5 ms·
If you can engineer transmission of information faster than the speed of light, you can violate causality. On a small scale, that means acausal computing in whi
by reasonattlm 14y ago
If you can engineer transmission of information faster than the speed of light, you can violate causality. On a small scale, that means acausal computing in which results can be generated before inputs, thus allowing for infinite processing power per unit time. On the large scale, outright paradox in the form of event chains that prevent their origination. These outcomes would be problematic to account for in our understanding of physics, to say the least, and seem like a better argument than others for assuming that FTL and all things that would enable it (e.g. sufficient amounts of negative mass) cannot exist.
It remains an interesting challenge to prove that more rigorously, of course.
- delinka 14y agoI'm so out of touch with physics these days that I'm probably not even arm-chairing it correctly. But I still like to ponder crazy stuff... I'd put my money on a hypothesis that says causality is enforced whether we can perceive it or not. Say we had such a computer with FTL circuitry. You attempt to instruct the computer to halt the current program when an answer is received, thus preventing the inputs being supplied that would produce the given output. Our current time-based perception says "paradox" whereas this proposed hypothesis would say "the computer simply will not halt the program," not because it's designed with safeguards, but because the laws of physics maintain causality.
- diminoten 14y agoI've always wondered if the concept of wormholes too violated causality (other potential problems aside)...
- mcguire 14y agoI am not a physicist, but as I understand it, Yup.
- jbattle 14y agoIsn't this just an argument against inconvenience? I.e. "If this were true, it would make other math, etc very difficult". The same argument could have been waged against the heliocentric model. Occam's razor is not a natural law after all.
- zheng 14y agoExcept that the heliocentric model greatly simplified calculations. Take a look at Ptolemy's (and others) many epicycle model for something super complex and still not very accurate.
- sp332 14y agoIf the speed of light is not really a limit, then events will still have causes. It's just that the set of possible causes will be wider than your light cone.