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Doesn't the inflation theory contradict this? If expansion (or contraction) of spacetime can occur faster than the speed of light, then it could theoretically e
by QAPereo 9y ago
Doesn't the inflation theory contradict this? If expansion (or contraction) of spacetime can occur faster than the speed of light, then it could theoretically enact causality faster too right?
There is no theoretical limit to the rate of metric expansion, but unfortunately metric expansion doesn’t allow for FTL communication. Let’s put aside issues of lightspeed in an expanding universe though because we don’t even need to go there to address this basic issue of why you can’t have a brain past certain limits.
At some point limited by the speed of light even in a static universe, your “thoughts“ would be incredibly slow. What would it mean to have a neuron the width of the galaxy? Would you be particularly intelligent just because you had a lot of individual parts from a certain distance? There’s probably some theoretical upper bound on the optimum size for a computing body in a universe bound by c, based on the total amount of entropy which could ever be contained in a given region and the rate of signal transmission.
As to adjacent dimensions and that kind of thing, who knows? In current physics that would be like magic, and magic can be whatever you want it to be after all.
- danenania 9y agoM-theory (which posits additional dimensions) is obviously not observationally proven by any stretch, but it's based on mathematics and scientific principles and is respected by many prominent physicists, so I wouldn't call it the realm of magic. It does make falsifiable predictions--the problem is developing technology capable of falsifying them. An Alcubierre warp drive[1] would be capable of enacting causality faster than light, no? 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive
- QAPereo 9y agoThe Alcubierre drive might or might not work on our universe; it requires something which may not exist. If it did work, it would also be a time machine, and so far causality has been a safer bet. M-theory is engaging and fascinating, filled with great math, but there is no indication that it describes our reality. Worse, M-Theory flirts with unfalsifiability. All told, when looking at things like the original question raised by the article, we have to look to established theory backed by observation.
- danenania 9y agoSure, I'm not trying to say that this stuff is very plausible. My point is that we do have some reasonable indications that some of our hard and fast laws might be more slippery than is commonly thought, and given the strangeness of consciousness, how it works could be pretty slippery as well. Imagine that human civilization survives and progresses for 100 million years. Do you think that they'll be able to look back on any of our "laws" without laughing? At that point we'd likely be far beyond Dyson spheres, harvesting large quantities of antimatter, solar system scale particle accelerators, artificial black holes, quantum supercomputers, etc., etc. Whatever would be discovered is almost guaranteed to be unimaginable by us.
- QAPereo 9y agoI think that to the best of anyone's ability to tell, the speed of light is ultimately fixed and represents the speed of causality. I think that we can do a lot within those limits, much of it beyond belief today. That said, I truly doubt that we're going to exceed the speed of causality, create time machines, and that kind of thing. For the artificial black holes, Dyson spheres, antimatter, quantum computers, and giant accelerators to actually work, the laws of physics they're based on can't be that wrong. They can be incomplete, requiring their place within a greater theory, but not simply wrong. There is observation consistent with the notion that the speed of light has been constant for the last ~14 billion years, everywhere we can see.