Tim Cook schrieb:
> Invisible wrote:
>> