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Old 03-25-2004, 06:53 PM   #1 (permalink)
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Warp Speed....

Is this possible? As I understand its like being on a rug with a table. You lasso the table and pull it close to you with a rope. The rug folds and pulls into you moving the table closer, you step over the fold, i.e. moving a minimal distance.

Is this applicable for space travel? Today in my astronomy class we were talking about the practicality of space travel. It seems that it is highly unpractical to travel the great distances of space due to the current model of physics in a matter of time that is workable for humans.

Is warp speed even possible? I brought it up and class and was told no, but in some books I've read regarding the subject I've been told it is possible.
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Old 03-26-2004, 06:30 AM   #2 (permalink)
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Any physics teacher worth his/her weight will explain that our current understanding of the theories is quite limited, thus literally anything is "possible", but not neccessarily likely.
The ability to exceed light speed is not likely following the current laws of physics, but who knows what we will understand next week.
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Old 03-26-2004, 07:44 AM   #3 (permalink)
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Do you want FTL travel without causality violations? If you do, we will have to find an "ether", or a universal frame of reference.

There are various means involving exotic (as in, never seen before) forms of matter and energy that would allow FTL-like travel, some of which are vaguly warp-drive like. The fact they require matter that we have no evidence exists, together with the causality violations of them, make it unlikely.

Personally, I'd believe a future involving very-long-lived 'humans' (effectively immortal) together with near light speed interstellar travel as reasonable. If you live 1 million years+, a 100 year trip that takes a subjective 1 year to you isn't all that long.
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Old 03-26-2004, 07:51 AM   #4 (permalink)
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If worm holes are theoretically possible then it is also theoretically possible that we could replicate wormholes...

In my mind this is how we will, if ever achieve manned space travel beyond say Mars...

As we will never acheive light speed, warping space is probably the only way to bridge these distances...
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Old 03-26-2004, 08:06 AM   #5 (permalink)
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What you are describing, Mojo, is more like the tesseract from Madeline L'Engal's children's books.

the star trek warp drive works on the idea that, since you can't travel faster than light in our universe, you create a bubble of universe around you, then warp it into a teardrop shape with the point behind you. Then, like a watermelon seed, it shoots through the rest of the universe. YOU aren't travelling at warp speed, your little universe bubble is.

Some physicists, including Hawking, believe that this is, in fact, possible.
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Old 03-26-2004, 08:56 AM   #6 (permalink)
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As we will never acheive light speed
Hey never say never. When you think of the postive things we have done so far, you can't rule anything out. I'm confident that one we will make this, or something like it happen.
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Old 03-28-2004, 12:19 AM   #7 (permalink)
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Considering that we haven't even fully documented our own ocean, it is pretty crazy to say that we will never, in a thousand,million, or billion years of advancement achieve light speed. Personally, I think they will figure something out within 1,000 years.
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Old 03-28-2004, 05:27 AM   #8 (permalink)
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I have severe doubts that the human race is going to last a thousand millions years!
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Old 03-28-2004, 12:10 PM   #9 (permalink)
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A common misunderstanding of special relativity is that you can't go faster than light. In actuality, it depends how you want to define things. If you divide the distance from earth to wherever by the time it takes the astronauts according to them, then this could be greater than c. A more consistent definition of velocity requires that the distance and time be measured in the same frame. It is this which cannot ever exceed c (in SR).

I think this type of thing is very doable, but it leads to problems if the travelers ever want to return to earth (everyone there will have aged much more). There are also the more mundane issues of shielding the spacecraft from interstellar junk and blueshifted radiation at those speeds.

As mentioned by others, there are possible loopholes using general relativity. The Alcubierre warp drive does not seem possible right now though due to its negative energy requirements, causality problems, etc. It also requires a ridiculous amount of energy. The best version would require a few suns worth of fuel. And nonexistent negative energy suns at that.

As others have said, our understanding of physics could change dramatically on this issue in the future. We'll see...
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Old 04-01-2004, 05:35 AM   #10 (permalink)
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I have a feeling that anyone who wants to travel great distances should not expect to return to or communicate back to Earth. I can see a possibility of the Earth being depeleated of its resources and everyone climbing into spaceships and travelling around trying to find a new home. It's possible for humans of a life expectancy of 100 years to get to stars that are 1000 lightyears away before they die. However, (more than) 1000 years will have passed on Earth.

