New efforts!

[Vee]

But to be fair, Joshex is also claiming to be the Beyonder

I'd say that making a tiny 'physics mess-up' to make scientists freak out is a colossal waste of the Beyonder's power, but it still pales in comparison to Secret Wars II.

[Arcana]

Does that make you Doctor Doom in this metaphor?

Hmm.  Well, I didn't say his claim was valid (exactly the opposite).  But if I have to be something in this metaphor, I don't want to be Dr. Doom.  Except for that one What If? he's kind of a loser in cosmic battles.  If I'm going to be something in this context, I'll take the Living Tribunal.

The best Doctor Doom story in my opinion, by the way, is the Triumph and Torments Doctor Strange Doctor Doom graphic novel.  To me that did for Doctor Doom what God Loves Man Kills did for Magneto: turned villains into comprehensible human beings without making them any less the villain.  If I have to be the villain, those are the villains I would want to be.

[darkgob]

Hmm.  Well, I didn't say his claim was valid (exactly the opposite).  But if I have to be something in this metaphor, I don't want to be Dr. Doom.  Except for that one What If? he's kind of a loser in cosmic battles.

And when he salvaged a decaying multiverse from the machinations of the Beyonders (plural!) and declared himself God of the remains which he shaped in His image.  That's a pretty big win.

[Vee]

Given that they're always going to have the villain lose eventually I'd say stealing the power of the surfer, the beyonder and odin and having his own parallel earth is astoundingly successful at cosmic conflicts.

[Arcana]

And now, for something completely different.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNcl3NMEXPo

[Thunder Glove]

Like most superhero-related media, that just makes me miss CoH all the more.

[Vee]

Sad thing is that was better than 3 of the x-movies.

[Felderburg]

gravitational waves move at the speed of light

Why? (Genuinely curious)

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

Why? (Genuinely curious)

Well, in part because because it's the universal speed limit for the propagation of information.

[Felderburg]

gravitational waves move at the speed of light

Why? (Genuinely curious)

Well, in part because because it's the universal speed limit for the propagation of information.

Well sure, but is there some relationship between gravity and light other than that?

[Arcana]

Well sure, but is there some relationship between gravity and light other than that?

Sort of.  There is no direct relationship between the two.  In fact there's nothing special about light.  Although we call c the speed of light, that's historical: we first connected c to the speed of propagation of electromagnetic radiation.  But in relativity, c has a much more fundamental importance that has nothing to do with light.

This gets complicated, and I can't be fully accurate without bringing math into it, but the basic idea is that in relativity space-time obeys certain mathematical properties.  One simplified way to think about it is to think about what "space-time" is.  It is really a way to consider space and time to be fundamentally the same "thing" even though we ordinarily experience them differently.  Most people have heard about ways in which under extreme conditions space and time start to change in odd ways, like at high speeds things shrink and clocks run slower.  What you're seeing is a form of "exchange" between space and time: space gets "smaller" (things shrink) and time gets "longer" (clocks run slower).  How you experience space and time depend on how fast you're moving relative to other things.

The "exchange rate" between space and time is c.  In other words, in relativity 300,000 kilometers of distance is "equal to" one second of time.  When you see "300,000 km/sec" you think "speed" but in relativity that's actually an exchange rate, like 1.13 dollars to the euro.

All events that spend less than 300,000 kilometers for each second are within the causal light cone of that event.  Colloquially if light can get there from here, we can affect that event.  If not, we cannot.  c, the "speed of light" is really the speed of causality, the maximum exchange rate for one event to cause or effect (affect) the other.

Electromagnetic radiation - i.e. light - travels at this speed.  Gravitational waves, for separate albeit related mathematical reasons - also travel at this maximum speed of causality.


There's also special relativity which states that massless particles must move at exactly the speed c.  Photons are massless and thus move at the speed c.  Gravitons are theorized to be massless, and thus must also move at speed c.  Why?  More crazy math.  But there are a few colloquial ways to describe the math.  One is to say that it actually isn't the case that massless particles move at velocity c but the reverse: all particles that move at velocity c must be massless.  You could use the lorentz equations to prove that any particle with any intrinsic mass that moved at that speed would then have infinite mass, which suggests a contradiction: that means the universe doesn't allow that to happen.  And you can go backwards and say that if a massless particle is moving at the speed of light, it is impossible for it to ever change velocity.  A massless particle moving at velocity c experiences no time due to lorentz effects: that's another way of saying its internal state can never change.  A massless particle can hit something, vanish, and then be re-emitted.  Its speed can *appear* to be slowed down because of these interactions.  But really all that is going on is that it is created, moves at the speed c, then is destroyed having always moved at that velocity.


When you get deep into the physics, you start to learn that what non-physicists and even physicists colloquially call "the speed of light" actually is not about light at all: it is a fundamental property of the universe, that light just happens to honor.  Light isn't special.  c, the relationship between distance and time that happens to be about 300,000 km/sec in metric units, is special.  It represents something more fundamental than a mere velocity.  It is built into the fundamental nature of how everything in the universe can, or cannot, affect everything else.

[Ohioknight]

Why? (Genuinely curious)

Well, in part because because it's the universal speed limit for the propagation of information.


Well sure, but is there some relationship between gravity and light other than that?

