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[alway]

Blarg, you got the Lorentz factor wrong; it's (v^2/c^2) [or (v/c)^2], not a subtraction. Subtracting would make it converge to m=m as v approaches c
But yeah; that equation boils down to M = m*LorentzFactor; as do many of those equations in relativistic physics.
Same goes for relative time dilation.
dT = dt * LorentzFactor
Same goes for spatial contraction; though divided instead of multiplied
Dist = dist / LorentzFactor

The forms [1-v/c] and [1-(v/c)^2] appear all over throughout relativistic physics, and are the source of pretty much all those asymptotes.

So it isn't a case of 'just add more energy and go faster,' it's a case of an asymptote beyond which lies nothing.

[Blargityblarg]

Freudian slip, sorry.

[Lagslayer]

Ok, so let me make sure I have this straight. Classical physics only applies to macroscopic objects. Quantum physics only applies to sub-atomic objects. Quantum physics says that some things can never be explained no matter what we do.

Am I right that this is the general consensus?

[kaijyuu]

Somewhat. Quantum physics is where the rules of the universe break down into absurdity and we just graph patterns, pretty much.


Some things we won't be able to understand any more than a character in a video game would be able to understand the underlying programming that makes the rules in its universe. There are patterns and laws that are consistent, but don't necessarily "make sense," so to speak, when looked at rationally. Relativity is plain whacked but there it is.

[Lagslayer]

Ok, I think I get it now. Our views were not so much in conflict as I initially thought. I was under the impression that it was claimed that some things were impossible to know, ever. That these phenomena sprang up out of nowhere for no reason.

This contradicted my view that everything comes from something else and that everything has an explaination. Everything is made of something smaller, but also a part of something larger. That you could never reach infinity by definition. That the rules never stop working all together, but become less or more obvious depending on the scale in which they are applied.

That being said, I still don't trust some of the measurements.

[alway]

@kaijyuu: No it isn't, stop being silly. Relativity makes perfect sense.

Quantum mechanics, just as with the other ways of describing physics, is a sort of 'level of detail' thing; similar to how lower poly meshes are substituted in games when the camera is a certain distance away. Quantum mechanics could be used to describe all the stuff we use classical physics for, and would do so more accurately. We just don't want to bother doing insane amounts of calculations in order to calculate all the quantum mechanical information simple to calculate the motion of a car on the highway. Knowing the spins of the electrons in the car is all fine and dandy, but for practical purposes, the abstraction of newtonian physics works.

Similarly with relativistic physics; we typically don't use it for a car driving down the highway because, while it could be more accurately described by it, the accuracy is unnecessary in most cases, or at least knowing to that additional accuracy has less value to us than the time it would take to calculate using relativistic physics.

[Lagslayer]

Gotcha, understood.

[Karlito]

@kaijyuu: No it isn't, stop being silly. Relativity makes perfect sense.

Indeed, relativity is normal. It's the weird sort of Aristotelian physics that our brains evolved to process that's really wacked.

[Sirus]

IIRC, relativity is used every day in GPS and other satellites, to compensate for how fast they move in orbit. It's fairly well-documented.

[alway]

Also, I would advise strongly against coming into physics with pre-conceived notions about 'how reality should be,' as that will merely lead to dead ends.

As for infinities, for the most part in physics they can't be reached, only approached; however, there are usually cases in which things exist in the infinities but with interesting properties as a result of it. With their 0 mass, photons live at the speed of light; effectively tying other properties they have to certain things. A photon has no sense of time relative to the outside universe; from the point of view of a photon traveling at the speed of light, it is created and absorbed in the same moment, despite perhaps traveling for billions of years across half a universe. Similarly, that distance means nothing to it due to spatial contraction.

@kaijyuu: No it isn't, stop being silly. Relativity makes perfect sense.

Indeed, relativity is normal. It's the weird sort of Aristotelian physics that our brains evolved to process that's really wacked.

This.

[Starver]

IIRC, relativity is used every day in GPS and other satellites, to compensate for how fast they move in orbit. It's fairly well-documented.

And IIRC, when they launched the satellites, some people weren't sure if the relativity compensations (also, the not-being-so-deep-in-the-gravity-well ones) were necessary, so they built in a switch to turn them off, if they needed to.

They didn't.

[alway]

And when it comes to quantum mechanics... well, that's running your computer. Most of its perceived weirdness comes from our propensity to think of 'things' as discrete objects and 'forces' as definitely-not-things. When in reality, things are more of wibbly-wobbly-probability-stuff, and forces are also wibbly-wobbly-probability-stuff, but slightly more wibbly-wobbly.

[kaijyuu]

There are two basic tenets of human rationality: Math and logic.

Math is 1 + 1 = 2. Quantum mechanics breaks this with the introduction of randomness, ie, "God doesn't play dice." Quantum equations don't always end up with the same result, they end up with a range of results with certain probabilities. 1 + 1 sometimes equals 3, essentially. My understanding is this is due to things being quantized; the equation isn't really 1 + 1, but rather 1.2 + 1.7 (or something like that), and since the quantum object in question can't handle fractions, it spits out only values that it can. It might be 2 sometimes, 3 others.

Logic is A = B, and B = C, then A = C. With relativity, that breaks; A = B to some observers but not others.


We can graph the results and come up with "rules" that govern this behavior, but we won't really ever be able to understand the "why" since that's not how our minds work. There's a speed of light for no other reason than because there is. We can still make use of this knowledge, of course, for the same reason you can use a computer even if you don't know how a CPU works. You just need to understand the outward behavior, that pressing a button causes a certain result. Same here.

That's what I mean by it being whacked and not making sense

[Karlito]

I'm not exactly sure what you were going for, but that Einstein quote expresses his disbelief in quantum mechanics.

[kaijyuu]

Right. God does play dice, which he admitted later (though I remember hearing his admission might've been apocryphal).