OT Faster than light was: Hollywood OS wars 3315

Right, but we're just playing word games. Whatever theory replaces GR is going to have to look a heck of a lot like GR in the areas we can test (and have already tested), in the same way that GR looks a lot like Newton's laws at human scales.

As we know, GR and QM work very, very well... but make different predictions for extreme cases, like black holes. We can't yet *test* those cases, but we should expect something strange when we do. The Michelson-Morley experiment showed that something was wrong with the prevailing understanding of physics, and one of the reasons SR got so much attention was that it explained things so well, and related a lot of other unexplained phenomena, like the precession of Mercury.

Personally, I think that, since we already know that time can behave very strangely when relativistic effects are significant, and people can disagree on the order of events, it's not so big a stretch to buttume that, when things get *really* strange (like around a charged and-or rotating black hole) you might see some really strange effects, e.g. causality violations.

We haven't actually seen anything like that in practice. Of course, we haven't come anywhere near the kinds of energies that would be needed to do any kind of time travel, either. It's a theory that, well, doesn't seem to have any way to survive Occam's Razor...

In English, it's "The exception proves the rule". (Also a common phrase). However, English is a highly mutable language, and the phrase originally meant "The exception *tests* the rule". Like how Michelson- Morley 'tested' clbuttical physics...

Oh, I'm sure they are special cases, and will probably continue to be useful even after the "M-Theory" is devised, like how for many, many practical purposes we *still* use Newton's laws. But I would not be remotely surprised to discover they were *both* wrong when it comes to exotic situations like black holes.

But I've never seen any real justification for it. Closed timelike curves fall out of GR pretty naturally in some situations, and I haven't seen a good reason to discount this result except an buttertion that "Nature abhors a CTC". But, like I said, I've never seen any solid reasoning to back this up - it's always seemed to me that it's really just certain *physicists* who dislike CTCs.

-- Sincerely,

Ray Ingles (313) 227-2317

"Bill Gates is a billionare because he realized that given a choice between a $200 program that works flawlessly and a $99 program that fails 5% of the time, most people (and businesses) will choose the cheaper product (while moaning how bad software is)." - Steven Maurer