Talk:Faster-than-light/Archive 1

message: I just wanted to say that this article was fascinating and informative. Good work!
VERY well written with clear explanations and links to the concepts at hand, so even a silly little linguist like myself could understand it.
Thanks to all the contributors!
--161.45.243.157 17:50, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Great Article 

message: Please move these to a separate category if they ever evolve into a discussion
* As far as I understand it, an object can not travel faster than light because the faster an object moves the more massive it becomes, and thus requires more force to accelerate it even faster, which causes it to never reach the speed of light without infinite energy to accelerate it. What would happen if a very massive object with a very strong gravitational field had an object accelerated towards it merely by the force of the two objects gravitational attraction? The problem of having to increase the ammount of energy put into acceration in order to counteract the accelerating bodies mass would be solved by the fact that the more rapidly the attracted body is moving the more massive it would become and thus it would become even more strongly attracted to the massive object. If one assumes that the distances between the two objects was great enough and the volume and stregnth of the gravitational field was large enough, wouldn't this cause the attracted object to accelerate past the speed of light before the two object collide? 
** I think that at that point you get an event horizon, and shortly thereafter, a black hole.
* Given a dispersion relation ω(k), the phase velocity is ω/<Sub>k</sub> and the group velocity is dω/<Sub>dk</sub> -- or so said some of my physics instructors in conversation. But if a phase velocity is going at speeds greater than the speed of light, then that means ω > ck. This troubles me, because the graph of the boundary is a line with slope c; it would seem that if ω(k) traversed that boundary, then either dω/dk is greater than c somewhere, to give the graph the upward slope needed to cross the line; or else the dispersion relation is discontinuous. This would meant that when the phase velocity goes faster than light, so too does group velocity. (And that would break the light barrier.) Thoughts? Do violations of the speed-of-light barrier only happen outside of dispersive contexts? 128.253.197.212 18:18, 10 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Odd questions 

message: === Loose concepts ===
"these concepts are outright impossible, as well as being well beyond our current technology"
Isn't this sentence kinda contradictory? It can't be both impossible and beyond our current technology, beyond our current technology implies that it is possible. Fuelbottle | Talk 22:52, 29 Aug 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Or does it? It means we can't do that yet, it doesn't specify wheter we'll ever be able to do that.
It's not contradictory, it's just (in its current form) redundant. And not neccesarily true.
----
I removed This process cannot transmit information, as nothing is getting closer to anything. since we definitely have transmission of information from high redshift galaxies :). - Boud 15:17, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)

text: Would you care to provide a source for this? - 70.18.182.39 03:41, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Article was rewriten since these comments 

message: "these concepts are outright impossible, as well as being well beyond our current technology"
Isn't this sentence kinda contradictory? It can't be both impossible and beyond our current technology, beyond our current technology implies that it is possible. Fuelbottle | Talk 22:52, 29 Aug 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Or does it? It means we can't do that yet, it doesn't specify wheter we'll ever be able to do that.
It's not contradictory, it's just (in its current form) redundant. And not neccesarily true.
----
I removed This process cannot transmit information, as nothing is getting closer to anything. since we definitely have transmission of information from high redshift galaxies :). - Boud 15:17, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)

text: Would you care to provide a source for this? - 70.18.182.39 03:41, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Loose concepts 

message: I had posted an entreaty, asking for further consensus, but got no responses, so I lost patience (sorry) and forged ahead on my own with a major MAJOR revision. Why? because I found the existing approach horribly misleading. I DO however compliment the previous author(s) for their diligent efforts at circumspect wording, but even so, to base the speed limitation (of a rocket propelled craft) on relativistic mass increase is dubious at best. The reader would've been grossly misled and would have concluded that a speeding rocket is ever harder to thrust, which is NOT the case! And that thing about time dilation preying upon exhaust gas speed was likewise awkward and obtuse. So I've replaced all of that.ETP 23:08, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mass increase 

message: how can this article incorporate the following:
To quote Richard Feynman "...there is also an amplitude for light to go faster (or slower) than the conventional speed of light. You found out in the last lecture that light doesn't go only in straight lines; now, you find out that it doesn't go only at the speed of light! It may surprise you that there is an amplitude for a photon to go at speeds faster or slower than the conventional speed, c." -- Chapter 3, page 89 of Richard Feynman's book "QED".
:That's just "phase velocity" -- the key is that "information" (group velocity) can't travel faster than light. Drernie 20:14, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Light travels at different speeds? 

