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
-- +--------------------------------------------------------+ | Martin J. Ling Tel: +44 (0)20 8863 2948 | | martin@nodezero.org.uk Fax: +44 (0)20 8248 4025 | | http://www.nodezero.org.uk Mobile: +44 (0)7940 482675 | +--------------------------------------------------------+
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