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[MonkeyHead]

Extreme relativity. 

[Il Palazzo]

Maybe we will now be forced to move from special relativity to.... Special special relativity? VIP relativity?

Well it was originally just "relativity" until Einstein realised that what he'd made was just a special case of a more general idea, which he expanded on and named "general relativity", I thought (special relativity being the stuff I've looked at since it's easier ).

Duh, and here I thought he called it so because he was PC.

Miggy, hasn't QM failed to reconcile with SR, though?

And let's not forget about the wave-particle duality of light.

[Heron TSG]

What if their tendency to ignore 99.99999% of all matter is intrinsically linked to their FTL-ness?

Then we will find another way.

They don't ignore matter at all. They merely are so small that they usually go between the other particles. When they do hit matter, they are absorbed or bounce off.

[Il Palazzo]

What if their tendency to ignore 99.99999% of all matter is intrinsically linked to their FTL-ness?

Then we will find another way.

They don't ignore matter at all. They merely are so small that they usually go between the other particles. When they do hit matter, they are absorbed or bounce off.

The idea is that 99.99999% of matter is "empty" space. Actually, I'm pretty sure there should be more 9s after the decimal point.

[Heron TSG]

That 99.9999% of space is exactly that, space. Not matter.

[ChairmanPoo]

In space nobody can hear you scream

[Il Palazzo]

That 99.9999% of space is exactly that, space. Not matter.

That depends on how you define empty space and matter. Can you say a segment of space is empty when the particle you're trying to pass through is deflected or otherwise significantly affected by interaction with fields permeating that space? What if another kind of particle does not interact with those fields?
Because that's the significant difference between neutrinos and ordinary matter.
You can't pass two atoms by eachother despite the fact that neither their nuclei nor the electrons ever hit each other.
Similarly you can't easily pass an electron by a proton without the two interacting, yet you won't have such problems when passing electrons by a neutron - the sizes of the particles are the same yet the previously occupied space seems now empty.

In other words, it's not that the neutrinos are so small that they sneak past electrons and nuclei(the size difference is not that large when compared to the volume of "empty" space in an atom), it's the fact that they don't interact with neither electromagnetic nor gluon fields that makes them ignore what we call ordinary matter most of the time.

[Osmosis Jones]

Just a word on Quantum Mechanics v Relativity;

The reason the don't reconcile isn't because you can't apply principles of in calculations with the other (things like astrophysics make big use of both quantum physics and relativity to describe a lot of what they see), but rather because of the fundamental assumptions that underlay each theory differ.

Relativity treats the universe as infinitely divisible, there is no minimal length unit. By contrast, Quantum Mechanics assumes the world is fundamentally discrete (thats actually what quantum means) in both energy, distance, and time.

Well that, and time is one way under quantum mechanics, but is two-way in relativity. This doesn't mean time travel is possible, rather it refers to deterministic behaviour. For relativity, imagine a pool table; if you knew the speed, mass and position of all the balls a few seconds after the break, you could calculate backwards and get the original system. However, because of the whole quantum weirdness thing, we have entropy; information can get irretrievably scrambled, such that you can't work backwards past a certain point.

There are also other things, but from what I understand, they're the big points.

[Another]

The concept of irreversibility of a quantum measurement process is an important point. However even in classical mechanics if a body goes from some asymmetric state to a state of [unstable] equilibrium (e.g. a theoretically possible process of a ball having just enough velocity to roll uphill and stop at the very top, not even spontaneous symmetry breaking needed) - you can't always predict backward in time as good as forward (and sometimes the other way round).

[Starver]

In space nobody can hear you scream

In space, nobody can make ice-cream.

(I was originally going to say that you could, but I'm fairly sure that the coldness at 4 kelvin would be too low to be able to make it properly.  And as for whipping air into it (the versions that need air whipping in), the gasses would either escape or themselves be condensed or even frozen.)


