[Scourge of Ages]

Wouldn't blaster weapons be based on the same technology? Pew pew and all that.

[Dragon]

Nope, they're pretty much plasma throwers. Completely different, presumably magnetic bottle-based. That said, this discovery would have more influence on teleportation research than on cutting tools of any sort. There exists a much better, plasma blade-based lightsaber concept, which seems more practical than using light matter for this.

[Herra Tohtori]

Well, even if they did get light to interact with itself to form structures, that doesn't mean those structures would, as such, interact as physical objects. They're still made of light, and would only interact with matter like any light would - give it enough intensity and it'll burn through, but it won't really knock things around like a physical blade would.

Apart from the fact that it's, you know, confined to the really cold matter that makes it slow down enough to form said "structures" in the first place - I suppose you could knock someone around with a super cold piece of equipment, but I believe the light would be the least important factor in the damage caused.

[BloodEagle]

I mentioned this earlier, but in canon the lightsaber is a plasma weapon.  Although they do put precious stones in them....  Bah.

[Dragon]

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Lightsaber
It's canonically a plasma blade. I've found no mention of "light matter" on Wookiepedia. There aren't too many details on the tech, but somewhere I've read a description of a magnetic bottle-based loop that would enable a lightsaber-like appearance. Also, an extending rod projecting plasma could be used, but it'd not sit well with canon (that said, SW does have lightsabers with a sold core).

[haloboy100]

Woah woah, slow down.
Allow me to play the layman and ask:
Doesn't light already bounce into matter? Is that not how mirrors work?

Anyway, this seems to venture more towards the path of holograms than lightsabers...
In such a case, we may need to patent the name "Hard Light Productions"

[Dragon]

You're misunderstanding the whole thing. Holograms and mirrors are about altering the direction the light is moving in. This is about altering it's speed, to the point of stopping it. And very interesting things that happen afterwards. This is mostly related to quantum research, quantum computing and teleportation.

[haloboy100]

How can it lead to teleportation?

[Dragon]

Well, this all contributes to our understanding of quantum effects. Quantum bonds, like ones created in this experiment, are fundamental to any serious approach to teleportation. Under certain conditions, it might be possible to use quantum entanglement to transfer information faster than light. In short, better understanding of them is very important to this kind of research. A longer answer is also possible, but it gets very technical and I don't think my explanation would be quite up to task. Indeed, it would probably take one of the best university lecturers to explain this to a complete layperson in a way that doesn't boggle his/her mind. This subject, while interesting, is a very though one, and riddled with complex mathematics to boot. Check out books by Michio Kaku, if you want to know more, he's very good at explaining complex things like that in accessible terms. While he probably didn't write anything about this particular experiment yet, if you read his description of teleportation research, it might become clearer why there is a connection.

[Luis Dias]

No it "might" not be possible to move information faster than the speed of light. This is mostly known in the physics community and entirely misunderstood in the layman "informed" community.

The reason why teleportation will always be "as fast" as light speed is because you cannot ever confirm you got the teleported data without an external confirmation of itself, which always comes in the form of light (for example). All the other cases where you go faster than light are also nonsense, like the Alcubierre drive and so on. It's a real shame, but it just isn't possible to do those kinds of things. The reason is very simple to understand though: while in theory you can bend space (and thus you can turn what is a light year space into a light minute space) you must do so with gravitational waves.... that transverse spacetime at the speed of light!

To allow beyond lightspeed travel would create all sorts of impossibilities, the more well known and understood would be time-travel paradoxes.

So no, AFAWK, FTL speeds are indeed impossible.

[Aardwolf]

Yeah, the whole Alcubierre drive thing is pretty dumb. Gravity and presumably any change to the curvature of space can only propagate at the speed of light. So you can't use it to speed up the trip to anywhere you haven't been. Portals maybe, warp drives no.

IMO the NASA guy who's trying to make an Alcubierre drive should be defunded immediately.

[Herra Tohtori]

Yeah, the whole Alcubierre drive thing is pretty dumb. Gravity and presumably any change to the curvature of space can only propagate at the speed of light. So you can't use it to speed up the trip to anywhere you haven't been. Portals maybe, warp drives no.

IMO the NASA guy who's trying to make an Alcubierre drive should be defunded immediately.

A. We don't know that space-time disturbances propagate at speed of light, because we have never empirically detected gravity waves and confirmed their origin synced with some major observable event whose distance we know. It's good speculation, and probably that's how it works, but we don't exactly know it.

B. Space between two objects can expand at a rate that distances the two objects regardless of speed of light.

C. Alcubierre drive works by expanding space behind ship and contracting ship in front of it.

D. Historically, do you have any idea how many scientific breakthrough discoveries were predicted to result from this or that research study or experiment?

