Fascinating Topological Limits: FTL in Gaming
While chatting with one of the players in my Superhero campaign yesterday, the subject of FTL travel in superhero and sci-fi games came up in the course of the conversation. Since I’m always on the lookout for good subjects to write about for Campaign Mastery, and this is a problem that’s come up in many games, I thought I’d take a moment to fill our readers in concerning some of the problems, solutions, and hand-waving that’s necessary to accommodate FTL travel, using the solutions that have been put in place in the Zenith campaign. And, to wrap the subject up into a tight little bow, I’ll discuss how FTL is a concern for straight fantasy games like D&D – and what the solution is to THAT problem.
Furry Thimbles Of Lethargy? – The Einstein Problem
Let me state at the outset that I don’t believe in the Speed Of Light limit. In my opinion, it has no more reality than the Mach 1 limit – the solution is a matter of insight and engineering, and the problem will eventually be cracked. Of course, this might be wishful thinking on my part. If you aren’t interested in the physics of FTL, feel free to skip down to “Fanciful Theory Leftovers? – The Inertia Problem” below.
Before the speed of light was measured, it could be considered instantaneous – a term for which physicists have an irrational dislike. The physical world was divided into physical phenomena, that move at some measurable speed, and energy phenomena, that moved with (effectively) infinite speed. Galileo was the first to attempt to measure the speed of light; he failed. In 1676, Olaus Roemer, a Danish Astronomer, became the first to successfully measure it, having noticed that the intervals between eclipses of Jupiter’s moons varied with the relative motions of Earth and Jupiter – he got a speed of 132,000 miles a second, a very good first estimate.
Einstein once said that every time he considered the possibility of moving faster than light, he found himself caught up in paradoxes, and it was this that led him to develop the Special Theory Of Relativity. Every high school physics text attempts to describe those paradoxes, and all of them are flawed, because they all operate on the assumptions that (1) there is some absolute limit to the propagation rate of information, and (2) that because light is the fastest thing we know about, it is the fastest thing that we CAN think about.
But here’s the problem: if you exclude light as a means of information transmission – assume that it has not been discovered yet – the next fastest phenomenon known to physics becomes the limiting velocity. Prior to particle physics and particle accelerators, and the invention of electrical current, that was the speed of sound. Every one of Einstein’s Paradoxes hold true for the slower ‘ultimate speed limit’ – and the same chains of logic lead to the development of Lorentz-type transformations of length, mass, and time, just using that lower speed limit in place of the speed of light in the formula:
The obvious implication is that the speed of light is only a speed limit if we can’t conceive of anything faster.
Let me put it in even plainer English. Let’s assume that we are looking at a clock that is some distance away, and that this clock is in a room where there is an observer who is watching or measuring some phenomenon – rolling a dice, let’s say. Each time he rolls the dice, he sends us the results using the fastest means of communications possible, whatever they might be. Einstein contended that if some means of FTL communications existed, we would receive the results of the die rolls before they happened, because our visual reading of the clock on the wall was limited to the speed of light. In other words, because Light could not travel faster than the speed of light, nothing could.
Is the hole in the logic clear now? I hope so, because I can’t put it any more clearly.
Those Pesky Transformations
And yet, the Lorentz-FitzGerald transformations are clearly valid. Not only have they been tested and found to measure up, but if they were wrong, everything from the design and manufacture of modern computers to particle accelerators would be completely different. They’ve been verified using everything from atomic clocks to astronomical phenomena. And they only work if the speed of light is the limiting speed of the universe.
Or do they? Is it possible that they only refer to what a stationary observer perceives, and not what really happens? That would account for the fact that they seem to work, and are factors that have to be taken into account – without saying anything about an ultimate speed.
The Transformation Of Mass
The transformation of mass is the one that has the greatest impact in terms of forbidding FTL travel. The theory goes that the faster you go, the more any acceleration is diverted into increasing the mass of the object that’s accelerating; hence it gets harder to accelerate the object any further. Like Xeno’s Paradox, you can get ever-closer to the limiting speed, but never quite get all the way.
Sorry; like that same Paradox, it’s an interesting thought experiment, but has no bearing on reality. For example, if our object was a missile using a conventional rocket engine, the mass of the exhaust would also increase, so the drive becomes more efficient by exactly the same ratio as the purported increase in inefficiency due to the mass of the payload.
The Transformation Of Time
Which brings me to the Twin Paradox, in which Time Dilation leads to a twin moving at close to the speed of light aging more slowly than one who isn’t.
The explanations for this paradox all stem from the concept that one twin has undergone acceleration and one hasn’t. How does the universe know which is which? Isn’t it just as accurate to say that the planet with the “reference” twin on it has accelerated away from the twin in the space-ship? So far as one twin is concerned, the other has aged more slowly, no matter which twin we are talking about.
It’s easy to construct thought experiments to demolish any arguements based on time dilation as proof of the limiting speed of the universe. Twins accelerating to something close to the speed of light (say 90%) in different directions, for example – if the speed of light is the ultimate speed of the universe, then their speed of separation can’t be 180% of the speed of light. When they turn around, decelerate, accelerate back the way they came from, and again accelerate, they will both have experienced the same amount of time dilation, i.e. that their speed of separation was zero throughout.
Paradoxes, Paradoxes Everywhere
Which brings me back to that statement attributed to Einstein: “every time I consider the possibility of moving faster than light, I find myself caught up in paradoxes.” In terms of proof against FTL speeds, this is a washout – because (as shown), every time I consider the possibility that nothing can travel faster than light, I find myself caught up in paradoxes!
A Question Of Physics: The Propagation Of Electric Current
When the poles of a battery are connected by a wire, a current flows. One electron is pulled along the wire from one atom to the next, creating a void that a neighboring electron is pulled into, creating a new void. Or maybe one electron pushes into an atom, which gives it too many, so another electron of that atom is pushed into a neighboring atom. Or maybe both these descriptions are oversimplifications of events in a subatomic realm where normal physics doesn’t obtain.
I remember reading that the actual speed of electrons within a current flow was relatively slow, but the propagation rate of the existence of a current is ‘virtually instantaneous’ – but can’t remember where I read that. The source then went on to assume that the propagation rate was the speed of light, or slower, because nothing can travel faster. I wonder how long it takes for the middle of that length of wire to “realize” that there is an electron current flowing?
A Question of Physics: Quantum Tunneling
Another question posed by modern physics concerns the phenomenon of Quantum Tunneling. During the “tunneling” phase of the phenomenon, speeds exceed the speed of light (1.5 to 1.7 times c. Currently, there’s a lot of scrambling going on amongst physicists to try and reconcile this and related phenomena with their old theories, such as postulating “Vacuum Energies” and “Virtual Particles” – in effect, trying to show that even though a phenomenon can travel faster than the speed of light, this doesn’t violate relativity. To quote from the last page of the excellent Wikipedia overview of Faster-Than-Light,
It was… claimed by the Keller group in Switzerland that particle tunneling does indeed occur in zero real time. Their tests involved tunneling electrons, where the group argued a relativistic prediction for tunneling time should be 500-600 attoseconds (one attosecond is 10e-18 seconds, or 0.000 000 000 000 000 001 seconds). All that could be measured was 24 attoseconds, which is the limit of the test accuracy… other physicists believe that tunneling experiments in which particles appear to spend anomalously short times inside the barrier are in fact fully compatible with relativity, although there is disagreement about whether the explanation involves reshaping of the wave packet or other effects.
This sounds an awful lot like making weasely excuses to a layman. “Your honor, my client committed the misdeeds of which he is excused, but technically he did not break the strict letter of the law.”
There have been suggestions made that this result is meaningless, because no information can be conveyed by these means; but last year (or possibly in 2009) I remember reading reports that a series of pulses had been transmitted via Quantum Tunneling all the way across Boston Harbor (I wish I had the reference handy to link to it). And if FTL communications is possible, then according to science, so is time travel.
And if you can travel in time, then you can arrive at a destination before the speed-of-light limit says you should be able to – in other words, travel at (effectively) FTL speeds (for that matter, you could arrive before you left).
A Question Of Physics: The Propagation Of Gravity
Gravity is a continuous, non-electromagnetic phenomenon – at least, no-one has ever detected a particle of gravity, a Graviton. Science postulates that such a thing exists, simply because everything else that science has discovered operates through fundamental particles.
If an object – let’s say a planet around Alpha Centauri – is exerting a gravitational field that is affecting, however slightly, the orbit of Earth around the Sun, and that gravitational field changes, how quickly does that gravitational field change become detectable on Earth, assuming instruments of sufficient sensitivity?
‘Changing gravitational fields?’ you may ask; ‘Is that even possible?’. Well, yes – an orbit is an ellipse, and as an object orbiting the sun approaches perihelion, it travels faster, according to Kepler’s Second Law. That means that it accelerates, and – according to the Lorentz-FitzGerald transformation – it increases its mass (or, as I contend, its apparent mass).
If the mass actually increases, that should have an impact on the shape of the orbit, as shown by Kepler’s Third Law – either the Period of the orbit (the length of time it takes to complete an orbit) should be reduced, or the size of it (as measured by the semimajor, ie long axis) should be increased, or both. The first means that the object will accelerate more than expected, producing an even bigger distortion, and so on – ad infinitum – or, at least, until escape velocity is achieved. The second means that the orbit will decay outwards – until the orbiting body is thrown free of the sun altogether.
Yet, we still have a solar system. That means one of two things: either the effect hasn’t had long enough yet to fling all the planets of the solar system out into the depths of space, or the mass increase of the Lorentz-FitzGerald equation – which relies on the speed of light being an absolute limit to how fast things can travel – is an illusion, an effect of perception; in which case the speed-of-light limit itself is also an illusion.
