Thread: Faster than the speed of light travel key to universal expansion

Could particles travelling at faster than the speed of light be the key to the accelerating expansion of the universe?

The though here is that massive particles travelling at speeds faster than the speed of light would take an infinite amount of energy to slow down to the speed of light, conversely it would seem that entropy for such particles would tend to speed up rather than slow down.

In addition they would have imaginary mass. Could such mass have the properties exactly opposite of gravity where things accelerate as they move farther away form the imaginary gravitational source? ???

Originally Posted by tom

conversely it would seem that entropy for such particles would tend to speed up rather than slow down.

What do you mean by the speed of entropy?

Originally Posted by grapes

What do you mean by the speed of entropy?

yes badly worded....

Basically, please correct me if I am wrong ... given a closed environment ... stuff, due to entropy, will tend to slow down and get cold over time. Things dont normally speed up or heat up without providing work.

However, and again correct me if I am wrong, that for a system of stuff travelling at speeds faster than light, it seems that the natural state would be to speed up, not slow down ... slowing down would actually take work ( an infinite amount of work to slow something to the speed of light ).

So for those FTL particles, they would speed up when entropy increases?

Well they cant slow down right? as that would take work.

Originally Posted by grapes

So for those FTL particles, they would speed up when entropy increases?

I am sorry... but I think you should lay down and rest a while... " What particle of mass moves at a rate faster than a photon ?''

Put the dots on that elastic band... and come back at me with more logic than this... Please.

Originally Posted by tom

... stuff, due to entropy, will tend to slow down and get cold over time. ...

I thought that entropy is supposed to make temperatures all become equal, rather than all become cold. You can't have everything get cold, or where did the heat go? You would have to have an expanding Universe for that - what a silly idea. ;-)

Wikipedia says "the second law of thermodynamics, ... states that the entropy of an isolated system always increases or remains constant". The problem is that in the real world, there is never ever anything that can be properly labelled an isolated system. The Universe may well be infinite in size (even in Big Bang theory), so that new effects are continuously arriving from further away. Therefore entropy always remains ill-defined and a bad basis for prediction in the real world.

I would also maintain that information theory in relation to entropy is ill-defined, and that there is no one or proper way to measure information in a physical system.

I would further add that the larger the scale that we examine in the Universe, the greater extremes we detect in energy maldistribution and temperature. Read Mandelbrot on this. This also means that there is actually no tendency towards blandness over time. Entropy may be of some use for making a steam engine, but is useless for looking at the ultimate fate of the Universe.

Originally Posted by RayTomes

I thought that entropy is supposed to make temperatures all become equal, rather than all become cold. You can't have everything get cold, or where did the heat go? You would have to have an expanding Universe for that - what a silly idea. ;-)

I just took tom's idea to mean that everything would converge on the average temperature of the universe, which, IIRC, is pretty cold.

Wikipedia says "the second law of thermodynamics, ... states that the entropy of an isolated system always increases or remains constant". The problem is that in the real world, there is never ever anything that can be properly labelled an isolated system. The Universe may well be infinite in size (even in Big Bang theory), so that new effects are continuously arriving from further away. Therefore entropy always remains ill-defined and a bad basis for prediction in the real world.

I would also maintain that information theory in relation to entropy is ill-defined, and that there is no one or proper way to measure information in a physical system.

Entropy was defined for physical systems long before it was used in information systems. It works fine as a tool, in physical systems. "The entropy of the universe" just means that there is no outside influences, because there is no outside.

But, yeah, theories about the universe are tenuous.

ETA: Oops sorry Ray, from your first post, I wasn't sure you knew all this. Looks like you do.

Couldnt the visible universe be considered a closed system?

Originally Posted by RayTomes

I thought that entropy is supposed to make temperatures all become equal, rather than all become cold. You can't have everything get cold, or where did the heat go? You would have to have an expanding Universe for that - what a silly idea. ;-)

Wikipedia says "the second law of thermodynamics, ... states that the entropy of an isolated system always increases or remains constant". The problem is that in the real world, there is never ever anything that can be properly labelled an isolated system. The Universe may well be infinite in size (even in Big Bang theory), so that new effects are continuously arriving from further away. Therefore entropy always remains ill-defined and a bad basis for prediction in the real world.

I would also maintain that information theory in relation to entropy is ill-defined, and that there is no one or proper way to measure information in a physical system.