at a fraction of c. Thus, no time travel problems or paradoxes are present.
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Locally, time travel doesn't occur as the warp ship doesn't go FTL in its own immediate vicinity, however it does move the space around the ship at faster than light velocity relative to the rest of the universe by expanding space behind the ship and contracting it in front of the ship. Since the Warp drive cannot be turned off from inside the warp bubble, I think the warp bubble would have to be so configured to attenuate over a certain distance and eventually disappear, leaving the ship back in normal space. A ship would activate the warp bubble, go a short distance and then activate it again, and doing so many times to reach its destination. Physicists say however that anything that can go faster than the speed of light can be turned into a time machine.
The thing about warp drives is they don't have to go faster than the speed of light. You can warp out at half the speed of light or any fraction thereof. A ship that warps out at sublight speed will be redshifted as it moves away and blue shifted as it moves toward, but it wouldn't be velocity that's doing this but the expansion of space behind the ship and the contraction of space in front of it.
A sublight warp ship would be able to communicate with the outside world and the outside world could likewise communicate with it.
Now if a starship were to travel to Alpha Centauri traveling at 0.5c warp, it would take 8.8 years to get there assuming no time dialation. If you had an arbitrarily powerful telescope and were able to observe its entire journey from the Solar System, it would take 13.2 years for you to observe its outbound journey. If you were to watch a television transmission transmitted from the ship, a minute would seem to last 90 seconds on the outbound leg of the journey. If it turned around and came back at that same speed the same observer would observe it taking 4.4 years to make the journey back, a second on the ship coming back would seem to last 30 seconds and the observer will measure the ships visual progress at apparently the speed of light, neglecting the consideration that the light from Alpha Centauri is already 4.4 years only when by that light you see the warp ship depart.
Now if you warped out at the speed of light, the journey would take 4.4 years, but the observer would be watching the ship depart and take 8.8 years to arrive at Alpha Centauri, 4.4 years to get there and 4.4 for the light to show that ths ship arrived. The clock in the light speed warp ship would seem to take 120 seconds for the second hand to go full circle around the clock face. The journey back would seem to take no time at all, but the observer can still watch it approach after it arrived, of course he would see two images of the ship, the ship that has already arrived and the ship as it is still enroute. A second measured in that ship would seem to be -60 seconds long, the second hand would move counterclockwise areound the clock face and time will seem reversed on the approaching ship that will be seen moving further away towards its point of origin.
If you could ever observe the departing ship make a complete journey to Alpha Centauri in less that 4.4 years through that telescope, you would be watching a time machine move backwards in timem because even it the warp ship moved at infinite velocity, it would still take 4.4 years to watch it make progress to Alpha centauri, the occupants of the ship will seem frozen in time as they make that journey, because for them it takes no time at all. This all works fine until you introduce a second observer who is moving slower than the speed of light in relation to the first. If there was a spaceship inbetween the two stars and the warp ship passes by at infinite velocity what would he observe? At 0.5 c, he would take 4.4 years to reach the Solar System and if the warp ship passed by when he was at the midpoint, he would see two ships, one moving toward the sun backwards and one moving toward Alpha Centauri forwards.
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the so-called 'Heim drive' and the 'warp drive' are completely different concepts and each relies on different physics independently.
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It is good to know that with helm theory I can’t kill my own grandfather at a time before I was born. Still I think the explanation given is far to simplistic. There may well be a very good and theoretical framework that is developed that is very consistent with nature. But as far as slipping into hyperspace goes I need a more mathematical explanation then well quantum mechanics forbids infinite length contraction. And I need a much better explanation then well….In hyperspace the speed of light is faster. I need to understand somewhat mathematically what happens from the perspective of each observer which is traveling at a different relative velocity then the ship, “slipping into hyperspace”.
