Re: How to achieve inner-body travel

: James Landau <savegraduation@xxxxxxxxx>
: I was thinking about how we could deal with the absolute size of
: molecules, which presents a problem in inner-body travel, and decided
: that the way we could deal with limits in molecules and atoms would be
: to take it to the subatomic level.

But the point is, you haven't even come up with a framework in which
"the size of a molecule" is meaningful at the human scale of things.
At the scale of macrosopic objects you may wish to "shrink".
Further, you haven't dealt with the fact that shrinking molecules
actually raises more problems than it solves for "inner-body travel".

: My first idea was to have some new quarks discovered, but scientific
: theory holds that there are only three classes of quarks, which
: doesn't leave any room for quarks with dimension-shrinking or
: dimension-growing powers to be discovered. Then I learned about a
: class of subatomic particles called the leptons, of which some may
: have yet to be discovered.

Sigh. Leptons have THE EXACT SAME ISSUE as quarks; they come in three
varieties, and new varieties are either not expected, or even if you just
suppose they exist, wouldn't have the arbitrary magic properties you
seem to imagine for them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lepton

In physics, a lepton is a particle with spin-1/2 (a fermion) that
does not experience the strong interaction (that is, the strong
nuclear force). The leptons form a family of elementary particles
that are distinct from the other known family of fermions, the
quarks.

That is, quarks are particles that *do* experience the strong force, and
leptons are particles that do *not*, and there are three varieties of
each. (... well, there are six types of quarks, but they are arranged
into three pairs, just like there are six types of leptons, arranged
into muon/neutrino pairs).

Bottom line, adding additional quarks, or additional leptons, is equally
plausible (or implausible, depending on how you look at it).

: If leptons couldn't do this, then how about Kromey's idea, with
: superstring theory?

You're still focusing on the wrong arena; namely, "particle size".
The consequences of which you don't seem to have considered.

Again, read Asimov's novelization of "Fantastic Voyage". He doesn't
menntion any snazzy recent jargon, but you could just add some nonsense
about how you're shifting the object to more and more remote branes with
some sort of excuse for why something on a remote brane would interact
with matter on ours, or distorting the brane surface, or whatnot, to make
it fashionable. At least that wouldn't raise immediate implausibility
flags, or not as strongly as "teeny tiny molecules" would.

But if you absolutely, positively, must have teeny tiny molecules,
then some nonsense about a family of "correspondence particles"
and mentioning "superstrings" and such, and use similar notions to
those used back in the days of tachyons in some stories, where an object
has all its particles replaced with the corresponing FTL (or in this
case, teeny-tiny) particle. It's still less plausible than a relativistic
approach, where the particles inside the object are the same, they just
*seem* smaller due to some spacetime jiggery-pokery, but hey, if you
just *have* to have them, there you go.

Now, why any of these things would happen spontaneously in "outer space"
to a passing spacecraft is another issue, but oh well. Certainly
"getting close to a new kind of particle" wouldn't really explain
it either.


Wayne Throop throopw@xxxxxxxxx http://sheol.org/throopw
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: super collider set to run the first lap
    ... And the charge of the neutron ... are composed of quarks, which have charges of either 2/3 or -1/3. ... quarks and leptons are considered fundamental ... particles, ...
    (rec.autos.sport.f1)
  • Re: super collider set to run the first lap
    ... And the charge of the neutron ... are composed of quarks, which have charges of either 2/3 or -1/3. ... quarks and leptons are considered fundamental ... particles, ...
    (rec.autos.sport.f1)
  • Re: quark families
    ... number of quarks at a given energy, and the number comes out as 5 ... Actually, as far as we know, there are only heavy unstable leptons (mu ... > colour force. ... It's an experimental fact that some particles are weakly-interacting ...
    (sci.physics.research)
  • Fermilab and symmetry breaking
    ... Quotations from: Fermilab and symmetry breaking ... world of elementary particles and forces. ... When physicists discuss symmetries, they refer to things that appear ... quarks into light quarks. ...
    (sci.physics)
  • Fermilab and symmetry breaking
    ... Quotations from: Fermilab and symmetry breaking ... world of elementary particles and forces. ... When physicists discuss symmetries, they refer to things that appear ... quarks into light quarks. ...
    (sci.physics.relativity)