Re: Is it possible to alter physical law?

From: Martin Ling (martin@nodezero.org.uk)
Date: Wed May 03 2000 - 20:17:26 MDT


On Wed, May 03, 2000 at 06:01:56PM -0700, Skye wrote:

>Is it possible to alter physical law?

By definition not.

> Or travel to a region in which they are different?

Maybe.

> Just an amused thought. I was thinking about ideas
> like hyperspace, the lightspeed limit, all of that
> wonderfull happy stuff, when I thought perhaps many of
> the breakthroughs waiting to happen center around
> regions of space where physical laws operate
> differently, or at least regions where they appear to.
> Like the Bose-Einstein Condensate through which light
> was slowed...

Light slowing down is nothing special - it slows down coming through
anything that isn't a vacuum.

(I believe the current record stands at 7m/s?)

> what if it were possible to make an area
> of space somehow less dense than even regular space
> (devoid of microwave radiation, etc...?) and see how
> fast light goes

Removing the last few particles, if any, isn't going to cause a sudden
jump in light speed. The figure we know for c is indeed that of light in
a vacuum.

Removing microwave radiation is nothing to do with the density.

The only way to do anything strange would be to have *negative* density.
For this, we would require some particles with negative mass. Such things
would be very useful - we could also use them for antigravity, and all
sorts of other tricks.

Martin

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