message: This page is rediculous. While I do not grasp the subject matter (can anyone say they do?) I did notice what I believe to be some obvious problems.
I added a {cleanup-rewrite} tag to suggest this page needs some cleaning up.
When I first saw the page, I thought of adding a {tag}.
I found more and more that fitted:
* {neutrality} - This article includes just one theory, one interpretation.
* {Limitedgeographicscope} - Please include metric measurements. 12 inches per nanosecond?
* {OriginalResearch} - I guessed this page wasn't put together by people remembering bits from highschool science.
* {disputed} - Without references and source material (even wiki links) no-one can validate this article's claims.
* {technical} - Obviously. Please add some plain descriptions. "Or in other words, how can thrust originating from a rocket's very own rest frame labor under any relativistic effect? It makes no sense at all."
* {cleanup-tone} - The last quote should show that the language leaves something to be desired, for an encyclopedic article.
:Well, someone's rewritten the article, and it looks good to my (admittedly unexperienced) eyes, so I'm tentatively removing the {cleanup-rewrite} tag for now, as well as making a few writeovers myself. 70.18.182.39 04:24, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  NPOV/Clarity 

message: I took out this html comment:
"Could someone please re-write this to something Stephen King could understand? What information does this paragraph contain?
The universe on large scales appears homogeneous and isotropic. On second thought, this is rather surprising, since it also holds for those parts that are too far apart to influence each other (for example, seen in opposite direction). Technically, this is expressed by saying they are not within each other's horizon which is limited by the speed of light. Homogeneity and isotropy is explained in the theory of cosmic inflation. The idea is, that objects (such as particles with mass) cannot travel faster than light, but space itself can. In the inflation theory it is assumed that space itself dramatically expands (with velocities much larger than the speed of light) in the first few pico seconds after the Big Bang."
I removed it because the information summarized in that paragraph is the same as that presented lower down:
"The expansion of the universe causes distant galaxies to recede from us faster than the speed of light, if comoving distance and cosmological time are used to calculate the speeds of these galaxies. However, in general relativity, velocity is a local notion, so velocity calculated using comoving coordinates  does not have any simple relation to velocity calculated locally."
70.18.182.39 04:36, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I think it is pertinent to mention that big bang inflation theory requires space to move ftl. Puddytang 19:06, 3 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Explaining an edit 

message: An anonymous user revised the opening paragraph to state that FTL was outright impossible under our current understanding of physics. I've replaced this with a more reasonable caveat (I'll agree that the original version that the anon user replaced was badly worded). FTL isn't outright forbidden by the laws of physics as currently known. It just requires fairly exotic conditions, and would have very peculiar side effects. Anything that generates a closed timelike curve in GR will allow time travel, which looks like FTL from other reference frames (the two are equivalent in SR and GR). Further, the laws of special relativity (and, if I understand correctly, general relativity) are compatible with the existence of particles that travel FTL, for which the speed of light is a _lower_ bound to velocity (see tachyon). While it is strongly suspected that some as-yet-undiscovered mechanism will outlaw all closed timelike curves, and that the idea of FTL particles like tachyons is only valid in certain cases (see tachyon condensation), nobody's actually managed to _prove_ it in an all-encompassing manner yet, so it remains an open question. --Christopher Thomas 02:19, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Science has a long history of proving things impossible which were later done Puddytang 19:21, 3 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Impossible" vs. "Probably impossible" 

