Proposal for instant transmission of information, violating the speed of light.

[DevilMan]

It takes TIME. Though it's not much. How about this...

Have you ever watched/seen a lightning strike? That in and of itself should prove to you that it takes time.

The energy does NOT start flowing until the switch is flipped (Potential > Resistance) When it does flip, energy starts "flowing" from + to - . That "flow" is not an INSTANT happening. The actual "flow" has a beginning and an end and takes time. It takes but a split second, but it's time just the same.

So NO. All of the dominoes do NOT fall at the same time.

Electricity is like water in some ways. If you have a garden hose and you run it down a hill and turn the water on, it takes a minute for the water to get out the end. That's low resistance. If you take and hack off the hose right below the spigot, the water will still continue to run out the bottom end of the hose. If you run the hose uphill you will have more resistance. You hack off the hose at the spigot and the water runs back down out of the hose. This is a one way deal though.

If you take an extension cord and lay it on the ground and have it plugged into the wall and hack it apart the light at the end of the cord goes out. Is it instant? It looks to be, but think of it this way. When you hack it, you cut off both the outgoing and the incoming electrons. You stop them from having a path to travel. So you say it's "instant" BUT when you hack it off, is there still electricity in the cord? So if there was you wouldn't be able to pick it up correct? There isn't. It's a dead cord. Now the live end still has power because it has a source and return. But it's not flowing because the path is broken.

Think of it as when you cut the hose off... the water still flows. Though there is no source anymore. Either way it still flows. It's just a matter of which is positive and which is negative as to which way it goes.

I think that's about the best I'll be able to do for this subject... And sorry if it's not in big enough words for ya.

DM

[nerobro]

What is the term for that? I would love to research this very topic but I do not know the terms of art to search for.

I'ts springy for several reasons. it's not just "one term" Impedence, Inductance, current, voltage.

When attached to the end of a battery, a wire has a static charge. Matching the end of that battery. As the charge is applied to the wire, there's a small current, that current is limited by voltage, voltage determines how fast the charge builds. As the charge moves, it also builds an electromagnetic field, that too works against the charge.

Honestly, all the factors that apply to this is quite a bit over my head.

It might help if you research switching power supplies. they're dependant on electrical intertia, and the fact that electricity is springy.

[halB]

It takes TIME. Though it's not much. How about this...

Have you ever watched/seen a lightning strike? That in and of itself should prove to you that it takes time.

The energy does NOT start flowing until the switch is flipped (Potential > Resistance) When it does flip, energy starts "flowing" from + to - . That "flow" is not an INSTANT happening. The actual "flow" has a beginning and an end and takes time. It takes but a split second, but it's time just the same.

So NO. All of the dominoes do NOT fall at the same time.

Electricity is like water in some ways. If you have a garden hose and you run it down a hill and turn the water on, it takes a minute for the water to get out the end. That's low resistance. If you take and hack off the hose right below the spigot, the water will still continue to run out the bottom end of the hose. If you run the hose uphill you will have more resistance. You hack off the hose at the spigot and the water runs back down out of the hose. This is a one way deal though.

If you take an extension cord and lay it on the ground and have it plugged into the wall and hack it apart the light at the end of the cord goes out. Is it instant? It looks to be, but think of it this way. When you hack it, you cut off both the outgoing and the incoming electrons. You stop them from having a path to travel. So you say it's "instant" BUT when you hack it off, is there still electricity in the cord? So if there was you wouldn't be able to pick it up correct? There isn't. It's a dead cord. Now the live end still has power because it has a source and return. But it's not flowing because the path is broken.

Think of it as when you cut the hose off... the water still flows. Though there is no source anymore. Either way it still flows. It's just a matter of which is positive and which is negative as to which way it goes.

I think that's about the best I'll be able to do for this subject... And sorry if it's not in big enough words for ya.

DM

Did you read the article I linked to? How do you think this relates to what I proposed. Even if I was wrong, I still feel that it relates in some way to my proposal. That's all I want.

