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Proper number off faster than light. How your shadow can do it but you can't is really good. Is this a material taken from lectures that you've given or you've pulled it together over the years.
Well, I've always had interest. For many many years, I had an interest, and I've actually published on some of the strange aspects in science journals, some of the strange aspects that shadows and laser spots can do when they when they go faster than lights. Because even the physics community, once they see the logic, they don't disagree with it, but they're unaware of it. So if you were to go and speak to someone you know that's versed in physics,
they would say, oh, no, no, that can't happen. But once you explain to them the logic of how it does happen, they'll say, oh, yeah, yeah, that's kind of cool. And it is. So it's really strange. It's it's one of these untold stories out there that there's this whole universe of things that happen faster than light that we don't know. For instance, when you turn on a room light the room. At first the room is completely dark,
and after a second, for sure the room is completely illuminated. Well, the boundary between dark and light moves across the law faster than light. So if you could see at those speeds, you would be able to see a much different universe. You would see lots of things moving faster than light all the time. And so one of the reasons why we can't do it, why we can't see it, is because our brains and minds are so slow. That would
mean that it just doesn't come through. But now with modern technology, we can have times rapid time lapse photography and see these things.
You drop a lot of really cool historical facts in the book about you know, the the understanding of the speed of light, how it developed and changed over the centuries. Maybe let's start there, I mean, tell us a little bit about and what you cover in the talk about the first folks to try to measure the speed light, is it Galileo or even before that.
People have been been speculating about the speed of light since since in most of recorded history. For instance, as you noted, let's see Aristotle and you clip back in the you know BC times they sort of thought that. They sort of thought that what happens is light doesn't come from an object, from a star, or from a light to you. Light goes from your eye to the object you're seeing. And for most of human history that's
the way humans thought. It was. Every now and then someone would say, no it I think it's the other way. But that was not what most people believed. And it was only around one thousand a d that that it was more and more realized that no, no, no, that
that's not the way it is. Light actually comes goes from something and comes to us, and that's when so back in the DC times, people thought, well, the Steed light must be infinite, because when your eyes are closed, you don't see something, and then when you open your eyes, then light goes out from your eyes and you can see things, even stars that are far away. Therefore, the
speedelite must be effectically infinite. But once people realized that light was coming from other things into their eye, then people realize, well, maybe it's not infinite, maybe it's it's got some speed. But for many years they just couldn't measured it. It was so fast, as I like to tell my students, there's really only three numbers in conceptual astrosoutics. One is infinity, which means it was really too fast or too big to measure. One is one means that
we measured it. It's one of those, and the other is zero. The third number and astrophys this is zero because it means it's too small to measure. It might be there, we don't know its size, but it's effectively zero. So for a lot of human history, the speedlite was infinite because it was just too fast to measure. We couldn't do it. So people like Galileo they tried to
do it. They would go to the mountaintops or hilltops, and then someone else could in another hilltop, and they had lanterns, and they had black things they could, you know, they could put over the lanterns. And so they would make deal feel you and your your hilltop. When you see me uncover my lanterns, you uncover your lantern and I'll count the amount of seconds it takes before I can see your lanterns. And so Galileo did this and other people did this, and they found out wall it
was out a second. No, it's about two seconds. No, it's about half a second. And they realized they weren't getting a consistent answer, and Galileo realized that, no, I just don't believe it. It was infinitely fast. What we're really measuring is how long it takes to uncover the lanterns. They're not really measuring anything to do with the state
of light. So many efforts measured the super fast speed of light just fouled until suddenly, in the sixteen hundred, someone who was not famous just happened to be doing something that some people didn't, you know, think would be all that interesting, and they got a result that they didn't understand. But that result was the door. That door was that we went through is the finite speed of light.
