Recent content by Iridium

Here is a bit more info about what I was thinking. By 'Squeezing' coherent light, one can apparently create 'bubbles' whose energy content is below that of normal vacuum. There are fairly severe restrictions on doing this, for example any region of negative energy must be surrounded by regions...

Agreed. I should have been clearer. The 'true' signal velocity can never be less than C relative to any observer, although it can approach C as the relative velocity increases. However, the effective transmission speed from transmitter to receiver can be less than C. Assume a...

I don't think this is correct. First, you can't travel 'at' the speed of light. If you are traveling at *nearly* the speed of light, you would not measure any different behavior from the laser. Another observer traveling at a different velocity would detect a different frequency coming from the...

Arguments against FTL communication are usually based on causuality arguments, which I tend to agree with. But it seems to me that the 'backwards in time' problem seems to make an assumption that might not always apply, ie that FTL velocity would be relative to C for all observers. Here's...

Thanks for a good post, pervect. After thinking about this last night I realized that based on a simple thought experiment, light must indeed gravitate: I have a box containing hydrogen ... the walls of the box are 'perfect' mirrors (they even reflect neutrons!). I make the hydrogen undergo...

On second thought, the light doesn't exactly 'stop existing' in the dark spot ... a better way to describe it would be to say that the light contains a certain number of photons, and the 'waves' affect the probability of finding the photons in certain places, thus the light doesn't 'disappear'...

Darn ... I calculate that my yottawatt laser beam only contains a mass-energy equivalent of about .037kg/meter of beam. 'Light-Gravity', (if any) would be small for a yottawatt laser. 1 yottawatt ~= 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 watts (joules/sec) 1kg mass ~= 90,000,000,000,000,000...

If I shine my new yottawatt laser onto a black hole (yotta = 10^24), I expect that the mass of the black hole will increase, along with it's gravity. I know that 'massless' photons can also be converted into electron/positron pairs, (and vice versa). But can the light itself generate it's own...

I've wondered about this myself. As I understand it, the light at the dark spot does indeed 'stop existing', ie if opposing waves 'hit' the screen, there is no 'invisible' reflection, since the light has canceled itself out and there is simply no light to reflect. *However*, the trick is that in...