There is no absolute speed. If I travel past a planet at 0.9c, the planet travels past me at 0.9c. If there are no other objects around, it seems like I will be stationary. Speed is always relative to something, and thus must be symmetrical because of equivalence.
What always freaks me out about this whole thing is where you have three points A, B and C, where relative to B points A and C are moving at 0.99c in opposite directions but how A relative to C is still moving away at less than 1c.
I know vaguely the reasoning for it but my brain always goes 'no that is silly' when I try to think about it 
Not really a question more of a this confuses me statement.
This is why I keep bringing up the difference between space ahead and behind you. Light send behind you is effectively such a point.
About the negative mass again, it is merely a different way of looking at antimatter. It behaves exactly as standard theories of antimatter, but is simpler, and therefore, by Occam's razor, I prefer it.
I cannot remember where I read it. Probably 'A briefer history of time.', by Stephen Hawking. It was a possible explanation of virtual particles. The electron and positron appearing and then annihilating, but with no energy input or output, could be viewed as an electron traveling forward and backward in time along different paths.
And, to one of the other questions:
A photon is an oscillation in the electromagnetic field and must always travel at c, as long as there are no disturbances in the field. Any disturbance slows the photon down. Why it is the only boson without rest mass (afaik), is something that I have an idea on, but the math has proven to be too difficult for me, so far.
I've been treated like I was stupid for thinking that matter and antimatter interactions were full energy conversions before- were they wrong to tell me there were things going on the next level of particles down?
It kinda defies all logic. What makes lightspeed so special that no two objects can ever be travelling at more than 1c relative to each other? I don't care what maths or physics say about it, until there's definite experimental evidence of this, I refuse to believe it's right.
Yes, I understood that an outside observer can see two objects moving apart at more than 1c total. But imagine a construction a light second in length, a target at one end, a laser at another, moving at lightspeed along the laser's aiming vector (it's all hypothetical of course). If an observer attached to the laser activated it, would the observer at the target see it? If it hit, would it be a second later? If yes, then how would they explain that technically, in universe terms, light just travelled faster than light? What would happen if another lightspeed object intersected the beam, say, a mirror? Would the 2c laser instantly revert to 1c upon leaving the construction's reference frame? If so, then where would the energy of this instant deceleration go?
I'm not a physicist, so treat me and my opinions like you will, but I only understand experimental evidence. Theories are alright when they work, but completely unintuitive derivations of theories that can't be experimentally proven shouldn't be treated as.. what's that word? Axiom, I think.
Relativity, both general and special, makes sense in a general way, being internally consistent with itself in most instances, but it completely defies logic in cases such as above, and therefore should really be taken with a barrelful of salt when FTL travel is concerned.
I know my posts have been a pain a lot of the time but I've covered this several times. Light doesn't go any faster if you have something moving .99c shooting it in front of itself so at c light shot forward shouldn't go anywhere but that doesn't really mean anything because you'd have stopped experiencing time and it's meaningless in a lot of other ways.
At .99c the laser and target thing work just like they would at rest. Time dilation is the bit people are familiar with but because your time would get so slow with only that you'd end up thinking you were covering more ground than light could. This is why space also distorts for you so the distances in front of you get smaller in a way other than you actually moving through them.
Now turn your laser target around so you are shooting backwards and you see questions like "will it hit the moment it fires?" when you don't take this stuff into account but with it even zooming around at .99c the light goes back to that target just like you'd expect at any other time.
And for an observer at point b they'd just see a moving at the speed of light and c moving at the speed of light. B is the point of view so a in relation to c doesn't really define either's speed. You could take a laser pen yourself and sweep it across the sky. If you've got clouds or something far enough away the position of the dot will seem to move fast that a photon would traveling in the same direction you swept the pen but that doesn't really have anything to do with speed. The actual particles still had to travel from your pen in a straight line to the whatever-they-bounced-off-of and back to you at light speed. The dot isn't really a thing and everything that's happened was still under light speed.
