Cnn screw up

[Nspire]

When CNN was covering the Columbia thing, did anyone notice the little message at the bottom of the screen that was telling info about the explosion? It said that the shuttle was speeding through the sky at "18 times the speed of light" a few times. No wonder the shuttle blew up.

[Kaiine]

:`(

[Demon Hunter]

umm im pretty sure it's imposible for anything but particles of light (photons) to travel at the speed of light, let alone 18 times.

[Ultima Avatar]

I wasn't watching CNN. I don't watch the news. Nothign to see: going to war, blah blah, Columbia tragedy, blah blah, going to war, blah blah, affairs in office, blah blah, economy crashing, blah blah, rapist found and strung up, blah blah.

[Nspire]

Quote[/b] (Demon Hunter @ Feb. 06 2003,2:01)]umm im pretty sure it's imposible for anything but particles of light (photons) to travel at the speed of light, let alone 18 times.
Yup, that's why I said CNN screwed up. It should have been sound instead of light.

[Tom Kazansky]

Anything that exceeds the speed of light would have an infinite mass, which is why it's impossible to exceed the speed of light.  For photons to travel at the speed of light they must be massless.

[Demon Hunter]

ok Nspire i read ya now http://www.cgalliance.net/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/tounge.gif

Tom, photons do travel at the speed of light because they are released from the atom when the electron changes orbit.

Definition from my astronomy book:

photon: " a particle of visible light or other electromagnetic radiation."

[Mr_Eon]

It's a particle. It's a wave.

It's a wavicle... ;)

And I do believe they managed to accelerate something to faster than the speed of light, but I'm fairly sure it required truly obscene amounts of energy.

Eon

[Demon Hunter]

rgr that Eon,
Photons are waves and particles, kinda wierd if ya think about it. I cant quite rap my brain around that one. http://www.cgalliance.net/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif

[Mr_Eon]

Aarrghh! How can something be a pointsource entity AND a waveform... It breaks my brain...

:/

Eon

[Katarn85]

A wave or a particle? The reason why light is considered both is because it behaves like both.

I think it's interesting how Einstein theorized in his theory of relativity that time slows down the closer one gets to the speed of light. It comes to the point where the speed of light is completely devoid of the passage of time. In other words, if I were to climb into a spaceship and, moving at the speed of light, start a billion-or-so year journey to the nearest neighboring galaxy, it would seem to me as if no time had passed.

[MaxX]

"umm im pretty sure it's imposible for anything but particles of light (photons) to travel at the speed of light, let alone 18 times."

Never say never... http://www.cgalliance.net/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif

[amorphus88]

hrm... from what I've seen of the theory of relativity... I don't think its that... the word's not "credible"... uhm... maybe something else. but it looks kind of iffy to me.

[Mr_Eon]

It's also been superceded by a more complete theory - I believe. Albert Einstein was on the right track, but he didn't have the instrumentation to work with that our modern guys have got.

Still - I'll take his word over yours, no offence!

Eon

[Ultima Avatar]

What's the theory Eon?
I needa know. I think that if we can break the speed of light, we'll eventually be able to go backwards in time! Or is time travel only future? Can one never go to the past? MORE DEBATE! Yea!

[Mr_Eon]

Well, it comes in two bits - the special and general theories of relativity.

Here's a link from Bartleby

http://www.bartleby.com/173/

[rizz]

lol i did all that as part of my degree... man it bent my head.

Getting a 12 foot pole into a 8 foot barn.. O_o

[amorphus88]

well how high is the barn?  and how wide?

and are there chickens in there?

Eon - none taken.

[rizz]

LOL

Pole in a barn for nubs...
                           _ _ _ _
O                         /         \
|--------------       |_         |
^                        | |        |
Man Pole              Door      Wall
<--12ft---->          <---8ft--->

You have a runner running with a 12 foot pole towards an 8 foot barn. He is running near the speed of light (yes i know its silly). The basic priciple is that signals take a finite time to travel from one place to another.. i.e. nothing can go faster than the SOL.

So the runner runs into the barn.. the front end of the pole hits the back of the wall. But by the time the shock signal from the pole hitting the back wall reaches the runner, he has already entered the barn with the rest of the pole.

Then relatitvity catches up with him and everything flies out the barn (or the back wall breaks).

Its madness..truly madness.. i had an exam question calculating that. O_o

[amorphus88]

I thought you were talking about your head. like getting 20 megabytes into a 740kb floppy.

minimum width of the barn would have to be 8.95 feet for the pole to fit, if the barn was flat.

I don't want to bother figgering out the rest. you go on and have fun with your smrtness.

[rizz]

hehe the maths of it isnt really that hard at all. You just get the speed of the runner (v) and apply the Laurentz contraction factor (which is in one of eons links). The hard part is working out which way everything goes round and what gets faster/slower bigger/smaller etc..