Conclusion: FTL is possible – we just haven’t figured out how, yet.
Fanciful Theory Leftovers? – The Inertia Problem
So, for game purposes at least, there’s plenty of room for FTL travel to exist. But is it practical? There’s still a major hurdle to be overcome before the answer can be ‘yes’: Inertia. And it arises because people don’t really appreciate how fast the speed of light is.
Ignoring the Lorentz-FitzGerald effect, if you can accelerate continuously at one gravity (i.e. you would weigh as much as you do on the surface of the earth), it would take a whisker under 30,559,884 seconds to reach the speed of light. That’s 8,448.856 hours – call it 8449 hours for convenience – or 353.7 days. That’s right, less than a couple of weeks short of a year.
To halve that, we need to double the acceleration. Most humans black out at a sustained G-force of 5 Gravities – which would cut the acceleration time to a little under 71 days, or a bit more than 10 weeks. But no-one has ever been subjected to that sort of G-force for anywhere NEAR that length of time.
Modern pilots, with training and special exercises, and G-suits, can reportedly sustain up to Nine G without blackout – a little under 40 days of that would get you to light-speed.
Sixteen gravities, sustained for more than about 1.1 seconds, is generally considered to be lethal, according to Wikipedia. It would take 22 DAYS of such acceleration to achieve light-speed.
Game Scale Numbers
In order to achieve FTL speeds in an hour, we’re talking 8449 G’s. At that acceleration, the pressure of air on the body would be more than 124,000 pounds per square inch. That’s the same as having a battleship’s main gun or a locomotive on top of you – for each square inch of exposed skin. Our pilot would immediately assume the thickness of tissue paper, or less.
Champions has a combat turn of 12 seconds. To go to FTL in that span of time would subject the character to more than 2.5 MILLION G’s. At more than about 10,000G’s, the pressure would compress the character into Neutronium, or worse yet, into a black hole.
These numbers are blatantly ridiculous.
The Acceleration Interval
The problem is that this acceleration is not instantaneous, it takes time – and because it occupies duration, inertia has to be overcome. The results are in keeping with physics as we know them – but are inconvenient in game terms.
It follows that if the acceleration is to be experienced in real time, it is going to take REAL time to achieve the speed in question – I would not be comfortable suggesting any figure short of 6 months, ie an acceleration of 2G maximum if any sort of realism is to obtain.
Unless, of course, your game is going to utilize one of the “cheats” to avoid this difficulty. They make the game more science fantasy than science fiction, but so what? Superpowers are already more science fiction than science fantasy anyway!
Game Mechanics
The following mechanics are designed for use with the Hero System, but are easily adaptable to any appropriate game system – since they are mostly a table of results from a set of calculations, with virtually no game rules involved. The universal “mechanics” are beneath the table below.
Champions charges 10 character points for a base level of FTL travel, which gives a maximum speed of 1 Light Year per Year. Each 2 additional points doubles this value:
Champions FTL Table | ![]() |
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Points | Velocity | Approximation | |
10 | 1 LY per year | ||
12 | 2 LY per year | 2 LY per year | |
14 | 4 LY per year | 4 LY per year | |
16 | 8 LY per year | 8 LY per year | |
18 | 16 LY per year | 1 LY per month | |
20 | 32 LY per year | 2 LY per month | |
22 | 64 LY per year | 1 LY per week | |
24 | 128 LY per year | 2 LY per week | |
26 | 250 LY per year | 4 LY per week | |
28 | 500 LY per year | 1 LY per day | |
30 | 1,000 LY per year | 2 LY per day | |
32 | 2,000 LY per year | 4 LY per day | |
34 | 4,000 LY per year | 8 LY per day | |
36 | 8,000 LY per year | 1 LY per hour | |
38 | 16,000 LY per year | 2 LY per hour | |
40 | 32,000 LY per year | 4 LY per hour | |
42 | 64,000 LY per year | 8 LY per hour | |
44 | 128,000 LY per year | 16 LY per hour | |
46 | 250,000 LY per year | 0.5 LY per min |
For these numbers to be of much use, outrageous accelerations have to be used – or travel takes a very long time. For those who want their ships to accelerate to FTL speeds from rest, I have put together a PDF (link above). For each of 24 different acceleration rates, ranging from 0.1 (Light-sail) to an unbelievable 16000 Gravities, it gives two critical numbers: how long it takes at that acceleration to achieve the maximum velocity from the table above, and how far the character/ship will travel while doing so.
At 1 G, for example, and a top speed of 16 Light Years per year, it will take 15,500 years to achieve top speed – at which point the character/ship will have travelled 248 million light-years. And it then has to decelerate, taking another 15,500 years and covering another 248 million light-years.
The table is useful, because if you don’t want to travel such an outrageous distance, you can locate half the total distance you DO want to travel, determine the peak velocity from it and half the travel time.
For example, at 1G, if the character/ship only wants to travel 10 light-years, look for a distance of 5 light-years. The closest values are 3.9 light years and 15.5 light years, so the answers will be somewhere in between, and rather closer to the lower value. Nevertheless, the character will have had to pay for a top speed of 4 LY per year. The times that go with those values are 1.9 and 3.9 years, respectively, so a rough guesstimate is that each half of the trip will take about 3 years.
If the character/ship had only paid for the 2 LY per year top speed? The acceleration to that speed at 1G takes 1.9 years and covers 3.9 light-years; deceleration takes the same; so for the rest of the trip, the character/ship will be travelling at their top speed of 2 LY per year. Ten light-years is the total distance to be travelled, less 3.9 while accelerating and another 3.9 while decelerating leaves 2.2 to be covered at full speed (2 LY per year), so that takes another 1.1 years. The total travelling time is 1.9 (accelerating) plus 1.1 at full speed, plus 1.9 decelerating = 4.9 years.
The tables make it easy to work with constant acceleration drives – provided that the problem of Inertia is dispensed with, or ignored.
Friskier Than Logic? – Warp Drive: The Star Trek solution
That’s where the Star Trek solution comes into play. The theory behind Star Trek’s warp drive – as determined in between the show’s original airing and the writing of Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan, and implied in several of the original Star Trek novels of that period – is that the Warp Drive creates a “subspace bubble” around the ship and accelerates this inertial reference frame relative to the rest of the universe. The ship itself – and the passengers within it – don’t experience inertia because they aren’t moving, relative to the space around them.
The result is that a ship or character that uses this type of FTL can accelerate to whatever speed it/they are capable of in whatever time frame the GM considers reasonable.
Although the Hero Games rules never come out and say so, the description of the power clearly implies that this is also what the authors had in mind.
The Star Trek Scale
According to the writer’s guide for the original series, the velocity of a ship or object travelling at warp N was N³ or N×N×N times the speed of light. In the Next Generation, this was tweaked to a more complex formula that give slightly higher speeds for a given Warp Factor. Both guidelines were regularly ignored and abused during production.
For what it may be worth, the following table permits conversion between the Hero System FTL scale and Star Trek’s Original Warp Factors:
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Show Me The Way To Go Home
A problem they never really address in Star Trek or the Hero system is how to navigate in such an inertial subspace bubble. Direction control is easy, but how do you know where you’re going?
Several Star Trek novels get around this by postulating that energy striking the “bubble” can be detected as – effectively – tachyons, which the ships computer can detect and interpret into an appropriate viewscreen image, showing stars streaking by as though the ship were really travelling at Warp Factor whatever.
Well, that’s all well and good – but how about for the ordinary (or extraordinary) super-type who can travel at FTL speeds?
The Zenith-3 campaign house rules resolve this by stating that an external gravitational field distorts the shape of the bubble, and that characters / ships travelling using warp drives are able to detect these distortions as feedback. In effect, they can “see” the density of matter in the local space around their subspace bubble. Using these masses (after recognizing and excluding those caused by nearby planets – not an easy task) permits significant masses to be used as navigational beacons.
The strength of a beacon is the product of its mass and its proximity – a smaller mass relatively close by is just as strong as a really big mass (supergiant or black hole) that is a long way away, and therefore difficult to distinguish. And, of course, the closest masses are those of the local star and its solar system.
The practice is therefore to locate all the relevant masses using conventional celestial navigation techniques, so that you know what to avoid. In the directions of those planetary and solar objects, they drown out the starfield in noise, but by knowing where these celestial objects are not you can determine where to get a clear view of the sky.
The other factor that is useful in Warp Navigation is that apparent motion has a greater effect with local proximity. So by “tagging” the most significant mass-objects in the vicinity and watching to see how they shift position as you travel, you can identify what is local, what is remote, and what is in between.
Gas Nebulae show up as fog, as does a galactic centre.
I would love to do an illustration of it for you – I have designed one, but have run out of time. Maybe I’ll come back and add it afterwards.
Freakish Thin Legalities? – Jump Drive & Warp Points: The Traveler/Mote In God’s Eye solution
The third approach to FTL in the Zenith-3 campaign is modeled on another classic science-fiction approach – jump points. These are curdles in space-time that appear naturally near large masses provided that the mass does not have all its energy locked up in fusion reactions. In effect, a concentration of potential energy too great for the local space-time to accommodate creates a warp point.
Warp Points are massless, because their mass has been shunted out of this space-time to form a conduit into another realm, known as Hyperspace or Otherspace or by various other names. When a ship passes through a warp point with sufficient energy, it exits from another warp point elsewhere in space-time. One warp point connects to anywhere from one or two to dozens of others, each with a different quantum temporal energy level; navigation is achieved by matching the spacio-temporal energy level of the desired exit gate.