message: I've removed the long speculation that used to be here to a sub-page: /Is Gravity Faster than Light?  I have nothing against the author, in fact I credit him or her for not putting it in the article proper (where it would be inappropriate, being unconfirmed scientific speculation) but I'm a bit tired of seeing the tweaks go by on my watchlist.  On a subpage, those who are interested can follow.  (I'm not sure it belongs in Wikipedia at all, but I will give the author the benefit of the doubt for now.)
It would be good to say something about the speed of gravity in the article proper -- perhaps something like
: How fast gravity propagates is an open question in modern physics.  General relativity assumes(?) that it propagates at the speed of light; most theories of quantum gravity postulate zero-mass gravitons as the force carrier, which would move at the speed of light, like all other zero-mass particles.  However, this has not yet been confirmed experimentally, due to the difficulty of detecting gravity waves.
and then go on to mention that recent experiment that I remember reading about but not in any detail...  also, could someone factcheck me on general relativity?
Zack 20:04, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Speed of Gravity 

message: An anonymous contributor added a paragraph about accomplishing FTL travel using hyperspace. I've cleaned it up so that it's in approximately appropriate form, but I'm not sure if it belongs in the section it's in. It might be useful to split the "possibility of FTL" section into "approaches to FTL in non-fiction" and "approaches to FTL in fiction" to address this. Comments? --Christopher Thomas 04:28, 10 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  FTL in fiction 

message: I found a USA today article about the Big Bang. This is the opening paragraph:
The universe expanded rapidly — growing from the size of a marble to billions of light years across — within the first trillionth of a second after its cataclysmic birth, astrophysicists reported Thursday.
I know that light is much slower that this. I don't know if it would fit somewhere within the FTL article, but I am a bringing it to your attention.--Doom Child 22:21, 17 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The USA Today article is talking about cosmic inflation -- have a read of that page for starters.  In inflationary theories, the speed of expansion of the universe is not limited by relativity, but I'm afraid I can't explain why (however, notice that such expansion cannot violate causality, as nothing ever gets closer to anything).  We should mention this in the article, yes, it deserves a couple sentences under "Universal expansion", but I'm not the person to write it. -- Zack 08:28, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  The article is right and it doesn't contradict the theory or relativity. I've added plain-english explanation to the article: "In other words, the galaxies (or more accurately, galaxy clusters) do not physically move away from each other. Rather, the fabric of spacetime between them expands. This also explains the Inflationary epoch during the Big Bang, when the universe expanded from a size a hundred billion times smaller than a proton to approximately one hundred million light years in diameter in just 10-32 of a second." -- Ron g 18:14, 24 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  'Hyper'Luminal speed 

message: May I point your attention towards this article, New Scientist 01/06?
Certainly, the drive mentioned based on Heim theory seems to satisfy the requisite of "going somewhere Special Relativity doesn't apply." At any rate, having been recognised by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics would definitely qualify as having been "seriously proposed by mainstream science."
--Xanthine 14:58, 27 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Re: Option E 

message: IF we managed to travel at or faster then the speed of light, and we were in an object with mass which had a "window" or a thing which allowed you to view space in real time, and send messages like sound or light through it. If you shone a flashlight from this object that was moving at or faster then the speed of light, would this light beam be going faster then light? What would be the effect? RandomGuy7 11:30, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The speed of light is relative.  A simpler example would be "what would happen if you walk forward with a lit flashlight in your hand?"  The answer is yes, the light would be traveling faster than "the speed of light."  That is why the speed of light in a vacuum is explicitly stated to avoid confusion when talking about such situations. Ziiv 08:05, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: This is a little unclear. What actually happens (under SR) is, observers in all (non-accelerating) reference frames see the emitted light moving at C relative to themselves. The person in the FTL craft sees light moving away from themselves at C, while people in the "stationary world" (people relative to whom the craft was moving FTL) also see the light moving at C relative to themselves. This causes very odd effects with observers moving FTL relative to each other (see tachyon), and is usually assumed to be unphysical (in other words, to correspond to a situation that can't actually occur). --Christopher Thomas 14:32, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Question from inexperienced person 

