Faster Than Light, Quantum Communication, Astronomy Pic Of The Day

Which things can go faster than light and what does it mean for Physics. Can quantum entanglement provide interstellar communication. Why NASA didn't believe in websites during the early internet era. How should scientists approach controversial ideas. Answering all these questions with Dr Robert Nemiroff.

More interviews to watch:
👉 Advanced Propulsion Systems with Dr. Sonny White
👉 Interstellar Travel Without Breaking Physics with Andrew Higgins

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00:00:00 Intro
00:01:15 How APOD came together
00:13:21 "Faster Than Light"
00:21:33 Faster than light galaxies
00:27:53 Outrunning light
00:36:59 Gravitational lensing
00:40:06 Quantum Entanglement and communication
00:47:00 Cosmic Inflation
00:53:39 Creative ideas
01:10:32 Further recommendations

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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

You are free to use my work for any purpose you like, just mention me as the source and link back to this video.

[cannes]

“We wanted it to be a smart internet” Well… we all know how that turned out! XD

[lyledal]

You and Dr. Nemiroff should absolutely start that journal!

[ticthak]

Shadows are a virtual phenomenon. There's no c limit on virtuality.

[Dan-Simms]

Great interview!
And man there really needs to be a cool science ideas journal, that would be so cool!

[jonathanbyrdmusic]

You know what they say about time machines. They don’t make them like they’re gonna.

[rjblaskiewicz]

APOD is such a great institution. Been following it since I was in college, when they were still posting etchings of the most recent terrifying celestial potents.

[garyswift]

Nice work, as always. I remember using Astronomy Picture of the Day, back in the day.

[seditt]

@Fraser Cain The best and more intuitive way I have seen Entanglement explained that makes sense is picture a ripple in a pond from a stone radiating out. Now if two people stood on opposite shores and took measurements of those ripples no matter how far apart those two observers are they can instantly know the state of the wave their colleague measured despite the space between them being longer than what light would take. Its akin the illumination front Dr Nemiroff spoke of. Thinking of it this way makes it clear why we can not send information faster than light and its because the information was contained in the rock which hit the pond initially and not where the observers sit. It takes a finite amount of time to make it to each shore and when measured the time it took to get to each will be less than light speed.

Now, with that being said there was a relatively recent experiment with beam splitters and FFT where they vibrated the mirrors to fully know which light past as they could detect the specific mirrors frequency in the output and they found after stringing multiple beam splitters and using differing frequency for each path that the only logical conclusion we could come to in specific cases is that the light started at the end point and worked back while ALSO taking the forward path at the same time. This starts to lean us towards a type of retro-causality I believe Fermi discussed a while back then dropped in which light is a standing wave going forwards and backwards in time. It also gives weight to the Bloc universe which states its all a huge static interference pattern yet we are moving through that in a sheet of time causing us to see a holographic representation in 3D of that 4D universe. This whole paragraph is hypothesis of various people but they all have reasoning but no solid proof however I tend to lead to it as my weightiest hypothesis for a Theory of Everything type of understanding.

PS: If it exist I will no doubt publish my ground breaking Theory of Everything in your Science Journal :D . That is only semi a joke as well cuz I have been working on something for few years which not only is mostly consistent with General Relativity but also QM via the use of an Absolute frame of reference as a whole, Time as a physical dimension with Mass energy resisting the flow towards a specific place such that when an object moves the speed of light they are actually stationary for the first time ever against the universal reference frame explain in part why C is the limit. Idk, I would go into more detail but A: its all likely wrong and B: Would suck if its not and someone else gets the ideas and i wasted all this time. That being said though. If its wrong its kinda fully how many of the various Constants of Nature just magically appear out of our universes dimensions and properties even though modern physics holds these values to be dimensionless. If we find their dimensions should they have them we can make them vanish thus simplifying tons of work.

[chris-terrell-liveactive]

A great episode! Blurring the lines between "things" (light, spaceships, galaxies) and "no-thing" (shadows, perceptions, illumination) in a playful way that can stimulate new perspectives. This is where I agree strongly with the idea of a journal for speculative scientific enquiry, already known to produce results but unpredictable, hence funds are withheld. This would be a really beneficial project, sadly I am less wealthy (financially) than Mr Musk, or I would let you have a few $M to play with!