As for bending space and what-not... I'm sure it's theoretically possible, however implementing such an amazing feat on a regular basis... well, I highly doubt it. The amount of energy required is just insane. With that kind of energy, we could do much more interesting things than warp speed
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Old 04-14-2004, 03:26 PM   #11 (permalink)
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Quote:
Originally posted by stingc
[B] A common misunderstanding of special relativity is that you can't go faster than light.
Oh. I had thought that as an object approached light-speed that its mass increased proportionally until it became infinite (therefore making FTL speed travel both impossible and impractical ). But I could have missed a big part of it.
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Old 04-14-2004, 06:01 PM   #12 (permalink)
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Quote:
Originally posted by Stare At The Sun
Considering that we haven't even fully documented our own ocean, it is pretty crazy to say that we will never, in a thousand,million, or billion years of advancement achieve light speed. Personally, I think they will figure something out within 1,000 years.
I expect more than likely, we will 1. destroy ourselves by man-made devices, 2. destroy ourselves through overpopulation and lack of resources, or 3. be destroyed or have an extreme portion of our population wiped out by an asteroid long before we reach these kinds of timelines.

Then, of course.. all those people that volunteered for the Mars inhabitation project will just be laughing their ass off at us... that is till they run out of good porn and beer.
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Old 04-15-2004, 08:33 AM   #13 (permalink)
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As far as warping space and then traveling the shorter distance goes, yes it is possible. Any object in space with a gravity field, including planets, stars, and black holes, all do that to some extent, with black holes being the most noticable out of them. What is required to bend space is a large gravity field. The larger the gravity field, the larger the warp in space. In order to bend space enough for us to travel a distance that would require faster than light travel in non-warped space while still traveling at sublight speeds would require a massive gavity field, much larger than the one produced by our own sun. Even if we could create a field like that in theory, such as using gigantic electromagnits for example, it would require huge amounts of energy that we're not capable of producing at this point in time. Thus, it is extremely unlikely that we will be able to warp space using gravimetric fields.
But then, that's just one theory on how to approach it, and there are many others. Just because one theory won't produce a likely result doesn't mean another won't. NASA has a laboratory, sort of a think pod, that is devoted to finding faster ways to travel. Solar Sails and other such ideas are floating around out there as well.

Just remember, nothing is impossible, only highly unlikely.
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Old 04-15-2004, 10:53 AM   #14 (permalink)
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The thing I have a hard time believing is... if you go light speed to a location in the universe and return, everyone has aged. Not that I have a hard time believing it, but I have a hard time believing it'd be anything to worry about.

I understand the faster something goes, the more time slows down, but what does that have to do with, say, getting to Mars from Earth in only a few minutes/seconds? Technically, you'd just be a few minutes/seconds younger, right?

If anything, wouldn't it just be a faster way to get someplace?
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Old 04-15-2004, 11:31 AM   #15 (permalink)
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Stompy, yes, but the farther you go, the longer you have been gone.

You can get to anyplace in the universe in as close to zero time as you want, barring huge and massive technical problems, by your perspective. However, a long amount of time will have passed at both the destination and at the departure point.

The huge and massive technical problems are larger than you think, in addition.

For instance, going to the far side of the milky way and back would take about about 1 million years earth time. You might only spend a few moments on the trip yourself, but a million years is a long time.

The second part is, accellerating something to near light speed takes a huge amount of energy. It also takes a huge amount of propellant, so much so that the only ways I know of to generate the propellant is to use interstellar hydrogen, or figure out total mass conversion.

But yes, if we had "free" lightspeed travel, a trip to mars and back would not cause crippling amounts of time to pass at either end.
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Old 04-15-2004, 01:14 PM   #16 (permalink)
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One interesting conclusion from the time slow-down is that, to light, no time passes at all. Since it's moving at the speed of light, it reaches its destination at the same moment (for it) that it left its starting point. Basically, light doesn't age!

Another interesting conclusion is that a particle with a very high decay rate that's created by energy hitting paticles in the Earth's upper atmosphere, under Newtonian physics, would never be able to reach the Earth's surface in time before it decays. However, since the particle is moving at speeds very close to c, it actually does reach the earth's surface in time to produce a blip on a radiation detector (and sometimes damage electronic devices!)