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I am sorry I can't offer a more detailed explanation. I understand bits and pieces of the theory but no way do I understand the math behind it (I suppose you would need at the least an intro to quantum mechanics as an undergrad). I myself am curious from the observer's point of view. Would one actually be able to see the spacecraft or would it be invisible (since its in another dimension)? I suspect that it would be visible but I am not sure.
btw, this will give you a much better and thorough understanding: http://forum.physorg.com/index.php?showtopic=4385&st=0
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How is the Heim drive different then? How does it violate the light speed limit? The Warp drive acts because Einstein's theory of relativity doesn't say how the speed of light limits the expansion of space itself. The inflation theory of the big bang requires that the Universe expand initially at a rate faster than light. The Warp drive takes advantage of this fact and creates spacial inflation behind the ship and spacial deflation in front of it.
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It is good to know that with helm theory I can’t kill my own grandfather at a time before I was born. Still I think the explanation given is far to simplistic. There may well be a very good and theoretical framework that is developed that is very consistent with nature. But as far as slipping into hyperspace goes I need a more mathematical explanation then well quantum mechanics forbids infinite length contraction. And I need a much better explanation then well….In hyperspace the speed of light is faster. I need to understand somewhat mathematically what happens from the perspective of each observer which is traveling at a different relative velocity then the ship, “slipping into hyperspace”.
Hyperspace, meaning a space with more than 3 dimensions + time.
Now if you go into hyperspace, how can you be sure you'll end up in the same brane but some distance away? What if you end up in a completely different brane.
If you can travel in hyperspace, how does this preclude time travel since time is one other dimension? Then maybe time is not a dimension.
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Any effect that allows information to be transfered from one point to another FTL can cause a granfather pardox (ie. a causality violation) in the right circumstances. It has nothing to specificly to do with the exact method by which that method if information is transfered, and everything thing to do with the way time dilates (slows down) as you approach the speed of light.
In other words, the causality violation is not necessarily so much an effect of the object being observed (you're space-ship) as the an effect of the ones doing the observing. This is because of two principle factors of special relativity.
#1. The speed of light is constant for all observers: Which means light doesn't speed up if you're craft starts traveling faster.
#2. All observers frame of refrence are equaly valid: Which means there is no 'galatic universal time, the time I see as taking place is just as valid as the time you see as taking place.'
These two principles combine to create the concepts of relativity with which we are familar. Such as time slowing down as you approach the speed of light, and the grandfather paradox. Their is litteraly mountains of observational evidence backing up this theorie. But again, the key is that the violation lies not so much with the one doing the violation, but with the people that observe it.
There is a great page going into depth on this principle here, but I'll post the relevant exert below.
"We can describe this effect by idealizing FTL to be "instantaneous", and describing how the more familar time dilation implies this effect. But remember, the same points apply to any FTL speed, you just have more messy arithmetic to grind through.
Consider a duel with tachyon pistols. Two duelists, A and B, are to stand back to back, then start out at 0.866 lightspeed for 8 seconds, turn, and fire. Tachyon pistol rounds move so fast, they are instantaneous for all practical purposes.
So, the duelists both set out --- at 0.866 lightspeed each relative to the other, so that the time dilation factor is 2 between them. Duelist A counts off 8 lightseconds, turns, and fires. Now, according to A (since in relativity all inertial frames are equally valid) B's the one who's moving, so B's clock is ticking at half-speed. Thus, the tachyon round hits B in the back as B's clock ticks 4 seconds.
Now B (according to relativity) has every right to consider A as moving, and thus, A is the one with the slowed clock. So, as B is hit in the back at tick 4, in outrage at A's firing before 8 seconds are up, B manages to turn and fire before being overcome by his fatal wound. And since in B's frame of reference it's A's clock that ticks slow, B's round hits A, striking A dead instantly, at A's second tick; a full six seconds before A fired the original round. A classic grandfather paradox.
Note, this is NOT a matter of when light gets to an observer, it is NOT an optical illusion. It is due to the fact that, in SR, the question of what occurs at the "same time as" something else is observer dependent.