message: "Almost every thought that says that something cannot be accelerated past lightspeed makes one major case: We cannot generate infinite energy. However, if infinite energy could be created, it would be quite possible to get past light speed.[citation needed] Although this may at first thought violate the idea of conservation of energy, this is not completely the case. The idea of conservation of matter is the idea of a universal constant amount of energy, not necessarily a local. To put it simply, "To create infinite from 0, you need to also create negative infinite."[citation needed]"
My TI-89 says that infinity minus infinity is undefined.  I propose that this section be deleted. Ziiv 06:52, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: This sounds like gibberish and/or OR. Go ahead and axe it. --Christopher Thomas 07:19, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

text: done. Ziiv 08:01, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Delete this? 

message: Mitchell Pfenning worked out the math involved and discovered that you could only warp a small amount (1/100th the size of an atom) and the energy required is 10 billion times that of entire universe.[citation needed] Does Wikipedia put up with such allegations? --195.210.193.14 12:31, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Uncited 

message: What about thought? According to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle at a point in the curve of the space time continuum energy becomes thought. if things without mass can travel beyond the speed of light then what about things with no mass, or energy out put? if so how fast would thought travel, and how would we measure something that moves faster than the fastest thing we can perceive. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 158.135.1.92 (talk • contribs) on 17:52, 29 August 2006.
:The Heisenberg uncertainty principle says nothing at all about thought. It says you can't simultaneously measure the position and momentum of an object with arbitrary precision, because measuring one perturbs the other. Speed of signal propagation is performed by measuring the relative arrival times of the signal being measured, and a signal with a known propagation time (typically a laser beam). --Christopher Thomas 18:36, 29 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  speed of thought 

message: In the last years there were many observations of superluminal transmission of signals at specific conditions. If these observations are real - they were fixed in different laboratories by known experimentalists - there was two possibility: or really at certain conditions can exist superluminal phenomena with different speeds, or at some part of way the transmission can be instantaneous, but on other way with usual speed. Then the averaging over all path can give different results at different experiments. Just the last possibility became real, so in my article: Annalen der Physik (Leipzig), vol.14, p.733 (2005) and also in the arXiv:phys/0309123 is strongly proved in the covariant form such theorem: at very specific conditions signal transmits instantaneously in the limits of near field. For this phenomenon is needed a definite deficit of energy ΔE relative momentum, i.e. tunneling regime on the distance Δx such that ΔEΔx=π. This expression is near to the uncertainty relation, but slightly bigger and it can describe all recent observations of superluminal transfer of excitations. Such phenomenon represents "the nonlocality in the small".
Mark Perel'man 12:24, 31 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Tunneling can be instantaneous 

message: I'm having trouble following this sentence in the article:
"Unfortunately, such warping would require the emission of negative energy, which has not yet been discovered or created in significant quantities."
How can something be both undiscovered and not created in significant quantities?
The sentence implies a contradiction. If deliberately so, the connection with the concept of "un/discovered" could be clarified here. Best wishes. Anon. 58.178.197.225 00:00, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Negative energy undiscovered but only insignificantly 

