I was doing some thought experiments and concluded the following: The speed of a moving object can never be absolute. It changes depending on who is looking at it, and what is their own relative reference for gauging speed, and their own velocity. But since we cannot gauge any velocity except through the movement of an external body, the whole of speed is just as much of an illusion as is time/space.
Month: October 2018
Galilean Relativity
By Taylor Moffitt of Halydean
The only way to gauge movement is through the movement of an external body. If we are in the darkness of space, alone, we have no external reference by which we may determine any movement. On earth, our usual reference is the ground under our feet, which is actually rotating about the earth’s axis at about 1,000 miles per hour, going through a procession on its axis, and orbiting the sun at about 67,000 miles per hour in an imperfect ellipse. Our solar system is at the same time traveling at about 514,000 miles per hour around the Milky Way galaxy, while it also is moving towards M31 (the Andromeda galaxy) at about 250,000 miles per hour. The thought of anything in our world being motionless is an illusion created by the fact that everything we see is moving with us, making us unable to gauge any of this movement. We don’t really even know if our galaxy is moving or if M31 is moving towards us, other than making an estimate of this relative to the movement of other galaxies.
Traveling at Near Light Speed
By Taylor Moffitt of Halydean
Muons were discovered by Anderson & Neddermeyer in 1936. They are created when particles from space crash into the atmosphere, for about 2 millionths of a second. They travel at 99% of the speed of light. Here on earth, from our perspective, they should be able to travel about .66km. However, research has shown that due to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, the particles do not age according to time from our perspective, but from their own perspective of time, which is slowed down by their great speed. This allows them to travel for about .66 km, or 32 km, depending no your perspective. One of these measurements is 48.48 times faster than the other, relatively speaking.
I thought that was pretty interesting because I figure it means that to travel 48.48 light years at 99% of the speed of light, one will need only to wait 1 year… and will only need enough fuel and supplies to travel for one year. Alpha Centauri is our nearest star system at 4.22 light years away. Since there are 365.259636 days in a year, if we had a warp-drive spaceship capable of traveling at 99% of the speed of light for the entire trip, we would need to pack enough meals and oxygen et cetera for only about 31 days and 10 hours.
Division by Zero
By Taylor Moffitt of Halydean
Some have said that division by zero is an infinite number, while your calculator probably says that it is “undefined”. The mathematical logic goes something like this: the smaller the divisor, the larger the quotient. So if we divide something by a very small number (such as 1-1,000,000 ) we will get a very large number. Division by zero only approaches infinity as long as the divisor approaches an infinitely small positive value, yet, it can never arrive at zero no matter how small it gets. The moment it arrives at zero, the pattern is fundamentally disrupted. To ask, “How do you cut a cake into zero pieces,” is not asking for a non-sequitur such as “infinity.” To answer “infinity” does not work, because you can only divide things into their smallest fundamental increments, subatomic particles, Planck lengths, et cetera, not into infinitely small pieces. If we were to divide it into energy, infinity is not possible there either because of the cake has a quantifiable energy component, as the law of general relativity shows us. Another approach is to visualize division by zero. If I were to ask my child how many cookies were eaten from the cookie jar, and the response was “zero,” that would mean nobody ate any cookies. It doesn’t mean that there was a person there going through the motions of eating a cookie with some infinitely small quantity of cookies. To divide by zero is to divide by nothing, and is therefore not to divide at all.
x / 0 = x
In statistics zero is treated as a story problem, such as n minus one choose zero is one. For example, “How many ways can you order coffee at Starbucks when there are no customers there to choose?” The answer is one because you have one outcome, the way you do it when there is nobody there. Nobody says it is undefined, infinite, or zero. It has a simple, quantifiable value. This treatment of zero is the same reason why 0!=1 in factorials. This is also similar to the case of Bose who proposed that there were only 3 possible outcomes to flipping 2 coins, rather than 4. Bose was laughed at by everyone until a guy named Einstein took note and the Bose-Einstein construct was developed in physics using that principle. The underlying math in the Bose-Einstein construct again goes back to the story problem treatment of zero.
This story problem approach to division by zero also makes sense in algebra because of the following:
x (y) / y = x
A number not divided by anything is unchanged. So if what I’ve said is true, we have a question of semantics, not a mathematical question. If we were to answer purely in Newtonian-era math, then it is indeed an undefined answer, and our calculator’s error message was correct all along. Obviously in certain cases division by zero has to be mathematically undefined, but I purport that if researchers are struggling with a real-world problem involving division by zero, they might try a new approach to division by zero and perhaps my ramblings may prove to be of value in certain cases.
Taylor Moffitt of Halydean 