The Speed of Light, is it a relative thing?

[Some Dude With A Mak- Cass]

28 minutes ago, Delasaurus said:

Do you think then that in this case, the age old problem of trying to find out who we are and how were we all to land on this planet in this vast Universe requires another name for us to grasp its significance? Like the Ancient Egyptians and Greeks just accepted that it was the work of the Gods. Unquestionable and unfathomable and so homage must be given to those that are higher in being?

With the demise of religion (in general) of the modern world, do you think that 'religion' has a place in explaining the vastness of all that exists in the modern world. Should we create 'new world' gods to celebrate the expanse of the Universal mystery if we cannot find a mathematical or rational solution that satisfies our quest?

Should we bow down at sunset to to the god iSun creater of all light?

Is there a place for the religious Gods in modern mathematics and science? I'm not talking about Jesus here and I wish no offence to anyone in their beliefs, but historically there has always been Gods associated with astronomy for eons.

 

i think there is some sort of higher power out there, but thats really due to my upbringing rather than facts. strictly speaking scientifically, no. if there is a higher power desiring homage and/or respect, we would know. they and/or it would have told us long ago, and they would not allow atheists or other beliefs to last long. modern science, in my opinion, should remain separate from religion. the vatican has a observatory, and i respect that, but the two don't fit, as we can see portrayed quite well with scientology. they tried to mix science and religion to make something new, and look how that turned out. it is all fine and dandy when someone wants to respect the cosmos, and if they do it by going to church, sure, thats fine. if you believe it, its real for you, and therefore has my respect. but they don't mix well, and never should. as for unknowable things, we must accept, not the unknowableness, but our desire and thirst to know it. humans make their own gods, there is little evidence to show otherwise. we should respect, that of all known beings, only we have fully developed powers of reason. some animals come close, but none come near. therefore, to animals, WE are the gods. what is and isn't a god is from your own point of view, not some universal truth. to a star, a black hole may be a god. to a black hole, a mighty quasar. to a quasar, who knows? that, to, falls into the realm of the unknowable. some things cannot be known, but we, and only we, have that thirst to know it despite the unknowableness. therefore, to me, we should respect our uniqueness in the cosmos, not a god made from the unknowableness of the cosmos. there is a difference between unknowable and god- like, though it is thin. no offense to those who are religious, of course, i have great respect to those who put themselves at the mercy of the unknowable, unprovable, and all mightier than themselves. this is quite a tangent.. why couldn't i replicate this kind of writing for school??

[Some Dude With A Mak- Cass]

also, this proves the infinite nature of the universe:

case closed, once and for all.

[Delasaurus]

Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. That is Einsteins famous fact that he offered to the scientific world.

BUT.......

As the Universe expands, does the speed of light expand with it?

If we are sitting in a chair holding a torch the speed of light can be measured as 299 792 458 m / s , if the chair is on an aircraft and we are still holding the torch when the aircraft accelerates, is the speed of light now 299 792 458 m / s PLUS the speed of the aircraft? As with time, Einsteins says that two clocks will show different times when one of them is accelerated and moved through a distance X.

Relative to the guy sitting in the chair on the aircraft, the speed of his torch beam will remain the same. From an observer on the ground we see the passengers torch beam shine out from the aircraft's window back at us. We measure this speed and lo and behold it comes back to us at the same 299 792 458 m / s.

Yet we know there is a simple equation from our observation that 299 792 458 m / s + speed of the aircraft, should give us a perfectly valid result.

If the aircraft is flying away from us the speed of light should be slower, if the aircraft is flying towards us it should be faster, by logic.

Quote:

Please welcome to the stage a master illusionist. An energy beam that stabs out of galaxy M87 like a toothpick in a cocktail olive is pulling off the ultimate magic trick: seeming to move faster than the speed of light.

Almost five times faster, in fact, as measured by the Hubble Space Telescope. This feat was first observed in 1995 in galaxy M87,  and has been seen in many other galaxies since. It might have you questioning your entire reality. Nothing can break the cosmic speed limit, right? You can’t just flaunt the laws of physics… can you?

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2131889-weird-energy-beam-seems-to-travel-five-times-the-speed-of-light/

Unquote:

So, is Einstein wrong? Or perhaps only the relativity part of Einsteins theory appears to fit the bill?

Is it possible that the speed of light is in fact a variable and not a constant?

[George Jones]

17 minutes ago, Delasaurus said:

Yet we know there is a simple equation from our observation that 299 792 458 m / s + speed of the aircraft, should give us a perfectly valid result.

