51–56 of 56 posts
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Minimum round trip time between San Francisco and Tokyo is about 60ms due to the speed of light, which means in practice FPS games are unplayable across the ocean. If they manage to implement this shit, we'll be able to have FPS games hosted anywhere in the world!
If we could actually break causality, playing games would be the last thing on our minds.
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Downvotes probably due to people thinking that your comment adds nothing to the conversation, not necessarily disagreeing with you (I would think that the pic would be cooler if it were higher res; as it is, I can't make much sense of it).
http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/201104/r751650_6238699.jpg reasonably high res
(b) I can't look at that picture without thinking of Agatha's dingbots from Girl Genius. http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20091005
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The speed limit of the universe isn't just some hypothesis waiting to be disproven. It can't be broken. It's impossible.
Scientific theories aren't reality - they are a model of reality and to be considered scientific a theory has to be refutable - if you can't conceive of experimental results that would disprove your theory then it's not really a scientific theory. So every scientific theory is in a very real sense "waiting to be disproven".
Neither the undecidability of the halting problem nor Gödel's first incompleteness theorem are "waiting to be disproven." Similarly, the speed limit of the universe, if assumed to be breakable, leads to all sorts of contradictions and true paradoxes. Note that I'm not saying that the entirety of some theory, be it special or general relativity, quantum theory, etc. are known truths.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The speed limit of the universe isn't just some hypothesis waiting to be disproven. It can't be broken. It's impossible.
Never underestimate the capacity of humans to be wrong. Science is made from people being willing to admit they're wrong: the evidence for speed limits is compelling, but not absolute. It would just mean our current model is screwed if we're wrong...
When you're dealing with things on the quantum level, observing a particle affects it. Remember Schrodinger's cat? The cat is both dead and alive, until someone opens the box. The opening of the box gives the cat its new state of deadness or aliveness.
Quantum teleportation works through entangled particles. Entangled particles are, in some sense, the same particle in two places. An action on one entangled particle will instantly affect the other particle, including observation of the particle.
Suppose Alice and Bob share an entangled particle. Alice observes the particle on her end, collapsing it into one of four states. Which state it collapses into is and always will be completely random.
Bob's particle was instantaneously affected in one of four ways corresponding to those states. Trouble is, he doesn't know which way, and he can't do anything with his particle until he does.
Alice has to communicate to Bob in any regular way, through light, telephone or internet, what she observed on her end, so that Bob knows what exactly happened to his particle, and what to do with it.
So in this way, it really was instantaneous over a distance, but at the same time nothing useful happened faster than the speed of light.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scientific theories aren't reality - they are a model of reality and to be considered scientific a theory has to be refutable - if you can't conceive of experimental results that would disprove your theory then it's not really a scientific theory. So every scientific theory is in a very real sense "waiting to be disproven".
We can know things. We know that no algorithm can determine whether or not arbitrary Turing machines will halt, because assuming the contrary leads to a contradiction. Similarly, no consistent axiomatic system powerful enough to express propositions of elementary arithmetic can be complete. Neither the undecidability of the halting problem nor Gödel's first incompleteness theorem are "waiting to be disproven." Simila…