How to have light move faster than C

The BBQ Pit
562

Indeed.

Of course, we’ve repeatedly mentioned that it’s a bullshit chain of thought.

I know I personally asked the question in this very thread (and I note you’ve also made the same point in this very thread): why did the OPERA team even post the results if they were afraid of “the man”? They obviously weren’t afraid of it and would have been thrilled if the results checked out.

Just about every scientist would love to make that kind of earth-shattering discovery or even just see that kind of discovery be verified. Legions of grad students would suddenly have new stuff to work on.

It’s a bizarre belief shared by lots of people, including crackpots, that scientists form cabals to suppress knowledge and preserve/protect known theory. It’s just not true in the modern day. It’s not even really possible. Too many different countries/creeds/etc are involved. It would take a conspiracy theory of Illuminati proportions to pull off.

563

Trinopus, I am not sure why you seem like you got up from the wrong side of the bed.

I said you may not consider that this counts, and note that the crystal stopping light for a minute was not even the example I was looking for, what I was looking for was a photon that had been stopped for a very short moment (very short) in a BEC.

This was seemingly more stopped than stored, though that might be an issue of interpretation.

Again I accept that this differs from stopping a normal particle, but still it is stopped and may still exist.

Indeed a static electric/magnetic field can be considered to be similar to a stopped photon.

They could also be argued to have mass.

But again, please note that I never said that any of this is the same thing as a photon having a rest mass, and I actually pointed out that you would probably not consider this to justify the statement.

And I never said a photon had mass, but rather that SR it really stretching a point with mass saying photons do and don’t.

And may I note this, particles rest masses do not increase with velocity, the mass a particle does gain is controversial as another poster pointed out, but a particle with rest mass has the same ‘mass’ at any velocity while another definition of mass does change.

And then I really am not sure where the line is drawn, does a particle create more gravity when in motion in e=mc2 is to be held up?

Even then I can think of how to break Newtons laws of motion if inertia in increased by a mass being in motion, 2 counter rotating gyro’s could be thrust to one end of a ship, the rotation could be stopped and then the less massive gyro ‘propellant’ could be stopped without imparting as much on the other end of the ship, this could be repeated to make an inertial drive that would logically break the law of thermodynamics.

This makes me wonder if the claim that mass increases can be claimed to have anything to do with inertial or gravitational mass.

And if mass does not increase with velocity, if it is no harder to accelerate something, then what does that say about SR’s claim about it becoming harder and harder to accelerate as mass increases near the speed of light?

That no longer seems to balance with Newtons Laws and Thermodynamics.

So what then can be said of SR’s definition of mass?

564

I have not been dishonest once, and you will not find an example.
Disagreeing does not equal dishonesty.

565

(Ah, I missed your earlier mention here. I didn’t CTRL-F my way all the way back to that page of the thread…)

566

There are many areas of science that have been effected by vested interests.
I will not give more examples that GMO and Cigarettes, but I am aware of many more.

What motive would exist, I am uncertain, it could simply be zealotry, or genuine conspiracy to keep a branch of science hidden.

But this would go beyond the scope of this thread.

567

You said something more:

You told me that you didn’t care what the actual answer was, that your mind was made up, that you wouldn’t even read a response that explained the facts, and that you were closed to debate.

That is only one small part of the basis of my charge of dishonesty.

Your own selective quoting and convenient amnesia regarding your own words is another.

In what way, exactly? A motionless electron has an electric field. How is this like a “stopped photon?”

568

Precisely, you can choose the path of blind trusting and know it was really found to be in error. The sheep.
Or you can choose the path of paranoia and be certain it was conspiracy. The nut.
Or you can admit that either is possible in a world which has a strange mix of transparency and corruption. Reserves judgement.

569

On the contrary, I was admitting that a stopped photon by such means may or may not be considered actually a stopped photon.
That may just be a press release term for a photon that is absorbed and recreated.

In other words I was saying no contest, if you don’t consider this to be a genuinely stopped photon I am not going to contradict you as I am not qualified to say in each instance this has been done if the photon could be said to exist as it is stopped.

Certainly in the case of the crystal I would say the photon is probably not to be considered truly stopped.

What the case would be in the other experiments, including the one I originally alluded to but can’t find a reference for, I don’t know.

I was not saying that the photon was stopped and had a rest mass, indeed if the photon was stopped I am uncertian how you would argue it has a rest mass.

This is all just a case of you mistrusting me as I am on the opposite side of an argument.