The connections between Warp Points are distorted by significant gravitational forces and by other phenomena. What’s more, with only a limited set of possible energy quantum states, nearby gates with similar energy levels will take precedence over more distant jump points with the same signature. A ship or character will always emerge from the closest jump point that matches the quantum state of the energy it has built up at the moment of transition.
It follows that navigating to a particular destination may require a very roundabout path, avoiding various dangers and hazards. Consider the diagram: A ship wants to jump from A to E, but B has roughly the same energy potential as E, and is much closer. The only way to reach E is to follow the line A – B – C – D – E, five jumps.
Some ships can generate enough energy to make multiple such jumps in succession; others can only make a single jump at a time. Some energy differentials between warp points are so high that transiting from one to another counts as multiple jumps in and of itself; these routes are not accessible at all to lesser ships.
Warp Points, by their natures are both unstable and prone to being temperamental; many change size and shape, or even open and close irregularly, and some often have jarring gravitational discontinuities. They are not permanent, and can evaporate or dissipate at any time; every ship that passes through one equalizes the potential differences between two warp points just a little, contributing to the erosion. All of these problems can be controlled to some extent by the creation of Stellar Gates, also known as Jumpgates and Warp Portals – artificial mechanisms that act to stabilize, control, and advertise the presence of a jump point.
Jump drives are often preferred over warp drives because, while the initial energy expenditure of a jump may be higher than that used over a period of time by a Warp Drive, once this expenditure has taken place the universe itself provides the energy to complete the FTL transition, whereas a Warp Drive is a constant ongoing expenditure. Overall, it takes a lot less energy and effort to use a warp point.
Transition Times
Adding to the complexities of Warp Point navigation is the fact that entry speed and direction contribute massively to the travel time by dictating the orbital path within the warp connection that a vessel or character will follow. While the average time will be the same as if the journey from Warp Point to Warp Point was conducted at the maximum FTL speed of the vessel, with no acceleration or deceleration time, it can be anywhere from 90% shorter to more than 3.5 times as long, per jump. (To determine the transition factor, roll d6+1 and multiply the results by a roll of d6+2, then divide by 10).
Successful navigation rolls can reduce the results of one die roll by up to 3 (to a minimum of 1). Successful piloting rolls can reduce the results of the other by a similar amount.
Into Hyperspace
Some energy configurations do not lead from one warp point to another, but deposit the ship/traveler in the Hyperspace medium (called the Astral Plane by the players of the game) through which the connections between warp points travel. Since the conduits maintain an inertial frame that is coupled to the frames at both ends but separated from them by the jump point barrier, ships travelling between jump points continue to experience time and gravity and related phenomena exactly as they would in normal space; that is not the case when a ship or traveler leaves a conduit and passes into hyperspace proper.
Hyperspace is a strange realm in which velocity is proportional to determination and will, and is the home of many strange phenomena. Inertial frames are not maintained within this realm, and hours, days, weeks, months, or even years can pass with no awareness of them being experienced by the individual. In terms of space-time, the individual is decoupled from their time-frame of origin and while their personal entropy arrow maintains the inertial state that it possessed prior to departure from normal space-time for the individual, it is decoupled from the space-time of origin of the character.
All this enables an individual reenter the time-space of their primary realm at any point in time or space, or to enter instead a parallel world to that of their origin, or an even more divergent reality.
Navigation is especially difficult, as perceived time is measured in hours plus, and every stray thought draws the individual in the direction of a space-time that resonates with that thought and its historical or emotional content. Think of escaping a repressive regime and you may find yourself entering a space-time in which that regime never existed; thing of the regime from which you are fleeing and you may find yourself entering a space-time in which they or an analogous group are even more powerful or dominant. There are no fixed landmarks, adding to the challenge.
Hyperspace can take you places Warp Points and Warp Drive can’t – but it is far more dangerous because of that capability.
Further Than Limbo? – Extra-Dimensional Movement: The Stargate solution
The last type of FTL that is available in the Zenith-3 campaign are artificial portals such as stargates, fairy circles, rainbow bridges, and the like. Regardless of their appearance, topology, and nature, these can all be essentially summed up as artificial temporary warp points, created to bridge point A to point B. With all EDM there are issues of accuracy, and the potential of bridging from one space-time continuum to another through hyperspace. If the energy is supplied to them, some of these constructs can be semi-permanent.
Like the other types of FTL, Portals can encounter unusual phenomena and hazards that are unique to this mode of travel, such as bifurcating transit conduits, gravity snarls, and reality shock.
Navigation poses an interesting problem when it comes to portals, since – like jump points – all navigation must be done in advance of the actual travel; no correction or adjustment is possible en route. Unlike jump points, which can be stabilized and explored on a long-term and consistent basis, portals only exist long enough for the traveler(s) to transit through them, plus a few seconds.
They also tend to be more direct than other forms of FTL which involve interstellar travel at the very least; most portals are point-to-point operations from the surface of one world to the surface of another, or something very close to it.
Fairytale Twisted Locii? – FTL in Fantasy Gaming
What’s that? FTL in D&D? Well, why not?
Portals exist in most games – if you know where to look for them. There are spells that let you travel from one plane to another. There’s a spell called Teleport that you might have heard of.
Any of these can constitute FTL travel. Sufficiently creative PCs can attempt to exploit any of them for the purposes of quick travel from A to B. And this can pose problems in D&D that are unlikely to arise in more science-oriented (including superhero) campaigns, simply because the science gives a context and framework to FTL – that’s what this article is all about, after all.
In fantasy gaming, most of that context and framework, and the protection from abuse that they carry with them, are absent. There are multiple vectors into the FTL-travel realm – and they are all in something approaching a state of anarchy, ripe for exploitation.
The solution: think of them in Science-Fiction terms, but without the restraints on your imagination. Decide how they work, and come up with complications that you can spring on over-clever players. The interpretations of FTL-capabilities described in this article would make an excellent starting point – the only differences are that access to “FTL” might require a flying carpet, or a sea voyage, or an overland trek, instead of a starship, and that the means are magical rather than technological.
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August 26th, 2011 at 7:12 am
What’s with the “Da’ Vane recently posted..Cult of Da’ Vane Does it Again” leading to [removed] which becomes a Google page? Did I just get a virus?
August 26th, 2011 at 12:55 am
Man, if only the world worked like the first half of this article. That would be AWESOME!
Ah well. Good stuff in the second half. Nice survey of the available solutions.
August 26th, 2011 at 1:45 am
Thanks, Roger. While it can’t be said that the world works like the first half of the article, it certainly can’t be said (yet) that it doesn’t! And I agree, it would be awesome.
But fairness and candour compels me to admit that the wikipedia page on “faster-than-light” had a few solutions that I had never heard of. Unless you’re talking about gaming solutions, of course!
It seems extremely improbable, with so many possible solutions to the problem of breaking the light barrier, that none of them will ever pan out!
August 26th, 2011 at 5:19 am
You are correct in your assumptions, Mike. Einstein was a genius in many ways, but some of his arguments had limiting flaws, and those limits have been limiting science ever since.
Your analogy with the clock also serves to highlight another flaw in Einstein’s body of work – the idea of time as the 4th dimension. Time isn’t a dimension. Time is a human construct – an imagining of the order of things based on our perception. Thus references to things like speed are also human constructs. This is also pertinent to the idea of faster than light travel – is it possible to slow light down?
If light can be slowed down, then we could see what other possibilities exist, and then look into them for travelling faster. Ultimately, faster than light travel means travelling faster than sight.
This brings us back to the idea of the 4th dimension and it not necessarily being time. We may only perceive three dimensions, but does that necessarily stop us from moving in the fourth dimension? All dimensions, when they become infinite, also become a loop, with perceived existence technically being on the loop – moving inwards or outwards from the loop being the next dimension. This pattern continues through 2-dimensional planes becoming globes. Since our 3-dimensional space is also supposedly infinite, and observed evidence has shown it to be expanding in all known directions, since stars and galaxies are spreading like the surface of a balloon, it is fairly easy to conceive that there is an inner 4th dimension which is the interior of our 3d universe – the inside of the expanding balloon as it were.
We’ve a lot to learn about phenomena like black holes, but as gravity wells, it is surmised that they distort the universe like a rubber sheet – which, bringing us back to the balloon analogy, means that they potentially lead into the 4th dimension. It may sound like the hackneyed plot to Event Horizon. Indeed – take the gate way to hell stuff out, and that’s the basic premise of the film: the experimental ship uses FTL travel by creating black holes and moving through the 4th dimension. A Sam Neill’s character explains, the shortest distance between two points is to fold space and move directly to the destination. It’s been the basic idea behind teleportation, both magical and technological, for quite some time.
Da’ Vane recently posted..Cult of Da’ Vane Does it Again
August 26th, 2011 at 6:12 am
I certainly would like to see FTL work (soon, not getting any younger) a lot of the things that Einstein imagined are a barrier have been proven.
For instance, time dilation is a known and measurable effect. It has to be compensated for in a lot of situations like GPS sats.
Mass dilation is a logarithmic effect if I remember correctly but it has been tested and measured. It’s effects are miniscule at most speeds. Only when light speed is approached are the pounds packed on. Xeno’s paradox works because you are actually decelerating your propelling gas (it doesn’t catch back up to you, because it’s going slower than you) and it therefore looses mass.
Electricity does indeed have a speed, It is very fast and “functionally instantaneous” especially in circuits but not as fast as light. Remember the “speed of light” we’re referring to is the speed of light in a vacuum. Light slows down when traveling through air, water, glass etc. That’s why prisms split light into it’s colors. Electricity is the same way. It slows according to the media it’s traveling through.
Quantum effects seem to be the only thing that break the light barrier. Tunneling, spooky action at a distance and quantum teleportation are all possible real life basis for FTL. In reality, humans don’t know why they work. Einstein hated them but was the one who pointed them out.
