chat about time theories ?

Anything dealing with waves can use Hz, or radians/sec, or any frequency measure. They're just an arbitrary way of counting events per second.

But, I don't think your idea of tuning in to specific frequencies would work with gravitational waves. We're not analogous to excited atoms emitting one frequency of light. The speed at which the source was moving would affect the frequency of the grav-waves. And, from what I gather, this whole idea boils down to deciphering what movements took place in the past. The only interesting movements are ones with changing velocities. So with a detector tuned to one frequency, I think you'd only see things that had moved at a specific velocity.

This may not work for your initial idea, but I can think of some neat applications in tracking nearby astronomical objects, which would create much simpler 'signals'.

And I still don't see a clear answer on how you'll 'catch up to' or otherwise detect the waves. Perhaps we should agree to disagree on that specific point, for the sake of argument?
 
Scientist, gamma rays are just high-energy photons. Nothing too special about that. You could get any sort of photons coming from a thing like a wormhole.
 
Well, Janus, it's not that I disagree, it's just that I don't have an answer! :-) We certainly don't have to worry about getting out in front of radio & TV waves but that's only because they're being continuously generated. A spacetime ripple from the past is, at best, a one-shot. No, I do not yet have an answer for that one. Perhaps someone else can jump in to supply it?

But, you know, you're right about those alternate applications - think of being able to see past orbital information of comets and asteroids. We can virtually do that now, with math, but what a great confirmation method! Think of tracing back orbital info on newly-discovered planets! We certainly shouldn't have to concern ourselves about getting out in front of the gravity wave as it would be light-years away! And, of course, the ultimate: Think of viewing back to picoseconds after the big bang! Yes, when we look up into a clear night sky, we are looking back into time at every specific object we observe, thanks to the limiting speed of light. What if these ripples, these spacetime distortions are not limited this way? One of the quesions I have about the fabric-of-space theory is its relationship to the rule of physics that states for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If, for example, a planet is deforming spacetime, say, creating a 'depression' around itself, is there not, somewhere else, (somewhen else?) creating a 'mound'? And if so, what is the net effect of the two? Is it zero? Or something approaching zero, due to an imperfect medium?

(...And oh, by the way, I think photons would get 'sucked' into a black hole, right? X-ray signatures always been interesting, though, as they seem to produce dipole effects from a very high energy (black hole?) source.)
 
I like this thread. Finally, a good discussion on this board.

Anyway, your idea of a 'mound' in spacetime sounds to me like a white hole. These were posited a while ago, from what I recall, as a sort of outlet for all the stuff that falls into a black hole. But that was when the maths of infinite spatial curvature weren't worked out so well. And the other thing that would cause a bulge like that is neg-matter, or matter with negative mass. And if we have that, we have wormholes and therefore another method of time travel.

But you couldn't have an equal balance of normal and neg-matter, because then space would have no gravitational curvature and would probably not even exist.

As for black holes, it's been shown that virtual particle pairs can appear, on 'borrowed energy', near the event horizon of the hole. Then, occasionally, one particle falls into the hole while the other escapes, becoming real. As equal numbers of particles and antiparticles escape in this manner, they annihilate and spew out high energy photons. In effect, black holes evaporate their energy into space.
 
Re: This thread. Yeah, I like it, too. I was looking for a good place to bounce some of my exotic pet theories off of, and I think I found it.

So, so far we have something like this:
Positive matter (what we all know and love) = warping of spacetime = inverse warping = negative matter = wormhole = time travel!
To summarize, the energy we are seeking for time travel is not something we have to manufacture, but rather, is constantly all around us and all we have to do is figure out a method of harnassing this and controlling it to suit our purpose! -- Which is a great beginning.

So, we now need to be able to identify the specific energy in this phenomena (sp?) so we can then detect and manipulate it.

Einstein said that the greater the mass of an object, the greater the warp effect in spacetime. So far, the greatest mass is found in black holes, with the greatest warp effects around its event horizon. In a way, everything that posesses a gravitational field has, in effect, its own event horizon. You get too close to any planet (or star) and down you go. You start backing off until you get to a balance point between the planet's (or star's) immediate gravity effect and interplanetary space. This is its event horizon. In planetary science, I belive it's called the La Grange point. I can envision a NASA probe to measure the effects of warping by probing right in this area. There should be some interesting energy peaks in certain, particular energy spectra when compared to that of just outside the area. This may give us the starting point to go excavating for this energy.
 
]Positive matter (what we all know and love) = warping of spacetime = inverse warping = negative matter = wormhole = time travel!

Hmm... This is the hope, anyway. But the fact is, neg-matter is not as abundant as we'd all like. There was an excellent article in January of this year in Scientific American on just this subject - getting enough negmatter to form a wormhole, or a warp drive. It seems that whenever you make a pulse of negative energy, it is necessarily followed by an equal or larger pulse of positive energy, which basically wipes it out. I hope you have access to the issue, it was really fascinating. There's still a possibility of getting the negative energy, for a short time, but it'll take a huge amount of positive energy to follow it up.

