https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4866?...ent=current_episode_textlink&utm_medium=emailExternal Quote:
Actually, @Brian Dunning does a good job of making complex stuff approachable.
but doing that brings us back to the whole debate about trust. (although Dunning is one of the debunkers-which he hates to be called-i do actually trust for the most part. I'm not sure if i trust him to understand the math he is talking about in his movie...but...)
Thought is relatively unimportant. If there are any interactions ("forces") that we don't know about then we interact so weakly with their force-mediating particles that they will never be of use to us, because we cannot interact with them.
That's a strong argument. Still, it can hardly be said that the gaps in the present scientific understanding of the world are merely matters of detail. Leaving aside the 'hard problem of consciousness', there are the problems of reconciling quantum theory with general relativity; explaining why the constants of nature have the values they do; and understanding non-locality in quantum mechanics. In my previous comment I carelessly referred to quantum entanglement as 'speculative', but if I understand correctly, entanglement of particles at great (and probably unlimited) distances is now well established experimentally. The problem is just that no-one understands it. There seems to be agreement among the experts that it does not directly contradict relativity, since it does not permit the transfer of information faster than the speed of light. As a corollary, it would not be a means of transporting recognisable physical objects, since otherwise these could be used to carry information, e.g. on cuneiform tablets! But so long as these fundamental problems (and probably others, notably in cosmology) remain unsolved, I don't see how we can be totally confident in rejecting faster-than-light travel on theoretical grounds. I would be more inclined to invert the argument, and say that the non-occurrence of frequent alien visits confirms the impossibility of faster-than-light travel!
At the risk of exposing myself on the peak of Dunning-Kruger's Mount Stupid, I think the article you link to is unconvincing. Yes, I know that in the customary illustration of relativity theory by space-time diagrams, faster-than-light travel produces causal paradoxes. But that just means that if FTL travel occurs, you have to give up the space-time diagrams, or at least to limit their use. (Incidentally, Einstein himself was initially unenthusiastic about the space-time interpretation of relativity, but later changed his mind.) Provided travel still takes some time, causes will still precede their effects, so there is no violation of causality.
As @jarlrmai said, the violation of causality is the main reason why FTL is impossible.
There were times when we hardly interacted with EM radiation outside the visible spectrum. But once we discovered it and harnassed its powers...
A negative mass and a positive mass will have a negative gravitational force between them. This negative force will repel the positive mass. However, this same negative force will attract the negative mass (as a = F/m, and the 2 negatives cancel out). An absurd always-accelerating chase ensues.
Nope - equivocation on "interaction". Every amino acid ever created, every cell membrane that's ever self-organised, every permeation of ions across such membranes, pretty much everything that has ever been life on earth (and almost everything that is non-life on earth, because basically the entirety of chemistry) has been electromagnetic interactions.
I think you misunderstood me. Of course there are physical interactions going on in nature all the time, but the key question here is are we aware of it? Only if we are aware of it, we can study it, harnass it, and exploit its potential.
We all know that money is a "strange attractor".
I question that. If I understand correctly, FTL velocities would lead to paradoxes in the common space-time interpretation of STR, as introduced by Minkowski (or Poincaré). In some reference frames it might appear that in some other reference frame an effect has preceded its own cause, which would be embarrassing! But so much the worse for those reference frames, at least where FTL velocities are concerned. There is an analogy with the so-called 'twin paradox', where one twin goes on a long space trip and returns much younger than his/her twin. The problem with this is not that one twin ages faster than the other (why shouldn't they?) but how to explain the asymmetry between the twins if motion is purely relative. The usual answer is to disqualify the reference frame of the 'traveling' twin on the grounds that he/she has undergone accelerated motion, and for the purposes of STR accelerated reference frames don't count. Not everyone agrees with that solution, since the duration of the acceleration can be made negligibly short compared with the duration of the trip, but it establishes the point that there might be good reasons for excluding some reference frames from consideration for some purposes. If there is a choice between accepting violation of causality and scrapping some or all of the usual space-time doctrine, I would choose the latter.
There is a "triple" version of the twin paradox involving only inertial reference frames. It involves a third brother, who travels towards Earth while his brother travels away from Earth. They meet halfway and on that moment the brother travelling towards Earth synchronizes his calender and clock with his brother traveling away from Earth. The acceleration when leaving Earth can be cancelled as well using the same trick (the outgoing brother simply passes Earth and synchronizes his clock with his brother on Earth).
You would need another breakthrough technology or even a breakthrough scientific discovery that starts a new exponential curve. We have seen several in our history.
This kind of 'solution' without falsifiable math is really no different from saying magic.
True, but in this case it is NOT "without falsifiable math".
I like to broaden the historical scope a bit. After all, we're talking about civilizations that may be a million years ahead of us.
I feel as I am repeating myself, but 'if you look further back in history' you'll see things like the 1st law of themodynamics, which killed free energy, the 2nd law if thermodynamics, which killed easy-to-get energy, the determination of stellar distances, which (among other things) killed space travel, then special relativity, which killed FTL and put a maximum bound on the amount of energy one can get out of anything, then quantum mechanics, which even puts limits to what is knowable. Imagine what more nasty limitations may lie ahead if we better understand dark matter, dark energy etc. etc.
Hill does not assume negative mass, just "something" (some force) that is able to repel mass and is yet to be discovered by us. Maybe something underlying dark energy could be the solution. But of course any speculation can be ridiculed with unicorns or skewed to violate our incomplete laws of physics, that's entirely up to you. I like your framework of supernatural vs superintelligent natural beings but there is a big grey area between them if you try to speculate about future scientific discoveries.
Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/star-treks-warp-drive-leads-to-new-physics/External Quote:
There's been years of debate on whether or not this is true, but the Alcubierre effect (where you don't actually move but move your frame of reference) is claimed by its inventor not to violate causality because it doesn't actually involve acceleration, and while engaged the bubble is a causality horizon so you can't observe through it in either direction. To a third party observer the traveler just appears to disappear at one location and then some time later appear at another location (along with a bunch of heat and high energy particles that might be explosively released when the bubble collapses) - from the traveler's point of view, they could turn around and observe their departure, but not return on the same trajectory to any time before that departure occurred.
Our current models in physics have the ability to predict, yes. But not everything they predict has been experimentally verified. New experiments may show errors in their predictions, which will lead to new models in the future. So only our current set of experimental observations is "scientifically sacred", not our current models and everything they predict regardless of experimental verification.
Yep, that's the grey area between supernatural beings and superintelligent natural beings I was referring to.
See post #36 above: new models (with new assumptions, yes) have been proposed that get rid of the dragon.