One other possible FTL technology which may turn out to be complete bunk but is fun to thing about is vacuum engineering. Vacuum energy is the state where a space should be empty but there are particles popping in and out of existence. Sounds crazy but it’s a real effect. Some think that inertia itself is a property of vacuum energy and that by altering the field around an object it could make inertia actually push the object instead of impeding acceleration. In a way, it’s warping the vacuum and therefore a “warp drive”. :)
It seems that hyperspace or some “subspace” concept is the underpinning of a lot of FTL ideas. There are a lot of real physics ideas about how to break the light barrier. Every day there are people and physicists that think they’ve toppled Einstein. So far there are tons of theories to do it. Just no one can prove their theories with experiments, where Einstein’s have been proved over and over again.
Emmett recently posted..The Hound Carrier
August 26th, 2011 at 7:20 am
No – It appears that some crazy russians decided to hijack the link to the post so that it goes elsewhere. I don’t know the purpose yet, but I’d recommend treating it as a potential virus. Thanks for alerting me, and I’ll look into seeing which other links have been hijacked and resolving this as soon as possible. Damn script kiddies.
Da’ Vane recently posted..Cult of Da’ Vane Does it Again
August 26th, 2011 at 8:28 am
The link seems fine now. And, looking on the bright side, it does at least prove that some people follow those links at the end of comments!
August 26th, 2011 at 8:07 am
Light can be slowed down already… when it goes in reverse, it travels faster than the speed of light.
http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=2544
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/17870
1999 discovery!
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/1999/02.18/light.html
The speed limit set by Einstien is completely arbitrary. Imagine two observers, each measuring the speed of light in their immediate vicinity. In the first case the photon travels a fixed distance, at the speed of light. In the second, the photon also travels the same fixed distance, also at the speed of light. In the second case however, the scale is much larger… all the stars and atoms in that part of the universe are much further apart. So in fact the speed of light in location 2 is actually much faster, but only when a comparison can be made with location #1.
An illustration for your reference:
http://i158.photobucket.com/albums/t90/awi1777/VariableLight.png
Only when the two scientists get together, and know the distance that they are separated by, does the discrepancy in the speed of light even become apparent and can then be measured.
It’s all relative, not to the universe, but to the observer.
August 26th, 2011 at 8:25 am
I have resolved the issue – I don’t think it is anything to worry about. Just some script kiddies tampering with my website over at DVOID Systems, that basically changed the way WordPress was functioning and hijacked all the links. I don’t know what the actual point was – all it seemed to do was go through that site to ultimately become a search page. On looking at the code – it seems that the whole point was basically just to direct pages to search engines – I’m not sure what the intermediary pages did. I think it’s just to inconvenience people.
Da’ Vane recently posted..Cult of Da’ Vane Does it Again
August 26th, 2011 at 8:42 am
@Da’Vane: it might have been an attempt to get an unearned high Google Pageranking. Equally, it might have been an attempt to make the owner of the target website look as though he was trying to unfairly get a high pagerank. Or it could be the “damage it to prove we can / because we can” attitude – which is probably the most likely of them all.
Mike recently posted..Fascinating Topological Limits: FTL in Gaming
August 26th, 2011 at 8:49 am
Einstein himself said that “God doesn’t play dice with the Universe” in reference to quantum mechanics and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
In fact, quantum mechanics is the advances science of the future, and is basically what we’d consider magical in many respects. The pulp science of comic books and the fundamentals of magic can all be partially explained by the principles of quantum mechanics in theory – what we’ve not figured out is how to put it into practice in a way that doesn’t involve destroying the universe or otherwise expending large amounts of power that we don’t have.
It’s not a case that things such as faster than light travel are impossible, but that they are not economically viable for commercial use. But then, most technology is like that – at one point personal communication technology wasn’t economically viable and now most people in modern society have mobile phones. The same with computers and internet access. Initially the groundbreaking technology is expensive and limited, but advances in science make it cheaper and more affordable as it’s uses become better known and society becomes more adept at using the new technology available. Nothing is truly impossible – we’ve just not discovered how to do it effectively and efficiently yet.
Da’ Vane recently posted..Cult of Da’ Vane Does it Again
August 27th, 2011 at 4:06 am
Hmm, interesting article. Would love to see your take on the tachyon duelists thought experiment. It basically proposes that any FTL travel generate casualty paradoxes.
Posit the following scenario: Two duelists are armed with tachyon pistols, which fire bullets so fast they will arrive at their targets “instantaneously” (FTL). The two duelists travel apart at 0.866c from each other and fire at each other at 8s. Due to relativity, from the perspective of each duelist, time is passing for the other duelist at 50% the usual rate.
If duelist A fires at 8s, the bullet instantaneously hits duelist B only after 4s have ticked on his clock. Mortally wounded by an apparent foul shot after only 4s, duelist B immediately returns fire immediately at A, which would hit A at the 2s mark, preempting his original shot at 8s!
Details here: http://sheol.org/throopw/tachyon-pistols.html
August 27th, 2011 at 9:36 am
Disregarding both reaction time and the likelyhood that anyone armed with tachyon weapons would understand that the effect appears to preceed the cause:
Duelist A sees that time appears to be slowed by an amount that may be 50% but is probably slower, for Duelist B, and vice-versa. Both fire at aproximatly the same time. A neutral referee, with the clock that both are watching would see the time for both of them slowed by 50%, so it follows that their opening speed relative to each other must be greater than the percieved 0.866c, and that they would percieve each other as slowed by more than that 50%. Both open fire at the same moment, when the neutral clock shows 8s – but they also percieve it to be slowed by 50%, because it is receding from them at 0.866c. So in actuality they will fire at a time that is somewhat later than when they are 8s apart. Duelist A appears to see Duelist B fire at (say) 16 seconds – without doing the math, and Duelist B sees dualist A fire at the same time. Hower, the shots reach their destinations at each duelist’s personal 8s mark relative to the external timekeeper, ie the instant they pull the trigger.
So each sees that the moment has come to shoot and the effects of the other duelist’s weapon fire arrives at roughly that same instant. Both shots arrive when each fires at the other, which appears to be at the right time to fire. A period of time later, each sees (assuming they survived the tachyon weapon) their opponant pull the trigger and their own shot reach the target – tachyons by definition not being electromagnetic in nature, or affecting/generating electromagnetic radiation , so only the effects of the shorts would be visible, and they would travel at the speed of light.
You can argue that this analysis does not fit the outlined scenario because it postulates an external observer with the timepiece both are using to time their shots. However, if they are operating on internal time, it won’t be slowed the way the observers’ will be, so both will fire at a subjective 8s time mark, hitting their target instantaniously but not percieving the shot, and will then see their opponant fire at the same time as their own shot lands some time later. Exactly the same result, in other words. Only the gap between firing and percieving the effect of the shot will change.
Nor does it matter if the measured velocities are 0.866c relative to each other instead of a hypothetical outside observer. Again, only the interval between firing and observing the results would matter.
August 27th, 2011 at 10:21 am
Actually, one could argue that this statement in the answer:
“…so it follows that their opening speed relative to each other must be greater than the percieved 0.866c.”
Is in direct contravention to this statement from the question:
“The two duelists travel apart at 0.866c…”
Therefore it follows that anything follows from a contradiction. Just sayin’.
A good explanation of what’s going on in relativistic problems can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Susskind#Modern_Physics:_The_Theoretical_Minimum
Those are courses taught by Leonard Susskind, a man who’s forgotten more about relativity than any of us will ever know. The SR course will go a good long way towards understanding where the mistakes in this thread lie.
August 27th, 2011 at 10:26 am
@AndantelnBlue and Mike: Regarding the tachyon duelists paradox – such paradoxes only occur because the theoretical arguments are taken outside of realistic context to become paradoxical.
The tachyon shot is faster than light, and thus there is a delay between when the perceived impact of the shot is registered and the actual impact occurs. This is the only effect. The shots themselves occur faster than the the firer can register them. But the rest of the action isn’t faster than light – so if it’s a standard pistol duel with tachyon weaponry, then the draw of the action would be registered normally, but the firing motion of the bullet isn’t registered at all until after it hits. It wouldn’t be a foul shot, because the draw itself is legal.
It’s like the Xeno paradox that an arrow can never hit a tortoise. Theoretically, a moving point cannot hit a secondary moving point moving away from it, because the second point will always move away before the first point can reach it. This is because points are 0-dimensional objects with no size or mass and must be in the same exact location which is impossible. But, once you translate this to actual physical objects with actual size, it becomes possible, because you just need to be able to get the first object close enough to the second object to hit it. Therefore, you have to take not just speed, but size into account, and you only need to get close enough for the arrow to hit the tortoise and prove Xeno’s paradox wrong.
Ultimately, faster than light travel doesn’t mean going back in time and effect before cause. It means simply not being able to percieve things visibly because it is faster than the speed that light travels.
After all, light itself is just one part of a wavelength, and sound is another, and by changing the frequency, we can turn light into sound and back again. This is how we create lasers. It’s also how we create X-ways, gamma rays, and microwaves. We just haven’t mastered cheap and efficient ways of producing and detecting these phenomenon, and fully understood the effects they have on the human body.
What is also interesting is that light works as both a wave and a particle. We don’t yet understand which other particles might also work like waves, and which waves might also work like particles. It could be that with enough energy, all particles can become waves, possibly using Einstein’s E=MC^2 or some derivative thereof.
What we really need is for someone to derive the E=MC^X for another type of particle to wave transformation, and then maybe we can compare that with Einstein’s version for light and crack the whole thing right open for being able to turn matter into energy and back again, and then maybe we’ll get some real teleportation going on!