I'm not arrogant, at least I don't think I am. 
I'm not talking down on other theories, I'm seeking to make mine suit experimental evidence.
(also, in the russian roulette example, logic agrees with math and physics, and tells me that pulling the trigger would a very bad idea. And experimental evidence can be obtained by, say pointing the thing at the other guy. 
I say, let theories exist as long as they work, but it's always possible to arrive at perfectly consistent and inter-agreeing results if the basic source material is wrong. It's like Sudoku. You may place one wrong number and keep filling the table until you're down to two unfinished rows, and then realise you've made a wrong assumption at the beginning and have to start over.
I'm perfectly fine with special relativity and stuff, but if I make an FTL jumper in my garage, I will expect no less than ten times its market cost if the world's scientific community decides to buy it from me. 
Well no, we've tested things enough that it's not like Sudoku. We know how much time dilation there should be and we've watched things like radioactive decay follow it. We've shot particles around with enough energy to make them go thousands of times c if f=ma were all there was to it but they still just go reallyreallyclosetoc.
There's no arbitrary limit to speed in space either. You can accelerate as much as you want, and you can always go faster. From your perspective, your speed will approach infinity (though light will always go faster!).
If you don't know calculus sure. Otherwise the meaning of c being your asymptote is pretty clear.
I don't have a job. 
But yeah, things like operational GPS and slow-degrading particles are harder to justify with simple things. I'll have to think about it. Thanks for the idea!
And Il Palazzo, if I never saw a revolver, would not know what it does, and would not be told what the game is about, then yes, I would happily keep pulling the trigger like the mindless drone that I would have to be. I would have likely just as happily do it with a semiautomatic Beretta or an AK-47. If I didn't read so much Wikipedia, didn't have a casual interest in physics and astronomy, and didn't watch Discovery Channel, I wouldn't have any intuition to judge these sorts of physically odd things either. But it so happens that I have the intuition, and it tells me these scientifically heretical things. I'm just trying to make sense of the universe.
And I've listened to Aristotle so this whole light things falling at the same speed as light things isn't logical. That's heretical even.
Hey at least it wasn't a flat Earth argument.
Intuition tells me a lot of things, but humor tells me Einstein could just as well be an alien agent sent to impede our scientific progress. His postulate, while reasonably close to any truth that might exist, allowed us to make calculations and come to reasonably true results, at the same time limiting our outlook and forcing us to come up with ways to overcome imaginary barriers imposed by science. That's humor. Intuition tells me that it's wrong to base everything you know on something that, despite all the calculations and matching results, might still be wrong in something.
So you're saying it's wrong to base anything we know on anything. Lovely.
Intuition tells me that it's wrong to base everything you know on something that, despite all the calculations and matching results, might still be wrong in something.
Oh, yes. It's not about special relativity being the absolute truth. It's probably wrong, or at least incomplete, or a limiting case, as relativity and quantum mechanics have yet to be married without trouble. Much as Newtonian physics was a limiting case of relativistic physics (for the limits mass and velocity to zero). The point is that special relativity is the best theory there currently is to explain certain known phenomena. And you don't seem to have a good alternative either (yet?). Which doesn't mean there doesn't exist one.
Science is not about finding true descriptions of reality, it's about finding better (more complete, simpler) descriptions than whatever currently exists.
What is surprising is that you seem to think that you can up with a better explanation just like that, all while you apparently haven't really tried to understand the explanation that already exists.
These things are complicated. The world is complicated. Things are difficult. You probably wouldn't just sit down and think, hey!, I will compose a better symphony than Beethoven! I will design a better space ship than NASA!
But to come up with a better theory of the universe? No problemo!
Well in America we don't trust scientists, much less think about how many of them have been thinking about things for how long. There's only like fifty of them and half are probably on drugs or evil buttholes torturing animals in a basement, right?
pages 3 to 7 to come :/
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Topic: Physics and mathematics discussion (Read 44219 times)