Showing posts with label gravity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gravity. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

A Quantum Gravity result?

Two weeks ago I asked a question haunting me for some time, on bad astronomy and universe today forum: What is the gravitational field of a photon?

I discovered this forum via the great podcast of Fraser Cain and Dr. Pamela L. Gay: astronomycast.

And the answered I got kind of stunned me. Like Richard said on the forum:
"But believe it or not, exact solutions of high symmetry conditions exist.
One is a plane ElectroMagnetic Wave solution.
Chris Hillman wrote most of those article I think."

It's amazing! There is an exact solution of a pure "Quantum Gravity" question!
And what's more is that it imply that the "gravitational influence" of a quanta of EM field is actually a PLANE in spacetime!
I'm so annoyed I cannot do the math, and spend time fully grasping this result, because it's exactly what I had in mind.
Can the gravitational effect of the petawatt laser (1.25 e15 watts in 0.5 e-12 seconds) in Livermore Laboratory be detected?
That will be a real "Quantum Gravity" experiment no?

NOTES: The rest of the blog express my feelings and has absolutly no scientifical ground!

If Gravity is a Quantum Field of some kind (and I really don't think it is), the photon should "emit" gravitons in all directions. But traveling at the speed of light that will generate a Gravitational shock wave!
My visual solution was: The photon needs to loose influence in the space dimension it is travelling!
The thing is, the photon is already loosing a dimension: Time!
In standard relativity, all observers are equal. The protons inside the LHC have their own point-of-view of the world that is as valid as ours. The thing is, that, as they increase their speed, their internal clock is getting more and more desynchronized with ours. For them, nothing changed (except when they are accelerated), but for us they look like they are living very slowly. This is strongly evident with particles that decay in nanoseconds and keep running in the accelerators for seconds. So, the faster they go, the lazier (for us) they get!
Everything looks good, since all is asymptotic and the protons can never reach the speed of light. But here is my question: What about the life of a photon?
By using the above limit, the photon does not feel time at all.
So, what is the life expectancy of a photon? It can be zero, no?

So what is amazingly beatiful for me in the above solution is that the photon loose one dimension by "merging" time and it's direction of travel!
I love it, it's just Einstein and Maxwell, and no need for vibrating strings and extra dimensions (Actually we just lost one :)!

Now, with a very strong electric field, generating photons that have this anisotropic influence on spacetime... Can we make the "Funiverse" a reality?

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Are we living in a Funiverse?

Since the time I played with Lifters, made one and learned about ion drives I have this question running:
Can our universe allow all the Science fiction stories where space travel is fast and inexpensive?
As far as Science and Science fiction goes, our Universe may be one of:
  1. The boring one (as far as space travel goes :) where there is no other way to move around than trowing matter out of the spaceship. Only Newton law of Action/Reaction can push us around. If this is the only way to travel, reaching other stars will be a one way trip at slow speed. I can imagine mankind doing it only out of despair (may be planet earth burning).
  2. The Fun Universe where we found out the relationship between Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity. In the process we found a way to accelerate through space without using precious mass of the spaceship but just energy. With this kind of travel we can start to explore our galaxy, but it will still be limited by the speed of light.
  3. The very cool Universe where we can control worm holes in spacetime and travel faster than the speed of light. Here all science fiction books are realistic but frankly, I still have doubt we are living in this Universe.

We can hope there is a strong relationship between Electromagnetism and Gravitation. When you think about it:
The relationship between space and time in General Relativity is: The speed of light!

I know scientist and astronomers are trying to verify that the 2 parameters: the speed of electromagnetic waves and the gravity space/time ratio, are actually equal.
As of our knowledge, they are equal. So, a strong underlying physical system is relating both theories.
The question is:
Is this link between Electromagnetism and Gravity able to accelerate a space craft without using some kind of fuel mass?
Are we living in a Funiverse?