ZetaX

It does not fit any part of conventional (what does this even mean¿) physics. If you think classical, there simply are no virtual particles. If you think modern/quantum, they don't act like claimed. Just picking what property you take from what theory is not how one does things. Take this example that is obviously wrong, but actually using the same pseudo-argument: Theory one ("classical physics"): All we know are donkeys. Theory two ("quantum physics"): [After seeing a pink flower] Some things are pink. Conclusion by mixing the theories: there are pink donkeys. Just because you think nobody offered anything better (why are the classical ones with ablation or by there being an error "worse"¿ Unless the technobabble, they use actual scientific results and don't assume things we know almost definitely to be wrong) does not justify making random claims. This is, essentially, just the god-of-the-gaps fallacy, but with this "theory" instead of god.

That's maybe one of those cases where we probably would have seen this effect earlier if it were real. Apart from that, the "theory" is just a very simple unfounded explanation and does not really say how exactly this would look like. But obviously, the effects would be measurable. As N_las said: you can't just come up with a totally random explanation for something and then claim it is correct because the observed effect is real. Without _other_ evidence (and it contradicting everything we know is actually strong counterevidence), your theory is as good as "it accelerates otherwise undetectable pink unicorns". - - - Updated - - - The problem is that actual theoretical physicists know that this explanation is almost definitely wrong and is more or less just technobabble. The virtual particle argument is really not more than that. It may sound nice, but only with a naive understanding of the topic. I would compare it to the many other errors of this kind where people that don't know all the details still know a bit and try to use their half-knowledge. For example people "disproving" e.g. SRT using the twin paradox because they have heard about time dilation, but don't know the details of SRT. I think there is this saying that half-assed knowledge is more dangerous than no knowledge, and this might be an example of that. It gained momentum in the less physically educated masses, yes, but that's not how good science is done. Either you come up with a theory and then test it, or you use the already well-established theories to explain it (then some testing is still a good idea). But this one is doing neither, it instead comes up with something violating known rules and (so far) no testing of the hypothesis.

I think both K^2 and N_las already explained why this argument is faulty (and in much more detail than this post): you are creating your reaction mass (claiming you can use virtual particles instead _is_ violating those laws I mentioned), and if you spend that much energy creating it, making it as fast as possible is more optimal. Thus using photons is best.

The problem is that if the claimed explanation is correct, we very very likely would have found the errors in our theories much earlier. It is like everyone missing that there were unicorns living in central park; not entirely imposisble, but really, really unlikely. It is therefore much more likely that there is another reason than the proposed one for why it works.

Conservation of mass and energy. Conservation of momentum. I am not sure if there ever was such a rewrite since the beginning of physics (say: Newton), but your milage may vary. Relativity just "refined" Newton's laws for the more extreme cases of very fast objects (SRT) or huge, possibly rotating, masses (GRT); Newton's laws are/were still true for slower things up to very miniscule errors. But this drive, if the virtual particle explanation is correct, would violate Newton's laws even at that level. The only "larger" change I am aware of was the change away from a geocentrical universe. But I would say that was before real physics was around.

No, because the supposed way of how it works is simply wrong. As some already said, it is probably just using some already existing matter as reaction mass. It is almost definitely not acting magically on virtual particles. If we assume that the drive works _and_ the alleged way of how it does is correct (note: at least the latter very likely is not; the drive may still work, but for entirely different reasons), our understanding of physics would not just be in error, but fundamentally wrong. The same level of wrong as if we suddenly realise that the stories from Harry Potter are real.

So it can power NYC, yet you think some of that power could not be used to liquify some nitrogen¿ No, not overlooked, it's just obviously irrelevant. Evidence! You just keep on claiming the many uses yet completely fail to actually demonstrate one of them. You only link to several companies, but none of them back what you say.

Energy and force are very different things. Energy is only involved if something is moved along the direction of a force. But the thing only moves orthogonal to the force holding it. This is the very same way a space station orbits a planet; which, as you probably are aware of, is not needing energy to stay there (atmospheric drag ignored).

Gpisic: I see no energy produced in the video. Levitation is not violating any law of nature. The carriage is obviously not accelerating, but given impulse by the people in the video.

How is a supplier of superconductors helping¿ Neither is Intermagnetics General a helpful source on anything you claim. I am not doubting superconductivity, it's a pretty well researched effect. I am doubting your completely unfounded claims on infinite energy. Just stop making them, because they are just ridiculous (read my last post again on why it's even physically impossible to have been a thing even if we assume it to work somehow magically).