message: If a traveller were going near the speed of light (relative to Earth observers), that traveller would still perceive the speed of liught to be the same from their viewpoint. i.e. the traditional, is the traveller moving away from the Earth at the speed of light, or is the Earth moving away from the traveller at the speed of light?
If the speed of light is constant independent of the velocity of the vessel, for example, of where he is being measured, the speed of light should be the same when measured on the earth and on the travelers ship.  Furthermore, although the mass of the traveler would be increasing as they approached the speed of light, their perception of time would be slower relative to the earth.
So although the traveler would be approaching the speed of light (from the earth's prospective) and it might appear that their mass is approaching infinity (and thus it would require them more and more energy), to the traveler their relative observations would be that their mass has not changed and they are still putting the same amount of energy to achieve the same acceleration.
If I'm not mistaken, the traveler, although going near the speed of light as seen from the earth, from the traveler's perspective they are not near the speed of light.  It could even be seen that they are not moving, and it is instead the space around them that is.
I'm sure that somebody has already posed this theory, so perhaps my understanding of the subject matter is mistaken.  Could somebody please clear this up for me?  Thanks. 68.81.198.36 19:13, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yep, that's abot it.  Even when accelorating, people can think of themselves as still and everything else as moving.  This is coered in Special and General Relativity.  67.190.111.238 00:53, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Maybe I missed this somewhere on the page 

message: Considering this page is a mess, I'd like to spend next 3 months improving this page. Basically I'd like to split it into at least three pages, to make it more consistent, and allow modification of possible recent events without affecting the core page.
First I'd like to create something like a preview section, where would be the new page until reasonably ready to replace the old page. Considering I don't have too much experience with advanced editing of the wikipedia. How should I create preview section?
Is anyone here able to visit a US/UK library and look into old books for proper quotes? I'd post on Usenet a little to get some list of recommended citations, and pieces of history I might forgot.Raghar 17:53, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  page revamping 

message: Most of the material at the tachyon section -- which seems rather confused or irrelevant -- is duplicated within the tachyon main article (the latter has a lot of extra information).  Anyone object to this section just being a main article redirect? --Michael C. Price talk 08:27, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree, as it stands now it only clutters the article and distracts from the main subject. 81.70.212.33 00:13, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Done.  Section trimmed and main article pointer added.  --Michael C. Price talk 10:28, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Tachyon revamp 

message: The opening question to this article reads 'Unsolved problems in physics: Is it possible to go faster than the speed of light? If so, would it violate the theoretical principles of the universe?'. I think this is poorly phrased. If something is observed in nature then by definition it does not violate nature's 'theoretical principles'. Changed it to something less ambiguous. 81.70.212.33 00:10, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Opening question?? 

message: I have noted from observation that if a body is rotating, i.e constantly changing direction. IOW going round and round as for example the Earth does or a Gramophone record. Surely it will be moving relative to distant objects at an infinite speed. IOW if you could extend an imaginary radius line from the centre to say one light year a 33rpm long playing record would in effect be traversing 2x pi x r  approximately 6.3 light years in 1/33rd of a minute. This of course is well beyond the speed of light.
Of course one could argue that no such imaginary line actually physically exists. 
However in the case of stars that are known to rotate, it is common to see rotation periods considerably shorter than their distance in light years. Surely this means that information should (in theory) be observable at any point of a circle of the same radius distance. 
In this particular case whilst the actual beams of light or photons carrying the information are not in themselves exceeding the speed of light it should be evident if the rotation period can be viewed simultaneously from two different view points (Which it can) the information in regard to rotational periods is travelling at an infinite speed. 
So it would appear where information is phased with rotation there is in effect no upper limit.
Of course this would also seem to indicate, whilst there is a such thing as space time, it would also mean events occur at source at the time they occur. In which case the same present would have to exist throughout the entire Universe regardless of the speed of transmission.
I also wonder (although this is more conjecture) if this aspect of rotation (in regard to solid objects) would explain centrifugal force which appears to work opposite to gravity. So might be considered a type of anti-gravity. I also wonder if the real result of rotating light beams at extremely high speeds would in effect create an anti-gravity field, particularly insofar as a light beam could be easily rotated globally as opposed to in a single plane. --Artberry 22:08, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Propagation of information relative to rotational phasing 

message: 1. Build a time machine that can recieve messages from the future.
2. Get next years mail today.
3. Send it via USPS yesterday air.
4. It gets there before you sent it!
Puddytang 20:20, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Communicate FTL with Time Machine 

message: Is there enough energy found in our solar system to even achieve FTL travel through any of the proposed methods? It seems kind of silly to mention wormholes as a means of FTL travel when it requires two black holes. Since there aren't any black holes in our solar system (thankfully), that means we would have to generate one. How can we use the energy found in our star system to create black holes like that? Malamockq 21:30, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Enough energy in our solar system to attain FTL travel? 