[DevilMan]

Did you read the article I linked to? How do you think this relates to what I proposed. Even if I was wrong, I still feel that it relates in some way to my proposal. That's all I want.

Yes I read the article and yes it's seems to be related to your original question. They seem to still be having the same issue though. Not enough concrete evidence to say with certainty that it works/exists. Maybe you should try and get hired on by them... you may bring in new ways of thinking that they haven't come up with to actually put to the test...

I did read it... It still reads to me that it's not possible. I'm not saying there isn't anything faster than the speed of light. Just saying it's gonna be hard as hell to prove/measure/recreate/put in a bottle to sell.

DM

[nerobro]

That article doesn't "really" state anything is moving faster than the speed of light. they're using controller boards to make a pulse "appear" to be moving faster than the speed of light. The signal that's created is "mushed" so it looks like the sort of things that come out of pulsars.

The information is pre-packaged, and layed into the wire using precise timing to make the signal appear to have been generated by a faster than light event.

The signal isn't actually traveling down the wire faster that the speed of light.

Also, judging by how they have that rigged up, the signals they're creating are going to be really noisy.

DevilMan, you should reconsider some of your analogies. the extention cord one doens't ring very true. It would take some time to go over all the points, but when dealing with a/c things get a lot more funny than the DC that was proposed.

The water and hose analogy doesn't work so well either. Your resistance example is actually potential, or voltage, as the case may be. Water "height" is a good way to explain voltage, pipe size gives a good feel of resistance. however, you need to treat electrical circuts as if all circuts have water in them all the time. Just at different "heights"

[DevilMan]

It was more or less to relate that it's not instant. It takes a minute for the water to get from one end to the other.

Yes there is a big diff in AC/DC as well as "ground free" electrical issues.

Some I know, and others I don't care to know. And none of it I know well enough to teach the subject. But the point was to show how it takes a minute for the water to get from point A to point B. More resistance, the longer it takes, etc...

DM

[tosburn3]

Wow, this board is awesome. I come on here to find advice about a gun, and I find crap like this.

I just might become a regular poster here .

Anyways, some pretty cool ideas have been thrown around here. As a Physics PhD student this is the kind of stuff I think about from time to time and my comments could possibly shed some light on things.

The original idea is definitely thinking outside the box, but it is pretty impossible to send FTL info electromagnetically.

I think the water/dam analogy makes it slightly tough to help understand this. A better analogy would probably be a pump/valve system.

A pump keeps a constant pressure on a water pipe in a loop. Opposite from the pump there is a closed valve. The pump pressurized the entire pipe prior to the valve opening, so that energy has already been stored outside of the pump. When the valve opens, the water may move instantly at the valve, but the energy used to move it was the energy which was already in the pipe. The water at the valve then sends information at the speed of sound through the pipe until it reaches the pump and the pump powers the rest.

For the circuit you described, lets assume that we start with empty space with no voltage. To obtain a voltage, you must bring in charges from infinity and arrange them in such a way that you have the desired voltage difference between two points. This is done chemically in a battery (alternatively you could use motional emf/Faraday's law, but for the purposes of this thought experiment lets just do it the easy way). As you bring charges close to each other to obtain the desired potential, the electric fields at all points in space change such that the net potential gained around any closed path is zero. Energy is stored in these electric fields.

When you turn the switch on, electrons may move instantly at the switch, but the energy comes from the electric fields that were induced when you "built" your battery originally. Then information is sent at the speed of light NOT NECCESARILY THROUGH THE WIRE but via the shortest path between the switch and the battery. This part differs slightly from the pump analogy. Then the battery uses its energy to drive the current from then on out.

This argument was mostly based on electrostatics, but it leads to questions like "but if the energy stored in the fields drives the initial current, then the electric field changed so the potential gained around a loop is no longer zero before the info gets back to the battery". This is a true statement, and this actually happens in electrodynamics, as can be seen from energy gains in a loop from motional emf.

