Can Removing Mass From Matter Be Used For Ftl Travel?

[cal]

As expected I was horribly wrong in my background on this which a friend clarified-

 

Scott:

Particles get their mass through interactions with the higgs field the same way a proton gets its charge by interacting with the electromagnetic field. A higgs boson is just a particle that is created when energy is applied to the higgs field. It is analogous to a photon, the boson that is created when applying energy to the electromagnetic field. A higgs boson itself has nothing to do with other particles having mass. Protons for example have charge regardless of the presence of photons.

 

So is there a way to disable or manipulate the field? I've never heard of a field collapsing, even when the theory of nothing comes up. Even in nothing, in dimensionless space there seems to maintain all the normal fields (according to all the theoretical physicists I've heard talk on this subject), but is there no way of manipulating the higgs field to modify mass?

Edited April 14, 2013 by Snax

[Rade]

You need to consider the more complex form of the Einstein equation that relates mass (m) with momentum (p):

 

E^2 = (pc)^2 + (m_0 c^2)^2

 

So, for example, for the photon which has zero rest mass, the equation becomes:

 

E^2 = (pc)^2

 

There is no change in the constant c for speed of light when mass is set to zero

[Rade]

So is there a way to disable or manipulate the field? I've never heard of a field collapsing, even when the theory of nothing comes up. Even in nothing, in dimensionless space there seems to maintain all the normal fields (according to all the theoretical physicists I've heard talk on this subject), but is there no way of manipulating the Higgs field to modify mass?

Here is a comment from internet...appears there is a way to modify the Higgs Field, but the bad news is that it would takes lots of energy

 

From Daily Beast:

 

"We might imagine “turning off” the effect of the Higgs field, leaving particles with no mass, just because that sounds kind of interesting. But again, not practical. To turn off the Higgs field in a region the size of a small marble would require as much energy as we would get by letting the Moon collide with an anti-matter Moon and releasing pure energy. Not a realistic prospect."

[CraigD]

With the help of the equation is post #2, show, we can answer title question “Can Removing Mass From Matter Be Used For Ftl Travel?” No. Removing the mass from a body would result in it behaving like existing ensembles of massless particles like photons, to move at the same speed as, not faster than, light.

 

Having stuff that can interact with stuff like itself – fermions – behave like light – bosons – would be mind-boggling. It would mean travelers could travel an infinite distance in zero time as measured by them. One of the challenges in this scenario is how some “zero its mass” machine could have its on/off state timed so that it traveled less than an infinite distance, as the ratio of zero to infinity doesn’t lend itself to division.

 

From Daily Beast:

 

"We might imagine “turning off” the effect of the Higgs field, leaving particles with no mass, just because that sounds kind of interesting. But again, not practical. To turn off the Higgs field in a region the size of a small marble would require as much energy as we would get by letting the Moon collide with an anti-matter Moon and releasing pure energy. Not a realistic prospect."

:thumbs_up Good find – almost a direct “no” answer to Snax’s question “is there a way to disable or manipulate the field?”

 

Here is a link to the Daily Beast article, written by primarily cosmological physicists Sean Carol. Alas, Carol doesn’t give any explanation, references, or even hints for how he came up with his gigantic energy estimate, raising the specter that he just pulled it from his intellectual nether regions. Though described in his wikipedia article primarily as “a gifted science communicator”, Carol is a real PhD-awarded physicist with some widely cited and interesting-sounding work, so I’m inclined to accept his suggestion that there are no practical engineering applications of the Higgs field formalism.

 

Since I lack the education, traditional or self-taught, to really grasp the physics of the Higgs field, I’m having to resort to forming a sort of intuitive folk story about it from various “gifted science communicators” who can. Each article, small as its tid-bits may be, seems to help.

 

:( Having grown up on SF tales involving mass-manipulation, this is a bit of a bummer for me, but reality cares not for even our fondest imaginings – it “is what it is.”

 

In the hub-hub of all the conversation about the recent successes of Higgs field theory, I think it’s important to be reminded that this work has done little to further one of the other big unsolved questions of physics, a quantum mechanical theory of gravity. Lots of semi-hard SF premised wonderful technologies around an imagined future technology involving the ability to manipulate – block, focus, etc – gravity, and while the lack of a successful theory of quantum gravity doesn’t suggest such a technology is possible, it also doesn’t rule it out.

 

Somehow, as a scientific civilization, we just have to find the theory.

[cal]

"We might imagine “turning off” the effect of the Higgs field, leaving particles with no mass, just because that sounds kind of interesting. But again, not practical. To turn off the Higgs field in a region the size of a small marble would require as much energy as we would get by letting the Moon collide with an anti-matter Moon and releasing pure energy. Not a realistic prospect."

