I don’t feel bad. I’ve been in this position for years. I accept that all these phenomena exist, and some great experts in physics have tried to explain it to me in the past, but it is very difficult to follow the very precise explanations without all the requisite background. But some people who do understand it do a better job than others of explaining it to those who don’t have the background, as The Hamster King has done (thanks Hamster). So I won’t stop asking questions, even if they sound stupid. And bit by bit I learn a little more.
In this case I can apply this to fix the problems with my Hieronymous machine. It was easy to rebuild using modern components since I’ve been through that before, so this morning I wired everything up again, and I just got back from the store with two new quartz crystals (or maybe they were the same ones I got before), and within minutes I should be able to tell you what happens.
I’m saying that things physically slow down, possibly even perception because of effects of gravity (possibly related to speed as well). So a plant might take longer to grow in space, and an atomic clock might run slower in space, but what if that’s what happens when these processes move away from gravity or travel at faster speeds, what if it has nothing to do with not exceeding the speed of light, and nothing to do with compressing time.
If time were constant throughout the universe, then instant communication wouldn’t cause any problems with causality. The whole principle doesn’t seem right to me.
Sorry for reply - ran out of time to edit - I wanted to add:
I just think we’ve fallen in a trap. After all it’s spooky to see something happen after you knew it was going to happen. Instant communication could allow my friend to tell me he has waved to me from 1 light hour away, and then 1 hour later I would see it. That’s not precognition, that light radiation travelling as it normally does, like you can see the lightning before you hear the thunder. But we’re such visual creatures, I think it’s hard for us to imagine getting information before we see it happen. Even though we’re well aware all those supernovas we see may have happened millions or billions of years ago, I don’t see why instant communication has to affect causality.
That’s the right idea. You can’t simply look at your atom and know that its partner has been measured, since that doesn’t produce a different result than what you’d see anyway.
There is such a thing as quantum communication, but it still requires an element of classical communication. Basically, I have two qubits(*), one of which is entangled with one of yours. Then I perform a measurement on both my qubits, and this also effects the state of yours (because yours was entangled). Then I send you some info about the outcome of my measurement via classical communication, and this tells you what operation to perform on your qubit to extract some information on your end. So you get more info out than what I sent you classically … but some classical communication was still required to make it work.
(*) atoms or ions or whatever which can be in two distinct states (plus superpositions of these two)
That’s a good attitude. Anyway just thought I’d point it out because I personally found it annoying when I first tried to understand this stuff and ran into explanation that were wrong and just confused me more. (What’s even more annoying is if you go on youtube you can pretty easily see the screwed up version. Of course there’s loads of explanations from universities so I guess it’s not all bad. Still the first one I found was from that “What the bleep do we know.” The only question about that isn’t “Is it sht?" but Instead "I know it’s sht, but is it bull, dog, horse or human?”)
Just knowing what happened faster than light could tell you is not what violates causality. Here is the first description I read: Imagine we have virtual particles whose existence is entangled (Virtual particles are particles that appear out of nowhere all the time in a vacuum.) If one is destroyed, the other ceases to exist at the exact same moment. We create these particles and separate into two streams. One stream we send though a device that allows us to selective destroy the particles in the stream. We call this stream T. The other we send through a device that detects if the particles are still there. We should be able to use these two devices to send any type of binary code. So far no problem. But what if instead of sending the streams directly to the two devices, we divert streams into cyclotrons first. We accelerate the R stream up as close to light speed as possible, while the T stream we keep as slow as we can and still maintain it. Say we get time rate differntial of two to one. In X amount of time as observed by the machine operators T will have experienced rX seconds and R will have experienced 2rX seconds.
Since the “simultaneous” destruction means that any TR pair will cease to exist at the exact same instant in their individual reference frames, if T is destroyed at X=1000secs, then R will cease to exist at X=500secs. That means that you could set the experiment up at 2pm and find out the 8pm Super Lotto numbers at 3pm.
The order things happen depends upon the reference frame you’re in. For example, it’s possible for one observer to see event A happen before event B, and another to see event B happen before event A. This in not merely an effect of the light from the different events arriving at different times. Even if you take the travel time of the light into account, different observers can disagree about the order that events occur.
If you could communicate instantaneously between two reference frames, you could create a situation where you observe an event, and tell someone in a different reference frame about it before it occurs in that frame. Not just before the light from the event arrives, before it EVEN OCCURS. That would break causality.
The time differential is what makes it happen, but it is not an illusion in this case. In my example you would have the T machine and the R machine. Any message put into the T machine at 8pm could be read on the R machine at 5pm. That would violate causality. In each particles reference frame they existed for the exact same amount of time, 3 hours. But because the T particles are going so much closer to the speed of light, it took 6 hours in the observers reference frame for T to experience those 3 hours.
And just to be clear, here is the time line from my example from the experimenters reference frame:
2pm start up machine and send particles into cyclotrons
5pm R machine receives message
8pm T machine sends message
That is why if you could actually encode information in quantum entangled pairs, it could violate causality and not just the FTL limit.
I don’t think that’s possible. It is all just an effect of light. You can’t tell someone something is going to happen before it happens with FTL communication, only before the light reaches them of that event happening.
I don’t think time warps. I only think that the illusion of time warping is created by effects of gravity or increased velocity. People keep restating that time isn’t constant throughout the universe, so at any one point space-time can be different from another. I just think we’re wrong about that, because I believe we will absolutely break the speed of light and discover it doesn’t affect causality at all… how will we re-evaluate things if that is true.
I do believe perception and physical functions slow down at faster speeds and higher gravity because we have proof of this, but I don’t believe time itself is effected.