[tosburn3]

That article doesn't "really" state anything is moving faster than the speed of light. they're using controller boards to make a pulse "appear" to be moving faster than the speed of light. The signal that's created is "mushed" so it looks like the sort of things that come out of pulsars.

The information is pre-packaged, and layed into the wire using precise timing to make the signal appear to have been generated by a faster than light event.

The signal isn't actually traveling down the wire faster that the speed of light.

Also, judging by how they have that rigged up, the signals they're creating are going to be really noisy.

DevilMan, you should reconsider some of your analogies. the extention cord one doens't ring very true. It would take some time to go over all the points, but when dealing with a/c things get a lot more funny than the DC that was proposed.

The water and hose analogy doesn't work so well either. Your resistance example is actually potential, or voltage, as the case may be. Water "height" is a good way to explain voltage, pipe size gives a good feel of resistance. however, you need to treat electrical circuts as if all circuts have water in them all the time. Just at different "heights"

+1

[tosburn3]

However, spacetime bending aside, FTL information exchange is not strictly prohibited by special relativity, it is just really tough because the things that you normally use to carry the information are in fact required to obey the speed limit.

This can be seen in phenomenon such as quantum entanglement, where no particles or energy move faster than the speed of light, but a signal can be sent.

A more practical example is a shadow. Lets assume that you have superhuman speed and wave your hand in front of a projector at half the speed of light. Far enough away, the propogation of the shadow on the screen can occur faster than light even though no particles or energy had to move FTL to see it happen.

----------------------------

The really long rod kinda has me stumped. The first thing that came to mind was that mechanical information propogates through solids at their speed of sound. This makes me think that it is impossible because the rod would flex with that flex point propogating at the speed of sound.

However, it was assumed in the problem that the rod was perfectly rigid, and thought should be given to determine whether or not this is possible. Lets say you have an elementary particle in its ground state (perfectly rigid) and God conducts an experiment where he sends FTL information over very SHORT distances by rotating the elementary particle. But this opens up a whole can of worms, like is it even possible to measure length scales that short (see planck length or even more extremely the holographic principle). We simply don't know the laws of physics for this type of situation.

The problem arises in large scale when I think about how info would travel through a rod in the limit where the "spring tension" between two atoms in the lattice approaches infinity. This would simulate a perfectly rigid rod. As the spring tension approaches infinity, then by my understanding of the problem, the speed of sound would also approach infinity which violates special relativity because both energy and particles (phonons) would move faster than light. However, this result comes from the Schrodinger equation, which DOES NOT take into account special relativity. I would have to redo the problem using the Dirac equation, which makes things tougher (however from a statistical mechanics point of view this is no big deal becasue problems in the ultra relativistic realm tend to be easier than those in the non relativistic realm).

Anyways, I will have to get back to you, but I don't think it is possible to do this unless you have a freakin huge elementary particle.

[athomas]

The water analogy for electricity is great on the basic scale, but it doesn't take into consideration how electrons really move. Electricity being springy is much the same. It comes up short at this level of discussion. Electricity isn't springy, its instant. However, the medium that it moves in is actually springy. If we could operate in a perfect superconductor, without any outside interference, then we could theoretically cause electrons across an infinate distance to move instantly. The electron doesn't actually move, but the propogation of movement between electrons is. However, as soon as you introduce resistance, capacitance, or reactance into the the mix, it becomes springy and you get lag in the system. Any lag at all reduces the speed of propogation to less than the speed of light.

The propogation of information with a switch closure suffers the same fate as the twisting rod. With the rod its a mechanical failure. With electricity, it is also a mechanical failure. It is physical matter that limits the device in each scenario.

[halB]

However, spacetime bending aside, FTL information exchange is not strictly prohibited by special relativity, it is just really tough because the things that you normally use to carry the information are in fact required to obey the speed limit.

This can be seen in phenomenon such as quantum entanglement, where no particles or energy move faster than the speed of light, but a signal can be sent.

