Farsight

Look at annihilation. Combine an electron and a positron and you get two 511KeV gamma photons. We do it every days in PET scans. An electron can't travel faster than light for a very simple reason. And nor can any other particle either.

No. Let's assume that you let down the side of the box so the photon is free to get out. That means we're half way to our goal already, because the photon is moving at exactly the speed of light. All you had to do is stop accelerating it with those bounces. Just at that point you start pushing the box really really hard, to try to keep up with the photon. As swanson said, you can't actually have a massless box, so to simplify matters let's say the box is a single electron. It has a small mass, so it takes force to push it, and to get it up to something close to the speed of light you've got to keep on pushing hard and fast it for a long long way. But you can't push that electron all the way to c. You just can't. It's just not doable. The reason why is crushingly simple. It's intimately related to the photon in the box, and the logic is utterly unassailable. But I can't tell you about it because the guys here will say it's pseudoscience. Sorry about that.

Sure it's a valid perspective. But that's all it is. A perspective. It's how you view the world, because of your motion through it. The thing is that you can't touch a reference frame, or smell it, weigh it, et cetera, because it's an abstraction. It isn't a quale like vision, which is emphatically "real" to you. It's just a term associated with what you measure and observe because of your motion. People say "in your reference frame" as if it's a place, or something real, but all it really means is "in your state of motion". It's simple to understand this when you think of constant linear motion and and an inertial reference frame. It gets a little more complicated when you introduce acceleration, and more complicated again when you introduce gravity. But the same ontological principle applies. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_of_reference

I realise it. Emphatically so. How do you define action? Momentum times distance. Or energy times time. See post above. Or see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_constant Ah. I see I've been censored again. Remember I've been working on relativity, I'm in line with Einstein, this had to come in the end. I can step up to the plate and tell you why we observe light quanta, why quantum mechanics is not spooky after all, and why this means teleportation is pseudoscience. But I'm booted into pseudoscience. Sorry, I will not carry on a conversation with this label stuck to my head.

No problem. Here's an excerpt from the book version. PM me and I'll send you the whole thing or point you at the paper, which is online. The book's better. But note there's a lot of background you need to understand before you can appreciate how it works. You have to understand the photon, and to understand the photon you have to understand other things too. Objects in the quantum world are "actions". This is why we have Planck's constant. When we talk about a photon, we express energy as hf and momentum as hf/c. The h is Planck’s constant of action, being 6.63 x 10-34 Joule-seconds. Action is energy multiplied by time, and also momentum multiplied by distance. The f is of course frequency per second, and the speed of light c is distance divided by time, which converts a measure of energy into a measure of momentum. What's important is that the photon isn't some "billiard-ball" particle. It isn't an object. It's an action. It's akin to a kick. OK now, try measuring a kick. You know it isn't an object, you don't expect it to have a shape or a surface. Because it's an action. And an action is only an action if there's some motion involved, so you can never pin down the location of a kick. You can only say where you detected it. Ouch! Another action is a shout. There's no specific place where it can be located at some point in time. It's a spherical compression wave in air expanding outwards, and whilst it has a centre, you can't go and stand next to my mouth and say "this is where the shout is". Instead, when you hear it, you say "the shout is here". And then somebody else hears it and says "the shout is here", and it's like it's in two places at once. That's what the quantum world is like. Everything is like this. Not just the "objects", but the things you detect them with too. That's why things are uncertain. Once you understand that you aren't dealing with objects, it isn't mysterious at all.

Wrong. There is no mass term in F= dp/dt. The mass of an object is to do with how difficult it is to change its speed. That's why the photon has no mass. You can't change its speed. Because if you do, it isn't a photon any more. Did you even read what I said yesterday? When you look at E²=p²c² + (mc²)² and think about the electron prior to annihilation, imagine it's not moving, whereupon it has no momentum, so E²=(mc²)². After annihilation the electron has been converted into a 511KeV photon moving at c, and a photon has no mass but it does have energy/momentum E=hf or p=hf/c, so by conservation E²=p²c². Note that what we've basically got here is E² = (mc²)² = p²c², and that demonstrates the relationship between momentum and inertial mass. In essence momentum and inertia are the same thing. It depends on who you say is moving.

Hello, what's this? It certainly is. It does rather seem that way. I know how Quantum mechanics works. I can explain it. Radioactive decay is not causeless.

I think it's good that Georgi has been thinking about particles and gauge, but I also think that this really is the wrong approach: http://www.physorg.com/news100753984.html

String Theory is dead.

Mass is all to do with how difficult it is to change the speed of something. You know, F=ma. Photons travel at c. You can't change the speed of a photon to c+x or c-x. That's why mass doesn't apply to a photon. But put that photon in the box bouncing back and forth, and the box has more mass. Because there's more energy in the box, because E=mc², and because you can move the box. It's to do with the symmetry between momentum and inertia.