I can’t be bothered wading though other misconceptions you have gained of me, but I have not been dishonest.

I was not envisioning a single charged particle, more of an electric dipole mixed with a magnetic field.

It would create a similar electromagnetic field, as that is what light it.

A magnetic field around a solenoid might have same minor degree of self induction from acceleration of the magnet, though I have never heard of this, if so it could lead to a tiny increase of inertia in an energized electromagnet.

To make this easier to model if might be best to imagine an extremely large solenoid on an astronomical size so that the delay in the adjustment of the magnetic field becomes obvious, this might allow some kind of interaction with it’s previous position. Indeed that actually seems certain unless the speed of light is violated.

But you could argue that self induction does not equal mass, but we do not really know for sure that inertia is not a form of self induction anyway.

570

Expansion on the idea of self induction from a solenoid with a steady DC current…

Ok, let’s say we imagine a solenoid of about 1 might minute across.
Next we will assume that the maximum velocity the change in a magnetic field can propagate is C.
And for now we will assume that there is no difficulty accelerating all parts of such a solenoid in a manner that does not lead to deformation of the solenoid or cause any issues with simultaneity.

Next we will look at the coil sitting stationary in space, the different parts are creating forces on the opposite side, if we simplify the loop into a square and identify the sides as left, right, top and bottom, the left and right sides would mutually repel each other.
And the top and bottom portions would mutually repel each other.

But this would all be equal, no net force, naturally.

Then we suddenly start moving it (left to right) all at once, as the left side moves it does not yet see that the right side has moved (as that would violate the speed of light) and so it notices that it is now closer to the right side than it was before, it is in a denser portion of the magnetic field and hence it repels more strongly.

Meanwhile the right side would see that it is further away from the left side since again the change in the magnetic field can only propagate at C.

So it finds it’s repulsion has decreased.

If the force of the left side has increased and the force on the right side decreased, then this creates a force that resists acceleration.

This seems impossible to deny, provided we do not let the speed of light exceed C, then a static magnetic field would create an increase of inertia, or an inertial like force.

This would seem substantially similar to a stationary photon being that a photon is merely an electromagnetic field that has decoupled from a wire or an otherwise moving electron.

571

Don’t read this…

At least don’t read this unless you understood and generally agreed with the electromagnet establishing an inertial like mass…

Also I am not sure if this is disproving the idea that the effect that must happen (if C is to be obeyed) is really equal to mass, or simply evidence that mass might be inverted and become negative, but here we go, negative mass!

The idea here is the same as the first, but instead of having repulsion imbalanced, we imbalance 2 attracting electromagnets.

So let’s use a pencil in the explanation, though we will need blow the pencil up to a huge size to observe the effect readily.

Let’s make 2 attracting electromagnetic coils (we could use permanent magnets, but let’s stick with coils for now) by winding wire loops on our pencil, we will put them quite close together, a few mm apart.

Now we will expand this model hugely till the gap between the coils is about a light second apart or so, now that is one huge pencil!

Now since the 2 DC coils are wound to be in mutual attraction (north and south poles facing) if we suddenly accelerate the pencil the rear coil will see it is closer to the old position it still sees the front coil at.
Hence it will be more strongly attracted to the tip of the pencil.

The front coil will see it is further away from the rear coil as it still sees the old position for the rear coil, this will result to reduced attraction to the rear of the pencil.

This will necessarily result in a net force assisting the acceleration!
This will actually cancel a portion of the inertia the pencil would have otherwise experienced.

If this effect was great enough and the mass low enough (forget the pencil and make the 2 magnets as light and strong as possible) and maybe a negative mass could be achieved.

Best not to try to even imagine that if unconstrained.

If it would be actual negative mass or a ‘trick’ of electromagnetism could be debated.

Additionally the accelerating magnetic field could be seen to be releasing photons just as an accelerating electron does.
So in this event it could be considered a variation of a photonic rocket, albeit one that is very efficient. With increasing redshift of it’s photonic propellant to other viewers.

In this way it maybe would not breach Newtons laws or the conservation of energy, but it could be a superb means to propel a ship around the universe.

This would not really bust any laws of physics as such, but it would kick the ass of all other methods to propel a spaceship.

Oh, but what if permanent magnets were used, where is the energy cost then?
Indeed where does Lenz Law come into play with this space drive magnetic motor?

Oh, and an electric dipole version could also be made provided Coulombic forces don’t exceed C.

