Thread: Can a dimension be in units of speed?

Originally Posted by Coelacanth

Yes, but it transfers the imaginary mass problem to slower-than-light particles.

Seems to me, we could renormalise things in our slower-than-light world, to make energy the negative of what we call it now. Every equation that has energy in it, add a negative sign (in fact, we do often talk about negative graviational potential energy, where the "zero" level is that of an object that is infinitely removed from the gravitational source). We'd still even have the conservation of energy principle, but we could say things like, in order to speed up this slower-than-light particle, we need to remove energy from it.

So this idea that faster-than-light particles need to have energy removed to speed them up, seems completely arbitrary. Define energy to be the negative of that, and you would need to add energy to speed them up, just like in the slower-than-light world. Unless we have some interaction between the faster-than-light and slower-than-light universes, and something like a conservation of energy principle between them, any sign convention, or any assignment of "real" or "imaginary" dimensions to physical quantities, is just arbitrary.

Or am I missing something here?

Does this help --> Tachyon condensation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Although the notion of a tachyonic imaginary mass is troubling, what is really being quantized here is the scalar field; even for tachyonic quantum fields, the field operators at spacelike separated points still commute (or anticommute), thus preserving causality. Therefore information still does not propagate faster than light. Also the "imaginary mass" really means that the system is unstable and that solutions will grow exponentially, but not superluminally (there is no violation of causality). Tachyon condensation drives the physical system to a stable state where no physical tachyons exist. The zero value field is at a local maximum rather than a local minimum of its potential energy, much like a ball at the top of a hill. A very small impulse (which will always happen due to quantum fluctuations) will lead the field to roll down with exponentially increasing amplitudes toward the local minimum. Once the tachyonic field reaches the minimum of the potential, its quanta are not tachyons any more but rather have a positive mass-squared, such as the Higgs boson."

To quote you:Rather bizarre, and I'm definitely out of my element here.

Originally Posted by Coelacanth

d) The article contains this quote.



Is there a difference between those two?

Wouldnt there be a gravitational effect from the energy, either negative or positive even if it was moving faster than light? Also would it be possible for collisions in the FTL realm result is virtual particles or other noise in the STL realm.

Also is there such thing as a binary dimension ... basically in this case you would have 3 space 1 time and one FTL/STL switch ... where it either belongs in our world or the FTL world.

Originally Posted by tom

Wouldnt there be a gravitational effect from the energy, either negative or positive even if it was moving faster than light? Also would it be possible for collisions in the FTL realm result is virtual particles or other noise in the STL realm.

No idea. But I would call either one interaction.

Originally Posted by tom

Also is there such thing as a binary dimension ... basically in this case you would have 3 space 1 time and one FTL/STL switch ... where it either belongs in our world or the FTL world.

Let me think about whether that is viable within the context of the Lorentz transformation. Purely hypothetical physics here, of course.

I think it only makes sense if there can be some interraction. We could have two (or more) totally disjoint universes (let's assign flat 3d/1d space-time geometry to them), which have nothing to do with each other, and call your universe ID # a dimension. But it sounds like more fun if there can be some relation between the two.

Originally Posted by Coelacanth

I think it only makes sense if there can be some interraction. We could have two (or more) totally disjoint universes (let's assign flat 3d/1d space-time geometry to them), which have nothing to do with each other, and call your universe ID # a dimension. But it sounds like more fun if there can be some relation between the two.

I would think that there could be some interaction either by gravity or from by-products of collisions made in FTL universe ( and by-products of our collisions felt in FTL universe ).

For gravity ... as a FTL particle passed through shared space ( between FTL and STL ) I would think depending on its speed as a fraction of c it would result in a gravitational ( negative ?? ) field of that ratio.

Originally Posted by David E. Eaton Sr.

[COLOR="#800080"][I]Does this help --> Tachyon condensation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Not so far, but I haven't really worked through it yet.

I suspect the hypothetical physics of faster-than-light particles have been worked out the way they have been for a reason, and I simply don't perceive that reason yet . . .

Originally Posted by tom

For gravity ... as a FTL particle passed through shared space ( between FTL and STL ) I would think depending on its speed as a fraction of c it would result in a gravitational ( negative ?? ) field of that ratio.

I'm trying to understand the Lorentz transformation in this context. Gravity is a distant dream for me right now

Originally Posted by Coelacanth

Gravity is a distant dream for me right now

You and me both.... Tom's scenario puts me in mind of an epsiode on Farscape but I don't remember if gravity was involved...

This link might be of interest to spacetimeandtheuniverse inhabitants.

Faster Than Light

It does mention tachyons, and also refers to them having imaginary mass so they can have real energy (but doesn't say why they can't have real mass and imaginary energy). It also mentions some other faster-than-light topics I've seen at this board.