I am very interested in good discussion and recently found this blog by a Cal Tech professor called Sean. He also is a theorist of Aether. Obviously he must be tickled pink with the recent Opera result. The comments are just as good and in there there #33 which points to a great demonstration of the fact FTL is incompatible with SR. This is what people refer to when they talk about "travelling back in time".
Essentially as soon as you have FTL, it is fairly easy (although you still go through all the minkowski transformation) to build a device that responds to a message before you send it. Of course this is profoundly absurd. In pop culture it is cast as killing your grandfather. A more 'philosophical' way to describing this is to say that it 'breaks causality'. "Causality" and the idea that if an event B, is a result of event A then B cannot happen after A. A rather trivial statement, really. I find causality profoundly engrained a deep and trivial statement, I could never say the same of SR (relativity of observers? I can see it in QM but not SR for some reason).
Now, essentially what the link above demonstrate if that only 2 of the following statements can be true
1/ FTL is possible (Opera HOLDS)
2/ SR is true
3/ Causality is true.
Obviously in the past, 1 was thought to be false, nothing travels faster than light. And here is the significance of Opera. If opera holds then 1 is true. I WILL NOT SACRIFICE CAUSALITY. So 2 is false. Special relativity falls. Gone all the machinery of minkowski diagrams, the "relativity of simultaneity" and other things that make my mind barfs. Personally, I can't wait.
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4 comments:
Marc,
Will sacrificing 2/ get rid of the idea of every event (call it E1) having parallel events that come about as a result of alternate possibilities of E1?
To be a little more concrete, let's say you have E1 being a man being hit by a car. E2 is him not being hit by the car. Each event is a possibility with its own set of causal events growing out of them.
This concept has always given me a headache. It's like an infinitely expanding graph of event nodes.
I hereby declare the multiverse meme absolute nonsense.
Why not sacrifice causality?
because that one hurts my brain real bad. Things happening before their cause. You writing the comment before the blog etc etc, it doesn't mean anything.
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