--- On Sat, 9/24/11, Stephen A. Lawrence <sa...@pobox.com> wrote:
> Yeah. Bien sur. The whole issue isn't that some > religious law might be broken; it's that you can get > contradictions if we allow stuff like this to go on without > careful controls on it, and short cuts, improbability > physics, and bistromath make no difference to that > conclusion. I agree, I wasn't really intending to go that far as to beat religion and science into a pulp, just pointing out a few similarities as I saw them. BTW, I will say I am glad you responded to this. Good to have someone who knows more of relativity than I to throw some change (2 cents is no longer such, due to inflation) at this. > And, frankly, I, and lots of other people (I'm sure!), feel > pretty strongly that Nature doesn't allow > contradictions. Paradoxes may be allowed in the math > of the model, but they're never in the real world. > Ergo, if FTL travel is possible, there are surely some > restrictions buried in the fine print. Count me as one of those lots of other people. No paradoxes. I'd figure the fine print is, FTL is going to take place at different speeds in different directions, depending on the frame. A thought occurs to me; back in the day, as some of my friends say, I did a few thought experiments on the idea of a reactionless propulsion system. If something like it existed, (a Campbell energy-to-momentum converter, however the hell it works), the only way I can see to conserve energy would be to have it have an efficiency depending on velocity relative to an absolute frame. If that is so, such an engine could be, it seems, used as a sort of universal compass. Measuring the efficiency in different directions would be, then, quite telling. --Kyle --Kyle
