Sorry, but it's almost certainly wishful thinking and questionable mathematics. Warp drive without leaving normal space and without relativistic time drawbacks vio;ates too many fundamental physical laws, upon which most of modern physics relies. And there are too many diverse forms of evidence supporting all that modern physics to simply brush it aside with NO supporting evidence for warp drive pipe dreams. No one would love a viable FTL drive more than I. But warp drive isn't the solution.
That's a reasonable answer. More than one person on this forum has made condescending comments falsely accusing some people of being fakes or flakes. I'm a bit sensitive. That's not quite analogous given those rogue climate scientists for the most part are on Exxon's payroll. I happen to have an insatiable curiosity about all things science. I know the difference between nonsense and real science and real controversy vs contrived controversies. Do you know it took Dr John Snow more than a decade to convince the established medical community that the London cholera epidemic was coming from the contaminated Broad St Pump water. This was despite the meticulous epidemiological data he complied. You'd think that was just artifact of the times. And yet as recently as the 1980s it took a decade before modern medical science accepted the well established case that H-Pylori was the cause of about 95% of all gastric ulcers, not excess HLC acid. So I'm not so quick to naysay the findings of a legitimate researcher just because the establishment rejects the hypothesis.
I'm not opposed to the idea that the minority viewpoint can be right; there are plenty of examples of it in the history of science. And in this case, like in many, there doesn't seem to be absolute certainty either way. Even in climate change, where my personal belief is that human activity plays a role, I'm not in favor of politicians saying we have absolute certainty. We don't, and with our current knowledge, I don't think we can. Interestingly, I had a beer with one of the scientists who was on the IPCC and shared in the Nobel prize for it, and he admitted that of course we can't be absolutely certain, but his argument was that it had to be framed that way to get the public to take it seriously. I don't agree - I think that just adds fuel to the opposition. I think the better approach is to say no, we can't be absolutely certain, but the vast bulk of the evidence points in that direction and it make tremendous sense to act according to the vast majority of the evidence and try to limit our negative influence on the climate. But that's not the general approach to the topic. It seems to me scientists should be trained to be skeptical. That was certainly how the faculty approached it when I was in graduate school, and I think that's the way science works best. Nimtz could end up being right, despite the fact that most researchers don't agree with him.
Here's what I hear about global warming: 97% of peer reviewed studies on climate change say yes, we are seeing a change in our climate that is attributed almost entirely to humans. Even a scientist hired by the Koch brothers to debunk climate change (his issue was there were too many unaccounted variables) made a 180 and asserts that we are experiencing a change to the climate and it's most certainly caused by human behavior. The majority of nay research is funded by corporations (Koch brother in particular) that would lose a great deal of money if they had to scale back. Beyond that, any of us would need to go back to school, get a PhD in climate science. We rely on what professional scientists tell us because our discipline is in fields other than climatology.
Ideally one could educate the lay public about the science of climate disruption and how uncertainty is built in to even things we consider science fact. But that ignores the reality of millions of dollars used to fund the Merchants of Doubt. I quote Rick Piltz's testimony before Congress quite often because I've not heard it more precisely said. In this link it appears he's said the same thing in other settings. I don't know why you think scientists aren't educated to be skeptical. Skepticism is a big thing in the science circles I run in.
I don't know about you guys, but I'm convinced that information transfer faster than the speed of light is impossible. This is just a limitation of nature that I think we're going to have to live with.
You don't need to be a peer to assess most of the evidence in any particular scientific field. Some basic rules of observation, weighing the expertise and looking at original sources will suffice.
Opposition might latch onto uncertainty, but it is even worse when they latch onto untruths, because when they can point to one they use it to cast doubt on the rest of the statements made. Better to be straight with people.
There is a difference between skepticism and wild speculation. Scientists explore a fractal landscape looking for new truths, but they also understand enough of the pattern to at least try not to step into the void spaces. The physical laws that we know have fuzzy edges worth probing, but there are also regions that are well understood and will not yield, no matter how badly you want to punch holes there. There is a discipline to productive skepticism.
I am of the opinion that FTL travel is not possible, though I am not a scientist. I am equally convinced that time travel is impossible (except forward at the usual pace). HOWEVER... that doesn't mean some very good fiction can't be written with a premise that one or both are possible and exist in the writer's creation. I would be very unhappy if nobody ever wrote another book based on FTL travel or time travel. Speculative fiction that requires something extremely unlikely can still have a lot of value and have a lot to say. Call it Science Fantasy if you must, but it can still be great stuff.
