Recent content by Magic Man

I think you know I was speaking generally and in context to the medium. You cut the quote short. I was stating that any limit is only that which is imposed by the medium it is traveling through.

Everything has a limit. The speed of light is not limited because of some universal rule but because of the medium it travels through and to get from one place to another has to involve some passage of time. c is the speed at which photons travel through a vacuum which is, to our current...

Okay thanks, was thinking more along the lines of a 3d viewer that allowed you to zoom in/out on the plot. Just interested in the overall path plotted.

Just a thought... Pick a spot/location on the surface of the Earth. Now, the Earth is rotating on its axis and also rotating around the Sun (and wobbling a bit too). The sun and our solar system is rotating around our galaxy and our glaxy is moving in the universe as a whole. Is there...

I can understand what you are saying but it still seems more like a convienience to explain a theory - i.e. it could be anywhere and everywhere at the same time until the time it is observed and then, at that moment, it chooses its final state. Or perhaps it was in that state all along...

But what would that interaction be?

Thanks very much for the replies. So there are a few assumptions. I.e. we must take c as the absolute limit assuming, from current evidence, that photons have no mass (or at least no current measurable mass?). If, at a later date we somehow manage to measure some mass in a photon (since I...

It doesn't? How is it 'informed' and what exactly is being 'informed'?

When tachyons became all the rage, why was the automatic assumption made that, because they seemed to travel faster than light then they must travel backwards in time? Why wasn't it just the case that perhaps here is a particle that is just faster than light, we should update our current...

That was my whole point and the issue I had. I read the previous posts as trying to suggest otherwise.

Thanks for the reply. I can understand how an interaction would most certainly interfere with the experiment but why does an observation have to be an interaction and not purely an observation. It implies that the experiment somehow knows that it is being observed...

Nice attitude, thought this was meant to be a helpful site. My mistake I suppose...

But not "real" in a physical sense. How can it honestly shrink physically simply because of its speed... What is measured or observed from a different frame is not the reality of the physical object. It also wouldn't be the first time that "careful mathematical argument" had been put to shame...

Never got this. How can the act of observing something change the result? How does it know it's being observed...? ;)

The "modern view" surely is the common sense view anyway. Why would anyone think there was a physical contraction unless they put the 'proof' of mathematical equations above common sense.