message: The argumental answer, "nothing can travel faster than light", is false. Faster than light travel is dependent on how objects are seperated (if a dwarf galaxy is seperated from a 
galaxy about 2.3 billion ly, the object is traveling at about 7.13c) -- there is no 
limit on how fast space can expand. the following citation to this is .atlaso ftheuniverse.com/bigbang. Fbs. 13 02:04, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  FTL velocity dependent on how distant objects can be seperated -- this may partialy demolish the backlog 

message: "Our universe has seven basic dimensional quantities, which can be taken to be distance, mass, time, electric current, temperature, amount of substance, and luminous intensity"
The above sentence mixes up metrology with physics.
Temperature, amount of substance and luminous intensity are derived units.
Electric current is electric charge in a unit time, if you include electric charge, there are a host of other quantized units such as the three colors of quark you should be including.
Quirkie 21:43, 26 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Metrology 

message: While I agree that this removed section needed to be cited, and was far too long, I do recall similar concepts being proposed. The idea is usually given in any "SR doesn't forbid FTL" introduction, stating that as SR doesn't directly forbid FTL travel, particles travelling FTL may exist. In some of these descriptions, the idea of generating these particles via pair production for purposes of communication is discussed. No citation handy, which is why I'm not restoring the section myself. Tachyons in conventional physics don't represent something that could be used in this manner, so I'm not suggesting that this method of FTL communication is actually practical (just one that's been proposed).--Christopher Thomas 03:22, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Faster without acceleration" section 

message: As I understand, this is not true communication because there is no way to relay information--the electron collapses its waveform, but we can't make it spin a certain way. But I was wondering what prevents the development of a device in which an array of particles were used. For example, imagine we each have six particles, which are entangled in pairs. In other words, each of my particles is entangled with one of his, and our sets are laid out in a 2 x 3 grid. My partner and I decide that we want the top row to be "dots" and the bottom to be "dashes". I then force the electrons in the top row of all the columns to collapse, sending a "signal" of three dots--the Morse code letter S. I could also collapse the bottom row if I wanted to, giving me O. Or, I could do teh bottom two in the first two columns and then the top one in the remaining, producing G. What law of physics prevents me from doing this, and thus sending information FTL? Sir Elderberry
:From what I understand, once two particles become entangled, they can be separated by any distance and still remain their entanglement.  Then one can measure one of two paired characteristics that can't both be measured for the same particle and that same characteristic immediately (no matter the distance) becomes the only (of the paired characteristics) that can be measured for the other entangled particle.  However, every article that I've read about this says that this cannot be used for faster-than-light communication without explaining why; it just is.  So I am equally baffled about why.  Val42 16:19, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Characters in Charles Stross's books communicate over interstellar distances via quantum entangled bits that must be shipped at sub-light speeds between the planets.  I suppose that one planet acts as a switch-board to route calls so that it is not necessary to carry bits to talk to everyone everywhere.  Once the bits are exhausted the only option is to wait for another shipment of qu-bits to arrive.  People are able to travel at FTL speeds, as long as they remain in their light cone and travel in closed space-like paths, but this messes up the quantum entanglement of the bits.  He doesn't explain any physics behind the communication methods, so I  assumed that something like a binary encoding onto the bits works in fiction. Autopilot 19:50, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Quantum Entanglement 

message: http://terra.gg.utah.edu/ls/1325-001.html Maybe that would be of use. --Remi 05:44, 25 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Link to possibly referenced... 

