Riddle

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by Overmod

talbanese: sorry about that! I could never stay awake through an entire Steven Wright routine...

No problem. I am here to learn!!!

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by Overmod

toyo, get a new dictionary. There have been more than 'six' quarks for many years now. For fun, look up Murray Gell-Mann's speculations on the 'Eightfold Path" ... and see if you can figure out whether he did, or didn't, actually believe quarks exist.

Quarks are HYPOTHETICAL 'elementary particles' -- and there are not 'six' of them, there are at least eighteen, in the Standard Model at least (six flavors each with three colors).

You might want to read up a bit more on what a hadron is... now that I've told you how to spell it correctly. The definition here:

http://www.physics.gla.ac.uk/lattice_EU_network/

(in the Introduction) is a better one than that in the "Wikipedia", as it accurately describes the hadron as a state and not a 'ding an sich'.

Be aware that electrons are not made up of quarks.

jruppert, think a bit more about how you would generate a field such as you describe... don't you think it might be a weensy bit easier to manipulate the spacetime INSIDE a field than attempt to modify the universe outside... particularly referential to a "velocity" frame?

Incidentally, this completely stands your assertion about the locomotive's existence on its head: The locomotive (by definition) continues to exist in normal time/space (by any definition, technical or otherwise, of "normal" -- it's the rest of the universe that's been distorted by the field. Sixty million Frenchmen CAN be wrong, if they're all cranked in various ways...

The cheese thing is only intended as humor.

I believe the standard line among trekkies is that the field is an artificial gravitational field, that though is only a size appropriate for a space ship, has a gravitational weight equal to an object far larger. By unbalancing the field - stronger gravity on one side, time/space would flow around the field to the other side, affecting motion.

[Overmod]

zardoz: there is a Planck length associated with the Planck constant, h. Start by correcting geometry by dividing by 2pi to give h-bar (the correct character has a bar, like a thorn, but I don't have the font).

Planck length is calculated (from fundamental constants, measurable with great precision, and h) as sqr(h-barG/ce3) -- that's "c-cubed" with the e being exponent -- which works out as about 1.6 x 10e-35. This is a factor of some 10e20 times smaller than a proton... oops... and qualifies as the 'shortest meaningful length'

Planck time is the time it takes the effective 'centroid' of your photon (which is moving at the speed of light) to traverse THIS length. Since below that length classical distance ceases to have objective (and 'observable' meaning, there is no 'point' in discussing units of time, in the Standard Model, that are any shorter. (That does not mean that they don't exist; we can speak quite facilely of the Big Bang universe coming into existence at about 10e-43 seconds)

Note what happens when the Compton wavelength and the Schwarzschild radius (taken as a length) converge to equal the Planck length -- note the mass in both cases converges on a particular value of interest, which is NOT particularly small. But that would be digressing even further from anything of practical railroad interest, I think...

BTW, I've always heard it was the objective size of the electron, not its position/indeterminacy, that made it indeterminate as a metric for length (vs. a proton). If it is not moving, you can determine an electron's position to reasonably high (if statistical) precision. It's only when trying to measure BOTH position and momentum that you get into Heisenberg trouble...

[Overmod]

Didn't see the added post until just now:

I hadn't realized that the warp field was intended as a GP drive. (Hey, maybe this qualifies us as a railroad topic again???) The only thing about that is that gravity is quite possibly a 'pseudoforce' expressing relaxation of pre-induced strains in spacetime... meaning that you can't "induce" a gravitational field directly and extrinsically. You see the problem: a bootstrap drive can't possibly be an FTL drive unless you fictify the physics. If you do that, why not go immediately to Doc Smith's inertialess drive (which poses its own weird violations of physics-as-we-know-it, but gets around the problems with gravitational field geometries...)

Part of the problem with an induced-GP drive that produces an 'infinite' field is that either the source is a point (in which case the field lines are NOT parallel, leading to forces on the ship "other than acceleration" (hint, NOT what you want 'warped') or something that does not translate into the necessary stable geometry for superdense virtual structures (e.g., kugelblitz). As with the Compton length -- a drive that requires more power to move matter than would be required to create the same amount of matter de novo is... well, something you won't power with dilithium-crystal matter/antimatter annihilation. By an interesting number of orders of magnitude...

[zardoz]

Overmod,

Thanks for the clarification. I was unaware of the Planck length, so it seems I need to "catch up on my technical journals".

Actually, since I already learned something new today (one of my goals in life), now I can go back to bed and nap all day!

[Anonymous]

I'm with zardoz, time for a nap. My references to Dilithium and star trek were tongue in cheek, though those ideas might have some merit. So, your serious answer suprised me, but is definately informative, very cool.

[jeaton]

Mooke

Just wait until they start on string theory next week.

Jay

[Overmod]

Personally, I prefer Silly String theory instead. "We put the degenerate in 'degenerate dimensions'..."

[jeaton]

Overmod

Ah, ye of no faith.

Jay

[zardoz]

What you see is just illusion, surrounded by confusion.