Lastly, one thing that's hard for people to grasp is that speed is all relative. If I'm moving away from earth at relativistic speeds, and I had a window, then people on Earth would look at my watch and see the seconds going by much slower than normal, and when I looked down at Earth, I'd see their watches moving really slowly. So, who's watch is "correct"? Well, both times are "correct." Since you're in different inertial frames, there is no time interaction between the two. Now, as soon as the ship slows down back to Earth's initial frame, that's when the time difference actually occurs and one watch ends up being the correct time (people on Earth, in this case), while the other one will have the incorrect time.
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Old 04-22-2004, 04:11 AM   #17 (permalink)
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In order to achieve warp speeds from even a Star Trek perspective we would have to first of all be able to store anti-matter and be able to allow the two to react in a controlled environment in order to harness the resulting energy.

In addition to that, we would need to create and harness a gravity field strong enough to bend the space-time continuum while striving to maintain our spaceship intact and keep it from being crushed by our artificial gravity well...

In all likelihood, humans are not going to experience faster-than-light travel (at least not for the next 100 to 1000 generations).
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Old 04-22-2004, 06:47 AM   #18 (permalink)
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Mojo, the problem with the table arguement is that you still have to pull the whole freakin table in order to get over there. Warping the fabric of space time to travel places would take extrodinary amounts of energy. Currently the only things that have enough of an effect on that "fabric" are black holes.
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Old 04-22-2004, 07:41 PM   #19 (permalink)
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I'm just thinking this interstellar space travel thing will never be all that practical or possible.
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Old 04-23-2004, 05:52 AM   #20 (permalink)
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The equation for time difference is this:

∆T = γT

T is the relative time and γ is 1/√( 1-β² ) and β is velocity/speed of light or v/c.

A spacecraft travelling at .01c that was gone for 365 days relative to earth will have a time difference of approx .4 hours. If the speed of the craft was .7c and was gone for the same amount of time, the time relative to the spacecraft with respect to earth will be approx. 146 days behind earth's time.
This means that what felt like 365 days to the astronauts was actually 365 days and .4 hours on earth or in the latter case 511 days on earth.
If the speed of the craft was .99c what seems like 1 year for the astronauts was actually 7 years on earth.

Last edited by supersix2; 04-23-2004 at 11:11 AM..
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Old 04-24-2004, 09:44 AM   #21 (permalink)
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if light has matter, or a substance if you will, in theory warp speed is possible, but it requires understanding the physics of it all...
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Old 04-24-2004, 09:11 PM   #22 (permalink)
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TawG what do you base your claim on?

At any rate I've been thinking:

The biggest limit to space travel that we have right now is proper radiation shielding and funding. Propulsion and the length of time it takes to travel great distances is not as much of a problem because quite frankly there are people willing to devote their lives to exploring the solar system in person.
As I said the main problem is radiation sheilding. As of right now astronauts who are simply oribitting the earth, are still somewhat within the magnetic field of the earth, are exposed to 3 years worth of radiation in a week. That is the main reason why astronauts only make space missions every 2 to 3 years. The magnetic field around the earth deflects cosmic radiation. Once outside this magnetic field the human body is bombarded with massive amounts of cosmic radiation. This radiation increases with solar activity. When the Apollo missions were being flow scientists paid careful attention to solar weather so that the astronauts would be in space during a time of low solar activity which mean lower amounts of radiation. However if the sun had given off a solar flare or other radiation burst the astronauts would have been fried.
However, the Apollo missions were about a week long so accurate predictions could be made and the window of saftey was fairly wide. A mission to Mars would take well over a year and the ability to predict solar weather is almost impossible. Plus the solar activity cycles are close to yearly cycles.
So once again the main problem with long distance space travel is shield from cosmic radiation. The best protection would be a magnetic field similar to that of the earth's.
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Old 04-26-2004, 01:32 PM   #23 (permalink)
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So once again the main problem with long distance space travel is shield from cosmic radiation.
I was just thinking of that when I had the misfortune of seeing a good portion of Red Planet the other day at work. One flare fried the entire ship and almost derailed the entire mission; that part definitely would apply to actual missions that I imagine will be launch in the coming decades.
Some kind of shields like the kind in Star Trek will have to developed to defend against the small space trash/specks that can be lethal at high speeds, radiation, and other hazards out there. It will be interesting the first time people pass through the heliopause and just what kind of vessel that will be.
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Old 04-28-2004, 06:11 AM   #24 (permalink)
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Originally posted by Slavakion
Oh. I had thought that as an object approached light-speed that its mass increased proportionally until it became infinite (therefore making FTL speed travel both impossible and impractical ). But I could have missed a big part of it.

The reason this appears to be impossible is that it would require an infinite amount of thrust to propel the craft. FTL travel, especially in the context of bending space, supposes a much more advanced technique of propulsion than Newton's first law.

