| ??? 05/01/07 21:06 Read: times |
#138415 - suspicious? Responding to: ???'s previous message |
Jez Smith said:
I was asked this today and I think I know the answer,but,
someone asked me if you hold a long stiff rod of some material such as a pencil in your fingers and you push on one end so it slips through your fingers havent you just transmitted information at not only greater than light speed but possibly infinite speed ? I said the answer was that no you havent because the rod of whatever it is gets compressed so the information thats transmitted is actualy a shock wave travelling at some sub-light speed through the material. The "shock wave" actually is, that the electrons in the atoms at the tip of your finger are interacting with the electrons in the atoms at the very end of the rod. In fact, this repeats through "layers" of matter in the rod, as there is nothing like a solid matter, that's only scattered nuclei and clouds of electrons, and as you "push" one electron it "pushes" on its neighbour etc. This whole process is of course slow enough to be sub-light-speed (actually, more related to speed of sound or something like that, but that's not too accurate as well as sound involves only relatively small vibrations). To be honest, I have no idea on what that actual speed is, just typing in this nonsense to seem smart... :-) The bottom line is, we simply cannot extrapolate our limited mamooth-like macroscopic experience to the quanto-relativistic truth... :-P JW |
| Topic | Author | Date |
| very off topic puzzler faster than light signals? | 01/01/70 00:00 | |
| suspicious? | 01/01/70 00:00 | |
| yeah i thought that it would be speed of sound | 01/01/70 00:00 | |
| Kind of like ... | 01/01/70 00:00 | |
| oh yes and that's not even quanto-relativistic... | 01/01/70 00:00 | |
| It is information ... | 01/01/70 00:00 | |
could see the other end move without light. | 01/01/70 00:00 | |
| No FTL allowed | 01/01/70 00:00 |