| Subject: Re: What is SETI? |
| From: david@djwhome.demon.co.uk (David Woolley) |
| Date: 12/05/2004, 22:21 |
| Newsgroups: sci.astro.seti,alt.sci.seti,sci.space.policy |
In article <40A26B94.4030001@somewhere.com>,
"Rich <someone@somewhere.com>" <> wrote:
Energy has momentum, not mass.
There seem to be different ways of interpreting relativistic mass,
but E=mc^2 certainly gives a mass, and you have used the simple
relativistic mass formula below, so you are not in the school of thought
that says that there is no such thing as relativistic mass.
You say that when v=c, m'/m is finite?
Only when m = 0.
Seems to me that it's undefined at 'c' and approaches infinity as
v approaches c.
What have I got wrong?
You've used a non-zero rest mass. There is an additional constraint,
E=mc^2 that causes the relativistic mass to become well defined.
How would the observer know this? Seems to me that this geometry is
not possible for anyone but a third party observing the transaction.
Because things would happen that were physically impossible in a causal
world.
Does the phrase 'spooky action at a distance' ring a bell? Physicists
have been saying things like this for decades.
Doesn't convey *real* information. In fact it tends to rely on their
being no real information. As to the decades, that's why I said that
the experiments were based on 50 year old theories. Whilst the theories
may have upset Einstein, they are not particularly controversial these
days.
I believe that you are referring to the fact that a group velocity can
travel faster than 'c'.
There are two classes of experiment:
1) spooky action at a distance[1], popularised as quantum teleportation,
where a conventional communication channel is needed before any
real information is conveyed (you need to know the state read out of
the other end of the link before you can do anything with the state
of your particle, othersise, all you know is that they have opposite
states - the readout of the other particle can only be communicated
over a channel limited to c);
2) anomalous propagation, where refractive index is changing very rapidly
with frequency and therefore the effect is only possible for very low
bandwidth signals, which therefore have very long rise times, and
the start of the rise time propagates at less than c.
This, however, is the sort of subject that leads to stalemates, so I
doubt if I'm going to hang in long on this one.
[1] I'm accepting for the moment that it is possible to show that hidden
state (i.e. the entangled particles simply go through a sequence of
opposite states with time) is not a sufficient explanation, although
it does seem sufficient for at least some of the experiments.