When you think in terms of Special Relativity and quantum mechanics, mass becomes much less important.

- trust this: ANYTHING is possible...
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Old 04-28-2004, 11:24 PM   #25 (permalink)
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Originally posted by stingc
A common misunderstanding of special relativity is that you can't go faster than light.
Actually, relativity does not disallow FTL travel. It dictates that a mass travelling at sublight cannot reach the speed of light, as it would theoretically eventually acheive infinite density and require an infinite amount of energy to perpetuate momentum when it reaches C. Light is (theoretically) both a particle and a wave, so that's how it achieves its speed.

Wormholes, however, sidestep the momentum issue by simply bringing Point A and Point B closer together in spacetime, rather than making the object move at extreme speeds. The energy requirements (both in sheer amount and amount of transfer within a given block of time) of punching a hole through the fabric of spacetime and keeping it both physically stable and safe for transportation, however, is also just as theoretical as the possibility that a wormhole could exist in the first place. It's like trying to determine how much money to charge for a toll road when you don't know where the road is going to be built or how big you will need it to be.

Edit: typo
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Old 05-13-2004, 01:21 PM   #26 (permalink)
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Sorry I'm asking this so late after the thread was started, but...

If time slows as you approach the speed of light, wouldn't that imply that you are traveling slower the faster you go?

Velocity= Distance/time

So for a ship to travel at .99C for one year(according to the ships clocks) to return to earth seven years later mean that the ship was actually travelling slower than .99C since the distance travelled would be the same, but the time the ship was gone would have increased causing the resulting velocity to be lower?

As for not being able to accelerate something beyond the light, What would happen if you got a ship up just below the speed of light and fired a gun foward? Would the bullet accelerate to lightspeed and then just stop accelerating?

What about light speed itself, light travels slower when it's going through something,i.e. the atmoshpere. So does that mean it speeds back up after leaving the atmoshpere, and if it does what accelerates it?

If light itself doesn't have any mass, then why is it affected by gravity, which is the force of attraction between masses?
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Old 05-13-2004, 02:31 PM   #27 (permalink)
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Quote:
Originally posted by MageB420666
Sorry I'm asking this so late after the thread was started, but...

If time slows as you approach the speed of light, wouldn't that imply that you are traveling slower the faster you go?

Velocity= Distance/time

So for a ship to travel at .99C for one year(according to the ships clocks) to return to earth seven years later mean that the ship was actually travelling slower than .99C since the distance travelled would be the same, but the time the ship was gone would have increased causing the resulting velocity to be lower?
Well, remember it is all relative. Time doesn't speed up as such. Your second hand on your watch would not appear to be spinning faster! However the clock on your spaceship would appear to have counted fewer seconds then the one on Earth.

You don't define a point of reference? Space ship travelling at .99c relative to the Earth? Then the ship is travelling at the speed of .99c. On the spaceship you are also travelling at the same speed. You have time contraction and length contraction by the same factor (lorentz transform I think? I can't remember totally). So luckily they cancel out!

If I'm travelling at almost the speed of light relative to elswhere and turn on my torch the photons coming out of it will still move at c relative to me.

Quote:
Originally posted by MageB420666
As for not being able to accelerate something beyond the light, What would happen if you got a ship up just below the speed of light and fired a gun foward? Would the bullet accelerate to lightspeed and then just stop accelerating?
Again it's relative! If I'm on this ship (in an inertial frame i.e. not accelerating) then my world is not moving. I then fire a gun and it will travel at a bullet speed! Now if I'm on the Earth where the ship is already moving with a speed of approximately c the bullet will accelerate as much as allowed without reaching c (as it can not have infinite energy to reach it). However due to relativistic effects the bullet will still appear to move as you would expect. It's a huge concept to get to grips to but it's true.

Quote:
Originally posted by MageB420666
What about light speed itself, light travels slower when it's going through something,i.e. the atmoshpere. So does that mean it speeds back up after leaving the atmoshpere, and if it does what accelerates it?
The short answer is that it doesn't slow down as such. The 'speed' you are referring to is the speed it can propogate through a medium. This is for the photons to be absorbed by electrons and then readmitted. So in effect nothing accelerates it. The photons travel at c through all mediums it's just that the medium gets in the way and appears to slow it down. WHen their are no electrons in the way it will travel naturally at c.

