Author: Theo Quinn
Publisher: DSVR
ISBN:
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 95

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Book Description
A speculative technology might finally give us Faster Than Light (FTL) travel. The proof, if we only knew where to look, could have been ours by now. If hypothetical aliens could tell you how they traveled to Earth, would you be surprised? Would the same physics we hold dear be close to their hearts too? No, not really. According to Relativity, we’re pretty much stuck here in the Solar system, and can’t leave in any meaningful way. Hence this book isn’t about Relativity or Quantum Mechanics. If you’d like to learn about them, the bookshelves are crammed. What I want to show you is why we don’t need either one, and why would that be very useful to us. That’s the FTL Hypothesis and what this book is about. From simulated reality to basketball games, and from Artificial Intelligence to pastry shops, analogies abound. Yes, analogies are incorrect by definition. Yet all popular science books use them, and there’s a reason for that. So enjoy them for what they are – a help to visualize the idea. The physics paper with FTL equations is at the very end in the “FTL Hypothesis” chapter. No analogies are used there of course, but it’s still a quick read. Let’s talk about about hypothetical exploits of trying to reach other stars. Soon enough, you’ll see why this makes sense in the context of the hypothesis. Suppose you’re a starship captain trying to increase the speed near Earth. You have some great propulsion tech, but still, you’re hitting a “brick wall”. The speed of light is the fastest you can aspire to. Now, say you’ve got an idea. You’ll take your gleaming ship outside the Solar system, out to deep space. So this is your second attempt to see how fast you can go. Well, you’re still hitting a “brick wall”. There’s this speed limit you seem to be stuck at. But lo and behold, this speed limit is higher. Maybe it’s 17 times the speed of light. And as you go further out into deep space, you’re amazed the limit is rising. Your space speedometer is now showing 113 times the speed of light! As you’re getting closer to your destination, a nearby star with a beautiful planet, your top speed is coming down, slowly but surely. Finally, as you enter the final leg of your journey, you’re back under the speed of light. According to our science today, this story is purely fictional. It may not be. Idea In a nutshell, reality is a massively parallel computing system. If true, we can travel the Galaxy the way you fly around the world. The idea is that every particle, like an electron, is a kind of a computer of its own, and all of them operate in parallel. Or simplified, the Universe is a computer. A very different one, yet it still works by processing information, just like any other. How different is this from your garden-variety computer, the one you’re using to read this? Well, a lot. I’ll give you a visual... Simulated trees and simulated people Imagine a world of simulated reality living inside your computer, being created with some really good software, the kind of software we will soon be able to build. It’s like making a whole new Universe, such as in a 3D game. There are people in it, together with houses, cars, streets, trees and the sky. And yeah, they have smart phones too! Imagine your computer is advanced enough, so this simulated reality is as good as the reality we live in. People in this reality are intelligent and self-aware, but they don't know they all live in your computer... Table of Contents Introduction Idea Simulated trees and simulated people Information within reality The difference that makes FTL possible When physics went the wrong way How to travel and communicate Faster Than Light Origins of gravity and how to generate it Some things are already Faster Than Light How to test FTL Hypothesis now Origins of Quantum world Origins of Relativistic world Summary of the hypothesis FTL Equation FTL Hypothesis: the math Rethinking the foundations of physics