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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  1267 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: A sober discussion: Aliens on Earth

    Regarding detection, I'll need to do some further reading, but I think it's entirely dependent on the formulation.

Okay, let's back up. The conception of "tachyon" I learned (from the number two guy at LIGO no less) was that c, nature's speed limit, meant getting past the speed of light consumed all the energy in the universe thus you ain't gonna do it. However, since E=mc^2 can be solved hyperbolically as well as parabolically, relativity doesn't rule out particles that are just as bound to move faster than the speed of light, never to slow to it. However, you have to turn mass into an imaginary number and things null out real good when you try to cross the asymptote.

I'm definitely the straight guy who delivers "but professor" exposition in these stage plays, though.





Devac  ·  1267 days ago  ·  link  ·  

All of that is true, yes. I'm sorry I don't have an off-hand response, but I'm trying to use Einstein-Maxwell equation to check if we could see something propagating <c in the gravitational curvature from, say, the point of tachyon creation. Unfortunately, with less-than-stellar intuition on my part.

kleinbl00  ·  1267 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I am delighted that I can still trick people into doing math for me.

Devac  ·  1266 days ago  ·  link  ·  

It gets better: I emailed some of this to an old lecturer to have someone sanity-check my interpretation.

kleinbl00  ·  1266 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Hey if you end up discovering faster-than-light travel it was worth it man

Devac  ·  1266 days ago  ·  link  ·  

So, the good thing is that I'm non-trivially wrong. Essentially, I wanted to see what would happen with the spacetime curvature around tachyon-containing bubble of elecromagnetic field. My messup is very mathy, but traces to a discontinuity at the spacetime point at which tachyon originates.

Oh well. My bad, learned something, it was fun. I still think there's a lot of potential here, though.

kleinbl00  ·  1266 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yeah that discontinuity is the big ugly problem as I understand it.

At least I ain't asking the forest service to move the moon.

am_Unition  ·  1265 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Thank Christ Gohmert (R-TX) is there to out-science scientists. I never thought of finding over 71 brazillion gillapetbytes of fuel for the 359 googellian Watt-erages of energy to boost Earth to a 1.01 AU semi-major axis!

Seriously, the Trump energy budget of a nuke vs. a hurricane was wayyyyy less of a discrepancy than Gohmert's (lack of) understanding here.

It's sad that lawyers constitute such a huge percentage of Congress. Maybe scientists should start flexin'.

Devac  ·  1265 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Wow, I didn't get kb's comment until reading this. It's certainly something to make up plans like that. He's like an exquisitely dim-witted Bond villain.

    It's sad that lawyers constitute such a huge percentage of Congress. Maybe scientists should start flexin'.

You, and many many others, were saying that since that March for Science. There's too much inertia, not unlike with the Moon.

kleinbl00  ·  1265 days ago  ·  link  ·  

My wife showed me a thread in one of the Facebook groups she subscribes to as a naturopathic physician. There were maybe 50 people worrying over the fact that keys stick to them now. There were only a couple people going "did you ever try sticking your keys to your body... before you were vaccinated?" There were zero people going "have you checked to see if your keys are, in fact, magnetic? With like... a magnet?"

One of the two political parties of the most powerful nation on earth has evolved to embrace the following platform:

- knowledge is suspect

- science is false

- infectious vulnerability is virtue

- social protections are evil

And granted, once you've started down that road it's really hard to turn off of it. But it's also really hard to recruit new members to your cause.

b_b  ·  1265 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Is he that stupid or do you think he was trolling? One could read the subtext to be, "Climate change is a fantasy so here's a fantasy solution." I am probably giving him too much credit, but I just can't believe that he's ever asked a question whose premise stipulates that climate change is even a thing.

goobster  ·  1265 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Oh no... Gohmert is dumb as shit. Here's an article from FIVE YEARS AGO showing just some of the batshit crazy things he has said.

Here's another - entirely different - list from 2013. This is when he said that Texas native caribou would go on dates next to the oil pipeline for the warmth...

The worst part? He knows he's the dumbest man in Congress.