Da’ Vane recently posted..Cult of Da’ Vane Does it Again
August 27th, 2011 at 10:40 am
Da’ Vane said “Ultimately, faster than light travel doesn’t mean going back in time and effect before cause. It means simply not being able to percieve things visibly because it is faster than the speed that light travels.”
False. I’ll refer you to the Special Relativity course referenced above for why though. http://youtube.com/view_play_list?p=CCD6C043FEC59772 Were I to just give you the reasons why it’s false, it wouldn’t mean much to you – most people instinctively reject contradictory information. You’ll have to do the work on your own.
Before you comment, remember, invest yourself in finding what is right, not in being right.
August 27th, 2011 at 11:30 am
@Da’Vane @ Roger: Actually, that’s not the error. The error is that sound is not an electromagnetic phenomenon, it’s a vibration in a medium – usually, but not necessarily, air. What we have learned to do is induce oscillations of electrical current which we can manifest either as sound or as electromagnetic waves.
I don’t think I ever said, “effect before cause”, though the original statement of paradox did. My line of thinking eliminates any suggestion of “effect before cause”, though it does have “effect before percieved effect and cause”.
As for the “travel apart at 0.866c” vs “travel at 0.866c”, that’s my error in reading hastily. Nevertheless, the overall result remains, only the numbers change.
Mike recently posted..Fascinating Topological Limits: FTL in Gaming
August 27th, 2011 at 11:33 am
Oh, and a PS to Roger: It’s worth remembering that this is physics for gaming. While I believe it to be accurate as far as it goes – at least in the first half – if it isn’t, that doesn’t especialy matter. The key is how you can explain and use FTL in any game that assumes that it both exists and works – if you have to fudge the physics a little, all that’s required is for it to sound plausible.
Mike recently posted..Fascinating Topological Limits: FTL in Gaming
August 27th, 2011 at 12:33 pm
No worries. Not trying to start an argument, but it’s good to understand what’s going wrong. You’re misunderstanding relativity (which is fine, most people do – it’s hard, counter-intuitive stuff that people study for DECADES and still mess up on).
The last thing I want is for you to think I’m being adversarial, I’m not, but I’m also going to at least attempt to show you where you can go to get *good* information when you’re espousing *bad* information. It’s worth remembering that bad information does nobody any good.
Here’s a short resource: http://sheol.org/throopw/tachyon-pistols.html
The problem with your explanation is that it does not match the S|T Diagram on that page. You’ll notice that it includes an Observer.
I drew another pic showing the exact scenario: https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/104810568712102362000/albums/posts/5645602216114344946
There are three worldlines: Gun1, Gun2 and Obs(erver)
Here’s what each person sees:
Gun1 – 2.1s: Gets shot by Gun2. 8s: Shoots Gun2
Observer – ~3s: Bullet from Gun2 goes by – headed towards Gun1. ~5.5s: Bullet from Gun1 goes by – headed towards Gun2.
Gun2 – 4s: Gets shot by Gun1. 4.1s: Shoots Gun1
The events are spacelike: you can find a frame of reference where things all happen at the same time, but in different locations.
August 27th, 2011 at 3:00 pm
I’ll break this down, because it seems that we’re all discussing at cross-purposes here, and it will save a lot of confusion in the long run to explain exactly what stance we are arguing from before we start going on about others being wrong.
@Roger: My argument is about the nature of the paradox you described and the paradox itself. This is the simple fact that the paradox is based on perception as a batter of fact. You reference this fact – that a shot that is fired on the 8 second mark appears to impact before it is fired, hitting on the 4 second mark. Thus the other duelist fires back on the 4 second mark and this appears to hit before it is fired on the 2 second mark. The idea, as referenced in the paradox, that you get perceived effect before cause because of faster than light speed.
Yet, this is an incorrect assumption, and it is that incorrect assumption that leads to the paradoxical situation, just as a similiar incorrect assumption leads to Xeno’s paradox. Which I discussed. You correct the assumption for realism, and the paradoxical elements – so in fact this paradoxical situation you mention is only paradoxical because it is made to be paradoxical.
In any situation where so connected events related by cause and effect are observable, they will always be limited by the speed of perception. This is because perception is the only way we have to register, react to, and communicate events in the universe around us. Things can easily happen faster, but we simply have no way of telling that they have any way that they do until we are able to perceive them.
Thus, if two duelists are using faster than light weapons but do not have any means faster of perception, they will be shoot each other fast, but unable to register, react to, and communicate that they have been shot. It takes time for all reactions, even for the body to register that it has been shot, and for the other shooter to see that the other shooter has been shot. You are talking about weaponry that would have no transit time for distance from pulling the trigger and hitting the target. Yet aiming and pulling the trigger would still take time. It wouldn’t be a case that the target would be dead before you pull the trigger – just that someone observing you would possibly be dead before they saw you pull the trigger. But that’s only the case if their perception of the impact of the bullet and it’s impact is faster than the speed of light.
That is an entirely different debate, however, because reflexes and reaction times, using the speed of thoughts and the automatic nervous system is something different. Perhaps there’s potential there for a new transport system – few physicists seem to take bio-electrical energy seriously, let alone psionic energy or anything from the nervous system, even if it isn’t much different from an organic form of electrical energy.
@Mike: What’s interesting is that Light consists of particles but propagates like a wave through space. Therefore it can have the properties of both and could work as missing link between various forms of energy. It’s certainly enough to speculate about in less realist universes where games are set, where you can often use alien and mystical power sources to get around inconvenient issues like simply not having enough power to do things.
Other than that, I essentially agree with you – as I said above, the paradox is formed by the issue of “effect before cause” which is not the case. It’s just “percieved effect before cause.”
Special Relativity, like most physics has, at it’s heart, the principle that the speed of light is constant and that time and space is constant for all viewers everywhere, thus it is important to be objective about things. This is fine to the extent of time not having any issues with perception. Yet, the speed of light is all about perception – for time to be the same everywhere, the speed of light would have to be infinite, and that would probably break quite a few formulas. Alternatively, we would not have to have light-based perception. This is a fundamental flaw in special relativity – and it affects one of the deepest held principles at the heart of all known physics.
All because it doesn’t deal with something that science, particularly physics, has always had issues with – perception and subjectivity. We’re not outside the universe looking in – we’re inside the universe looking at it, and we need to understand ourselves, our universe, and how we work. We can’t ignore our own limitations and the impacts that our own perceptions have on on our results and our judgements.
The biggest flaw in science today, fundamental to the schism between theists and athiests is that of perception and judgementalism. If science has not found proof that a divine creator exists, it does not mean that a divine creator does not exist. It means that science has not found proof that a divine creator exists. A divine creator may exist, but we can’t perceive them. Or they might not exist. Any judgements about which is more likely are irrelevant. When you think about it – what are the chances of there being sentient life in the universe that we can perceive? What are the chances of there being sentient life AT ALL? Yet we exist, so who knows what is possible? That’s the whole point of science isn’t it – to try and find it? To find the answers and learn what we can about the universe simply because we can until the day we’re not? And to find those answers, we’re going to need to be able perceive and understand those answers. And that means we’re also looking to expand our perceptions and thus our horizons.
Da’ Vane recently posted..Cult of Da’ Vane Does it Again
August 27th, 2011 at 3:11 pm
Da’ Vane said “My argument is about the nature of the paradox you described and the paradox itself. This is the simple fact that the paradox is based on perception as a batter of fact. …Yet, this is an incorrect assumption, and it is that incorrect assumption that leads to the paradoxical situation.”
I’m game and always willing to be proven wrong – learning is awesome! I also understand tensor calculus. So. Show me the math. If you don’t feel like you can do it in a blog post, I’ll be happy to read it on one of your blogs. However, since I *can* do the math required for SR and GR, I simply ask that you show me yourself. Don’t give me references to others’ works. I want to have you explain it to me.
August 27th, 2011 at 3:49 pm
@Roger: Math, you say? For SR and GR? Oh dear… it’s a good thing we won’t be needing them since the numbers are irrelevant.
The paradox itself is caused on a basic principle in SR and GR which is the core belief in universal time without taking into regard perception. This is the belief that if one second passes on point A one second also passes at point B. This is the concept of homogenous time or inertial time.
Now, let’s say the person at point A has a flag, and when he raises it, the person at point B records when the flag was raised. So, if the person at point A raises the flag a 1 second, the person at point B records it at 1 second. The even occurred at 1 second. 1 second everywhere. Inertial time.
Now, we have another principle, light speed, as being constant throughout the universe. And lets position our people 1 light second apart. This means that it should take light 1 second to travel the distance from person A to person B. Person A raises the flag at 1 second. It takes 1 second for the light to travel to Person B. Person B records the time as 2 seconds.
But surely this should only be recorded as 1 second, you are asking? Otherwise, how would person B know when to start the timer? This is a very good question. I don’t have an answer for this, do you? But remember, physics is based on the principle of inertial time – the idea that time is constant everywhere. Therefore the time from the start of the experiment from person A, and the time taken by the light should also be counted. The true results of the experiment are 2 seconds, but because of perception, Person B is most likely to record it as 1 second.
When you use FTL travel, you cut down the second part of the true experiment, but leave the first part unchanged. It’s the first part that is percieved – the time from starting the timer to seeing the flag, not the inertial time to seeing the flag, and that’s the flaw in SR and GR.
The only way inertial time could possibly exist is if the speed of light or whatever other form of perception you are using is infinite, so there is no delay between people knowing when to start their timers, regardless of distance.
You do not need maths to work that out. You need logic and reason.