If I was on Earth and it was 6:00PM, and I decided to instantly teleport onto a super-fast mag-lev train because I wanted to skip ahead a day (increased speed = slower perception/slower processes) and the train had been running already and it was only 5:30 on the train. Lets say my teleporter is positioned so that I could see the train circling ever faster and faster, rotating several times around the earth ever couple seconds. If I could follow the passengers in their windows from my perception, things would look very slow. However looking out from their windows, things would appear very fast, as if somehow they were rocketing forward through time.
I feel like this is a normalization of perceptions. Humans can only take into account one frame of reference at a time, but to me it makes sense and doesn’t contradict my theory. Anyway, I’m at the teleporter, press the button and woosh.
Now according to causality, because I instantly appear on board this incredibly fast vehicle I will have time traveled because obviously It was 6:00, but only 5:30 on the train. If I look out the window I should see myself… AND I DO. BUT that is only light. It is not actually me, I could not make a call to myself, it’s some sort of illusion of light. If I warped back I would find nothing there, I would not be back 30 minutes in the past, I would be back at 6:00 my time. The light that I can see is an illusion and so is the compression of time on the faster moving vehicle. In fact time is constant. I can’t move from a faster flowing river into a slower flowing river and end up time travelling when returning to the faster moving river. That is because the rivers of time are constant and don’t bend or compress like we think they do, it’s just the processes slow down based on other factors.
Also: I misstated that time travels slower in space than on Earth, but it is indeed the opposite effect.
nilum, in as much as I can understand what you’re trying to say, I think you are arguing against Special Relativity, which is well established physics that has been known and studied for over a hundred years. If you want to challenge well-established physics in a way that will be at all convincing to physicists, you need to first study the physics in question and understand it really well. It doesn’t sound like you’ve done that.
No offense meant, I’m just saying I think it might be more productive if you were to start from “Why do physicists believe this is true?”, not from “I think this is bullshit, now let me tell you how the world really works…”
No. It’s a real effect. It’s not just the result of the propagation delay of light.
Here’s a simple example. You’re familiar with the Lorentz contraction, right? When an object is moving fast it gets shorter in the direction of motion. A 100-meter-long rocket traveling at 90% of the speed of light will appear about 43 meters long to a stationary observer.
Say the rocket flies through a 100-meter-long tube. From the perspective of the stationary observer, the rocket is less than half the length of the tube, so the following sequence of events happens:
The front end of the rocket enters the tube.
The back end of the rocket enters the tube.
The front end of the rocket exits the tube.
The back end of the rocket exits the tube.
However, from the perspective of someone on the rocket, the tube is only 43 meters long. The rocket is more than twice as long. So they see the following sequence of events:
The front end of the rocket enters the tube.
The front end of the rocket exits the tube.
The back end of the rocket enters the tube.
The back end of the rocket exits the tube.
The two observers can’t agree on the order of the middle two events.
Say you have a FTL communication device. You observe that as the back end of the rocket enters the tube, the tail fin scrapes on the rim. So the instant the front end emerges, you send an FTL message to the pilot telling him what you saw.
But from the pilot’s perspective, the back end of the rocket hasn’t entered the tube yet! Still, he heeds your warning and adjusts course so that he has plenty of clearance for his tail fin.
Paradox! The FTL communication violates causality and allows future information to be sent back in time, changing the future.
No. When they look out their windows, things are moving slow as well. The situation between the two reference frames is symmetrical. Their time flows slowly relative to YOU. And your time flows slowly relative to THEM.
That’s not how hawking explained it. One of his time machines is a mag-leve train travelling near the speed of light. Time in the cabin appears to slow down, and outside the cabin time appears to speed up. Thus allowing someone to travel many years into the future without aging.
It’s true relative to an outside observe his time would seem normal, but in the cabin time would appear slow.
Hawking’s example might have used trains that were accelerating and decelerating, which causes different temporal effects. If the train is moving at a constant velocity (not speeding up or slowing down) then time outside it will flow more slowly.
If you set up a situation that’s clearly symmetrical, its easy to see why this has to be so. Consider two rockets that pass each other headed in opposite directions at 90% of the speed of light. From the perspective of rocket A, time is flowing slowly on rocket B, and vice versa.
If space from my frame of reference makes the ship appear squashed, then the space outside of the ship’s frame of reference must make things look expanded.
So it wouldn’t change the order in which the events happened.
If it’s a 100m long tube, and the ship is 100m. An observer outside would see a 100m long tube and a 50m ship.
An observer inside would see a 200m long tube which they are entering in a 100m long ship.
The events would not change at all. The visible spatial distortion works both ways.
Physicists do a lot of thought experiments where they don’t take into account frames-of-references they have yet to see or experience themselves. There is an effect people have at supersonic speeds which causes the Earth in front of them to appear stretched out and long.
I don’t think that’s what the perception would be.
I think too passing, near-light speed ships would see the other as normal. The perception of speed might be different (like cars passing you going the opposite direction on a highway).
Again, imagine a situation that is perfectly symmetrical: two rockets flying past each other in empty space. How do the two rockets appear to each other? Which is short and which is long? Which has a clock running fast, and which has a clock running slow?
If there both travelling at the same speed their clocks should be the same. If they are flying at the same speed, they should have the same reference for spatial distortion and appear at the same length.
Anyway, i don’t buy it. I think special relativity is wrong. Einstein got it wrong. Time does not distort. And all these tests we have done to ‘prove’ it I don’t think are perfect.
When we finally do have a FTL communication, I think we’ll see that time is constant throughout the universe.
In this case I can apply this to fix the problems with my Hieronymous machine. It was easy to rebuild using modern components since I’ve been through that before, so this morning I wired everything up again, and I just got back from the store with two new quartz crystals (or maybe they were the same ones I got before), and within minutes I should be able to tell you what happens.