It doesn't sound right. I find the question a bit confusing. Are you talking about the gravitational field of a large mass, and asking if the gravitational field of that mass increases if the mass begins to move very quickly? Apologies in advance, but I'll presume yes. The "active gravitational mass" of a body is proportional to the energy of that body. A stationary object has its "invariant mass", which has an E=mc² energy equivalence. A moving object also has kinetic energy. So it has more energy, and the total is known as "relativistic mass". As a result, it has more active gravitational mass, and causes more gravity. But the object would have to be moving very fast before you noticed a difference, and it would have flashed past before you could even tell. You have to get very hypothetical and think in terms of a huge rod of superdense material. If this was shooting past you at an enormous rate, you'd fall towards it faster.

Obelix: in his last paper, Einstein admitted that perhaps the concept of field was inadequate. The fields go, and you're left with a Unified Theory rather than a Unified Field Theory. It's all in the geometry.

I haven't told you the details swanson, but I've broken quantum mechanics. It's all classical after all. There's no multiverse. Things don't pop into existence just because you look at them. There is zero chance that a baseball can materialise on the other side of a brick wall. Strong stuff I know, hard to believe, but I'm not fooling. And then when we also "teleport" it to another new location? And another? And another? And that molecule is one of a billion that is me? I'm sorry Skeptic, I think we'll just have to agree to differ on this one.

No. You're just moving them. No, teleportation is where you go from A to C without having to go through B. Here, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleportation where it says Teleportation is the movement of objects from one place to another, more or less instantaneously, without traveling through space. The concept has been widely used in science fiction. It should not be confused with quantum teleportation. Follow the link on quantum teleportation and it says Quantum teleportation or entanglement-assisted teleportation is a quantum protocol by which quantum information can be transmitted utilizing a classical communication channel... Hence my "fax machine" remark. The teleportation you're talking about isn't actually teleportation. The original object hasn't been sent anywhere at all. It hasn't travelled an inch. I could send the data to three destinations and make multiple copies. Then I could make more multiple copies. Limiting myself to one copy along with the destruction of the original doesn't mean it's been "teleported" to the destination. Yes, I suppose so. You could call it "free" energy. It comes from somewhere, but it isn't immediately obvious. For example think of a car that doesn't need fuel. I'm not saying that this is actually doable. Instead I'm saying it' a whole lot more feasible than teleportation. And it's a lot closer to the spirit of a perpetual motion machine, than quantum teleportation is to the spirit of the teleportation of science fiction.

Thank you Swanson. I'm sorry Skeptic, but quantum teleportation is just a fancy name for what is in essence is a fax machine. It doesn't really send an atom from A to B. Sure, that's why I said there is no free lunch. But think about tidal power. The moon causes tides. We can extract energy from those tides. And the moon's orbit is increasing anyway. OK, it isn't a conventional "over unity" perpetual motion machine, but this simple example is enough to make me say a perpetual motion machine is a darn sight less impossible than teleportation. I reiterate that the energy has to come from somewhere, even if that somewhere is not obvious.

Let's not get confused about mass. Mass is invariant mass. An electron exhibits this property, a photon does not. Annihilation "destroys" mass. That invariant mass has gone. Yourdadonapogos: charged black holes don't exist. Yes, we can see charge and dramatic magnetic flux whilst a black hole is swallowing matter, but once it's swallowed it, the charge has gone. Think about it. A black hole is black because light cannot escape it. A photon cannot escape a black hole. The photon is the "mediator" of electromagnetic force. If that can't escape a black hole, nor can electromagnetic force. This renders the Resner-Nordstrom concept invalid. The Kerr concept of a rotating black hole with angular momentum is also invalid, but I'd rather not go into it. Klaynos: yes, black holes exhibit mass. When a black hole swallows a photon, its mass increases. But again it's only by virtue of E=mc². It's because mass and energy are merely two different ways of measuring energy. When you look at E²=p²c² + (mc²)² and think about the electron prior to annihilation, imagine it's not moving, whereupon it has no momentum so E²=(mc²)². After annihilation the electron has been converted into a 511KeV photon moving at c, and a photon has no mass but it does have energy/momentum E=hf or p=hf/c, so by conservation E²=p²c². Note that what we've basically got here is E² = (mc²)² = p²c², and that demonstrates the relationship between momentum and inertial mass. In essence momentum and inertia are the same thing. It depends on who you say is moving. The photon isn't quite pure energy because it's got a polarization and is moving at c. The black hole stops it. It acquires the photon energy/momentum and grows. Note that I say energy/momentum because they are two different measures of the same thing. One is distance based, the other is time based. That's why you divide by c (distance over time) to go from one to the other. You'll have heard the saying "a black hole has no hair". It doesn't have much else either. That's why the black hole is pure energy.

1. That which will be done within decades, or 100 years at latest. Examples include teleportation of small items - up to virus size, and invisibility. Teleportation is impossible. You can contrive a kind of "fax machine", but it isn't genuine teleportation. 2. That which will happen hundreds or thousands of years in the future. Examples include teleportation of large objects, including humans. Impossible. Honestly, how he gets away with this sort of garbage just beats me. And the wormholes and the time travel. Tosh. 3. That which is totally impossible. Examples include precognition and perpetual motion machines. Precognition is impossible. I wouldn't say a perpetual motion machine is impossible. The earth moves perpetually. But there's no free lunch. If you get energy out of it, that energy has to come from somewhere. And think about it. If you could teleport an object, you could repeat it continuously, and use that to drive a perpetual motion machine.