572

BTW I have seen a patent on a variation of this idea that involved rapidly switching electromagnets so that a unidirectional thrust is produced, I have had that idea myself too.

But here is an idea being developed by the DOE for NASA that appears to be the same concept:

But my idea has the huge advantage of only requiring DC, or even permanent magnetism.
Even if switched versions had an advantage in practice, the conceptually simpler version I present removes many issues with trying to achieve extreme and perfect switching.

There are probably no sensible objections to my concept from working at least in a theoretical model.
This is a better theoretical proof of principle.

If the speed of light isn’t breached then the effect must exist and the only issue are details related to simultaneity, while this works on a lack of observed simultaneity between the 2 parts, the details of how the 2 parts are moved as a whole despite issues with simultaneity is unimportant as if one side moves only once it sees the other as moving, then the end that was first to move is imbalanced for longer, which is to say if the gap was 1 light second one would see the other stay in place for over 2 light seconds as now light must make a round trip.

Changing details of simultaneity does not change the end result, only which side gets a varied force and for how long.

Yup, kinda off topic as it is now kinda unrelated to disproving SR, or definitively breaking any laws of physics.

But I think it has been worth the analysis.

Oh, and the DOE is working on this for NASA so you are going to have a hard time claiming I am an idiot, at least in respect to this idea, as they think this area holds promise.

573

Or you can examine the evidence, do the math, and find out what actually happened. It’s not rocket science; it’s physics.

574

Sounds like a way to suck money out of NASA to me:

575

LOL! Speaking as someone who has spent a lot of time examining exactly this over the last week… You are completely full of shit.

576

Then what does “admittedly disingenuous” mean? And don’t think we didn’t notice that you ‘admitted’ only when your claim was challenged.

577

There isn’t any controversy here. It’s just a matter of language. The physical predictions are 100% identical whether you choose to use the concept of relativistic mass or not. An analogy of sorts would be if we discovered a tribe that defined ages in lunar orbits rather than earth orbits. “634” would not be a crazy answer to the question “How old are you?” if we understand the linguistic assumptions being used.

Sure, there may be studies funded by the tobacco industry that have obvious financial conflicts of interest, but the appropriate response is to discount those, and that’s exactly what people do. That doesn’t stop thousands of independent studies from being done and reported on. It’s as clearly established today as it can be that cigarette smoke has dire health effects. The existence of financial interests by the tobacco industry hasn’t stopped medical science from marching unimpeded toward the truth, which it reached ages ago.

You are, at the core, accusing physicists of being motivated by external interests. What if we hold a mirror up to that accusation? What if you are a puppet of Big Zealotry Inc. and are pushing these new ideas because of someone’s financial interest in shaking up the physics world? J’accuse!

Bonkers, right? You’re just some guy in a room with thoughts, and you’re sharing then. It’s equally bonkers to imagine that anyone cares a lick about keeping the “established” answers the same. It’s even more bonkers from the perspective of a physicist, since the absolute most awesome life-changing thing you can do in physics is discover something that completely breaks the existing picture of things. Such breakthroughs are rare, and sometimes they are false alarms (see: neutrino velocity), but sometimes they survive scrutiny. And that’s the motivation. Physicists simply are not motivated to keep things status quo. Take a cursory glance through seminar calendars at universities or, more accessibly, any of the standard pop-sci rags. They are littered with “new this” or “modified that” or “something you thought was right is wrong”. They are often sensationalized in the pop-sci literature, but the tone alone should be enough to demonstrate that change is good, not suppressed.

578

This was mere inflation, overstating the probable effect.
Not dishonesty.

Exaggeration but not to the point of being untruthful.

579

“Science advances one funeral at a time.”

― Max Planck

It really isn’t a fruitful area of discussion though, your inability to see the possibility that science is not free of such corruption of it’s ideals, or my insistence that it is, will probably not get anywhere. I do have evidence for my argument within physics but it will pull us off topic.

As for mass, I would still assert that is something moving relativistically is harder to accelerate, then 2 counter rotating gyroscopes should have more inertial resistance to being accelerated than if they were not rotating.

As such a space drive could be made to the detriment of the conservation of energy and Newtons laws that every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

580

That would probably make for a more entertaining thread than this current one. Feel free to create a new topic. There’s no rule saying you can only engage in one topic at a time.

581

The claim I was challenging was when you stated you were a physicist. You could look it up.
Keep dancing, you’re almost there!