Since Light Travels Faster Quotes

Since light travels faster than sound, some people appear bright until you hear them speak - Simon Benford

Since light travels faster than sound, some people appear bright until you hear them speak,

We sometimes hear of things that can travel faster than light. Something called 'the speed of thought' is occasionally proffered. This is an exceptionally silly notion especially since the speed of impulses through the neutrons in our brain is about the same as the speed of a donkey cart.

Inexpensive Progress Encase your legs in nylons, Bestride your hills with pylons O age without a soul; Away with gentle willows And all the elmy billows That through your valleys roll. Let's say goodbye to hedges And roads with grassy edges And winding country lanes; Let all things travel faster Where motor car is master Till only Speed remains. Destroy the ancient inn-signs But strew the roads with tin signs 'Keep Left,' 'M4,' 'Keep Out!' Command, instruction, warning, Repetitive adorning The rockeried roundabout; For every raw obscenity Must have its small 'amenity,' Its patch of shaven green, And hoardings look a wonder In banks of floribunda With floodlights in between. Leave no old village standing Which could provide a landing For aeroplanes to roar, But spare such cheap defacements As huts with shattered casements Unlived-in since the war. Let no provincial High Street Which might be your or my street Look as it used to do, But let the chain stores place here Their miles of black glass facia And traffic thunder through. And if there is some scenery, Some unpretentious greenery, Surviving anywhere, It does not need protecting For soon we'll be erecting A Power Station there. When all our roads are lighted By concrete monsters sited Like gallows overhead, Bathed in the yellow vomit Each monster belches from it, We'll know that we are dead.

If the speed of evolution of Intel microprocessors (since 1971) had been applied to cars, in early 2016 one car would have cost five cents and would have travelled faster than light.

must feel to be speeding along at this height with no visible means of support. Twilight fell: the sky was turning to a light, dusky purple littered with tiny silver stars, and soon only the lights of Muggle towns gave them any clue of how far from the ground they were, or how very fast they were travelling. Harry’s arms were wrapped tightly around his horse’s neck as he willed it to go even faster. How much time had elapsed since he had seen Sirius lying on the Department of Mysteries floor? How much longer would Sirius be able to resist Voldemort? All Harry knew for sure was that his godfather had neither done as Voldemort wanted, nor died, for he was convinced that either outcome would have caused him to feel Voldemort’s jubilation or fury course through his own body, making his scar sear as painfully as it had on the night Mr Weasley was attacked. On they flew through the gathering darkness; Harry’s face

But traveling faster than light would require infinite energy; it is possible on paper, not in practice. More recently, physicists have theorized other ways that physical travel into the past could be achieved, but they are still exotic and expensive. A technological civilization thousands or more years in advance of our own, one able to harness the energy of its whole galaxy, could create a wormhole linking different points in the fabric of spacetime and send a spaceship through it.8 It is an idea explored widely in science fiction and depicted vividly in Christopher Nolan’s 2014 film Interstellar. But all this is academic for our purposes. For Gleick, what we are really talking about with time travel is a thought experiment about the experiencer—the passenger—in a novel, disjointed relationship to the external world. We can readily perform feats of “mental time travel,” or at least simulate such feats, as well as experience a dissociation between our internal subjective sense of time and the flux of things around us and even our own bodies.9 According to Gleick, part of what suddenly facilitated four-dimensional thinking in both popular writing and the sciences was the changing experience of time in an accelerating society. The Victorian age, with its steam engines and bewildering pace of urban living, increased these experiences of dissociation, and they have only intensified since then. Time travel, Gleick argues, is basically just a metaphor for modernity, and a nifty premise upon which to base literary and cinematic fantasies that repair modernity’s traumas. It also shines a light on how confused we all are about time. The most commonly voiced objection to time travel—and with it, precognition—is that any interaction between the future and past would change the past, and thus create a different future. The familiar term is the grandfather paradox: You can’t go back in time and kill your grandfather because then you wouldn’t have been born to go back in time and kill your grandfather (leaving aside for the moment the assumed inevitability of wanting to kill your grandfather, which is an odd assumption). The technical term for meddling in the past this way is “bilking,” on the analogy of failing to pay a promised debt.10 Whatever you call it, it is the kind of thing that, in Star Trek, would make the Enterprise’s computer start to stutter and smoke and go haywire—the same reaction, in fact, that greets scientific claims of precognition. (As Dean Radin puts it, laboratory precognition results like those cited in the past two chapters “cause faces to turn red and sputtering noises to be issued from upset lips.”11) Information somehow sent backward in time from an event cannot lead to a future that no longer includes that event—and we naturally intuit that it would be very hard not to have such an effect if we meddled in the timeline. Our very presence in the past would change things.