No, when relativity is taken into account, simple arithmetic addition of speeds is not valid.

The correct way to combine speeds u and v is

(u+v)/(1 + u*v/c^2),

where c is the speed of light. if one of the speeds is the speed of light, e.g., take u = c, this result gives

(c+v)/( 1 + c*v/c^2) = c(1 + v/c)/(1 + v/c) = c,

and all is well.

25 minutes ago, Delasaurus said:

If the aircraft is flying away from us the speed of light should be slower, if the aircraft is flying towards us it should be faster, by logic.

Logic alone is not sufficient to do science.

[Delasaurus]

Thanks for that George. Coming from a fine arts and engineering background, I sometimes like to play devils advocate and question fundamental principles, nothing like kicking the scientific donkey to see if it still goes 'eeeewww aawwwww' eh?

However, your equation is faultless and perfectly fits a certain model whereby  the Speed of Light is a constant that was agreed to be 299 792 458 m / s in 1975. The actual number obviously doesn't mean anything in the equation as it is a constant. It could be, c equal 2, it doesn't matter, I understand that, except that we would have to re-write Cosmology.

But what if it isn't constant, as some researchers are believing.

Then surely the formula should now simply be X+Y again? Where X is the speed of light which has become an unknown variable plus Y a known speed.

I can see your equation still holding up, except for the fact the speed of light may not now be 299 792 458 m / s, since it has become a variable. And it is this constant or 'fixed' speed that is in question.

[Delasaurus]

On 16/10/2017 at 06:40, MarsG76 said:

Until we see the edge, it's infinite...

 

 

What if the Universe (time/space) was a long pipe? Imagine say, a km of fine tube joined end to end and curled up into a sphagetti ball, where we travelled along it only to arrive at the place we started from? For all intense and purposes we behave in our tube of time/space exactly as we experience life now...things drop due to gravity and things attract due to gravitational pull at different strengths and weaknesses at different parts of our coiled up tubing. Light is still a constant and behaves just as well as it does in our known galaxy. Horizons would be seen and never reached and as on earth our jouney if we walked around its circuference would end us back where we started. If our tubing was made of clear material, indeed we could visibly observe other parts of the time/space tube.

We know according to Einstein that time/space warps toward a curve, if this is so....

...do we have a model for 'finite' space, whereby we would never see its edge, as its edge is an illusion.

 

If we're to take a cross section of our 'pipe' Universe model it might look something like this........

 

And the walls of our pipe would be made out of the time/space continuim itself, thereby making time travel into the next adjacent piece of 'galaxy' pipe a possibility, else we could simply travel with the flow around the pipe and view the adjacent vortex (representing our galaxies) as we go.

[Steve Ward]

And it's 299,792,458 in a vacuum ... 

[ronin]

The speed of light is 299 792 458 m/s immaterial of your movement either towards or away from the source. Makes it easy in a way as whatever you do it is always 299 792 458 m/s.

What makes it not so easy is that to account for any velocity by either yourself or the source the apparent wavelength is altered.

If they think it may not be constant then there is the simple option that the velocity is just a bit different but again you still see it at velocity immaterial of your movement.

So in effect swap 299 792 458 m/s for say 299 792 500 m/s.

If the thinking is that the speed of light was faster in the early universe then oddly this could have a bearing on Dark Energy. The faster velocity could account for the observed increment in Red Shift of the distant objects that gave rise to DE.

[Delasaurus]

Ok but we need to be careful here, are we talking about a frequency change or a velocity change? As if we shift the apparent wavelength or frequency too far either way, surely, 'light as we know it Jim' will cease to exist at all and become what we earthlings...call radio waves or x-rays. Which according to Einstein still can't travel faster than the speed of light even though the visible light has now become invisible?

Time over distance travelled is not = to cycles per second

So surely if we talk about a Red Shift...that is to do with a change in frequency not velocity whereby visible light becomes more red toward the radio wave spectrum. But its velocity hasn't therefore neccesarily changed.

As light behaves as both waves and particles, and particles can be accelarated, then surely light particles themselves, must conform to the same laws of physics in that as a particle, it can behave at variable velocities? As a wave, its 'wavelength' however, remains within the visible spectrum.

Unless of course we take an oriental view that the many are 'ONE' and the same thing. And therefore, radio waves to gamma waves are the same thing..part of the 'ONE'

It is only the change in 'frequency' that makes the stars visible or not.

In essence then, I declare a new constant called the 'ONE' which is also a variable....and the 'ONE' is both finite and infinite in nature, but just how fast is this 'ONE' going? And what shape is it?

