5 ms·

I desperately want to believe that this will somehow enable us to live in a Star-Trek future, even though I'm sure it won't. Would someone with some knowledge

• smallblacksun 15y ago
  It would mean that the theory of relativity is not 100% correct (in much the same way as Newtonian physics are not 100% correct). It wouldn't have any direct impact on anything (because relativity still makes correct predictions the vast majority of the time), but it would create the opportunity for new theories which can explain everything that relativity does plus this new experiment to be created. That new theory could have significant ramifications, or it could be a minor adjustment to current theory that changes nothing.
• rbanffy 15y ago
  In any case, I'd like to submit my resume to the Time Travel Bureau. I am a computer collector and I am very familiar with many of the technologies time travelers from the future may want to procure. ;-)
  • planckscnst 15y ago
    Why would they procure them from you rather than go get a fresh new one from the day it was made?
    • rbanffy 15y ago
      I'm not selling the devices - I'm selling the expertise ;-) How do you know the best time and place to buy, say, a Mattel Aquarius or an A-series Unisys mainframe on an ISA board?
  • nixy 15y ago
    Mr. Titor, is that you?
  • gruturo 15y ago
    Sorry, your future self was faster and already got the job. He also claimed to have a larger accumulated experience :-)
• VladRussian 15y ago
  The Star Trek future, ie. travel with speed faster than light, will most likely happen through "warp drive", ie. using the space expansion(contraction) - this is how the natural faster than light movement does happen in the current Universe, and it doesn't violate Special Relativity. Special Relativity holds only for space with static and continuous metric (to preview the complexity of the theory otherwise, try to play with Maxwell equations where integration would happen over non-static volumes/surfaces :) . The space expansion doesn't fit the premises of Special Relativity and thus there is no contradiction. Special Relativity is pretty artificial theory which applies to the true world of our expanding (ie. non static metric) Universe only by approximation - this approximation works only as much as the speed of expansion is slow and either time period under consideration is small or distances are small (but not very small as the space continuity premise of SR seems to get broken as we get to Planck distances) In this particular case of neutrinos, i think, if they integrate Earth gravity time dilation variations along the neutrinos path, it would be correction on the scale around this billionth of second.
  • VladRussian 15y ago
    Correction, my bad: estimated time dilation variations integral along the neutrinos path is several orders of magnitude smaller than the billionth.
  • freemarketteddy 15y ago
    >i think, if they integrate Earth gravity time dilation variations along the neutrinos path. Isnt that effect in the reference frame of the neutrinos and not the measuring instrument(I'm not too sure about this)?....And also wouldnt it mean that the neutrinos take more time instead of less time?
• InclinedPlane 15y ago
  Haha, something like this isn't necessary to live in a star-trek future. Consider what we know about the Universe but can't fully explain so far. We know that space-time is dominated by a "dark energy" that may be due to background quantum vibrations or some as yet completely unknown phenomenon. We know that most of the mass of the Universe is bound up in dark matter which at present seems most likely to be a weakly interacting massive particle, specifically neutralinos (a supersymmetric particle). Neutralinos are thought to be their own anti-particles, they could have been responsible for bizarre "dark stars" in the early Universe and for an ongoing gamma ray flux due to neutralino-neutralino annihilations. Moreover, most of the dark matter in the Universe would essentially be the cosmic neutralino background, an echo from the big bang analogous to the cosmic neutrino background and cosmic microwave background. There is already tantalizing experimental evidence that such dark matter particles exist, from multiple sources. Additionally, recent evidence seems to hint strongly of the existence of strange-matter. Unlike ordinary quark-based matter such as protons, neutrons, other baryons and hadrons strange-matter would consist of up, down, and strange quarks in a more-or-less liquid like state instead of individual quarks being bound up in 2 or 3-quark composite particles. It is possible that some of the so-called "neutron-stars" out there are in fact strange-matter stars. It's also possible that such matter is stable in effectively arbitrarily sized fragments, down to individual tons, grams, or even atomic nuclei scales. Who knows what kind of post-nuclear physics we could perform if we got our hands on such particles. One possibility would be to use them to create energy via fusion. Tossing particles at a strangelet with sufficient speed should cause them to dissolve and fuse with the strangelet, releasing more energy in the process than conventional fusion. And that hardly touches the surface. There are even more bizarre things out there like micro black holes, the matter vs anti-matter chirality, the possibility that superconductors serve as mirrors for gravitational waves, and so much more. There's plenty of star trek out there waiting for us.