So it's possible, just not feasible by the means we're viewing it in. But, may I suggest the argument that if we were at a point where we could experiment with turning off the Higgs field in a small region, that we would also be at the point where we could easily generate massive amounts of energy by manipulating something else? Granted this is all probably tens of thousands of years away, but if we make it to be a

then turning off the Higgs field becomes feasible. Right?

 

 

:thumbs_up Good find – almost a direct “no” answer to Snax’s question “is there a way to disable or manipulate the field?”

...

:( Having grown up on SF tales involving mass-manipulation, this is a bit of a bummer for me, but reality cares not for even our fondest imaginings – it “is what it is.”

Stop right there criminal scum! It's not totally out of the realm of possibility, as I described above. Also, a circle with a radius of zero is still a circle. Just because we don't have the proper means of calculating how to handle transportation of stuffs doesn't mean we won't ever know, like you said, we just need to find the theory. So fear not, your sci-fi tales may yet come true. Double also, some of your fear might be that this won't happen in your lifetime. That would be a reasonable fear if lifetimes weren't infinitely expandable, but if you can hold on for 2 more decades, limitless cellular life will probably be cracked (longevity pills and all that good stuff, totally cracked according to Ray Kurzweil, who has accurately predicted a lot of this kind of stuffs)so you may see the day when ftl travel and mass-manipulation is possible!

[CraigD]

"We might imagine “turning off” the effect of the Higgs field, leaving particles with no mass, just because that sounds kind of interesting. But again, not practical. To turn off the Higgs field in a region the size of a small marble would require as much energy as we would get by letting the Moon collide with an anti-matter Moon and releasing pure energy. Not a realistic prospect."

So it's possible, just not feasible by the means we're viewing it in. But, may I suggest the argument that if we were at a point where we could experiment with turning off the Higgs field in a small region, that we would also be at the point where we could easily generate massive amounts of energy by manipulating something else? Granted this is all probably tens of thousands of years away, but if we make it to be a

then turning off the Higgs field becomes feasible. Right?

Not necessarily.

 

Sean Carol’s estimate (which, as I noted in post #6, isn’t supported by anything but Carol’s good reputation) appears to give only a rough minimum energy requirement. Neither he, nor anyone I’ve read, has suggested that it’s possible to remove the inertial mass from an ensemble of non-zero rest mass particles, only that, were it possible, it would require a lot of energy per unit volume.

 

If it’s not in principle possible to remove mass from ensembles of NZRMPs, then no matter how much energy a civilization can utilize (and thus how high it ranks on the Kardashev scale), it remains impossible for them.

 

As I've mentioned, Higgs field physics is way over my head. However, Carol’s bandying of an energy/volume estimate related to it moves me to wonder, if the energy/volume of the Higgs field is finite, might an answer to Snax’s “can you turn it off?” question be to use it up? That is, if you occupy a volume of space with enough NZRMPs – say, with a black hole – that the energy equivalent of their mass exceeds that of the higgs field for that volume, will other NZRMPs in that volume not have Higgs interactions, so have zero mass? :QuestionM

 

Sadly, my physics skills aren’t up to the task of addressing this question. :(

 

Double also, some of your fear might be that this won't happen in your lifetime. That would be a reasonable fear if lifetimes weren't infinitely expandable, but if you can hold on for 2 more decades, limitless cellular life will probably be cracked (longevity pills and all that good stuff, totally cracked according to Ray Kurzweil, who has accurately predicted a lot of this kind of stuffs)so you may see the day when ftl travel and mass-manipulation is possible!

I’ve been a big fan of Kurtzweil and his predictions since the early 1990s (arguably and somewhat self-aggrandizingly, I’d say I’ve contributed my proper small part to fulfilling some of them), but don’t have more than a little hope that I’m among the “people alive now who will never die” he’s spoken of. Note that his “nobody who doesn’t want to will die” prediction is “by 2099”, while his “life expectancy increasing by more than 1 year every year by 2022” is one of his most vaguely defined, and IMHO most likely to be very wrong.

 

Concerning faster than light travel, I think many people forget or are unaware of the rock-solid physics consequences of such a possibility with regards to time travel, so imagine that the consequences of realizing FTL technology would merely allow travel to distant stars and planets to be similar to present-day boat travel between Earth’s continents – more or less the social scene depicted in Star Trek. Physics – and not terribly complicated physics at that – shows that the consequences would be much stranger, the ability to revisit and change ones own past many times being an unavoidable consequence. This nearly 10-year old webpage by the mostly unsung Richard Baker remains the best explanation of the basic physics of this I’ve seen.

[cal]

Concerning faster than light travel, I think many people forget or are unaware of the rock-solid physics consequences of such a possibility with regards to time travel, so imagine that the consequences of realizing FTL technology would merely allow travel to distant stars and planets to be similar to present-day boat travel between Earth’s continents – more or less the social scene depicted in Star Trek. Physics – and not terribly complicated physics at that – shows that the consequences would be much stranger, the ability to revisit and change ones own past many times being an unavoidable consequence. This nearly 10-year old webpage by the mostly unsung Richard Baker remains the best explanation of the basic physics of this I’ve seen.