You pretty surely implied it here: As I explained in my now-deleted post, the amount of energy in that would be absurd. Not "power NYC" but "power the world" levels. Not speaking about the explosion surpassing thermonuclear bombs when you would actually accelerate something to such speed.

So you claim a family member of yours worked at an infinite energy source that could propel stuff at almost the speed of light¿ While also levitating itself¿ Sorry, but you will have to give better evidence than that.

I am not entirely sure how that construct looks like. I guess you are talking about accelerating something in vacuum around a (circular) track while levitating it via superconductivity. If so: the force keeping it up is not infinite and it will simply touch the border at some speed. The strength of field a superconductor can withstand is also not infinite. Additionally, you will have other losses due to induction (and at absurdely high speeds by gravity). Oh, and there is no time travel from time dilation. It is always just a positive factor. Traveling at half the speed through time is as much a time machine as cryostasis is.

You did not respond to my very long previous post which contains many things not mentioned by others. Especially a lot of good reasons why 0^0=1. numberphile is often doing faulty mathematics, and that's just one more example. That's not a "fact". By the way, you calling that a fact is somewhat contradicting your claim to not call such things facts, but "ideas". One can define it as "impossible" as one likes. Definitions are not "speculation". And I don't see what your point is. Reaaaallllllllyyyyy......................

No nonsense in infinity. All you wrote there could be read as elements from 1-dimensional projective space, which for the sake of this post shall be defined as fractions a/b, where we don't allow a,b to both be 0 and consider a/b and c/d "the same" if ad=bc. Now for b not 0, the term a/b is just an ordinary number. And all terms of type a/0 are "the same", call that infinity. So surely 1/0 = 2/0, but you can't get 1=2 from that. All the above is just definition and convention, thus so far no further rules or ways to calculate are given, but I will leave it at that. That's wrong. Only to a _positive_ power it is. 0^(-1) would be the same as 1/0 and we already had that... Indeed and that's the one that works well. So what happens when these 2 collide? Obviously plugging into your calculator gives you 1 and you could call it a day there, but lets look a bit deeper. Calculators are programmed to display 1 whenever something is raised to 0, and told not to give it any thought. Just display the number and move on. However, it's bigger than that. You can't argue by limits that way. The property of continuity, i.e. lim f(x) = f(lim x), is not something that is automatically satisfied. Indeed: in this case, it cannot be satisfied as already argued by yourself. This has a much greater flaw than 0^0: you need to define complex exponentiation. Which is messy and best not done at all unless you talk about multi-sheeted covers. It is not left undefined by most mathematicians. 0^0 = 1 is an ubiquitous definitions that works well with everything you would need it for. a) Sets: If A is a set of size a and B a set of size b, then the set A^B of all maps from A to B is a set of size a^b. And there is indeed a single map from the empty set to itself. Polynomials/power series: Ever used sum (the bug sigma one) notation to write down a polynomial¿ Because it is very standard to write them as a sum over a_i x^i, and the term with i=0 is the constant part. But that makes only sense if one lets x^0 be 1 all the time, not only for x not 0. c) By a more general and also very useful convention the empty product is always 1. As 0^0 is an empty product of 0s, we get it to be 1 again. d) A lot of laws and rules simply carry over. Actually every single one I can think of that is at least possible to be satisfied (continuity is not, for example) and true for nonzero a,b in a^b. I have no idea what you want to say here. "0/0 equals anything that can equal 1 when put over itself" sounds at least random as you gave no reason for that. And "can equal" is a weird construct to begin with. Anyway, there is not much reason to think about 0/0. Or of 1/0 as a real number. But it is not true that 0 is a "dangerous thing". The only thing that is problematic is that amateurs use functions (e.g. division) at places where they are not defined yet expect a meaningful result.

Saturn's Phoboe ring is bigger than the sun by a factor of 6 to 20. Anyway, that new ring planet's ring system is much bigger with a diameter claimed to be about 258 times the sun's.

More nitpicking: The scenario in the last line is the case of the axis being in the orbital plane, not vertical to it.

What if your experience is not what I experience¿ What does that even mean¿ (rhethorical questions!) Sorry, but these kind of questions are just silly when you want to talk about science and/or reality. This is not a philosophical debate. Rgardless of experience, the more basic assumption of sharing the same universe implies that, when doing it correctly, you, me and the very advanced robot will end up with equivalent laws of nature (or be wrong).