And that person was Olay Roamer and a Roamer. What they were doing is they were just watching the moons of Jupiter. And when the moons of Jupiter, particularly Iisle, would go behind Jupiter go in front of Jupiter, and Romer noticed it was just something odd about the timing of these eclipses, and the eclipses would take longer in some circumstances and shorter in other circumstances, and it just
didn't seem to make sense. And so meanwhile, on the other people on the next bill trying to uncover lanterns, but the roamer was saying, hey, wait a minute, can you understand this? And the answer it turns out that Olay Rummer was actually the first to discover the finite speed of light, and to measure it was in a small fraction of the not super actively, but relatively accurately,
like but we know it today. The discovery was just a bit of a surprise, and it advanced human knowledge in a great way by just a sort of a thirddipitous results.
You write a couple of different places in the book about there being more than one speed of light? Can you explain that?
Yes?
So now we know in modern science we know a lot about the speed of lighte. And we know that the speed a light in objects. So when you look through water, the speed light and water is not the same as the speed a light in air or in vacuum. Speed light through air and vacuum are actually very similar. It's a very small fractional percentage difference between us. But in water it's like third flower. But there's different even
kinds of light. We now know things about the way light works, and there's phases, and there's something called the group velocity. The group colosity is more of us how long it will take light to go from you to a mirror to bounce back. If you measure that speed, which we can now do with great accuracy, you're measuring the group philosity of light. Also thing it's called the phase velocity. Words, if you measure how much light is deflected, that tells. But that's not all that important.
Really.
It's important for understanding the details of physics and how things work. But in terms of the conceptual speed light, we now know that the speed light and glass is different than the speed light and water, and the speed light and water is different than the speed a light and air, which is slightly different than the speed light
and vacuum. And the fastest that we know that anything can pass you by is the speed a light in vacuum, and so we call that the speed of light, but it really means fastest speed that we know of in terms of something that has energy and mass can go.
Understand the speed of light is not just an exercise in and of itself. I mean it helps to understand the much bigger picture of the universe we live in and the nature of reality.
Right, Yeah, so light is just a fundamental thing. It's one of the used to dominate the universe. The photons that the make up light used to have the most energy in the unit. But now the universe has evolved that the light has has become less comparatively energetic where it's mass, and now something called dark energy have not diluted like light. So now light is there's lots of there's like billions of pieces of photons for every atom
in that we know of. But still the amount of energy in light is down, has gone down down a lot, and so now light is more isn't most useful for its mass and its energy doesn't the energy it has, it's most useful for what it can tell us because it's acrossed the universe from far away, and so when we look at it near and far and we can
try to decode what it is. Light was created someplace, Light was reflected from someplace, was emitted in some place, and we we we pieced together the universe from the light we see pretty much.
You have some fun exercises in the book. There's no way we can cover all of them, but one of them early in the book is an aside where you the title is nothing can go fast faster than light, which is I think probably the general assumption that most of us non scientists would suggest. But you say that, if you were to head into local university and ask a random physics student if anything or if shadows could go faster than light, you're probably going to get an
answer no, nothing would go faster than light. But they'd be wrong, right.
Yes, they would be wrong. So it's an amazing thing. I've given talks and I've had you know, good physicists in the audience object saying oh no, that can't happen, and then when I try to detail it, they don't even want to let me continue. So we get into an awkward part where I say, oh no. But then I think at another university that has justice prestigious scientists and they a lot of it, they say, oh, yeah, this
is really interesting, this is really great. So yeah, if you were to go to this experiment, you might find people there who would seem to disagree with this, but unless what you can do is you can tell them to look up my articles, not only my articles, there
are other articles, and then to read this book. And it really it makes it very clear and it's been measured in the last too, that shadows and laser spots and illumination fronts, like when you turn on the light in the room, they all can move, and they do move faster than life.
And you say, you write that you've submitted papers to recognize physics journals and had them rejected because that editors say, oh no, there's no way this paper is flawed because nothing can go faster than light. They're wrong.