As A fired that first shot at tick 8, the bullet effectively teleported from A's gun to B's back instantly --- instantly according to A. But for B, who was moving at 0.866 lightspeed WRT A, B was hit in the back by the bullet 4 seconds BEFORE the bullet was fired. And again note, this is NOT due to the optical illusion of lightspeed delay in viewing A's turn-and-shoot; the light form that event wouldn't reach B until MUCH later, not tick 4."[/url]
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
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I'm curious, how would you then turn a warp drive into a time machine? Because unlike a Tipler Time cylinder, or a Wormhole, with a warp drive, the drive actually travels back in time with the traveller. If I were to write a science fiction book, and wanted the heros to visit the time of the dinosaurs, then he would do it in a spaceship equipped with a warp drive. If you have a "Many Universes" Sort of history, what you'd do then is to bring one end of a wormhole with you when you warped back in time to the dinosaur age, then land on Earth 65 million years BC and the colonists can then step through the wormhole. Of course colonizing the past would change history, but presumable with the wormhole you could step across the timeline and be back to the original history in the present no matter what goes on on the other side of the wormhole.
The main point that's hard to swallow is that people with this technology can go back many different times and leave wormholes in many different eras that diverge into parallel historical tracks due to the activities of the time travellers. The economic potential of this is the fact that you could mine the same gold vein many different times. People from the future whould know where to look for all the mineral deposites they already mined out and mine them out again in the past. You'd have a virtually infinite supply of resources. In a world like this, there is no reason to explore the stars when you have many different parallel Earths you can colonize and exploit.
Also if you were to travel to a historical era such as Earth 1776, it would quickly cease to be the year 1776 once the time travellers make contact with the locals. They can all be educated and brought up to modern standards, what happens with regards to the revolutionary war becomes irrelevant and time colonists from the future barge through pave highways and build houses. If the British and colonial armies cause trouble, then a modern strike force would quickly set things right so they don't bother the time colonists who are trying to settle here.
However, when I tried to demonstrate how you can travel in time with the Warp drive I failed, because I assumed that there was no time dialation in the warp bubble relative to the observer as that ship was not actually moving and was instead creating space behind it and estroying space in fron of it. Naturally all this spacial expansion and contraction would stretch and compress lightwaves traveling from it. If for example a ship were to travel instantaneously from Earth to Alpha Centauri and there was no time dialiation between the ship and the observer, what would be observed is the ship or the effects of the warp bubble moving away from the observer at appearently the speed of light until 4.4 years passed and the ship will have actually have been seen to arrive by the observer. Time on the ship as it moves away will appear frozen as the occupant of the ship experiences no passage of time.
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Imagine the scientific strides that can be had by going back in time--starting a new civilization that lasts until the end of the universe. They go back in time again--progress at a greater rate.
Repeat.
After a couple of cycles--good grief!
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Those would be scientific strides only for the people who went back in time and did it again. As seen from the timeline he departed from, he would just seem to disappear forever. For the alternate timeline he created, he would appear from nowhere from a fictional future timeline that is no longer valid. Both timelines would probably continue to exist side by side, one in which the time traveller left for the journey into the past and the other where the time traveller arrived froma future that is no longer valid. Their is no benefit to the society that builds the time machine as all its good for is making the time traveller diasappear.
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No but it is good if that universe he helps is ours.
I wonder about universe 'sets' where time travel twins off not just one bubble--but many more involving the tampering.
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No but it is good if that universe he helps is ours.
I wonder about universe 'sets' where time travel twins off not just one bubble--but many more involving the tampering.
urs doesn't seem to be one of those universes, but there is always a chance that random atoms floating around in space might suddenly come together in their random motion and form a "time machine with an astronaut on board". the probability of that happening is not zero, just very very small. The probabilities might be similar for receiving visitors from alternate futures whose pasts do not have visitors from the future.
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