A more practical example is a shadow. Lets assume that you have superhuman speed and wave your and in front of a projector at half the speed of light. Far enough away, the propogation of the shadow on the screen can occur faster than light even though no particles or energy had to move FTL to see it happen.

AWESOME!!! DUDE AWESOME!!!

That shadow idea is blowing my mind currently. It exploits the upscale in the size of the shadow no? So that once the shadow is more than twice its real size, it should be moving faster than the speed of light? I'm trying to see if I understand this.

That thing about moving the atom in its ground state is also very outstanding. Stay tuned, I have a new idea I have been working on for a couple of months that I shall soon publish to this board.

[tosburn3]

The water analogy for electricity is great on the basic scale, but it doesn't take into consideration how electrons really move. Electricity being springy is much the same. It comes up short at this level of discussion. Electricity isn't springy, its instant. However, the medium that it moves in is actually springy. If we could operate in a perfect superconductor, without any outside interference, then we could theoretically cause electrons across an infinate distance to move instantly. The electron doesn't actually move, but the propogation of movement between electrons is. However, as soon as you introduce resistance, capacitance, or reactance into the the mix, it becomes springy and you get lag in the system. Any lag at all reduces the speed of propogation to less than the speed of light.

The propogation of information with a switch closure suffers the same fate as the twisting rod. With the rod its a mechanical failure. With electricity, it is also a mechanical failure. It is physical matter that limits the device in each scenario.

Not exactly... Electrical info travels at the speed of light, which is close to instant but not quite.

Even a perfect superconductor (which is possible, but not practical over such distances) would be restricted to relaying the information at the speed of light. It turns out that Maxwell's equations inherantly incorporate special relativity in them, so a full treatment of electrodynamics would show this.

But when you study circuits as an engineer you make "electrostatic" approximations that eliminate lots of phenomena, such as info travelling at the speed of light. To really dig into the subject, you must transform into the Lorentz gauge (see gauge freedom) which leads to the "retarded potentials" which are the solution to the inhomogeneous equations for the scalar and vector potentials in this gauge. This gives the fully time dependent potentials as an integral over the charges and currents, and they depend on the "retarded time" which is the normal time minus the time it takes for light to reach the observation point from the source. The retarded potentials then lead to the Jefimenko equations, which give the electric and magnetic fields as a function of the charges, currents, and retarded time.

Only then can you see phenomena like light arise purely from electromagnetic arguments.

Take my word for it, the math sucks. But if you are truely interested you can read the last few chapters of Introduction of Electrodynamics by Griffiths.

[tosburn3]

AWESOME!!! DUDE AWESOME!!!

That shadow idea is blowing my mind currently. It exploits the upscale in the size of the shadow no? So that once the shadow is more than twice its real size, it should be moving faster than the speed of light? I'm trying to see if I understand this.

That thing about moving the atom in its ground state is also very outstanding. Stay tuned, I have a new idea I have been working on for a couple of months that I shall soon publish to this board.

Thats the idea, but unfortunately this cannot be used to transfer information because the shadow only appears to be moving faster than light to the observer. Here is a cut from the wikipedia page about shadows:

"The projected shadow may appear to have moved faster than the speed of light, but there is no actual physical manifestation moving upon the surface. The misconception is that the edge of a shadow "moves" along a wall, when in actuality the increase of a shadow's length is part of a new projection, which will propagate at the speed of light from the object of interference."

Its kinda tough to grasp how this apparent FTL travel cannot convey information, but if you think about it for a while you can get your head around it.

[DevilMan]

I think that giving a "shadow" substance is the problem here. It's not an amount of dark light or something. It's the lack of light. Dark isn't something that can be measured. But lack of light can be.

DM

[tosburn3]

I think that giving a "shadow" substance is the problem here. It's not an amount of dark light or something. It's the lack of light. Dark isn't something that can be measured. But lack of light can be.

DM

Thats the whole point, because a shadow isn't really anything it can move faster than light. If it was made of something then it couldn't. Its like a technicality.