Yeah, that has happened too. So what happens is we we have editors that know. So when you send in use some research, you send it into a journal. So the journal you send it into the editor signs an editor. Then the editor has what's called referees. You can picture there are scientists and sit around with stripes on them and they advise the editor as to whether this piece of science writing that was submitted to journal should be
published or not. Many things submitted to journals are not published because the editor, on advice of the referee usually said, oh no. So we now know for some journals some editors are are cluing and they understand what we're doing and that this is correct. But if we get the wrong editor and the wrong editor submits it to the wrong referee, then we just get back a wrote rejection which we know to try to push pass. We try to find we asked that editors send to a different
referee where we ask that another editor takeover. And so since we are able to publish our stuff, that is a successful tactic. But you're right, we've gotten just you know, back an immediate thing saying oh no, this can't be right because someone hasn't thought it through. They just they remember some you know, some adage that says nothing to go faster than light, but which is nothing can pack with masks can pack you faster than lights. So far as we know, we don't have any examples of that.
But shadows can go way, the spots can go, things can go, and these things can be very very interesting and tell us things about the universe that we didn't know before.
Yeah, you have one experiment in the book that where you point a laser pointer at the moon and it can go. You can whip it around and it could go faster than the speed of light RT.
Yeah. So one of my favorite favorite thought experiments, and there's a lot of conceptual thought experiments in the book, is let's say you're seat here on your here on Earth, and let's say there is this big dome out one light year away. So if it's one light year away, it takes light a whole year to get there. So now you have your laser pointer. Uh, so you take your laser pointer and you point it at one spot
in the dome. And even though you point it there, it's going to take a year for light to get there. But then in one second, you take your laser pointer and you shift it around to one hundred and eighty degrees around to the to the other side of the dome. So after a year that takes like to get there, the laser spot will cross. We'll go all the way
around that dome in a second. But that dome has has a rate, has a circumference greater than a light year, So that spot is moving greater than a light year in a second, which means the spot has a superluminal speed. Now there's no information being created on the dome that's moving on the dome faster than light. The laser spot is the superposition of unrelated photons that are hitting at different places, and so that is what is appearing appearing
to move faster than light. But yes, there's these things. You know, we don't have a dome out at one light year, but these thought experiments are very clear demonstrations that things laser spots can move. So if you take your laser spot, maybe we don't have a dome light year away. What we do have is things that are closer to the moon. If you just try your local wall and you take your laser pointer and you s creep it around the wall, you can't move your arm
fast enough to make it go faster than light. Unfortunately, but the moon is far enough away that if you take your laser pointer and you sweep it past the moon at a reasonable speed not too fast, that that layer spot, if you could see it, would move faster than light across the moon.
You have a chapter that deals with how to make a magnetic field move faster than light? So what is there a simple answer to that, a simple explanation that we would understand.
Well, that's a tough one because okay, yeah, the magnetic kal minds are actually not something you can grab onto. There are conceptual lines of h of uh that has something to do with magnetism. So yeah, so we draw them in and then when the ninetism changes, you turn a magnet or something like that. Yeah, these magnetic kial minds can can move faster than light. That that's very clear,
but it's not that easy to explain. So I did could go do some effort in the book to do it, but I don't know if that would work here in the in the Coast to Coast forum.
Okay, very well, you know you do touch on here and there the differences between relativity and quantum mechanics, and try as I might to get my head around it, I just can't do it. But it seems to be a lot of what quantum mechanics concludes to be real and true is at odds with what we think of as relativity. I don't know how they coexist, but they.
Do, right, Yeah, so they are not in We don't always know how they interact, and we're sometimes surprised. But there is quantum mechanics does not contradict special relativity. In fact, there's there are types of quantum mechanics, quantum electrodynamics and and things like that that incorporates special relativity into them. The classic quantum mechanics, the Schrodinger equation, it's called that can be brought into conflict with the concepts of special relativity.
But physicists do know that special relativity is right and that it does fit into quantum mechanics. But that doesn't mean there's there's some really strange quantum mechanics experiments out there that it appears that information is being transferred faster than light, but it is not when it is when it's looked at it very detailed, it's just the appearance that it is. It's not really going faster than life.
And how that is is just absolutely fascinating. How it seems like something on one side and something far away. They seem like they know about each other, but they're not communicating. And so if you look at the details of it, which I try to explain in some of the chapters in my book, you can see that there's no real communication going on there. There's correlations which we don't understand why this correlation, but there's no communication.
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