message: Particles faster than light.
Unfortunaly I can not edit this article, but you can find it at:
http://www.petar-bosnic-petrus.com/work/conical-and-paraboloidal-supraluminal-particle-accelerators/
--195.29.48.180 09:05, 23 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Supraluminal accelerator 

message: Source: SkewsMe.com
No information transfer from quantum entanglement? Try telling that to the cryptologists.
Say you have 4 pairs of entangled matter such that (x0,y0) are distinct from and won't affect (x1,y1), (x2,y2), etc. If y0 changes you know that x0 changed, the same being true for the other pairs. Right there you have a nibble's worth of information transfer any time x0, x1, x2, etc. are changed immediately altering y0, y1, and y2 respectively. Monitoring the y bits will immediately tell you when the entangled x bits are updated.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 97.113.163.36 (talk) 03:29, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Information Transfer 

message: I started fixing sections from this article, but it's a real mess. This article needs serious attention from people who know GR, or even just general science. Some of the problems here are basic convolutions of grammar and clearly amateur science writing. I will work on it a bit more tomorrow. SamuelRiv 05:41, 5 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks, Samuel.  I tried a while ago, but couldn't keep up.  I'll try to pay closer attention to the work you're doing.Drernie 17:21, 5 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Attention from expert 

message: In the section named "Possibility of FTL", it is correctly stated that "Faster-Than-Light travel or communication is prohibited by Einstein's theory of relativity". 
I don't think that can be correct.  The theory can't prohibit it.  The theory can, however, give a reason why it isn't possible. 
Though, in fact, as far as I can tell the theory only explains why in certain circumstances you can't SEE FTL.  DeniseMToronto (talk) 06:13, 18 December 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: It is just a form of words, meaning more or less what you said, that is, according to the theory it is not possible.  The theory of relativity in not about what you can see but about what you can detect or measure in any way. Martin Hogbin (talk) 22:27, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

text: I have corrected the bland statement about FTL being impossible because of SR.  It isn't -- see here and tachyon article. --Michael C. Price talk 10:36, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

text: 189.24.6.58 said: The simplest way to realize that special relativity does not allow any particle moving faster than c is to remark that spoecial relativity works with four REAL numbered axis and a FTL would  make Lorentz equation to produce complex numbers. So the vary basic mathematical meaning would be lost. Actually, all that this shows is that it doesn't make sense to use the Lorentz transformation to try to define the "frame" of an FTL particle--but that's no big deal, you can't define the frame of a photon either (try plugging v=c into the Lorentz transformation and see what happens). And as explained here, if you assign the tachyon an imaginary rest mass, all its measurable properties in our own sublight frames will be real-valued. Hypnosifl 06:31, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

text: A thought about complex numbers that I have not found in science to date- in electronics complex numbers tend to arise in connection with phase shifted values like impedance and capacitance. If you think of spacetime as a 4-d system, then 90 degrees out of phase with 3-d space is just a 4-d location, but not in time. Most consider time as the 4th dimension, but in this case it would be a spacial location. According to the Lorenz transformations any object moving faster than light has a negative complex coordinate. Instead of seeing this as a reversal in time, consider it as a phase shift in 4-d space. If you think of the universal 3-d space as a flat sheet expanding into 4-d space, then an object at light speed has come to a dead stop in the 4 d direction while the sheet continues away from it, causing a gravity funnel, one which light cannot escape. when an object moves faster than light, the location will actually travel below the dead stop point and slightly curved, futher into 4 d-space but not backwards in time...in time, its forward momentum in 3-d space will continue to show slightly less than light speed as the only thing visible will be an event horizon that is moving at less than light speed.Jiohdi (talk) 21:11, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  MAJOR CORRECTION NEEDED 

message: Substituted at 20:33, 2 May 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Assessment comment