Quote:
Originally Posted by rainwatcher
Why is it that in every argument about breaking the speed of light so little attention is addressed to causality. The simpler old tried and worn out arguments are trotted out, usually with a mention of how we, loosely speaking, ridiculed Copernicus and of course the old stand by Galileo, and thus 'anything is possible'. I believe the arguments are reduced to base level by so call science reporters who have not served their dues, do not do their homework and put all sorts of infantile, poorly thought out, and generally poorly sub edited copy. Yes, in the serious science journals we get the facts presented, generally very dry and hard to digest, but the story that emanates from these facts take years to develop and invariably is accompanied by confidence and error levels. In the meanwhile we have to put up with the BBQ chat of “why is the speed of light so strict, after all look what we did to Galileo”…. “Yeah right you are Wayne, want another beer.”
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Problem being, Peter, is that despite all the theory, all the prognostication and "blackboard"/"back of napkin" calculations that has been done, the idea that causality violations occur once you exceed the speed of light has never been experimentally verified. None of it has been. Simply because they don't have the technology to do so. They've never tried to devise a way of accelerating particles up to light speed and then past it. So, whilst they believe (on a theoretical basis) that travelling faster than light will allow you to travel back in time and do all the nasty stuff they've dreamed up (all those paradoxes they like to trot out), it's never been tested. There have been some anomalous detections of particle they think maybe (emphasis on the maybe part) tachyons, they're not even sure if they've actually detected anything in these situations.
As a matter of fact, not much of any of the theories to do with causality, FTL travel or anything to do with time travel etc etc have been verified experimentally. Even the theory isn't as written in stone as many physicists would like you to believe. As Carl Sagan said "Any extraordinary claim requires equally extraordinary evidence"....until any theory can be experimentally verified it's just qualified speculation.
Like Miguel Alcubierre's "Warp Drive"....it may take the insanely huge amount of energy that many scientist "believe" it will take to create the warp. But until they even try to see what happens when you manipulate spacetime (with whatever they find that can do so), all it will be is just theory/speculation. It may not need that much energy, we really don't know.
I know what you're saying about many of these "science shows". They do tend to gloss over parts of theory that do need to be addressed in order to inform those watching these shows of all the important aspects of these theories, and that's a pity. It means those watching the shows don't get all the information and are therefore misinformed.
Ultimately though, those making these shows aren't trained scientists and sensationalism sells shows more than droll and dry theory/facts