Yes. I can. Definitely. Energy is the one thing that you cannot create or destroy. An electron has mass only because it has energy, by virtue of E=mc². If you destroy an electron by annihilating it with a positron, you destroy the mass and the charge, the the result is photons. They have energy. However a photon is not pure energy. It's fairly close, but the motion and the polarization mean it doesn't quite fit the bill. What does, is a black hole. There is something else, something much more common, but people who don't understand this subject will accuse me of speculation or worse, so I'll leave it at that.

It isn't. Let me repeat a quote from Einstein:

Well said Obelix. Steve, here's another quote from Einstein's Leyden Address: Swanson, that's Einstein talking about the ether of General Relativity. Your "piece of granite" jibe was uncalled for.

Objects in the quantum world are "actions". This is why we have Planck's constant. When we talk about a photon, we express energy as hf and momentum as hf/c. The h is Planck’s constant of action, being 6.63 x 10-34 Joule-seconds. Action is energy multiplied by time, and also momentum multiplied by distance. The f is of course frequency per second, and the speed of light c is distance divided by time, which converts a measure of energy into a measure of momentum. What's important is that the photon isn't some "billiard-ball" particle. It isn't an object. It's an action. It's akin to a kick. OK now, try measuring a kick. You know it isn't an object, you don't expect it to have a shape or a surface. Because it's an action. And an action is only an action if there's some motion involved, so you can never pin down the location of a kick. You can only say where you detected it. Ouch! Another action is a shout. There's no specific place where it can be located at some point in time. It's a spherical compression wave in air expanding outwards, and whilst it has a centre, you can't go and stand next to my mouth and say "this is where the shout is". Instead, when you hear it, you say "the shout is here". And then somebody else hears it and says "the shout is here", and it's like it's in two places at once. That's what the quantum world is like. Once you understand that you aren't dealing with objects, it isn't mysterious at all. Edit: I should add that everything is like this. Not just the "objects", but the things you detect them with too. That's why things are uncertain.

Print that out and frame those words. Then in a little while, you can eat them.

Can I make it clear that the idea of parallel worlds is an unproven hypothesis. It has no foundation on fact, and as such should be classed as pseudoscience. And yet it's peddled as something real and given legitimacy by respected physicists. Hanlon also wrote critically in New Scientist about a Lawrence Krauss idea that the life of the universe might be shortened by merely looking at it. I agree with Hanlon that there's some total garbage out there masquerading as science. I say this as the guy who can offer a clear description of what the quantum of quantum mechanics actually is.

It's on the way. And it's really simple. But the maths isn't. See "Maths of Möbius strip finally solved" from New Scientist magazine 21 July 2007: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19526133.500-maths-of-m%F6bius-strip-finally-solved.html It took seventy seven years! See Starostin, E.L.,van der Heijden,G.H.M. (2007). The shape of a Möbius strip Nature Materials 6, 563-567. You can find this paper online on Eugene Starostin's home page http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucesest/ and on Gert van der Heijden's home page http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucesgvd/ where he says: "We study the mechanics of inextensible strips with applications to paper crumpling, fabric draping as well as general sheet processing. Geometrically this leads to the study of developable surfaces (surfaces flat in one direction). As part of this work we solved the long-standing problem of finding the shape of a Möbius strip". What's interesting is that Eugene Starostin is a research fellow at UCL in the Department of Civil, Environmental, & Geomatic Engineering, whilst Gert van der Heijden is also a also a research fellow at UCL, in the Centre for Nonlinear Dynamics and its Applications. These guys are not regular mathematicians with long-established track records. It's coming from left field, and these are exciting times, graviphoton.

Steve, if you haven't already, you should read Einstein's Leyden Address of 1920. See: http://www.zionism-israel.com/Albert_Einstein/Albert_Einstein_Ether_Relativity.htm "Recapitulating, we may say that according to the general theory of relativity space is endowed with physical qualities; in this sense, therefore, there exists an ether. According to the general theory of relativity space without ether is unthinkable; for in such space there not only would be no propagation of light, but also no possibility of existence for standards of space and time... " The thing to note is that this ether doesn't fill space, nor is it a "field". It is space. And like swanson was saying, it has properties: Unfortunately "ether" is something of a dirty word. Almost taboo. There's been a great deal of research in this area, but it has tended to suffer sneering dismissal or even censorship and suppression from what you'd describe as the "accepted school", who are not in line with Einstein. But things are now changing. See Focus magazine issue 183 http://www.focusmag.co.uk/viewIssue.asp?id=879 for an article called "The science of nothing" involving research into the vacuum. It talks about aether quite freely. Sorry, I can't find the full text online, this is just a stub: Victorian scientists used the mysterious 'luminiferous aether' to explain how light is propagated through empty space. But now the idea is making a resurgence and could transform medical treatments.