Da’ Vane recently posted..Cult of Da’ Vane Does it Again
August 27th, 2011 at 7:59 pm
@Da’Vane:
The answer seems self-evident to me. Time Zones. At Noon here in Sydney, it’s A different time somewhere else according to clocks and calanders, but events can still be timed to occur simultaniously in both regions. Since it has been agreed by the participants that the raising of the flag will occur after 1 second, the observer sees the flag rise at the 2 second mark and documents the event as occuring at 2 seconds (his local time) and at 1 second (flag-raiser’s local time) – and notes that the two are simulatnious. Just as ‘noon’ GMT occurs at different times in different parts of the globe, so the flag-raising event occurs at different times depending on where you are. Any paradox stems from confusing the two time-frames.
August 27th, 2011 at 4:17 pm
Well, I can see where you’re misunderstanding relativity. Hopefully you can understand and integrate it… here goes!
You said, “But remember, physics is based on the principle of inertial time – the idea that time is constant everywhere.”
False. That’s NEWTONIAN physics, not relativistic physics.
Technically, I can stop there, but allow me to give you the layman’s reason why. Please note, that this is what Terry Pratchett calls “Lies for children”. I don’t think you’re a child, but I don’t know how much math you can handle either, so let’s start with the simplest (and most wrong) of the explanations, k?
The point of relativity is that time is relative to the observer. That’s where time dilation and length contraction *come* from. Time is not the same for either an observer watching from the station as a train speeds by or his buddy on the train. In fact, their yardsticks will be wrong according to each other too!
They will BOTH see the other as having a yardstick that is too short and they will BOTH see the other as having a clock that runs too slowly. Time is NOT absolute. In fact, in a very important way, the more energy you expend in movement, the less time you do it in.
Let’s stop there for now. Your primary thesis is that “Relativity says that time is the same everywhere.” It is not true that this is the case, and I have shown two examples, time dilation and length contraction that are direct consequences of that relativity of the passage of time.
If you like, I can show you HOW time dilation works, but unless you know a little bit of calculus (just a good understanding of a derivative will suffice) then it’s not going to help you, you’ll just have to take my word for it.
August 27th, 2011 at 8:50 pm
@Roger: Actually, the point of relativity is that “time is relative to the observer AND that the speed of light is an absolute limit that can never be exceeded”. If you assume only that light (and other electromagnetic phenomena) can never exceed the speed of light, you end up with the entirity of relativity as a description for what is percieved / percievable using light (and other electromagnetic phenomena), but the universe itself can quite happily continue operating on newtonian principles.
All the paradoxes that are cited to prove the existance of relativity as a phenomenon all have at their heart the assumption that communications can never exceed a given maximum speed, and that the time is the same everywhere at the same instant – and that the rate of change in time (and all our time measurements are a rate of change in something) is also the same everywhere. But these are incompatable assumptions, and the attempt to reconcile them produces things like the transformations at speed of length and time and mass.
Here’s an analogy to put those paradoxes into context, and expose the fallacy: Assume that it is the age of sailing ships, and Paris is 3 days travel from London. At noon on August 28th, London time, a flag is raised, and a message is sent to Paris stating that this has just occurred. Exactly three days later, that message is recieved, establishing that local time in Paris is three days behind London time, and that observers in Paris can never know anything that happens in London sooner than three days later. So far as the residents of Paris are concerned, London is three sailing-days away, and everything that they can observe actually happened three days earlier. When it is August 28 in Paris, it is actually August 25th in London. Then, some enterprising busy-body invents the telegraph and strings a line across the English Channel to Paris. Suddenly, messages take only an hour to reach Paris from London, perhaps less. So far as the observers in Paris are concerned, the events that are described in telegrams are arriving two days and 23 hours or so before they actually happened – the “absolute limit” of Paris being three days message-travel from London has been violated. Does that mean that the telegraph – and, later, the telephone and radio – don’t work? Not at all.
All the causality paradoxes that are used to justify relativity stem from the same trap – they assume that nothing can go faster than light and then contradict themselves by asking what if something could do so? Naturally you end up with paradoxes, which are used by the proponants to ‘prove’ their original assertion.
Physics – and basic logic – can never prove a negative. They can disprove a positive assertion.
As for the time-space diagrams that you linked to earlier, they make the same mistake: they assume that because relativistic effects are ‘real’ and nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, that anything attempting to do so must slow down, and that the mathematics describing such a slowing down show that time at FTL speeds must run backwards, and therefore that FTL permits effects to preceed causes. In reality, all they prove is that if you accept those assumptions, effects can preceed the perception of causes because there is a delay between the event and its being observed.
The mistake is in aligning the time axes for each observer simultaniously; in reality, the time axis for one of the two is shifted to the right, such that the effect, which is defined by the paradox as being simultatious with the cause, travels vertically. Or, if it’s FTL but not instantanious, it would travel to the right, ie in the direction of increased time. In other words, defining noon in London and noon in Paris to be the same instant is a recipe for contradiction, because it simply ain’t so in terms of their local time.
August 27th, 2011 at 4:23 pm
@Mark
I can teach physics all day for a year, please let me know if you want me to shut the hell up, this is your blog. :D
August 27th, 2011 at 8:53 pm
@ Roger: At Campaign Mastery, we tend to let such debates ramble on until people start getting stroppy or people lose interest – or start repeating themselves dogmatically as though restating an assertion is proof of its accuracy. I don’t see any of those conditions obtaining in this debate as yet. :)
August 28th, 2011 at 4:04 am
@Roger @Mike: Mike has summarised the point of the fallacy of relativity. Note that the definition of inertial time comes direct from the theory of Special Relativity.
Time Zones are indeed a very good analogy here for the relativistic nature of time as perception. But time zones are not the answer to the question of how to coordinate Person A and Person B when to start their timers. The answer is the means of communication, which is the speed of perception. It’s the fastest possible speed at which you can get information from Person A to Person B. At the moment the fastest speed of perception is the speed of light, but if faster than light travel is possible, that will become the fastest speed of perception. After all, we’ve been tying messages to arrows and bricks for centuries, and sometimes the arrows and bricks are the message.
As a matter of interest, time zones only exist because the Earth is a globe and therefore different points of the globe are in different parts of the day/night cycle. Noon in London and noon in New York are identical, but they are four hours apart. You can get around this by using universal time, of course, from an agreed point, which is why GMT is often used. But it doesn’t change the fact that an experiment done at 12:00 GMT is going to be 8:00 EST and therefore done in the morning.
Plus, while you may travel west and arrive before you started, departing in a place from London on 12:00 GMT and arriving in 10:00 EST, the fact remains that this is only local time, and it is in fact 14:00 GMT and was a two-hour flight for you. You haven’t travelled back in time and therefore effect hasn’t proceeded cause. You haven’t gotten off a plane before you got on it.
In relativity, time changes, you don’t. So the assumption that time is constant everywhere is flawed in relativity. And, despite what you say, you can look up the basic principles of physics in general and special relativity and see that despite the claim that time changes, with the idea that space-time bends, the scientists still think very much in the static ideas of inertial time.
This is largely because physicists are taking an objective approach, looking at things from the outside. But we’re not outside. We’re inside – we’re the subjects. We’re inside the universe we are looking at. We need to take a subjective approach, to be able to critically examine our own perceptions as a species, and it’s limitations, and work on expanding them. To truly get to grasp with GR and SR we need to understand that these have to be used subjectively from the inside, otherwise we will never get the models right. Only then can we even have a shot at guessing what they might be like from the outside.
Da’ Vane recently posted..Cult of Da’ Vane Does it Again
August 28th, 2011 at 4:49 am
Oh, and @Roger: I don’t think it was Pratchett that called them “Lies to Children” – I think it was Ian
andStewart and Jack Cohen. They wrote the scientific parts of the book. But much kudos if you can name the book, chapter, and even the page – THAT would be impressive. I am a big Pratchett fan… :DDa’ Vane recently posted..Cult of Da’ Vane Does it Again
August 28th, 2011 at 4:51 am
Oops – Ian Stewart rather… I hope he never sees that! How embarrassing. Damn lysdexia!
Da’ Vane recently posted..Cult of Da’ Vane Does it Again
August 28th, 2011 at 10:06 am
@Da’Vane: corrected your comment as per your followup.
August 28th, 2011 at 7:09 am
Hehe, no worries. The phrase is from Science of Discworld, it appears 7 times in the text as lie-to-children and 12 times as lies-to-children. Lie-to-wizards and lies-to-wizards show up once each.
Can’t tell you the chapters, I only have the book with me in .txt format – my .epub format is at home.
================= Note: this section is long and dense, read carefully pls.
RE: Relativity, there are two issues I want to point out. One is a bit of a complaint, the other is a correction on some misunderstandings you and Mike seem to have.
The complaint: Setting up a situation that the physics is designed to *rule out* and then calling it a ‘paradox that can’t be resolved’ by the physics is a bit… odd. One of the major accomplishments of SR is that you can now talk meaningfully about events happening *locally* at the same time or in the same place.
Here’s what you’re doing and why it’s not good argument: SR *assumes* that light is a maximum speed-limit. You then counter-assume that it’s not and derive a paradox. That’s just silly, it’s also not very convincing.
Now, that said, both of you are exactly right, in SR, that the speed of light as a constant (and a limit) is an assumption. It’s a very good assumption, based on observations of moving magnetic fields, but an assumption none-the-less.