The idea of white holes was, I think, completely discounted, at least for our universe. The matter that falls into a black hole doesn't need to go anywhere, after all. It just widens the event horizon a little bit.

The event horizon and the LaGrange point are *not* the same thing. A Lagrange point is, almost as you said, the balance point between two or more bodies where their combined gravitational gradients are zero. But the event horizon is the point around a sufficiently dense body where nothing can escape. In effect, it's a black wall through which stuff can only pass one way: in. Even light can't get out - the escape velocity from this point is equal or greater than c. So you couldn't send a probe there, because it'd never come back. But the space surrounding a black hole still has interesting temporal properties - after all, gravity warps spacetime, not just space.

PS: gravity from any object actually extends out to infinity, but its effects just seem to disappear, as they fall off with the inverse square of distance.
 
-Positive matter = warping of spacetime-

Don't forget that the warping of spacetime could be the cause of positive matter.
 
Negative matter is matter with negative mass, but otherwise the same properties as normal matter. Unlike antimatter, when negative matter comes in contact with normal matter they annihilate without releasing energy - the energies simply cancel.

Negative matter has never been observed, but negative energy has been proven to exist. I think the Casimir Effect involves negative energy, but not in a form useful to wormhole creation.
 
Actually the Casmir Effect is the basis for wormhole construction. You take two 'aircore capacitors', put an incredible amount of energy in both (More than a star going nova), and a wormhole will form, connecting the two plates.
 
Hmm..it is tru that negative matter has not been observed, but negative ergery does..therefore, if e=mc^2 work on the other side of zero in the negatives as well, then is it not probable that negative matter could exists? (Just not for very long in this reality, however there is most likely a negative matter 'universe' existing somewhere where we would enter and just go 'poof!'
 
Sure, negative energy would work the same way as normal matter in e=mc^2. But it's hard enough to get a small amount of negative energy, let alone enough to create a decent amount of negmatter.

And how is it 'likely' that there's an universe made of negative matter out there somewhere? That doesn't seem very likely at all.

From what I know (not much) about the Casimir effect, it involved two large plates, positioned very close together, which thereby excluded certain wavelengths of virtual particles between the plates, creating a region of "negative" energy or pressure between the plates, pulling them together with energy only from the vacuum. (What a mouthful!) So how does forming a wormhole between the two plates do anything useful? They're supposed to be really close together, aren't they?
 
That's why you need all the extra energy, so you can have a distance between the plates that you can work with.
 
Don't the plates need to be close together, for the exclusion to have measurable effects?

Know of any good papers on this phenomenon?
 
Scrounging around the Scientific American web site brought about some interesting data, most of which you have already stated, Janus. Try these URLs : http://www.sciam.com/askexpert/physics/physics44/physics44.html and http://hepweb.rl.ac.uk/ppUK/PhysFAQ/casimir.html and a good related site is http://www.sciam.com/1297issue/1297yam.html about Exploiting Zero-Point Energy. I was looking for the January Scientific American article that you spoke of and did not find it, exactly, but did come up with a lot of other interesting sites. Interestingly enough, the Casimir effect has been used as an explanation for the phenomenon of sonoluminescence, which has nothing to do with time travel, but interesting, nontheless. Anyway, yes, you do need the plates to be close together. And yes, this is essentially a high-energy non-polarized capacitor. And in electronics, for a capacitor to have more capacitance, among other things, the plates should be closer together. There is a mathematical formula for figuring this. For that matter, in one of the URL references, there is a formula for figuring the amount of Casimir effect which essentially says the same thing.

In my recently-acquired Scientific American info, there were two topics that particularly caught my eye: One was a discussion about real warp drives (http://www.sciam.com/askexpert/physics/physics57/index.html), where they talk about generating a bubble of warped spacetime around the spaceship and this is used to further warp spacetime (sounds a bit like that drive described in Bob Lazar's web site!) and the other one was a response to a question on whether time is quantized. (http://www.sciam.com/askexpert/physics/physics4.html) One astronomy professor suggests that time, like space, seems to be three dimentional! Together, these two things seem to bring closer our goal.
 
Interesting links. Thanks.

I don't know if SciAm puts all the articles in their magazine up on the site; I have a hard copy. But I believe the article I mentioned was the same one that mentioned the 'warp bubble', which was listed as one usage of negative energy (if it could be harnessed).
 
Speaking of web sites, please check out the following: http://einstein.stanford.edu
I actually just found it yesterday crawling around NASA sites. It is about an actual upcoming NASA physics experiment probe to test Einstein's general theory of relativity vs. Newton's theories! Particularly, it will employ an extremely sensitive gyroscope set to actually measure, to a very fine tolerance, the space-time curvature around our planet!! The site mentions another theory that says a large orbiting body pulls spacetime along with it! This probe is supposed to prove or disprove that theory! Well, I was very pleasantly dumbfounded. This was just (in principal) what I was thinking they should do. This is very exciting and I'm certainly looking forward to the future for what results are returned.

If a planet pulls spacetime 'round and 'round with its orbit, what do you get? Layers? If so, what are in the layers? Time connections with the past? What will they find? Check it out - several pages long, once you get into it.
 
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