Well, not exactly “much.” Shaving this close to the speed of light, we are arguing about speed differences of something like millimeters per second.
shrug. Relative terms are… relative. “s/speed/gamma/g” if you’d rather that.
Probably true, with the caveat that we have no idea what the OMG furnace is, or how it works. But whatever it is, that’s certainly a reasonable guess.
Darren Garrison, put it this way: If you had an OMG proton and an OMG neutrino, emitted from the same source and traveling in the same direction, and if you were riding along in the proton’s reference frame, the neutrino would still zip past you very quickly.
Of course, from the reference frame of the neutrino, the proton is moving at the same speed. It is probably more sensible to talk in terms of a maximum gamma (that is the Lorentz contraction factor for anybody who is confused) from an arbitrary reference frame, but as a practical matter, any no-zero-mass particle could be accelerated to any speed short of c by successive Penrose or other gravitational momentum transfer processes regardless of the energy it had when it was produced, so there is no upper infinitesimal ceiling to particle kinetic energy or speed short of conservation of the total momentum of the universe. There is probably a practical upper limit of potential momentum transfer given the mass of the ‘local’ universe and time, and it is statistically certain that the cosmic particles we have observed do not even approach that by many orders of magnitude.
Stranger
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I’m not very good at physics. So bear with me. I’ve read that some particles come in twins that have the same “spin” - and that each will maintain the same spin even if the particles are separated. As soon as the spin of one is affected, the spin of the other will be too. So wouldn’t whatever force transmits the spin between the twin particles be the fastest thing?
There is no instantaneous force or transmission of information between separated particles. You are thinking of entangled states.
You are referring to the quantum entaglement, in which particles have innately complementary states regardless of the separation distance between them. The change of states is apparently instantaneous (if you observe the change of state of a local particle, you will see the complementary change with a delay appropriate to the distance it takes light to travel from the distant particle) but it is wrong to think of this as having a speed or rate, and there is no ‘force’ or other exchange between them. They’re just tied together in an apparently nonlocal but causal fashion. Although there are various interpretations of quantum mechanics which attempt to rationalize this behavior there is as yet no falsifiable hypothesis for how it works other than that it is a characteristic of nature at the level of single particles and very small systems where quantum mechanics dominates.
Stranger
That’s the thing. So there is actually an appreciable delay before the change in the state of the distant particle?
No, it is apparently simultaneous.
Stranger
It’s not apparently anything. There is no way to determine the time at which a particle changes state. If you make a measurement, you’ll get the exact same result as if the particle had always been in that state all along. Entangled particles do have some very counterintuitive correlations between observations of their states, but those correlations are only recognizable once you have information about the results of the experiments on both, which means waiting for some conventional (at most lightspeed) information channel.
But C is 3×10[sup]8[/sup] meters per second only to the first five decimal places. It really is 2.99792458x10[sup]8[/sup] m/s (exactly*) which would make the calculated speed faster than C.
This is why keeping track of your significant figures is important; your precision is only as good as the least precise factor. What they’ve done is like somebody saying they drove 255.8 miles on 8.9 gallons so they got 28.74157303 miles per gallon, a precision that cannot be supported.
Unfortunately, the limitations of doing floating point math on a calculator allow me to put in only 15 of the 9s, and I’m too lazy to do the math on paper to find out what the true speed was to 23 places.
*Thanks to redfining the meter as “the length of the path traveled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second” instead of a couple scratches in a platinum-iridium bar.
Agreed that if the Oh-My-God energy is 3.2±0.9 x 10^20 eV, then the 1.459 figure is misleadingly precise and has bogus digits. Better just to write 1x10^-15.
However, if you need 23-digit precision then you are doing something wrong. The mystery number is just c/2γ², so it is impossible to calculate to 23 digits or even 2 digits. You could write the error bar as 1.3-0.5+1.2 if you had to.
I mean to say, if c = 299792458 and x = 1.3±0.8 × 10[sup]-15[/sup], then, sure, writing out c - x takes 23 or so decimals, but you would never write that out or calculate that way.
??? Have you confused drift velocity with diffusion velocity?
Well, it depends on what currents, wire sizes, etc. you consider typical. But there are certainly reasonable choices for those values that get you to Stranger’s result.
The only set of values I know off the top of my head is that if you attach a foot of copper wire to 1.5 volts, you get a centimeter per second (I was interested in a simple electromagnet experiment, and no, I didn’t account for the internal resistance of the battery, even though I should have). But a foot of copper wire is an extremely low resistance, and thus a very high current. More realistic currents would then give you a much slower velocity.
“take it as a given” … “fighting ignorance” … bit of a paradoxy, wouldn’t you agree?
anyway … you talk about “fastest thing” … light is not the fastest. as far as humanity currently understands, thought is (by far) the fastest “thing”. also time, itself, is faster than light. however … i’m not willing to spend better part of a weekend researching to validate myself. so … y’all enjoy yourselves.
Huh? Thought is only about the same speed as sound, far less than light. And the speed of time is exactly equal to the speed of light.
albino manatee is undoubtedly thinking (in Chronovian time of the thought of, say, Alpha Centauri, which took him far less time than four million years.