NOTHING CAN GO FASTER THAN LIGHT Of course the idea that there is an ultimate speed limit seems absurd. While the speed of light is very high by earthly standards, the magnitude is not the point; any kind of speed limit in nature doesn't make sense. Suppose, for example, that a spaceship is traveling at almost the speed of light. Why can't you fire the engine again and make it go faster-or if necessary, build another ship with a more powerful engine? Or if a proton is whirling around in a cyclotron at close to the speed of light, why can't you give it additional energy boosts and make it go faster? Intuitive explanation. When we think of the spaceship and the proton as made of fields, not as solid objects, the idea is no longer ridiculous. Fields can't move infinitely fast. Changes in a field propagate in a "laborious" manner, with a change in intensity at one point causing a change at nearby points, in accordance with the field equations. Consider the wave created when you drop a stone in water: The stone generates a disturbance that moves outward as the water level at one point affects the level at another point, and there is nothing we can do to speed it up. Or consider a sound wave traveling through air: The disturbance in air pressure propagates as the pressure at one point affects the pressure at an adjacent point, and we can't do anything to speed it up. In both cases the speed of travel is determined by properties of the transmitting medium- air and water, and there are mathematical equations that describe those properties. Fields are also described by mathematical equations, based on the properties of space. It is the constant c in those equations that determines the maximum speed of propagation. If the field has mass, there is also a mass term that slows down the propagation speed further. Since everything is made of fields - including protons and rocketships - it is clear that nothing can go faster than light. As Frank Wilczek wrote, One of the most basic results of special relativity, that the speed of light is a limiting velocity for the propagation of any physical influence, makes the field concept almost inevitable. - F. Wilczek ("The persistence of Ether", p. 11, Physics Today, Jan. 1999) David Bodanis tried to make this point in the following way: Light will always be a quick leapfrogging of electricity out from magnetism, and then of magnetism leaping out from electricity, all swiftly shooting away from anything trying to catch up to it. That's why it's speed can be an upper limit - D. Bodanis However, Bodanis only told part of the story. It is only when we recognize that everything, not just light, is made of fields that we can conclude that there is a universal speed limit.

NOTHING CAN GO FASTER THAN LIGHT Of course the idea that there is an ultimate speed of light is very high by earthly standards, the magnitude is not the point; any kind of speed limit in nature doesn't make sense. Suppose, for example, that a spaceship is traveling at almost the speed of light. Why can't you fire the engine again and make it go faster-or if necessary, build another ship with a more powerful engine? Or if a proton is whirling around in a cyclotron at close to the speed of light, why can't you give it additional energy boosts and make it go faster? Intuitive explanation. When we think of the spaceship and the proton as made of fields, not as solid objects, the idea is no longer ridiculous. Fields can't move infinitely fast. Changes in a field propagate in a "laborious" manner, with a change in intensity at one point causing a change at nearby points, in accordance with the field equations. Consider the wave created when you drop a stone in water: The stone generates a disturbance that moves outward as the water level at one point affects the level at another point, and there is nothing we can do to speed it up. Or consider a sound wave traveling through air: The disturbance in air pressure propagates as the pressure at one point affects the pressure at an adjacent point, and we can't do anything to speed it up. In both cases the speed of travel is determined by properties of the transmitting medium- air and water, and there are mathematical equations that describe those properties. Fields are also described by mathematical equations, based on the properties of space. It is the constant c in those equations that determines the maximum speed of propagation. If the field has mass, there is also a mass term that slows down the propagation speed further. Since everything is made of fields - including protons and rocketships - it is clear that nothing can go faster than light. As Frank Wilczek wrote, One of the most basic results of special relativity, that the speed of light is a limiting velocity for the propagation of any physical influence, makes the field concept almost inevitable. - F. Wilczek ("The persistence of Ether", p. 11, Physics Today, Jan. 1999) David Bodanis tried to make this point in the following way: Light will always be a quick leapfrogging of electricity out from magnetism, and then of magnetism leaping out from electricity, all swiftly shooting away from anything trying to catch up to it. That's why it's speed can be an upper limit - D. Bodanis However, Bodanis only told part of the story. It is only when we recognize that everything, not just light, is made of fields that we can conclude that there is a universal speed limit.

