And yet, without "seeing" where our Sun is at this very moment in the present, the Earth is nonetheless drawn not to where the Sun was 8.3 minutes ago, but to where the Sun resides at the present moment.
Hmmm...
Posted on 06/23/2003 9:25:12 AM PDT by RightWhale
And yet, without "seeing" where our Sun is at this very moment in the present, the Earth is nonetheless drawn not to where the Sun was 8.3 minutes ago, but to where the Sun resides at the present moment.
Hmmm...
Sigh.
If you're talking about direction (inward or outward), you must be assigning a velocity to the field propagation, because if it were infinite, there'd be no direction. The whole field would just appear or disappear.
Now let's suppose you turn on your magnet and leave it on for a year. However fast you imagine it to be, the field will reach to some region of space. Since you left it on for a year, it will take a year to collapse at the same speed. But you must admit that the the field close to the apparatus will collape almost immediately after you flick the switch. So in order for the "inward collapse" to reach the apparatus just as you are flicking on the switch, the collapse has to begin much earlier--a year earlier, in fact.
"C" is a velocity, not an acceleration.
Interestingly, one "g" (32.174 ft/s/s) equals 1.03 light years/year/year.
Merely accelerate at one g for one year and--neglecting relativistic effects--you will be "near" c and half a light-year out.
Each kilogram of mass (again neglecting Einstein) will have 4.89 x 10^17 joules of kinetic energy. Since one year is about pi x 10^7 seconds, this works out to about 1500 megawatts operating over one year to accelerate your kilogram.
To account for various inefficiencies, call it 2000 MW. Or two San Onofre nuclear power plants.
If you plan for any payload or structure on your 1-kg spaceship, and you plan to have the powerplant on board, the problem is reduced to stuffing two nuclear power stations in--say--100 grams and a few cc. Scale up until you hit 'Enterprise'.
The problem is that humans are too puny to deal with such power and power densities; it is like stuffing the Sun into the Rose Bowl.
Among the questions I mean to ask the Almighty is: "Why did You make us so short-lived?" and "Why did you put everything so freeping far apart?!?" It is almost as if the Universe is designed to prevent communication/contact among intelligent species--assuming that we are not alone.
Personally I have been forced to conclude that we are alone or very nearly so.
--Boris
That is certainly correct; he would not even understand it.
--Boris
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