A rather unlikely encounter, but yes, it's possible. It's the usual tidal locking/bound rotation we see with the moon. No. But that is not relevant.

Well, it actually is in the formal meaning. You are putting too many unspoken assumptions into your statements. It would be better to state them (I already did that for you, so this is more of an advice for the future). Anyway, my main point is not being nitpicky about lines, but the 4D example. I don't think the latter has such simple excuses.

Yes. You also want to exclude the case of both lines actually being the very same one, because then their intersection is a line (nitpicking indeed, but you said "in all circumstances"). But apart from that: yes, intersecting lines will always intersect in a point when not being identical. But you also made a statement about higher dimensional versions (planes always intersecting in a line) and those are still wrong. You already missed or did not mention two special cases when intersecting lines (no intersection and they being identical) by not being well-aquainted to working with these on the formal level (the one where you have very concise and strict definitions and rules); planes in 4D are even more complicated.

Yes, points have dimension 0 and that's not just a name. Everything works better that way in mathematics and there really is no reason whatsoever to not use that. The dimension of the empty set is a different matter, though (-1 or -infinity are common). You know, I gave you a link to Wikipedia's article on skew lines. At the very least read it before acting like I am too dumb to know your (wrong) statement that "lines always intersect". It's a bit difficult to just explain 4-space intersections in a couple of lines in a forum. You could try some 4D stuff to get a better grasp (I recommend the 4D version of rubik's cube) of this. Apart from that, defining subspaces by equations is a good way of dealing with this without the requirement for that, and that's what I did there. Longer version: Let your 4-space have coordinates w,x,y and z; in other words, every point is given by its four coordinates, e.g. the point with coordinates w=1, x=-5, y=pi and z=0 (like 3-space has three axes you may call x,y,z and a position is given by three numbers). Then we consider the plane A where the first two coordinates are zero, and the plane B where the last two coordinates are zero (both are really 2-dimensional planes). The only common point is the one where all four coordinates are zero; thus they intersect in a point. You will have to believe me that this is the "usual" case, not a special one like parallel lines in the plane, though. Actual (yet still correct) use of buzzwords to demonstrate that I am pretty nice so far : a possible definition of "in generic position" is given by "the corresponding subset of parameter space contains an open and dense subset of the Zariski topology" More seriously, I am trying (see the part on 4-space). But properly dealing with 4-space or even GR is not something to fully explain in a couple of lines in a forum post.

You said: "Intersections of dimensions are always one dimension below it. Lines intersect at points.". I answered that in general, they don't intersect at all (i.e. their intersection is empty). If you consider your phrase to automatically assume that they intersect at all (which with the usual mathematical meaning it won't, but I can accept your version for now) then my 4-space example still shows that your statement is wrong.

K^2: I don't think he got me there. The existence of counterexamples is why I said "normally", "unless in a special configuration" and "in generic position" (for most other readers: the latter is the formal term used for this). Why is that not a counter-argument¿ I could have given an actual example, but it's quite simple to find one yourself (any random one does, as already mentioned). Anyway, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skew_lines . I also mentioned the 4-space one with planes in case you actually want subspaces (i.e. containing 0) instead. If you want the example for that: coordinates w,x,y,z, planes w=x=0 and y=z=0. - - - Updated - - - A little addition to my previous two posts: the formal meaning of "generic" or "random" would probably be a bit too mathy. If you truly want to know, then I (or K^2) should be able to explain, but expect it to contain at least some math and the term "parameter space". I think, but wait for his own answer, too, that K^2 and you have a very different understanding on what the answer to "what is dark energy" looks like. To you, it is some kind of explanation where it comes from and why it is there, but to him it probably is a full description of what it does. In the end, everything we can research will likely turn down to "how does it behave" instead of "why does it behave that way". The good old example of gravity strikes again: one could say that mass bends spacetime and thus all the conclusions from general relativity; but in the end, you only moved the goal post to "why does mass bend spacetimee¿". Instead, the pragmatic way is to just find all the formulas and such describing its properties and I think that's what K^2 is talking about here.

That's not true. Two lines in 3-space normally don't intersact at all. Similiarily, two planes in 4-space intersect at a point unless they are in a special arrangement. A correct version is: two n-dimensional subspaces of (n+1)-space which are in generic position intersect in a (n-1)-dimensional space. More generally, codimension (the difference between the dimension of a subspace and the full space considered; for example a plane in 3-space has codimension 1, while a line would have codimension 2) is additive when intersecting spaces in generic position.