Most people don’t realize that. It shows that you both are paying very close attention. Now, *contesting* that assumption is a bit harder to do when you’re intimately familiar with Maxwell’s equations of electro-magnetism, but it’s still possible and the point had been raised several times between Einstein’s Annus Miribalus and 1915. In point of fact, Einstein himself anticipated objections of this nature explicitly in his 1905 paper “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”:
“If an observer be stationed at A with a clock, he can estimate the time of events occurring in the immediate neighbourhood of A by looking for the position of the hands of the clock, which are simultaneous with the event. If a clock be stationed also at point B in space, — we should add that “the clock is exactly of the same nature as the one at A”, — then the chronological evaluations of the events occurring in the immediate vicinity of B, is possible for an observer located in B. But without further premises, it is not possible to chronologically compare the events at B with the events at A. We have hitherto only an “A-time”, and a “B-time”, but no “time” common to A and B. This last time (i.e., common time) can now be defined, however, if we establish by definition that the “time” which light requires in travelling from A to B is equivalent to the “time” which light requires in travelling from B to A. For example, a ray of light proceeds from A at “A-time” tA towards B, arrives and is reflected from B at B-time tB, and returns to A at “A-time”
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Electrodynamics_of_Moving_Bodies
There he makes explicit that this is an assumption. Fortunately, it is the right assumption. The invariance of the speed of light has been shown to enough decimal places that even if it were to vary, the changes would be so small as to be nearly inconsequential and are totally within the boundaries of testing that have been done: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_special_relativity
The OTHER problem is that the invariance of the speed of light was already known!. Maxwell and Lorentz figured that out in 1895 or so. Here’s the thing: it’s the invariance of the speed of light that let’s NON-Relativistic electromagnetism work and last time I checked, lightbulbs still switch on when I flip the switch – you’re going to have to deny that undergraduate level EM is somehow ‘wrong’ if you’re going to deny that SR is ‘wrong’ for assuming c is constant. It might be. But the much, much MUCH better bet is that it’s not. Regardless, anything you come up with to replace a theory where c is invariant is going to have to, in the lower limits act like c is invariant. Either way, you’re stuck with c being constant or nearly so.
August 28th, 2011 at 10:02 am
I don’t have a problem with c (defined as the speed of light in a vacuum) being invariant, I just don’t think it’s proven that it is a limit to the speed of everything.
This seems to be a misreading of what I wrote. In a nutshell:
1. Making an assumption
2. Extrapolating laws of physics based on that assumption
3. Assuming that the inability to disprove the assumption proves that the laws of physics derived in (2) are valid.
… is not a very satisfactory approach to physics.
Any conjecture of a phenomenon which violates the assumption results in a paradox.
Immediately a phenomenon is discovered that violates the assumption, the laws of physics have to be modified to take it into account. Under the old physics, the phenomenon is a paradox, not possible, by assumption dressed up as definition. Those that religiously subscribe to that old physics will rule the phenomenon impossible, a fakery, or will attempt to circumscribe the conditions that permit it so that it remains “a special case” with their physics correctly describing the general situation.
This is not the same thing as counter-assuming that that something is not the case and deriving a paradox. It IS the same thing as counter-assuming that the assumption is incorrect and showing that results obtain that would be viewed as a paradox by those assuming that the assumption is correct.
Actually, it’s TWO assumptions. Which brings me back to what I said at the start of this comment.
August 28th, 2011 at 10:08 am
@Roger: FYI, WordPress doesn’t understand i and /i tags. Use em and / em instead. I’ve edited your comment accordingly.
August 28th, 2011 at 3:11 pm
@Roger: Mike is right – the arguement for special relativity is this:
“Given that the speed of light is the fastest constant in the universe and that time is relative then…”
The problem is that this is not a proven given – it has too many clauses. In fact, the clause about the speed of light is actually two seperate clauses – that it is constant, AND that it is the fastest thing that there is. The first has been proven, but the second hasn’t and is in fact one of those clauses that can truly only ever be disproven.
Yet, all the theoretical proofs for the possibility for where such proof of something faster than light might be found are undermined because of the assumption that light is the fastest thing there is. It is arguing a given that is not given and claiming that it is paradoxical to do anything other than that given.
An analogy here is objective alignment in D&D – Detect evil effects works on objects and creatures the are of evil alignment because that is what the effect does and the creatures are objectively defined as evil. Likewise, objectively evil creatures are defined as evil because effects that affect evil creatures affect them, because that is what those effects are defined to do.
Ultimately, it’s circular logic. Relativity starts with the assumption the the speed of light is the fastest constant in the universe and uses this to prove that it is the fastest constant in the universe. When you start with the answers before the questions, you aren’t doing science, you are rationalising ideologies and preconceptions.
It’s like the God dilemma – which ever way you look at it, if you answer that there is or isn’t a God, that’s going to be based on what you believe, not on science, because science isn’t able to answer the question adequate due to a lack of evidence and proof. A true scientist knows science cannot answer the God dilemma, so it is a matter of personal faith.
Most things, when you lack evidence comes down to a judgement call based on instinct, intuition, luck, and what you believe is right. That’s not science. It shouldn’t be treated as such. The are times when science cannot help. Science should acknowledge that, and when used properly, it does.
I do like the way that Einstein argues that the way to reconcile the incompatibility be inertial time of physics and the limit of the speed of light as a fixed constant limit that is less than infinity is to basically remove inertial time from the equation. It certainly solves that argument, while keeping all the paradoxes based on assumptions from givens that are not given about the speed of light.
Personally, I’d have just taken this as a very strong hint that maybe the speed of light is not the limit we think it is. It would be a lot less work, and would probably open up new ideas and avenues.
Da’ Vane recently posted..Cult of Da’ Vane Does it Again
August 28th, 2011 at 6:26 pm
@Mike:
Thanks for the em tag heads up. Looks like you used a blockquote tag, those are useful, I’m going to try that here in this post too!
W/r/t what you’re changing: “There are things that go faster than light” as long as *that* is part of your example, you have changed the rules and are not making a convincing argument. SR specifically states that information propagates at c. When you change the rules (as in the Tachyon Pistols ‘paradox’) and add in objects that move faster than c then you HAVE changed things such that your argument fails to convince. The Tachyon Pistols paradox is non-existent in properly formulated SR. Does that make sense when put that way?
@Da’ Vane:
Hrmm, you don’t seem to understand quite what the role of c in the theories of relativity is. You’re not… wrong, per se. It’s more that your interpretation and understanding of what’s going on isn’t complete and it’s leading you astray.
In relativity, c is a fundamental constant part of which’s meaning is “time”. c is not separable from spacetime. c, in a very important way is part of the fabric of space.
Here’s just one example (out of multiple thousands, really):
Take an event F. Two observers O1 and O2 watch the event from two different non-accelerating reference frames S and S’. The frames are non-accelerating because it’s the same w/ GR, just much, much, much harder. The event F is on a train moving along the tracks from position x to x’ from time t to t’. Observer1, in frame S is on the side of the road. Observer2, in frame S’, is on the train.
Let’s define the event to have space-time coordinates (t,x,y,z) in system S and (t?,x?,y?,z?) in S?. Then the Lorentz transformation specifies that these coordinates are related in the following way:
t’ = GAMMA*(t-vx/c^2)
x’ = GAMMA*(x-vt)
y’ = y
z’ = z
Now, that may look a bit confusing, but it’s easy to explain. What we have is a chart showing a map of how to get from S -> S’, it’s a translation from Observer1 reference frame to Observer2’s. Now let’s break it down some more, starting from the bottom up.
z’ = z:: Easy, the two frames are not changing relative to each other in the up|down direction. GAMMA is here too, but it’s been reduced to 1, so we don’t write it down.
y’ = y:: Easy again. The two frames are not changing relative to each other in the forward|backward direction. GAMMA is ALSO here, but there’s nothing changing, so it gets reduced to 1. You’ll be able to see how in just a minute or so.
Next comes the cool stuff. READ THIS ALL CAREFULLY, IT’S IMPORTANT: It’s what you’re not understanding – that c is built into the fabric of the equations, and more importantly, how it is so built.
x’ = GAMMA*(x-vt):: OOOh, much more interesting! First we have that same mysterious term GAMMA (which I’ll get to in a second) multiplied by the term (x-vt). (x-vt) is read as follows: x position minus the product of velocity and time. What’s that mean? it means simply
You do this when you’re working speeding train word problems, it’s second grade math. GAMMA is a scale factor – its formula doesn’t change no matter what reference frames you’re using, ever. It’s GAMMA that we want to be paying attention to, really, because inside GAMMA is a secret that’s amazing. However, before we get there, we still have some more work to do unwrapping the surprise. On to the last one!
t’ = GAMMA*(t-vx/c^2):: LOLWUT?! What the heck does that mean? Well, let’s break it down YO GABA GABA! style. First we have our scale factor, GAMMA. It’s just a multiplier – whatever answer we get for the rest of the problem, we multiply it by GAMMA. The next part (t-vx/c^2) is pretty easy, just like for translating x -> x’ above. It should be read
Why c^2? In this case, it’s because of stupid math tricks. See, when working with SR and GR, c comes up a LOT. It’s like a virus, it’s everywhere, inside everything. However, we’re translating time t to time t’, so we need to stay in units of TIME, not POSITION. And look, our formula uses units of position! Ack! What to do? Well, here’s the trick: The speed of light is just a scalar quantity, the units don’t particularly matter at all – relativity is all about the relative positions of observers and their frames. Sooooooo, in the stupid/funniest trick of all time in all of physics c == 1.
Really. Just define the speed of light to be equal to 1 unit of length per 1 unit of time: 1 length/ 1 time == 1/1 == 1. Look at that part of the equation again: vx/c^2. vx is velocity times position. The units of that are [m/s]*m. Dividing by c^2 helps us eliminate the position data from the equation. Cool huh? Everything cancels out except for 1 unit of time, which we then subtract from another instance of time!
So, that’s the first way that c built into the fabric of reality. Here’s the second way: GAMMA.
GAMMA == 1 / Sq_Root( 1-[v^2/c^2] )
Ack! Looks complicated.