First, since traveling faster than the speed of light cannot be done in normal space you must somehow get out of normal space. The data Andromeda and I had analyzed from our encounter with the ionized cloud indicated we had actually skipped out of normal Einstein space.

Since light travels faster than sound, some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

Once superintelligent AI has settled another solar system or galaxy, bringing humans there is easy — if humans have succeeded in programming the AI with this goal. All the necessary information about humans can be transmitted at the speed of light, after which the AI can assemble quarks and electrons into the desired humans. This could be done either in a low-tech way by simply transmitting the 2 gigabytes of information needed to specify a person’s DNA and then incubating a baby to be raised by the AI, or the AI could assemble quarks and electrons into full-grown people who would have all the memories scanned from their originals back on Earth. This means that if there’s an intelligence explosion, the key question isn’t if intergalactic settlement is possible, but simply how fast it can proceed. Since all the ideas we've explored above come from humans, they should be viewed as merely lower limits on how fast life can expand; ambitious superintelligent life can probably do a lot better, and it will have a strong incentive to push the limits, since in the race against time and dark energy, every 1% increase in average settlement speed translates into 3% more galaxies colonized. For example, if it takes 20 years to travel 10 light-years to the next star system with a laser-sail system, and then another 10 years to settle it and build new lasers and seed probes there, the settled region will be a sphere growing in all directions at a third of the speed of light on average. In a beautiful and thorough analysis of cosmically expanding civilizations in 2014, the American physicist Jay Olson considered a high-tech alternative to the island-hopping approach, involving two separate types of probes: seed probes and expanders. The seed probes would slow down, land and seed their destination with life. The expanders, on the other hand, would never stop: they'd scoop up matter in flight, perhaps using some improved variant of the ramjet technology, and use this matter both as fuel and as raw material out of which they'd build expanders and copies of themselves. This self-reproducing fleet of expanders would keep gently accelerating to always maintain a constant speed (say half the speed of light) relative to nearby galaxies, and reproduce often enough that the fleet formed an expanding spherical shell with a constant number of expanders per shell area. Last but not least, there’s the sneaky Hail Mary approach to expanding even faster than any of the above methods will permit: using Hans Moravec’s “cosmic spam” scam from chapter 4. By broadcasting a message that tricks naive freshly evolved civilizations into building a superintelligent machine that hijacks them, a civilization can expand essentially at the speed of light, the speed at which their seductive siren song spreads through the cosmos. Since this may be the only way for advanced civilizations to reach most of the galaxies within their future light cone and they have little incentive not to try it, we should be highly suspicious of any transmissions from extraterrestrials! In Carl Sagan’s book Contact, we earthlings used blueprints from aliens to build a machine we didn’t understand — I don’t recommend doing this ... In summary, most scientists and sci-fi authors considering cosmic settlement have in my opinion been overly pessimistic in ignoring the possibility of superintelligence: by limiting attention to human travelers, they've overestimated the difficulty of intergalactic travel, and by limiting attention to technology invented by humans, they've overestimated the time needed to approach the physical limits of what's possible.

Ever since I was a child, I've been hearing physicists insist that nothing can travel faster than light. That it would break the universe somehow. Something to do with causality ... But it's what we are doing at this very moment to Bitworld! We are saying that according to the rules of the simulation, everything, everywhere has to march forward in lockstep. As much as we might like to see how it all comes out - whether that tear is going to break loose from Mercury's eye, for example - we may not. We can't throw more mana at it and fast-forward that one part of the simulation, because then it would be out of sync with all the other parts. It would break the world.