Faster Than Light or is it

You have no clue what I can or cannot do.

All you know is that I did not perform any such reference.

That does not mean that I cannot, nor does it mean that I do not actually know the actual figure.

I got more tucked away in my tissues than you do in yours, and mine isn't the result of stuffing my face.

Have a nice death, lard ass.

Yeah. But, you wouldn't know if I'm right or not. After all, your entertainment is to sit around with your finger up your ass.

You are the worst waste of skin the world has ever known. As I said elsewhere in this thread, you can't even do enough math to calculate the distance from Earth to Jupiter, much less the flight time of light.

Of course I do. So do all the others in this group who know you as Dimbulb, AlwaysWrong, NymNuts, etc.

Exactly.

Mathew Orman

You have demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt that you do not have the first clue what you are talking about.

So far so good. Lets simplify the experiment to a case that is trivially analysable. Take an infinite horizontal plane surface (available at all good thought experiment stores) and a laser pointer of very high power. Start with the beam pointing at the surface making a shallow angle alpha with it and gradually rotate the beam up at constant angular velocity omega until it is parallel with the surface. The spot elongates as the angle gets more shallow and the speed that it recedes at can be made arbitrarily large as alpha decreases or omega increases. A variant of this experiment was once used to measure the speed of light with precision mirrors on a fast rotating shaft.

Once the distance to the point where the beam instantaneously touches the surface multiplied by the angular velocity exceeds the speed of light you have a spot on the screen moving superluminally. There is no contradiction with relativity here. You cannot use the mechanism to send a signal and no information is transferred by it.

In practical terms the beams of distant pulsars are whizzing around past the Earth at zillions of times the speed of light. Millisecond pulasrs being the most extreme examples. The photons *direction* is changing very quickly with time but each of them is only travelling away from its source at the speed of light. SR is not violated.

Regards, Martin Brown

Prove it. This relation is well known in physics and not even remotely controversial - it even applies in classical physics of ship design with a different choice of maximum possible velocity!

You can see the same dispersion related phenomena occurring in surface gravity waves on a lake with a boat bow wave where the distinction between the speed of propagation also varies with wavelength and the overall wake pattern is determined by the interaction of all wavelengths. The dispersion relation determines the angle between the wake and the direction of travel.

It is well known that the phase velocity in a waveguide is greater than c. It does you no good at all since you cannot send any kind of signal at that speed the signal necessarily moves at the group velocity.

Regards, Martin Brown

Yes, that is why I said "could" not "will". The apparent speed depends on the geometry and the timing. For example, shine the laser for 1 second, turn it off, wait the there-and-back transit time to jupiter then shine it at the moon. You will get an apparent "superluminal" speed.

Jupiter is 22 light seconds away now?

Thanks for clearing this up - my point was that even the spot won't get there superluminally - imagine swinging your garden hose nozzle on "stream" from point A to point B on your yard - the stream will be curved in the middle, and the water won't get to point B any faster than the speed of the stream.

Thanks! Rich

Which just happens to be the exact same point I was trying to make, but apparently, the troll's pea-brain wasn't capable of grasping that.

Thanks, Rioch

You lying bastard. You were not making any point. And the CRAP you were spewing was untrue. THAT was my point, dumbass.

You were attempting to state that it IS possible. (do I need to go quote the dumb shit again?)

You were WRONG... I called YOU on it.

All the squirming in the world will not change that FACT.

This from the dolt that couldn't make the calculation? Pot/Kettle, dipshit.

DimBulb is innumerate.

How did you get past my filters?

GFY, troll.