Quote:
Originally posted by MageB420666
If light itself doesn't have any mass, then why is it affected by gravity, which is the force of attraction between masses?
Although they don't have mass they do have momentum and so interact with other objects. General relativity suggests that gravity is actually the warping of space-time by a massive body. Imagine if you stretch a piece of cling-film over a bowl. Place a heavy item such as a large marble in the middle and it will stretch the plastic and make a well shape. This warping of space-time is what light actually follows. This explains the Newtonian concept of gravity involving two-masses.

Well I think that's it but ask again about any points I haven't made well. I'm sure that it won't make a lot of sense! I tried!

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Old 05-13-2004, 09:19 PM   #28 (permalink)
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As you said, speed is relative, so if I'm traveling on the ship, object a, and I fire a missile( I just remembered that bullets stop accelerating once they leave the muzzle), object b, then an observer on earth, object c, would only notice b accelerate to just under light speed and stay there, while on a I would notice b accelerating up to it's normal relative speed to a. but an observer on c would just see it accelerate to just under c? Your right that is a large concept to understand, but it has never been proven, it is all theory, not neccesarily truth.

And the point you make of relativity in terms of a point of reference to calculate speed doesn't answer anything, to put this idea in layman's terms I am reffering to the 'fabric of space'. This means that position and velocity are not based relative to other objects, but to the actual fabric of existence.Which would mean that there is some base speed of zero that is independant of every object in the universe. So for the limitation of the speed of light to exist, wouldn't all speed have to be set relative to this reference? So then an object travelling at .99C away from Earth could be travelling at 1.1C relative to the actual fabric of space.

To put that idea in a little easier to follow form, let's say that space is the ground, reaching out to infinity, and all the planets, stars, etc. are just cars driving in every which direction over the ground. Wouldn't the speed of the photon be calculated in reference to a point on the ground instead of one of the moving vehicles?
I hope that made it a little easier to understand.

About the black hole thing, I didn't think of that and it seems to make sense.
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Old 05-14-2004, 01:10 AM   #29 (permalink)
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Quote:
Originally posted by MageB420666

And the point you make of relativity in terms of a point of reference to calculate speed doesn't answer anything, to put this idea in layman's terms I am reffering to the 'fabric of space'. This means that position and velocity are not based relative to other objects, but to the actual fabric of existence.Which would mean that there is some base speed of zero that is independant of every object in the universe. So for the limitation of the speed of light to exist, wouldn't all speed have to be set relative to this reference? So then an object travelling at .99C away from Earth could be travelling at 1.1C relative to the actual fabric of space.
There is no such thing as a fabric of space (well it is assumed). Relativity assumes that absoloute time and absoloute space DO NOT exist. This is in comparison to Newtonian which suggests there is such a concept. However Newtonian can't explain the bending of light and acceleration close to c. So as before you muct have an inertial (non accelerating) frame of reference to take measurements from.

Quote:
Originally posted by MageB420666
To put that idea in a little easier to follow form, let's say that space is the ground, reaching out to infinity, and all the planets, stars, etc. are just cars driving in every which direction over the ground. Wouldn't the speed of the photon be calculated in reference to a point on the ground instead of one of the moving vehicles?
I hope that made it a little easier to understand.

About the black hole thing, I didn't think of that and it seems to make sense.
Looking at this now it is just the same question as above. The ground ('space') you refer to is not inertial so can not be taken as a frame of reference. Alternatively if you are referring to some type of Ether I believe many experiments have looked for this and all have failed.
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Old 05-16-2004, 07:55 PM   #30 (permalink)
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>>first of all, sorry that you were shot down so quickly. people really should be prefacing their comments with "anything is possible" because we understand so little, anything indeed is possible. we think that a lot of things, like warp speed travel, are highly unlikely given our current understanding of physics.

>>the "ground" to which you are referring is gravitational, it seems to me, so I think it would have to be warped with massive energies, precluding our ability to navigate "over" it

>>strangely, ether has long been discredited but we now believe in "virtual particles" that permeate all of space, including empty space. the fact that it is all-pervasive makes it the New Age Ether/Fabric of Space (http://universe.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/darkenergy.html)
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Old 05-17-2004, 01:35 AM   #31 (permalink)
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By an ether I'm talking about a Universal Inertial Frame. These dark energies/matter are applying a force to the entire universe causing it to expand and accelerate. This would mean that this energy/matter is accelerating in order to provide the force and so not be inertial.

Current understanding/theory/equations would probably discredit such an idea but we still lack a universal theory so who knows.
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