Re: Tracking


Wayne Throop wrote:
:: Um. Hey, maybe the proper time being imaginary, multiplied by the
:: wavelength being imaginary, means the emitted photon would be OK.
:: Heh.

: "Logan Kearsley" <chronosurfer@xxxxxxxxx>
: Oo! But wait... wouldn't that allow some emitted photons to have
: negative energy?

That's the beauty part. You use 'em to make wormholes.

Ah, but not only that. A beam of negative photons could be used to
refrigerate things. Or to make a 'flashdark' (as opposed to a
flashlight, you see- something that projects the absence of light). And
the FTL object emitting these negative photons would effectively gain
energy in the process. I think we just broke thermodynamics.

I'm struck by the analogy with charged tachyons- they're moving faster
than light, so emit Cerenkov radiation, which makes them loose energy,
but since they have imaginary mass, the less energy they have, the
faster they go. In this case, moving faster than light means that the
radiation emitted has negative energy, so the object gains energy and
still goes faster. Maybe. Or maybe the extra energy just ends up as
heat in the FTL system.
And yet, in the rest frame of the FTL object, it has emitted
positive-energy radiation. So, does that mean that energy measurements
change sign in FTL frames? That's in keeping with the fact that energy
measurements are frame dependent. Hey! I might have just discovered
Dark Energy! Stuff beyond the cosmic event horizon is moving away from
us at greater than c due to the expansion of space, so if energy
measurements swap signs between frames with FTL relative velocities,
all of that stuff would appear to have negative energy density,
providing an anti-gravitational force to further expand the
universe....

-l.

.

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