[onebylandtwoifbysearunifby]

Good to see you doing this interview with Bob (his book is decent too). If i could tell you the number of times i've tried to explain the "c" is about infornstion, not a speed limit... And the number of people arguing until they're blue in the face because they've been reared on the trope "Speed of light is the cosmic speed limit for evrrthing in existsnce and nothing ever can ever go faster ever!". Now i can just tell them to read Bob's book and get back to me. 😂

[doncarlodivargas]

Question: if we can move faster than light, then i can easily find my car key by travelling very fast, passing the light from when i came home, turn around and take a picture of that light for then to easily retrieve my keys?
Hay! Why do i need a car if i can move faster than my car can move?

[PhysicsPolice]

19:40 What these events all have in common is coincidence. Coincident events (from a shadow, laser pointer, fissure in a piece of paper, or illumination front) aren't objects. They're not "things". It's true that "nothing can travel faster than light" because these counter-examples fail to meet the criteria of beings "things" at all. Some have fictive concepts that track the coincident events like the shape of the shadow and the geometrical ray of a laser pointers. Others have an explicative cause that can be given a noun referent in English like "the cut in the paper" or "the illumination front". But these concepts represent events, not objects. Christmas isn't an object that exists in reality. It's an event that has a proper noun referent.

[WizardClipAudio]

First of all the expression is 'nothing can go faster than the (so called) speed of light, in a vacuum.' A shadow is not a thing, in and of it's self. A shadow is the relative absence of the phenomenon you're comparing it to, being impeded by something, which contextually means, that a shadow quite literally is 'nothing', So, the statement in that regard, holds perfectly true enough'. Speaking of 'impedance', is light not electromagnetic phenomena like the rest of the Electromagnetic Spectrum? If the so called speed of light is constant and consistent in a vacuum, and only apparently 'slows down' when impeded by something with mass, but returns to it's so called 'speed' once it returns to a vacuum, then we're not really taking about 'speed', and speed of light is a misnomer; Because when an object is traveling at a known speed in a vacuum, and is impeded or interfered with momentarily, it does not simply return to the same speed in a vacuum, without being acted upon by another force to return the energy or speed it's lost. So, light doesn't actually have a 'speed', per say, but rather what you're measuring, or actually referring to is 'rate of induction' because you can't make light go 'faster', than it inherently does in a vacuum, by simply putting more energy into it. Light from a super nova even doesn't move through the vacuum of space any faster than light from a flashlight in space, in spite of the almost incomprehensible energy disparity. So, basically the 'speed of light', is a more nonsensical combination of words than, 'my pet bowl of oatmeal, needs a rabies booster, in honor of your mother'. 🤷‍♂

[truecrony]

If we could measure spin without causing collapse (measure without measuring) then we could use the measurements themselves as a form of communication. This particle was measured so it equals one. This particle hasn't been measured/collapsed so is equals zero. Drawback if possible would be that you have to start out with one-time use array/collection of entangled particles and then separate them at the needed distance without losing coherence. Quantum computing has a hard time keeping particles entangled. But, we could have 1024 entangled particles on a Satellite Probe and the other 1024 on Earth and you could receive a one-time message of one kilobit at FTL.

[dancingwiththedogsdj]

Sir, thank you for doing what you do! I love these interviews, but this gentleman is one of my favorites! Y'all's enthusiasm and his playfulness was awesome! Please keep doing what you do and have a wonderful day to all. 🍻🌎❤️🎶🕺🏻🔭🚀🛰️

[Beldizar]

I feel like describing the level-arm of a stream of photons moving faster than the speed of light is nothing more than a pedantic gotcha. Nothing is moving faster than light here, there's just a false perception of a collection of things that we categorize as a single "thing" that is moving faster than light. This is just a semantic construct that people are going to take as an example of an exception which they'll likely try to apply to things where the rules actually apply. Nothing travels faster than light. If you think you have something that moves faster than the speed of light, it isn't a real thing, it's some sort of semantic construct that someone is trying to muddy the water.

[vincentclark]

Thanks for asking/following up with the FTL communication question!

[KOZMOuvBORG]

Thanks for reminding me about APOD, was a daily favorite of mine long ago

[sulljoh]

So fascinating that this stuff is actually useful from about 30 min

[infinitumneo]

It's perplexing how universities inhibit the quest for knowledge. They should be a place were the pursuit of knowledge should thrive. Albert Einstein was working as a patient clerk when he wrote his papers on Reality and General Reality. These papers were revolutionary and probably wouldn't have been accepted or supported by any universities at the time.