Almost none. Vast majority of BIG scientific discoveries have been accidents, byproducts, sometimes even ignored as unimportant or thought of as mistakes. The path of scientific progression is unpredictable at its most boring times and wildly random at the interesting times.

This is why it's a bad idea to try to "direct" scientific research into "profitable" or "promising" subjects. Anything and everything should be researched; basic research is probably the single most important thing to keep science advancing.

Granted, in this particular case they're definitely consciously trying to complete a major scientific and engineering breakthrough, one that - if successful - will possibly be spoken of as the beginning of a new era. It is an incredibly ambitious undertaking, and I'll be the first to be skeptical about their goal of success.

Regardless of this, though - I firmly assert that de-funding this research or any other on the premise of not being profitable or being impossible is foolish and unscientific.

Maybe they won't succeed. But what if they would, but their funding was cut before they managed to get it working...

E. Even if they don't succeed in fulfilling their exact goal, they'll be dealing with a lot of uncharted, unknown territory. What makes you think the research could not produce other, unforeseen results?

[Aardwolf]

Nah, they measured gravity somehow and found it propagated at between 0.8x and 1.2x the speed of light.^{[citation needed]}

[Dragon]

No it "might" not be possible to move information faster than the speed of light. This is mostly known in the physics community and entirely misunderstood in the layman "informed" community.

The reason why teleportation will always be "as fast" as light speed is because you cannot ever confirm you got the teleported data without an external confirmation of itself, which always comes in the form of light (for example). All the other cases where you go faster than light are also nonsense, like the Alcubierre drive and so on. It's a real shame, but it just isn't possible to do those kinds of things. The reason is very simple to understand though: while in theory you can bend space (and thus you can turn what is a light year space into a light minute space) you must do so with gravitational waves.... that transverse spacetime at the speed of light!

To allow beyond lightspeed travel would create all sorts of impossibilities, the more well known and understood would be time-travel paradoxes.

So no, AFAWK, FTL speeds are indeed impossible.

You missed one important point in my post. I wasn't talking about Alcubierre drives, or indeed, anything associated with gravity. I was talking about quantum entanglement. It's been experimentally proven that this occurs, and it works "faster than light". The question is if you can actually transmit something using this effect. Nothing really "travels" in that case, aside from information, which could possibly be used for teleporting objects. Of course, it would be not very useful for space exploration, because you need a receiver which was, at some point, in contact with the transmitter. But still, it's an important and very interesting area of research.

Also, space can expand faster than light. Otherwise, the Great Expansion after the Big Bang wouldn't have been possible. Alcubierre drive is an unlikely tech, because it involves literally re-shaping the universe to your liking. In layman's terms, instead of moving an object, you're moving the place this object is in to somewhere else. The energies involves, as well as the physics of it are rather crazy, but it might be possible under some theories (there's no confirmation on that, but that's what experimental physics are for).

[Phantom Hoover]

For god's sake Dragon you are not the only one who understands things.

[redsniper]

Fool!
This is HLP! Every single one of us is the only one who understands things and we must explain that to everyone else, at every opportunity, in the most condescending way possible. How else will they learn? How else can we assert the colossal size of our e-peens egos intellects?

[Nuke]

its still 93% less derp than the ksp forum.

[Lorric]

Dragon seems to be being nice and helpful to me...

[Luis Dias]

Dragon, I missed zero in your post. Of course I was speaking about entanglement when I mentioned that you cannot have data transferred faster than light. The reason, as I stated previously, is that this "teleported data" is not readable and confirmable until you get external sublight confirmation that indeed the data is read correctly. It is more complex than this, but rest assured, the light barrier is still king. This effect cannot produce the Mass Effect communication device.

[Herra Tohtori]

Nah, they measured gravity somehow and found it propagated at between 0.8x and 1.2x the speed of light.^{[citation needed]}

Now you're giving error bars. I'm aware of the experiment(s) you refer to, although there's been some controversy about what they actually measured, if I recall correctly (it's possible that they simply ended up measuring the speed of light in a slightly novel way). There is no strong consensus about what the results of their measurements mean and how they should be interpreted.

General relativity does predict that speed of gravity would be exactly c, I was merely pointing out that we haven't so far been able to empirically measure it in a clear, non-controversial manner. Such as detecting a known gravity wave front on one side of Earth and then detecting the same gravity front on the other side of Earth some parts of second afterwards. The two measurements could then be synced by recognizing the profile, and comparing the arrival times should show fairly clearly what the speed of gravity is; the problem is making sensitive enough instruments to observe these small changes in space-time.


Honestly speaking I do expect space-time changes to propagate at c, it would make quite perfect sense regarding why speed of light is the ultimate limit of traveling through space-time in any reference frame. That said, this seems to be specifically irrelevant considering the Alcubierre drive which is basically a solution of the general relativity equations that allows moving at higher than speed of light without exceeding speed of light relative to local space-time.