And of course, we always tend to speak of things in duality..the Christ and the anti-Christ, so if there is a 'ONE' it must follow there is an anti-'ONE'...except that maybe the anti-'ONE' and the 'ONE' are again of the same dimension.

It is also interesting that some scientists are looking at ancient texts to describe the Universe. For example The Bhagavad Gita, as some scientists struggle to find the answers that can only be solved by such books of wisdom or faith.

Perhaps as many of you have said, we may never find the answer or know the truth and can only succumb to offering up models of the world we inhabit that seem to fit our purposes, here on planet earth.  So that we can boil the water for the babies bath and have our mobile phones etc. But never ever know the true answer to the Universe. Is it 42?

 

[Delasaurus]

By the way..here's something interesting I just found, in my mentioning the Bhagavad Gita and scientists...it relates to Einstein.

 

 

http://www.vijaykumar.org/Bhagavad-Gita-Hinduism/Albert-Einstein-and-Bhagavad-Gita-Science.html

[RayD]

1 hour ago, Delasaurus said:

And of course, we always tend to speak of things in duality..the Christ and the anti-Christ, so if there is a 'ONE' it must follow there is an anti-'ONE'...except that maybe the anti-'ONE' and the 'ONE' are again of the same dimension.

It is also interesting that some scientists are looking at ancient texts to describe the Universe. For example The Bhagavad Gita, as some scientists struggle to find the answers that can only be solved by such books of wisdom or faith.

Perhaps as many of you have said, we may never find the answer or know the truth and can only succumb to offering up models of the world we inhabit that seem to fit our purposes, here on planet earth.  So that we can boil the water for the babies bath and have our mobile phones etc. But never ever know the true answer to the Universe. Is it 42?

Holy cow that's deeper than a very very deep thing 

[Paul M]

10 hours ago, Delasaurus said:

What if?

How would this change our view on linear mathematics and straight line views of the Universe?

Could Mandelbrot have stumbled on the mathematical equation of the Universe? Whereby finity and infinity are both the same and interchangeable. Infinitely finite or finitely infinite? Which is where we need another word perhaps (a graham)  to describe its nature..

 

Ah Mandelbrot!

Back in the early 90's I read a book called "Chaos" by James Gleik. It was my introduction to Chaos Theory and the Mandelbrot beetle. The book showed the simple iterative formula and how Mandelbrot "mapped" the results on a simple graphical display.

I had a BBC model B computer then, running good old BBC BASIC. I had a go at writing an algorithm to see if I could generate my own beetle. Against all the odds it worked. It was unbelievably slow by today's standards and took a whole evening to generate the simple 1:1 beetle. I didn't write a user interface so zooming was a matter of changing variables in the algorithm and letting it run.  It was a huge success but at high zooms, still only thousands of times, it took days!

Colour was the key. The beetle was anything but black and white. In fact, as explained in the video, each pair of coordinates would be run through the algorithm. They either tend towards 0 or infinity very rapidly dictating that they were either within the "set" or outside of the "set". Some coordinate pairs would be slower to diverge either way and the number of iterations required to "test" each pair would decide what colour to plot those coordinates on the screen. So all that crazy detail in the beetle is actually the "coastline" of the beetle, the infinitely complex boundary between those point within the set and those points outside the set.

The graphical representation is only part of the beauty. Having played with it numerically is truly mesmerising. There is no way of knowing if any point in the plane is inside or outside of the set without testing it. You can't look at the surrounding pattern and assume anything because on a finer scale it changes to something else.

Infinity at your fingertips! 

[ollypenrice]

I'm entirely bemused by the term 'infinity' since it strikes me, as a non mathematician, as doing nothing so well as demonstrating that it has no business existing in the first place! We have an infinite number of matchboxes each containing a hundred matches... etc etc. The conundrums are all well known.

It seems to me to be a term which makes little sense without our participation since, for something to be finite, it must be definable and I don't see how something can be definable with no one there to define it. Definition does not exist outside an observing intelligence.

So I can't help wondering if 'infinite' really just means unknown.

My own feeling is that we are close to the limits of what we can hope to understand about the universe without a better theory of time. The 'tensed theory of time' (there's a past, an advancing present and a future) makes perfect sense locally, but so did a number of other descriptions which proved to be an impediment to deeper understanding. While ever one of nature's key dimensions is incompletely understood we are not going to advance by much.

Olly

[Stub Mandrel]

Confusions arises because 'infinite' the adjective is perfectly sensible - it means continually extendable without limit.