It’s not. It’s the reciprocal of the square root of the quantity 1 minus the square of the relative velocities (v) that have been divided by the square of c.
But what does that MEAN!? You’ll laugh. Really. It’s a pythagorean form. It’s a distance calculator: a derivative. You know the type: A^2 + B^2 == C^2. GAMMA asks you to divide by the distance between two things. But notice one of the things it’s asking you to divide by the square root of: c.
If you pull c out of the scale factor, you break *everything*. It needs to be there! Why? Because everything else in that equation is dimensionless with one exception: v. v has dimension of length/time. So does c. But remember our stupid trick, where c == 1? Here too. We don’t change the formula any, but we get rid of the dimensionality of it. Dividing by c^2 is dividing by 1.
So, GAMMA is there in every transformation between frames. When there’s no translating actually going on, GAMMA reduces to 1/1 (see if you can figure out how, it’s easy) and can be dropped. In cases where there is a velocity differential, it shows up and gets stronger the faster you go, just like it should, and the speed of light, c is right there, deeply embedded in the whole system.
So, you CAN postulate that there’s another thing, something that’s faster than light, but it’ll do you no good whatever, because you’re not going to find an energy realm large enough that it won’t immediately reduce to what SR and GR say it will – the speed of light is the speed of time and is the speed at which information travels. That’s beyond reasonable doubt at this point. It’s been tested over, and over, and over and over and over again, Relativity has never failed a single test. Not once, and c is part of the reason why.
August 28th, 2011 at 9:53 pm
@Roger:
And that is where SR and I part company, and what this article is all about. SR states that information can propagate no faster than c because nothing can go faster than c but that statement has not been proven to my satisfaction, and certainly is completely irrelevant in an article which is required to assume that FTL travel is reality and then seeks to offer plausible models for that FTL to work.
Bullsh$t, to use the routine Australian vernacular. The London/Paris analogy that I offered makes no mention of the speed of light, only to the assumption that there is a limiting speed of communications simply because nothing faster has been found, to date.
Your comment then goes on to assume that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light and employs circular logic and mathematics to prove that this is your assumption – which you then claim proves the accuracy of the assumption itself.
The only reason c is built into the fabric of the equations is because you need to build it in to express the assertion that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. As you pointed out in an earlier comment, Newtonian physics does not include such an assertion, and is perfectly valid if you disregard that assertion.
There is also a level of condescension in the tone employed that is unwarranted and out of place in this discussion. I am well aware of the mathematical ‘scaling factor’ that is used to compress everything into a speed-of-light limit, in fact, I put it in big letters in the article.
Velocity = distance divided by time. No need for any speed of light factor UNLESS you assume that velocities cannot exceed the speed of light. Stating that you have to build c into everything is nonsense when it comes to proving the assertion, it’s only there because of the assumption that things have to be scaled to fit into a speed-of-light-limited scale. It certainly does not prove that the assumption is correct.
Irrelevant. Even assuming that I grant this assertion, which I do not – in fact, there is clear evidence that it HAS failed, which I refer to in the first part of the article (refer to the Wikipedia page on Faster-Than-Light) – This article’s purpose is to provide plausible explanations for an environment in which the assertion is assumed to have failed.
Mike recently posted..Fascinating Topological Limits: FTL in Gaming
August 29th, 2011 at 1:10 am
Strangely enough, I wasn’t directly addressing you. My remarks after “@Da’ Vane:” were directed at Da’ Vane. Now that you seem to be taking remarks not directed at you as personal attacks, I’m going to bow out. Good luck.
August 29th, 2011 at 3:26 am
@Roger: hopefully you will see this. I wasn’t taking your comments as a personal attack on me but as a disrespectful attitude toward Da’Vane. However, it wasn’t clear that everything from that mention onwards was directed exclusively at her – comments are public and are presumably directed at the subject in general unless explicitly stated otherwise. No hard feelings, I trust.
Mike recently posted..Fascinating Topological Limits: FTL in Gaming
August 29th, 2011 at 5:50 am
@Roger: I hope you see this too. Fundamentally, it’s is a presumption that c= spacetime, and that in fact there is such a thing as spacetime. Spacetime comes from the idea of inertial time, that time is constant across all of 3d space, but in Einstein’s own arguments, he got rid of inertial time, so how can there be such a thing as spacetime? It’s the assumption based on the forceful cojoining to two discrete factors – space and time.
C is only embedded in the whole system because you started with C in the first place. You could change C to anything else, and it would still be the same because you started with it. That’s why it’s circular logic. The numbers are irrelevant. This is important, because working backwards, you can change the factors and come up with different factors for C, but C itself is constant – it is a place holder. As long as you start with a given factor for C you will end up with a given factor for C because the entire theories are written to do this.
As you say, it’s a scale factor. And where there’s a scale factor, then there isn’t a limit. You can scale things infinitely. Therefore, more proof that there is potentially things faster than light, even if C is the speed of light, because you can transform that speed faster.
@Mike: That was a disrespectful attitude from Roger? I can’t say I actually noticed myself… Although I do believe the other criteria for intervention – arguing for arguing’s sake – may be coming into play here, as it seems all sides are becoming increasingly defensive and based on principles and ideologies rather than reason and logic.
@Roger and @Mike: Science is about asking questions and challenging itself, and this article does that, and then tries to use the possible answers in a gaming context. It’s based on the idea that science might be wrong about relativity and the possibilities that might mean. While it is interesting to argue whether or not relativity is wrong, this article itself takes the viewpoint that of “what if it is and what would that mean?” It is somewhat moot to argue that the basis of the article is invalid, when such a concept is the fundamental basis of science itself.
I personally believe Einstein was a great man, but he was only human, and was too attached to his work and his ideas. Albert Einstein is the Sigmund Freud of modern physics – a groundbreaking scientist, but from a different time, and we’ve learnt more. As such, we should always be willing to look back at the forefathers of the field and assess their work critically, and respectfully, and use what is still viable and leave what is no longer valid. Models change and adapt over time, and relativity needs to adapt as well, even if it needs a fundamental fix.
Maybe the reason scientists are still looking for the Theory of Everything is because they aren’t critically evaluating the logic behind the exceptions and realising that maybe if they did, they may already have it. The relativity is about the speed of light as the current limit of the speed of perception and relative time in physics being different to inertial time, while inertial time as a theoretical concept probably still remains. This would mean the speed of light is not a physical limit, just the limit at which things are visible.
Perhaps the reason there’s so much “dark matter” in the universe is because it is is moving faster than the speed of light and we simply cannot perceive it in any way at this time until we find a means of perception that is faster than light. Just because we can’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t there – it just means we can’t see it.
It’s like failing a Spot check – you see nothing, but you don’t know if it’s because there’s nothing there to see or because you failed to see there was anything there, or both. Only if you make a Spot check, and find nothing can you know there’s nothing there to see.
Da’ Vane recently posted..Game On
August 29th, 2011 at 6:43 am
I agree completely, Da’Vane. And that seems like a really good point to draw a curtain over the debate – there will be a new post going up any time now…
Oh, and a PS: Anytime someone adopts a condescending tone with a reasoning and educated adult (of any given number of years – some smart 12-year-olds could qualify), you are being disrespectful, in my opinion. It’s something I try to never do, and tolerate in others rather poorly. Maybe I’m oversensitive to it for some reason, but I would rather be too quick to react to such things than be too slow.
Mike recently posted..Fascinating Topological Limits: FTL in Gaming
August 29th, 2011 at 7:25 am
@Mike: To be quite honest, I’d rather be too slow to react to disrespect and condescension than too fast. It doesn’t necessarily follow that just because someone offends someone else, they are being intentionally offensive – people have different tolerances to different things. Another issue that is, surprisingly, relevant to relativity.
Thanks to my lysdexia, I am actually quite slow on the uptake of visual and audible cues, so my social skills tend to suck, and I am quite often considered rude, inappropriate, and offensive. I get treated very badly by a lot of people who assume things that are simply not the case – because they assume that just because I’ve offended someone I must have intended to do it, whereas the truth is more likely the fact that it is because I was concentrating on something else and wasn’t pay attention to how I was presenting myself, and it’s very easy to put something the wrong way or to use the wrong body language, or take inappropriate social actions and miss social cues if you aren’t paying attention.
That’s normally why I am more often involved in these sorts of issues, and have a bit of a reputation as a troll. Quite often people consider disrespect to mean anything from directly challenging their assumptions to not being eloquent enough in your responses to not treating them like a superior being. I personally believe that respect is about treating people as equals, but that means treating you like myself, and therefore that means treating you not as someone who might be oversensitive to disrespect, but someone who is lysdexic and probably wouldn’t know disrespect unless someone pointed it out in a dictionary, at which point, you’d probably be more interested in reading the dictionary definition than the fact that people are apparently being disrespectful to you. It’s all relative…
Da’ Vane recently posted..Game On
September 22nd, 2011 at 10:45 pm
This might be the proof you are looking for Mike: http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2011/09/22/technology-particles-light-speed.html
September 22nd, 2011 at 10:53 pm
Fascinating story, especially if confirmed – Thanks Gerald!
Mike recently posted..Five (Plus One!) Effective Combat Tactics for Assassins
November 18th, 2011 at 6:05 pm
Further tests to eliminate systematic issues with the original findings are continuing to show the faster-than-light travel: http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2011/11/18/science-faster-than-light-neutrinos.html
January 31st, 2014 at 12:54 am
[…] the game physics that I use for the Zenith-3 and Warcry campaigns, which I previously discussed in Fascinating Topological Limits: FTL in Gaming amongst several other articles. You might also want to check out A Journey Of 1,000 years which is […]