O_o

[MaxX]

"I think that if we can break the speed of light, we'll eventually be able to go backwards in time! Or is time travel only future? Can one never go to the past? "

w00t! Time Travel...the FINAL frontier! http://www.cgalliance.net/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/tounge.gif

[Nspire]

How the heck did this go from a mistake CNN made to rocket science?! This one takes the cake for the "Wacky Off-topic" award.

[rizz]

lol does anything ever go to topic...

as for time travel i think the current theory is... that it is theoretically possible but you could only travel backwards and only as far as the point when it was first discovered. So pretty pointless.

Of course with time travel theres the whole paradox thing then which doesnt even bear thinking about

[SirLagalott]

Why would you only be able to go back as far it was invented? Is it like from that show '7 days' where the pod has to be "caught" after it goes faster than the speed of light around the world for a while?

[Ultima Avatar]

EH? Never saw 7 days....
I just realized, a lot of time travelling movies came out in the 80s: The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, Back to the Future 1-3...wow.

[rizz]

I dunno i just read it like about 5 years ago im sure some new and wild theories are about now

[Malohaut]

I'm no rocket scientiest, nor am I a physicist, but I've been trying to understand relativity for a while now with very little success, but I do have a few ideas, and I will be looking into that Bartleby link.

Time. Isn't it just a concept like negativity? You cannot have negative dimes, but in your head, if you take 1 dime from none, you have negative 1 dime. In the same way, isn't time just a concept where its man's attempt to keep track of the history of motion? Like a minute ago, I was back there, now I am here, and a minute later, I will be there. Time doesn't seem to be a tangable property like matter, and as such I can't see it being manipulated.

So when a person goes up to and exceeds the speed of light, that person can turn around and watch the light reflections of their past reach them, but in actuality, they are still in the present are they not? The only thing that has changed is the input signals from the light, but in actuality, his mass has not moved backwards in the mass of time and thus cannot change anything mass-wise.

Anyhoo, that's my 2 cents from an un-educated mind. Somebody please help show me the light. :)

[Katarn85]

From what I've read (which isn't much), time travel IS possible. One book I read even explained a possible procedure. It's long, so if anyone wants to hear it, let me know (I rarely have time for long posts anymore).

[Malohaut]

I'm certainly interested. Go ahead and post it. I'd like to see what it has to say.

[rizz]

Yeh i would like to see it.

[Katarn85]

Ok, here's what I heard.  It's highly theoretical, so feel free to bring arguments against it, if you wish.  I'm just recounting what I read.

 The procedure involves a wormhole, basically a bigger cousin of a black hole.  A wormhole is a tunnel through the space-time continuum (the fabric of reality, you might say), allowing (I think) instantaneous travel between the two end points.

 One must understand that by their very nature, wormholes tend to be unstable (generally the bigger they get, the more stable they are).  Anyways, imagine a wormhole which has one end that is stationary, while the other end is thrashing around at a great speed (let's say, for the purpose of conjecture, at about three-fourths of the speed of light).  Apply the theory of relativity here: the faster an object travels, the slower time moves.  Time is literally moving at a slower rate around the thrashing end.  Now imagine that (again, for the sake of conjecture) you've been camping for month on an asteroid that somehow has been orbiting the thrashing end of the wormhole.  Remember relativity again: what has been a month to you could be years to the stationary end of the wormhole.  Now you fire up your jetpack and launch yourself into the wormhole.  You come out the other end.  For you, a month has passed.  For those near the stationary end of the wormhole, let's say that it's been ten years.  You have essentially cheated time - you've traveled nine years and eleven months into the future.  Again, highly theoretical and strange.

 Another, "cleaner" time travel scenario (that I read so long ago that I don't remember how it works) involves creating a wormhole, and then using some gravity generator (natural - a planet or star - or artificial) to drag one end of the wormhole around the other until the tunnel of the wormhole is kinda twisted around itself, with the two ends right next to each other.  The book said that a ship could fly in the unaffected end and come out the affected end a month into the past.  Even though I haven't a clue how it all works, something tells me that gravity's correllation with the space-time continuum has some affect on time travel.  For those who don't know, gravity is the warping of the space-time continuum, hence bent starlight.  This is why black holes have such massive gravitational pulls - they are literally holes in the space-time continuum (stuff, in a sense, falls into them).

 Any thoughts?

[amorphus88]

that would create an endless philosophical paradox.

you're beginning to train to travel back in time, you train for months and months. woops. one day you suddenly appear. so you decide to not train anymore. why bother, right? *zip*, it's gone. BUT, you needed to train to get there in the first place, so how did you appear in the first place?