To use some totally inaccurate analogies that will convey common-sense understanding, the speed of light is the speed of time.

Think about a pebble tossed into a pond.  The wave that expands from the splash is the universe.  All matter and energy are little sub-ripples in the ripple of the wave -- they (you) can go left or right around the expanding ring of the wave (which is motion in space). 

Time is the motion of the wave away from the splash.  The wave is moving away from the splash at 3x10 to the whatever meters per second (the speed of light in a vacuum).   

And everything is always exactly moving at the speed of the expansion of the wave.  If you are "standing still" then you are moving at the speed of light in the direction of the expanding wave, not moving left or right around the ring of the wave. 

If you are moving left or right, then the amount you are moving in space is subtracted from the motion away from the splash.  When you add all the motion together, left or right plus motion away, the total is always exactly the speed of light.  So movement in space reduces movement in time.

Don't think about the analogy too hard or it totally falls apart (for starters an expanding wave has "time" built into it) but it's more right than wrong.

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

Interferometry...great name for a toon

i had a PB named Scintillant Phonon, which was also a fun name.

[Arcana]

To use some totally inaccurate analogies that will convey common-sense understanding, the speed of light is the speed of time.

Think about a pebble tossed into a pond.  The wave that expands from the splash is the universe.  All matter and energy are little sub-ripples in the ripple of the wave -- they (you) can go left or right around the expanding ring of the wave (which is motion in space). 

Time is the motion of the wave away from the splash.  The wave is moving away from the splash at 3x10 to the whatever meters per second (the speed of light in a vacuum).   

And everything is always exactly moving at the speed of the expansion of the wave.  If you are "standing still" then you are moving at the speed of light in the direction of the expanding wave, not moving left or right around the ring of the wave. 

If you are moving left or right, then the amount you are moving in space is subtracted from the motion away from the splash.  When you add all the motion together, left or right plus motion away, the total is always exactly the speed of light.  So movement in space reduces movement in time.

Don't think about the analogy too hard or it totally falls apart (for starters an expanding wave has "time" built into it) but it's more right than wrong.

If you want to really burn someone's noodle, consider that in the standard model of physics, *everything* technically moves at the speed of light.  The appearance of motion at anything less than the speed of light is, in a very real sense, an illusion.  All massless particles move at exactly the speed of light.  All non-massless particles are actually collections** whose components are moving at the speed of light individually, but the collective interactions happen to move at less than the speed of light***.

What's more, massless particles moving at the speed of light are timeless: they do not experience time.  All clocks in their reference frame are stopped (to be more precise, the limit of a clock rate approaching their reference frame is zero).

So everything in the universe is comprised of massless particles always moving at the speed of light and that experience no time that nevertheless combine into aggregates with both mass and time.  Mass and time are not fundamental properties of the universe.  They are emergent properties of energy, cause, and effect.  c, the quantity that happens to be the speed of light in a vacuum, ties all of those things together.


** Even particles presumed to have mass like quarks acquire that mass through interactions with the Higgs field.  So in a sense you can think of quarks as massless particles that only gain mass when in the presence of other particles: Higgs bosons.

*** If this seems a weird notion, consider that the molecules in air move at a certain average speed due to their temperature: for 80 degrees F its about a thousand miles an hour.  Collectively, the air might be moving with a 10 mph breeze, but the individual molecules are whizzing around a hundred times faster.  We can simultaneously feel the 10 mph breeze on our face *and* the 1000 mph individual molecule speed by the temperature of the air.  There's no contradiction there.

[Noyjitat]

*yawn* this thread sucks.

[Remaugen]

*yawn* this thread sucks.

There is no gravity, just suckage.

[MM3squints]

*yawn* this thread sucks.

https://images.weserv.nl/?url=2static.fjcdn.com%2Fpictures%2FDeadpool%2Bmovie%2Bpg%2B13_af9927_5809653.jpg

What dose that have to do with anything? Just a change in topic

[JoshexProxy]

I'd say that making a tiny 'physics mess-up' to make scientists freak out is a colossal waste of the Beyonder's power, but it still pales in comparison to Secret Wars II.

I was warned that it was a colossal waste of time and power by my colleague in the matter, he said "people are just gonna use this to support some strange far-out theory of theirs" and I was like "nah, they'd have to be pretty stupid to do that, I mean they'd practically be the laughing stock of the world cause it would be obvious they are lying when the universe has a fvck-up".

score; +1 colleague. not that I compete, he's a frickin genius.

but yeah, it was a waste of power a waste of time, not that time is an issue to us any more, in-fact it's meaningless. the only question is if to press the undo button.

[JoshexProxy]

*yawn* this thread sucks.

https://images.weserv.nl/?url=awesomegifs.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2Fsnail-abandons-thread.gif

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

I was warned that it was a colossal waste of time and power by my colleague in the matter, he said "people are just gonna use this to support some strange far-out theory of theirs" and I was like "nah, they'd have to be pretty stupid to do that, I mean they'd practically be the laughing stock of the world cause it would be obvious they are lying when the universe has a fvck-up".

score; +1 colleague. not that I compete, he's a frickin genius.

but yeah, it was a waste of power a waste of time, not that time is an issue to us any more, in-fact it's meaningless. the only question is if to press the undo button.

https://farm3.staticflickr.com/2908/14571393794_a899120ed1_o.jpg