(fwd) Where Do We Go From Here?

Yep. Nowadays the problem is that even adding and subtracting without the aid of a calculator is becoming a rare talent. Look how many cashiers and burger flippers unless the register tells them how.

It does about triple. It peaks at approx 1.05 BTW.

Jerry

Yes, but the math was scaring people until Yeager went and flew the X-1...

(Just like a number of the country's finest flight surgeons were convinced, on some sort of theoretical grounds, that the Mercury astronauts were gonna keel over with some kind of weird heart trouble the moment they experienced zero-G orbital flight... once they actually tried it, Gordon Cooper (for example) described the experience as "the only time I was ever actually _comfortable_ in a pressure suit"!)

So when will someone build a spacecraft with enough impulse to theoretically push it well past the speed of light, and see what _actually_ happens?

(It's been pointed out that all observation of relativistic effects has to date been performed with subatomic particles accelerated by external fields, not with self-propelled objects of tangible size...)

-dave w

Hmmm. A life goal :)

This is incorrect.

I know it just a technicality but I disagree on one point.

it says you can not GO C IE you can not travel AT C not beyond C

if we could find a way to "skip" or "jump" past C then who knows.

pure speculation off course

also we have no idea WHY mass >

Perhaps Mass does *not* increase as you approach the speed of light. Perhaps only the perception of that mass, from the point of view of an observer standing still, increases. From the point of view of a traveller on a spaceship approaching C, all may remain quite normal, and it will appear to them that the rest of the universe has been distorted.

No disagreement there, and if it were just restricted to burger flippers it wouldn't be so bad. BTW, I can still take square roots the old fashioned way (if I have a lot of time on my hands).

Slide rule?

Tom

Wouldn't help your mass fraction any, though...

-dave w

Well, I can do it with a slide rule too, but I was thinking of synthetic division (pencil and paper method). I guess I can also do it by Newton's method, come to think of it. Penalty of being old.

EEEEWWWW!! That's why I got a slide rule in the first place!

Tom

Infinite from whose point of view? The point of view of someone standing still or the point of view of someone on the spaceship?

Obviously it does *not* take an infinite amount of power to accelerate something to the speed of light. For instance, the event horizon of a black hole is that point at which light cannot escape, because the black hole is pulling matter in faster than the speed of light. Since matter entering a black hole is going faster than the speed of light once it passes the event horizon, and since a black hole does not have an *infinite* amount of mass or gravitation, it therefore does *not* take an *infinite* amount of energy to go that fast. Also, light is travelling at the speed of light, and light sources do not have an

Then there is the question of inertia. A spaceship may gain mass as it accelerates, but perhaps it loses inertia, so it might take less and less fuel to accelerate each pound of mass.

Not for geeks with slide rules!

Bob Kaplow NAR # 18L TRA # "Impeach the TRA BoD" >>> To reply, remove the TRABoD!

By the way, if anyone is interested, here's a nice web site on the problem:

(I wonder how hard it would be to get a Project Daedalus to fly as an OddRoc/ FF entry? I've got a 1978 edition of the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society book on it, and it's got enough for a data packet...)

Nothing I've read suggests that matter going into a black hole accelerates faster than the speed of light, including Hawking's books and others.

tim

But what is Dark matter? If they think they know it all, they dont. There is another energy that we dont know about and do not know how it works. Just like electromagnetic fields. Till we detect them we wont know they exist. The theorys are close. But not correct.

RDH8

Robert,

I don't know if this is simply not the place for this discussion, or if I just don't feel like arguing it.

There's something about the way the statistics of quantum entanglement play out that has made me a bit cynical. It looks like you could send a message FTL, but when you crunch the numbers it turns out the error is exactly enough to kill any attempt to send the message.

Hawking seems to have a similar gut feeling, with his cosmic protection conjecture. He lost that bet. It seems that one can generate a naked singularity, but only under some very odd and extreme conditions that might not be possible.

I would suggest two books for you:

Black Holes and Time Warps by Kip Thorne

It will give you a feel for what's going on.

Zooty

PS: I just noticed that the signs in my local store say "10 Items or Fewer." This is great news! The economy's improving. Ph.D.s are finding jobs as checkout clerks in supermarkets.