Anyway: I wouldn't necessarily mind being made into neutrinos to travel, but it would be a lot of neutrinos, so I'd rather like that there'd be a fairly foolproof way of getting them all to the target area (rather than disperse) and of course a way to revert back to matter when I get there, in a significantly similar configuration...  Heisenberg compensators ahoy!

[Starver]

The concept of irreversibility of a quantum measurement process is an important point. However even in classical mechanics if a body goes from some asymmetric state to a state of [unstable] equilibrium (e.g. a theoretically possible process of a ball having just enough velocity to roll uphill and stop at the very top, not even spontaneous symmetry breaking needed) - you can't always predict backward in time as good as forward (and sometimes the other way round).

I was going to say that this doesn't happen, something could not travel towards an unstable point of equilibrium and then stop there, because it is travelling to that point and those travelling at that point.  But I now realise that you're counting the friction (or equivalent resistance) that takes the (possibly minute) final velocity and (eventually) squashes it entirely.

Except that the energy goes somewhere.  Into the movement of the air, the nature of the ground it's rolling over, all kinds of ways.  And if you had the power to temporally reflect all of these effects back again, they'd give the kick to the stationary object in the right direction.

Yes, it's rather contrived.  Imagine choreographing a nearly concentric set of water-pressure waves to converge upon the location of a stone at the bottom of a pond, lift it up through the water column until it emerges at the surface, at which point further surface waves and a contracting hemisphere of air-pressure ridges fling the stone fully out of the water (shaking lose its hydrophilicly bonded damp surface contamination), up and over into a hand (drawing itself back as the stone arrives so that it can clasp and slow the trajectory back down to a stationary 'end-point'.


Not arguing with your point, which is about the ability to predict 'the wrong way'[1] in time's arrow, but I just like bringing such imaginings to life.  Another example of which might regard fragments of porcelain which an inrush of air-compressions and other energies push together to meld into a cup and launch up into the air such that at the height of the parabola it barely slides onto the top of a table, to (after gaining a brief amount of vibrational energy that marginally increases it speed, until it nudges against, and is brought to a halt by a person's elbow.


[1] As you note, some things are easier to backtrack than to predict before they start, while other things are easier to predict than determine a starting situation that brought you to a resulting one.  Either way, your main problem is not having infinitely precise positional information, nor the time and processing power needed to deal with such an infinite amount of precision.  (And, of course, elements of understanding about the system being only understood to the current level of scientific knowledge.)

[jasonwill2]

thread hop:

I read the story a bit back, but have not followed it very well.

What all has happened? Has the information been peer reviewed yet?

[MonkeyHead]

Step 1: CERN experiment to do with a specific type of particle decay suggests neutrinos might be travelling faster than light. Data is published and Physics community is invited to suggest where the unseen error is, or to come up with the new Physics needed to explain the behaviour. Most Physicists (myself included) think that the result is down to some unforseen experimental flaw. The media however dont quite get it and go wild with stories about time travel and all that stuff, so the general public assume physics is broken.

Step 2: Physics finds that the experiment has several flaws in it relating to timing and uncertainties in which neutrino is being observed at any one time.

Step 3: CERN remove one of the problems (sending smaller batches of particles to reduce uncertanties in transit time), but resultstays the same. By now the media are bored of this so not mcuh is said. The Physics community is mostly unmoved from its beleif that an error is still responsible as a few signifigant ones remain.

Step 4: Experiement will be repeated in near future by other similar facilites while CERN look to tighten up on how they time the transist of particles from production to detector.

Apologies if my bias or leaning does not match your own

[kaijyuu]

Apologies if my bias or leaning does not match your own

That's ok. You can be wrong. Really everything's all random and it's just dumb luck that we've found any repetition and predictability in behavior at all.

The obvious cause of this is apple pie.

[MonkeyHead]

Yea, entropy is all just a mask behind which there is chaos.

Man, that would make a kickass line when I finally flip and go all supervillan on western europes ass.