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If you could change any law of physics, what would you change?

WestAir

By WestAir
in Science & Spaceflight

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WestAir

WestAir

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If you had the power to change one law of physics in any way you see fit what would you change and why? If you could add a law or completely remove one, what would it be?

I thought about this after watching one of those perpetual motion youtube videos and thinking, "Man the conservation of energy sucks. We'd be so better off if we could make energy from nothing." So I'd start my mad scientist meddling by removing the conservation of energy. I then realized that since life evolved in a world with the CoE, that many animals would have evolved to utilize free energy rather than playing around in the vicious food chain that we have now. You wouldn't even need food for energy, but just for nutrients.

Another piece of physics I'd like to manipulate is the propagation of photons. I'd make them like a graviton: Unaffected by gravity. That way we'd be able to see what a blasted singularity looks like.

What about you?

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K^2

K^2

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Food isn't so much for energy as it is for entropy. I mean, sure, if you are a predator, you need energy to chase your food, but if you didn't need food in the first place, there would be no need for chasing. The only way for life to persist, however, is by maintaining low entropy. Hence the self-replication, hence the need for food, and all the rest follows.

Conservation of energy is one of these laws that's so fundamental, I'd be really paranoid about messing with it. The only way I can see it being violated without everything falling apart is if time is periodic. Then, instead of energy, you'd be dealing with quasienergy, which isn't strictly conserved.

It'd be interesting to mess with some constants. Speed of light, plank's constant, etc. I'm sure there is a way to adjust these to get some interesting macroscopic effects without all of the nuclear physics and chemistry falling apart. It's just not something that you want to be able to get wrong. Oops, you've tweaked the strong interaction constant, and now neutrons are slightly lighter than protons. Everything just collapsed into neutron stars.

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magnemoe

magnemoe

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Making gravity easy to manipulate, if works as today except that you could generate an gravity field somewhat like an magnetic field or gravity plates and drives as is common in sci-fi.

This would still require energy, but not much more than the work it does and heat losses.

Breaking the conservation of energy has an major danger unless its hard, you could end up with an process who generated more and more energy, if your was real unlucky it could feed on itself and not blow itself apart.

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K^2

K^2

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Slowing of relative time while travelling at really high speeds,I'd get rid of that no more speed limit:)

Then we couldn't go anywhere in reasonable time! Think about it, you got rid of the light speed limit. It'd take you a year to get to current light speed at acceleration of roughly 1G. So in 50 years, taking half of that to accelerate and half to slow back down, you'd only cover 250 light years. But with the speed of light limit, eventually, space contraction starts working in your favor, and in 50 years of ship time you can make a round trip to Andromeda. Yeah, millions of years would pass on Earth, but without the speed of light limit, it's not possible to make the trip at all.

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LLlAMnYP

LLlAMnYP

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Oh, that is awesome! As a kid I had an awesome sci-fi kind of book written by an author from Soviet Russia. Four youngsters were given an interesting device that allowed them to modify some laws of physics, such as reducing friction to near zero values, adjusting the speed of sound, turning time backwards and such. When someone flipped the switch to turn off energy conservation, a pebble was thrown at a mountain. By laws of conservation of momentum the mountain got upturned and started sliding off the island it was sitting on, whereas the pebble shot off into space at relativistic speeds.

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lajoswinkler

lajoswinkler

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Multiply the speed of light by 10, just for the morbid curiosity of watching how the universe would collapse.

How about setting the limit at 100 km/h?

I remember one video about the world with low c, so low that everyday speeds create relativistic effects.

Now I found out about this weird game.

And I'm going to try it out.

Why would it collapse? Afak very little is dependent on the speed of light. You would observe things earlier and feel sforces faster than now, but the forces would stay the same. I might be massively wrong though.

1s electrons move at very high speeds. Hydrogen would become unstable as we know it.

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Holo

Holo

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Then we couldn't go anywhere in reasonable time! Think about it, you got rid of the light speed limit. It'd take you a year to get to current light speed at acceleration of roughly 1G. So in 50 years, taking half of that to accelerate and half to slow back down, you'd only cover 250 light years. But with the speed of light limit, eventually, space contraction starts working in your favor, and in 50 years of ship time you can make a round trip to Andromeda. Yeah, millions of years would pass on Earth, but without the speed of light limit, it's not possible to make the trip at all.

You can keep on accelerating until you are much faster, to the point where (IIRC) shipboard time in our universe is the same as shipboard time in the new universe for a given distance and acceleration.

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Duxwing

Duxwing

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For interest rather than practicality:

Negative inertia: objects in motion tend to remain in motion, and objects that come to rest tend to instantaneously gain a randomly great velocity along a random 4D vector. For extra fun, keep c at or below current levels.

No Pauli Exclusion Principle: infinitely many electrons can stabley orbit a single proton in a single energy level. Watch the negative charges accumulate and the universe resultingly rip itself apart.

Equality of Fundamental Forces: gravity is as strong as electromagnetism, which is as strong as the strong force, which is as strong as the weak force. Laugh while doubt and panic grip engineers everywhere.

Nothingness: All particles annihilate on contact. All waves destructively interfere. The universe will disappear, but you will never know.

Relative Order: Each observer perceives that the left side of the universe tends toward maximum disorder whereas the right side of the universe tends toward maximum order.

Conditional Order: The left side of the universe tends toward maximum disorder whereas the right side of the universe tends toward maximum order while and only while all sentient minds agree upon which side is left and which side is right.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Only what is presently seen exists, and it forever disappears when one's gaze is diverted.

-Duxwing

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