Comments by "Ash Roskell" (@ashroskell) on "Why Going Faster-Than-Light Leads to Time Paradoxes" video.
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@N3KRoM3KHANIKaL : It seems to me that even the great physicists have a habit of falling into the trap of ejecting either time, or space (or gravity or mass) from their thinking when they consider these questions. The muddle leads to dead ends, like, “bootstrapping,” and, “grandmother paradoxes,” because they are so busy seeing, “violations,” of one factor or another instead of taking them into account?
Consider the birth of the universe? While the entire mass of the universe was compressed into an area smaller than humans can comprehend, what was time actually, “doing,” as a result of such immense compression? We can calculate the precise amount of mass it takes to create a black hole, yet somehow an entire universe, “violated,” every known law of physics by expanding outwards with a mass so much bigger than it takes to create the smallest black hole that there is literally not enough room in the whole of YouTube for me to print out all the zeroes after the first one, if I tried to put a figure on it.
And what do physicists do? They eject the notion of time whilst, paradoxically, wonder how the universe violated time by communicating with each opposite end to produce a uniform appearance? Not once do they ask, what happened to time itself? Despite knowing that space-time is a repeatedly proven phenomena to the extent that we rely upon it to use things like YouTube in the first place. Time had to be utterly distorted at the beginning of the universe, but we prefer to accept ideas like Inflation? I think we need a new Einstein, Newton or Copernicus to move us forward.
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It seems to me that FTL travel is not forbidden by physics, so long a nothing occurs before your own time line? You could travel into the, “past,” toward the distant light of Vega, continually adjusting for blue shifted, speeded up events and positioning unfolding before the vessel you’re in. Vega only receives the message before we sent it, relative to our position, which automatically corrects itself as you cover the distance. Let’s say they replay, using FTL signalling? They would experience the same phenomena, but our reply would not arrive before we sent it. Only, apparently before they sent it, but only if they remain at a giant distance from us.
I think there’s a flaw in the, “bootstrapping,” reading of the problem, which fails to take into account the distance itself. It’s a space-time problem that discards, “space,” resulting in erroneous bootstrapping conclusions. Hawking suggested such violations are impossible but it was only conjecture. He has no theory to back it up. Not even a thought out hypothesis. He just said, “Maybe the universe does something to prevent light speed breaking?” He had no idea how, or in what way we might investigate that idea.
To me this strikes me as the same muddled thinking that results in bizarre notions like Inflation. That’s another hypothesis that is often, wrongly, referred to as a, “theory,” despite having no evidence to support it, as yet. At least, no evidence that cannot be accounted for by rival hypotheses. With Inflation, the fundamental category error is in seeing the apparent uniform (“homogeneous”) spread of baryonic matter throughout the universe as resulting from a violation of time’s speed limit. How can the universe be the same in opposite directions when the speed of light would have to be violated to make it so. Two obvious answers occur to me.
One: that the uniformity is caused by something intrinsic to the nature of matter itself, in the same way that two plastic cups can be identical in every important respect, despite being made in two different factories on opposite sides of the Earth. Using the same materials, processes and methods is what makes them the same, because they are made of the same stuff and appeared in the same way.
Or Two, my preference: Put, “time,” back into the equation. Instead of seeing Inflation as a, “violation,” of time’s limitations, ask the question, “What was time doing when it was compressed into the entire mass of the universe, which was itself compressed into an infinitesimally tiny spec?” Surely, if we accept that space-time is a thing; the two entities being inextricably interwoven (which we’ve proved over and over and now rely on this knowledge to make our world work) then it is foolish to assume that time was running at the same rate throughout the entire expansion of the universe?
I put this criticism of Inflation forward as the best example I can think of for the type of category errors we make that lead us into the dead ends of, “grandmother paradoxes,” and bootstrapping, etc. Why are we ignoring the vast amount of matter and space between us and Vega when we ask what would happen to an FTL message. The constraints of causality would still apply in so far as how we would experience the exchange of information. We would send the message and get a reply, in that order. It would arrive at Vega many years in our past, but still at a point after the point at which we see it now; not beyond that point.
I’m not at all sure if I’m communicating clearly, but I’m convinced we get muddled by the trap of our own experience of the universe, which is stuck at a point that is neither micro nor macro enough to see it from both ends . . . so to speak. Thanks for the fascinating video though. And, if you read my whole comment (I doubt anyone will) thanks for your immense patience.
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