I've actually argued on your side here about the improbabilities of time travel being possible, and the logical fallacies it would create (either in paradox or in undoing its own system like the causality error in the link you provided) but there have been so many physicists as of late saying that FTL travel is possible, and especially since there is a whole new field of mathematics that has opened up to deal with it, I am led to believe what they tell me, which is that FTl travel will one day be possible and utilized. That being said, there are ways of avoiding causality problems, like never going back in time (which I've even heard isn't possible even during FTL travel) so it's not totally out of the realm of possibility is all I'm saying.

 

Granted most of what I've just said here has proponents and opponents for every step of the argument. I've heard very conflicting evidence on both sides of the spectrum, but the general consensus now seems to be that FTL travel is possible, even if only on paper.

Edited April 19, 2013 by Snax

[CraigD]

I've actually argued on your side here about the improbabilities of time travel being possible, and the logical fallacies it would create (either in paradox or in undoing its own system like the causality error in the link you provided) but there have been so many physicists as of late saying that FTL travel is possible, and especially since there is a whole new field of mathematics that has opened up to deal with it, I am led to believe what they tell me, which is that FTl travel will one day be possible and utilized.

I believe that if you read their literature carefully, you’ll discover that few if any physicists claim FTL travel is possible, but rather, that it is possible if some other condition not known to be possible is possible.

 

There appear to me to be 3 main credible models for FTL travel:

1. “Warp drive” – compressing and expanding space so that a vehicle does not travel faster than light within its local region of space, but its local region of space does. The most famous real physics example of this is the Alcubierre drive. In fiction, this is the kind of FTL travel starships in the Star Trek universe use.
   
2. Traversable wormholes – traveling through natural occurring or artificially constructed “tunnels” in space that are shorter on the inside than they are on the outside. Kip Thorne may be the most famous popular science writer on this idea, especially in his book Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy. In fiction, this is the kind of FTL travel in Carl Sagan’s novel Contact, and the movie based on it.
   
3. “hyperspace” – traveling in directions other than the usual 3 noncompact spacelike + 1 timelike dimensions. Various kinds of Heim theory are known for presenting models in which this is possible. Brane theories, while to the best of my knowledge mute on published predictions of the possibility of FTL travel, have a better peer reviewed literature (Heim theory has something of a cult). There are many fictional references to it.
   

Warp drive and wormholes theories both suffer from their dependence on the existence of a kind of “exotic matter” that has negative energy – that is, that produces a repulsive, rather than attractive, gravitational field. It’s very uncertain if such a thing exists, or can exist. Hyperspace theories suffer from lack of experimental confirmation that the dimensions they depend on exist in a physically detectable way, and for lack of credible suggestions for how one might travel in directions along them.

 

That being said, there are ways of avoiding causality problems, like never going back in time (which I've even heard isn't possible even during FTL travel) so it's not totally out of the realm of possibility is all I'm saying.

Snax, I recommend you reread the page I linked to in my previous post, and any related material you might need to understand it, until you understand well what it’s describing. Once you do, you should agree that backward time travel is a straightforward geometrical consequence (though not an intuitively obvious one) of FTL travel the possibility of FTL certainly implying the possibility of time travel.

 

Whether and how BTT implies violations of causality is a more complicated subject. As one might expect, in the absence of clear theoretical or empirical evidence that BTT is possible, it’s not a subject very well or seriously explored by many physicists.

[cal]

Snax, I recommend you reread the page I linked to in my previous post, and any related material you might need to understand it, until you understand well what it’s describing. Once you do, you should agree that backward time travel is a straightforward geometrical consequence (though not an intuitively obvious one) of FTL travel the possibility of FTL certainly implying the possibility of time travel.

No, I meant like, I've heard that backwards time travel isn't a direct consequence of FTL travel, that it can be avoided. Also, I've heard it argued that the half of the geometric light cone that is back in time can't be reached during FTL travel, and that only the forward half can be used by matter. I want to clarify that that's what I meant, I know it's theoretically possible to go back in time, but it doesn't seem like that's what would certainly happen in practice.

[Pmb]

As expected I was horribly wrong in my background on this which a friend clarified-

 

Scott:

 

So is there a way to disable or manipulate the field? I've never heard of a field collapsing, even when the theory of nothing comes up. Even in nothing, in dimensionless space there seems to maintain all the normal fields (according to all the theoretical physicists I've heard talk on this subject), but is there no way of manipulating the higgs field to modify mass?

No. Presently there is no way to shut of such a field. Even if you could the particle would only travel at the speed of light, not faster. And things like warp drives are merely hypothetical right now. Nobody even knows if they could be constructed or if contructed could they be controlled. The interior of the warp drive is causally disconnected from the outside.