That wasn't the point. There are unexplained things about the Universe, in particular there is no unified theory yet. One possibility is something as bizarre as the concept of eleven dimensions or whatever the latest string theory speculation is. I heard a lecture not too long ago on some researchers trying to test the loss of gravity at extremely short distances with the hypothesis gravity might be leaking into an unrecognized dimension. So the point was, how do you know? Just because something appears to be a law, with science, unless one is talking math formulas, there is always the potential for a new discovery, even one as Earth shaking as something new about special relativity not yet recognized. Wormholes, for example, don't violate the laws of physics. And we don't have a clear understanding why the arrow of time only flows in one direction. It's fine to say, the current evidence is that FTL travel is not possible. But it's not scientifically accurate to to say absolutely FTL travel is impossible, because there is always uncertainty in scientific conclusions.
Sure, the current evidence says FTL is impossible. But that evidence has met every test thrown at it since Einstein discovered/invented relativity. That's pretty good inductive warrant for believing c is an absolute speed limit. That, and the fact that, as noted earlier, the proper time for a photon shows instantaneous transit, with zero time elapsing. So again, to ask for FTL travel would be like asking to travel faster than infinitely fast, which is logically impossible. The "proper time" being what's crucial, not the speed measured by human observers. In the philosophy of science there's a fancy phrase, the "pessimistic meta-induction," which basically tells us all our theories in the past have been strictly wrong, so we should expect our current theories to be wrong too. I have some trouble with that -- Newton's theories are indeed strictly wrong, but they're useful with a certain domain and are still used. Relativity remains robust after more than a century. As to quantum entanglement and quantum tunneling, I've seen nothing suggesting that information can be sent superluminally via these phenomena; just the opposite, in fact. so the light-speed limit remains intact. It's also worth mentioning that under the Many Worlds interpretation of QM, which many physicists accept, there is no "spooky action at a distance." Under MW, everything in QM actually behaves in a classical manner, with determinism, locality and realism all restored to physics.
I must be going to all the off-the-wall science lectures, because I saw a lecture recently given by researchers who say they have evidence of spooky action at a distance. Loophole in Spooky Quantum Entanglement Theory Closed
I don't think there is anything actually controversial about spooky action at a distance. it was first experimentally confirmed more than 30 years ago, proving Einstein's objections to be wrong. The question is how we should interpret it. If we want to interpret it as a means of circumventing the relativistic prohibition on FTL information transfer, spooky action at a distance does not do that. If we want to interpret QM as a whole in some metaphysical way, than the Many Worlds interpretation shows that spooky action at a distance does not actually happen. We think it happens only because we assume that there is a quantum world and a classical world, and somewhere (the Heisenberg cut) the quantum becomes classical. MW treats all of reality as entirely quantum mechanical, and when that is done, there is no spooky action at a distance. It only seems as if there is because we assume a quantum/classical dichotomy.
There's nothing really spooky about it, either. It's just a mathematical way of saying 'we couldn't tell what state the particles were in until we measured them.' The only information transfer is in the scientist's brain, when they deduce the state of the other particle by measuring this one.
My understanding is two different researchers are measuring said particle independently of each other, with one going first, making the observation of one particle that then affects both entangled particles. Your version is inconsistent with the researchers explaining their experiments leading me to believe you are unaware of the latest research. If you have a source I might read it would help my understanding of the issues.
I take two identical boxes, put $10 in one and nothing in the other. I give one to you, and mail the other to someone on the other side of the world. You open yours and it's empty. What 'spooky' communication instantly tells the other box that there's $10 inside? Maths is a model, not reality. Just because you can't tell what state a particle is in until you measure it, that doesn't mean anyone has to tell the particle what state it was in when you do.
That's a false analogy, not sure why you'd use it. A better analogy would be you have two boxes with a cat in each that you send to two different places. Observer two then opens her box and while there should be an equal chance of a dead or alive cat, the cat is always alive if observer one first observed a dead cat, and always dead if observer one first observed a live cat. The particles' spin should not be dependent upon the other. What you are saying is that they are at the time they were entangled. That's too simple and I find it hard to believe the researchers are ignoring this hypothesis. I need to read more to resolve the issue. I asked for a link supporting your assertion. I posted one supporting my understanding of the quantum entanglement experiments I heard the researcher give a talk on. I'm willing to consider your interpretation, but certainly not based on your assertion alone.
Actually, it's the opposite. If person A sees a dead cat, person B will see a cat that is alive. Someone described this to me in terms of polarized light. If an unpolarized particle decays into two photons, one of which is polarized vertically (photon A) and the other is polarized horizontally (photon B), changing the polarization of A to horizontal will change the polarization of B to vertical.
That's right. But they are. That's what quantum entanglement means. If they are on opposite sides of the universe, they are quantum entangled until someone performs a measurement and collapses the wave function of the entangled pair, a collapse that will take place instantaneously across the universe. However, again, this does not violate special relativity, since the phenomenon cannot be harnessed to send a faster-than-light signal, which would violate relativity theory, if it could be done. But, it can't be done. Again, though, this is only a mystery if you accept the wave-function collapse postulate. If there is no wave-fnction collapse, the issue of spooky action at a distance reduces to Many Worlds, and there is no mystery in any of this.
