[an0n]

Dude. I'm English.

The Foreigner-Effect™ even cancels out the repulsion caused by my hideous deformity and toxic personality.

****, it's so powerful, it even works on English chicks I meet abroad.

I got laid in France for no reason. I called a group of English girls a 'bunch of German bastards' and they were like "Hi, my name's Kathy."

[Taristin]

Ok. Let's be serious now...

I don't care where you're from, you're still a repulsive Terran, with an ego larger than a horses... well, we'd better leave that unsaid.

[Carl]

Originally posted by Corhellion
Well...if light does have mass, why doesn't NASA come up with a way to get something to hitch a ride on a light beam? Use it as a "launch catapult" for various things.

it's called a solar sail. anyone who knows anything about theoretical space travel has heard of them. and light only has a very small amount of mass, so they aren't very practical.

[IceFire]

Originally posted by Carl


it's called a solar sail. anyone who knows anything about theoretical space travel has heard of them. and light only has a very small amount of mass, so they aren't very practical.

Yeah I was reading that NASA has staked some money into a project with solar sails to see if it works and a couple of physicists are saying its not going to work very well.  I forget what it was exactly just that they didn't think it would work.

KnossosS, its cool to hear about NASA and others seriously exploring the possibility of FTL travel.  Even if the research is meaningless to practical travel for a long while to come, the possibility of it is amazing.  Once we have a technology like that under our belts, exploring the universe is a very real possibility. With probes and maybe even with people.

[AlphaOne]

Woo things on this tread go way beyond my level of knowledge (99% of it does ) but from what i know from my phisicks class Einsteins Theory of relativity has to be wrong or at least some bit of it because you can not create an infinite mass not even a blackwhole has infinite mass..therefore gooing past the speed of light its just a matter of bending the laws of gravity and other laws like that there...I think.!
And about hiyching a ride on a stream of light you have to ask yourself this what the hell happens with the pilots when they accelarate from practicly 30.000 km/h to 300.000 km/sec...!(it has to be messy )

[JudgeMental]

OK, time to toss into this fracas here...

And if light doesn't have mass, why does it exhibit force on objects? Ala solar-sails. *whistles suspiciously*

I hope you didn't mean solar sails, because to my knowledge, solar sails use the solar wind, which is not light.  However, if you meant light sails...  I HAVE heard of those:p

Light is strange, and has lots of elements, and mass is one of them.  But, that's a moot point, I guess, since it's so far been rather hard to harness that.

And about hiyching a ride on a stream of light you have to ask yourself this what the hell happens with the pilots when they accelarate from practicly 30.000 km/h to 300.000 km/sec...!(it has to be messy )

Well, it depends on how long it takes for you to GET to 300,000 km/s.  If you went there in a matter of seconds, then I would admit, the results would be rather... squishy, and flat.  Definately flat.  But, fortunately, the light intensity required for that kind of acceleration is just a litte beyond us:p

And besides, because mass increases the closer to the speed of light it gets, there is a limit to how fast any beam of light could accelerate you.  You couldn't get anywhere near the speed of light that way.

It's a mess:D

Anyway, that NASA stuff is cool.  I would love to see DOOM 3, HL², or even a tricked-out FS2 engine on those simulators:eek:

[Unknown Target]

Alpha, why are you going around bumping old threads?

[JudgeMental]

Ack!  I was suckered!!  I wondered how it came from nowhere and grew so fast though...

Oh well...  I let it die now...

[AlphaOne]

Well I dont know what to say except that I for one believe Einbstein's Theory of Relativity has to be wrong,it has to have a "glitch" somewhere because you can not create something with almost infinite mass its just imposible....not even a black whole has that kind of mass!
Plus I dont like the ideea of someone saiing that we cant go faster than..that...the speed of light... !
It has to be a way we just javent found it yet.. !

[Unknown Target]

Alpha, stop bumping old topics! Get that thru your head! Let the damn thing die.

[TopAce]

Originally posted by Unknown Target
Alpha, stop bumping old topics! Get that thru your head! Let the damn thing die.

This why the 'closed' button is invented.

[Flaser]

OW!!!!

People, for heaven's sake (*or hell in other cases), please take a damn physics book before starting to talk all kinds of rubbish.

Most of the problems you're talking about aren't solved by science as it is.

The matter of light for example - light does have mass, since gravity affects it, but you can't speak of a photon's mass in the manner you'd do with something.

By the way I have to deflate the whole of you:

Einstein theory is a 100% correct.

The problem is that just because it's correct doesn't mean you've applied it correctly.

Subspace or wormwholes actually circumvent the limitation of time - basicly any object passing through them is taking a shortcut.

Now I don't know the details since I hadn't asked KnossoS, but I do now that quantum physics don't work in a manner you'd believe, and that mainly 'casue you've grown accustomed to the manner in which the world operates on the scale and time-frame you're living inside.

The most simple quantum physics experiment I can think of is the two slot experiment where they had two slits in a wall that could act as light sources.
Then they lowered the light force enough to assure that only 1 photon could pass though at any given moment.
The problem was that they still got the interference you see whent both sources are active.
So in effect the single photon was at 2 places at 1 time!

[Descenterace]

MUST... NOT... CORRECT... OLD... POSTS...

Ah well.

Light doesn't have mass.  It DOES have momentum, though.  This is because matter and energy are the same thing, in different forms (E = MC^2, etc).

The reason gravity bends light is that it follows the 'contours' of space.  Gravity bends space, and light follows the bend in space.

If light had mass, the presence of a photon would also bend space, because it would create a gravity well (albeit a small one).

[Unknown Target]

die thread, DIE!

[Flaser]

Descenterace, I'm not going to start an arguement here.
It is quite a matter of how you look at it, actualy my physics teacher said that light does have math, and he's not that much of an idiot if he manges to solve the best high ranking competition's problems.

No, please I'm not saying that just because he said so or I say so, it does.
What I try to emphasise is, that it's not that simple...