However, the noun 'infinity' is without rational meaning as by definition infinity can never be reached.

 

[xtreemchaos]

I'm sitting on the fence again, just from lack of data and no good jokes . wouldn't it be cool if we could see the edge then we could figer out whats past it, oh no that's another can of worms, but it would be interesting, maybe we shoud look inwards instead of outwards "I know I'm taking in tongues again " charl. 

[andrew s]

19 minutes ago, Stub Mandrel said:

Confusions arises because 'infinite' the adjective is perfectly sensible - it means continually extendable without limit.

However, the noun 'infinity' is without rational meaning as by definition infinity can never be reached.

 

For me Cantor did a good job on taming infinity and how to deal with it mathematically. 

It is a concept that captures a limit just as does an integral or sum of a convergent  series. 

I think the issues agree when we try to use it to picture a physical situation (e.g. match boxes)

Regards Andrew 

[xtreemchaos]

ive a question, if the speed of light is 186,282 miles a sec  , whats the speed of Dark ? .  charl.

[Alien 13]

I have a problem with infinity, you can draw a  Koch snowflake then a slightly larger circle around it, the sides of the snowflake are of infinite length but its area is less than the circle surrounding it.. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_snowflake

So even if the universe is infinite in size it doesn't necessarily mean that its big.

Alan

[Paul M]

Intere

20 minutes ago, Alien 13 said:

I have a problem with infinity, you can draw a  Koch snowflake then a slightly larger circle around it, the sides of the snowflake are of infinite length but its area is less than the circle surrounding it.. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_snowflake

So even if the universe is infinite in size it doesn't necessarily mean that its big.

Alan

Interesting!

It's possible to put the "whole" Mandelbrot beetle within a circle of precisely known circumference. So the infinite length border of the beetle must require an infinite spatial regression to make room for the fractal complexity. Then we have a problem with the Plank Length? 

A simple "yes" or "no" will suffice

[ollypenrice]

5 hours ago, Stub Mandrel said:

Confusions arises because 'infinite' the adjective is perfectly sensible - it means continually extendable without limit.

However, the noun 'infinity' is without rational meaning as by definition infinity can never be reached.

 

I'm impressed!

Olly

[Delasaurus]

11 minutes ago, Paul M said:

Intere

Interesting!

It's possible to put the "whole" Mandelbrot beetle within a circle of precisely known circumference. So the infinite length border of the beetle must require an infinite spatial regression to make room for the fractal complexity. Then we have a problem with the Plank Length? 

A simple "yes" or "no" will suffice

I think that's the interesting thing about using mathematics to describe the Universe, the more we delve into the question of our existance using math, the more complex the numbers become. And we end up asking more questions than there are answers to.

To my mind the Mandelbrot or Julian set offers a model for absolute 'infinity' and I mean infinite. But we must realise it is only a mathematical model and not the Universe itself.

Does the Universe behave as a Mandelbrot set is another question. Some scientists believe that the fractal Universe does not hold up in 'reality' and return to Classical math.

We have to be clear when using maths as to what we are trying to do. We can get bogged down in equations and disputes in the speed of light etc, but surely what we are trying to do is simply find a 'model' that fits the way the Universe works.

[andrew s]

No physical theory is the thing in itself.  Modern science uses mathematical models to describe what we observe and perdict what we could observe - I.e. make predictions. The names given to the parts of the model e.g. electron photon can in some cases be associated with thing is our direct experience but more often not. This is what often causes issues as we struggle to get a mental model of them.

You need another approach to get at the thing in itself or the meaning of life.

Regards Andrew 

[Knighty2112]

2 hours ago, xtreemchaos said:

ive a question, if the speed of light is 186,282 miles a sec  , whats the speed of Dark ? .  charl.

That’s easy Charl. 666 miles a second! ???

[andrew s]

2 hours ago, Paul M said:

Intere

Interesting!

It's possible to put the "whole" Mandelbrot beetle within a circle of precisely known circumference. So the infinite length border of the beetle must require an infinite spatial regression to make room for the fractal complexity. Then we have a problem with the Plank Length? 

A simple "yes" or "no" will suffice

No. The Plank length is just a unit of length. Speculation about what happens at Plank length scale is just that - pure speculation. The is no real science in quantum foam and similar concepts.

Mathematically there is no problem with infinite quantities being bounded by finite ones and vice versa. For example the unit line 0 to 1 has an infinite number of points on it.

Regards Andrew 

[Stub Mandrel]

Meet Albert. he's as thick as a Planck.