Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[puke]

Now time dilation... That shit needs some proof...

what you describe (and what i did not quote) is General Relativity and the Doplar Effect.  a frigtening number of people mistake this for relativistic time travel, but it is not.

Time Dilation and objects changing mass as their velocity increases, on the other hand, falls under Special Relativity.  And I agree, I dont buy into that shit either.  I'm not aware of any evidence supporting it, as as far as i know it exists only in theory.

But people cling to it like religion.  and who knows, maybe its real.  but like you, i'll believe it when i read about better evidence being found.

[beorn080]

@Sean: Its the whole energy-matter particle-wave duality thing. All energy is matter and vice versa, so in essence it is traveling through its own medium. In actuality, radio waves just travel like that. Don't know why. Some crazy thing about energy or magic or extremely tiny gnomes with crayons drawing the paths a split second before they go by and then extremely tiny fairies erasing the paths after they go by. I read the book the first week then read the other textbooks in the room since the teacher decided to go at a speed the rest of the class could deal with.

[dreiche2]

what you describe (and what i did not quote) is General Relativity and the Doplar Effect.  a frigtening number of people mistake this for relativistic time travel, but it is not.

Where did the theory of general relativity now come from? And the Doppler effect??

Time Dilation and objects changing mass as their velocity increases, on the other hand, falls under Special Relativity.  And I agree, I dont buy into that shit either.  I'm not aware of any evidence supporting it, as as far as i know it exists only in theory.

Ever heard of GPS?

But people cling to it like religion.  and who knows, maybe its real.  but like you, i'll believe it when i read about better evidence being found.

Well, if that helps, I'm a theoretical physicist (though not really working in specifically physics anymore), so I've read a little bit about it. (obviously I could be making that up).

Edit: reread the original post, so I guess I see where Doppler effect came from... even though it might not really apply...

[puke]

I shouldnt feed you Dreiche, but:

1) i was responding to Yanlin who had accurately described, in laymans terms, the basics of general relativity and the doplar effect as evidenced in redshift and blueshift of astronomical bodies. 

2) GPS based atomic clock differences have nothing to do with the speed of light, but rather reflect tiny differences in the speed of time at different ends of a gravity well.  this may be a side effect of how gravity effects our atomic clocks, or it may be real time dialation.  either way, it has absolutely nothing to do with velocity.

3) youre not a theoretical physicst, or if you are, english isnt your first language.  i read enough to be a lay hobbyist in a variety of scientific fields, and am not an expert in any of them.  but i understand enough to realize that your posts in this thread have not been constructive, and you have gennerally been trash-talking your betters, rather than contributing to the discussion in any measurable way.  you havent been supporting any of your statements, and when you have tried, youve just been wrong.

please behave better.

[dreiche2]

1) I politely disagree.

2) The link I gave disagrees, you ignored it.

3) English is not my first language (but at least I know how to spell Doppler effect, thank you). I tried to be constructive and not impolite, if I appeared that way I apologize. I however feel that your post is pretty offensive and condescending, so I don't think I have to apologize to you specifically.

[dreiche2]

Sorry for the double post, but I don't want to put the whole post into an edit. As for the original issue:

There's a problem with throwing ANYTHING out of the airlock at lightspeed. By the time you push the button to open the airlock, you will have overshot the target by several thousand parsecs because of relativistic time compression.

I can see where you are coming from, I think. From the target point's of view, you are approaching with nearly light speed, and due to time dilation, you do everything very slowly, so you might not be able to press the button in time. Right?

Makes sense, but the problem is that all other kinds of things come into play from the target's point of view, such as length contraction and, I guess most relevant here, also that simultaneity is not invariant in between reference frames (so basically two things happening at the same time from one point of view do not do so from another one with relative speed).

However, things look much simpler in your own frame of reference. From your point of view, it's the target that is approaching you with almost light speed, and where everything is happening very slowly. But in your own ship, everything happens normally. Thus, if you are initially, say, 8 light minutes away from your target, then you have 8 minutes as normal to push the button before the target reaches you.

If you had missed the target by "several thousand parsecs" (i.e. several thousand light years) while you where trying to push the button, then from your own point of view your target just covered several thousand light years of distance within a few seconds. Which doesn't work.

Hope that made some sense. I'm off to bed for today!

[Soulwynd]

Sorry to barge in, but as the guy who majored physics in college I have to say that once upon a time people took atomic clocks. synchronized them, put a couple into airplanes, flew around the globe and measured the difference comparing with the expected from relativity's formulas. It was precise enough, some guys contested the precision, but even so, it shows relativity is there.

Oh, and gps only works due to relativistic formulas. One because of how gravity affects time and two because of speed. One almost counters the other in the case of GPS, but if I remember correctly, gps clocks must run a lil bit slower than earth's. I remember we calculated that in college.

[Duke 2.0]

 To physics discussion:

 I am disturbed by the lack of Capital Ship Carrier in that discussion.

[Soulwynd]

 To physics discussion:

 I am disturbed by the lack of Capital Ship Carrier in that discussion.

As in, a carrier that carries several capital ships? xD

[Yanlin]

That... Would be AWESOME.

[dreiche2]

Well, I have another game to suggest, Psi-5 Trading Company for the Commodore 64   

Hey at least you had a crew to command around!

[Sean Mirrsen]

Well, a mighty underhanded tactic in HW2 was adding some large amount of frigates to a carrier's build que, and pausing each a second before completion. Cheaply teleport into range, and resume everything. Insta-rape fleet.

[Soulwynd]

And here's yet another incoming IGG free mmorpg.

http://go.igg.com/main.php

There might be capital ships, but it looks more like a master of orion thing.

[Asehujiko]

This gave me a completely new idea for a weapon!

You get a spaceship that can fly at c, put some huge headlights ontop of it, fly in the direction of an enemy at max velocity, activate the light so you have a huge glob of photons piling up infront of your ship, wait till your engines can't handle the extra mass anymore and slow down while the enemy gets clobbered by what essentialy is a solid wall of light. The best thing is, this works even at <c, you just need to ge close enough to it so that the photons infront of you don't get enough time to move away from you before the next one directly behind it bumps into it.

[Yanlin]

This doesn't work because light is reflected off all things.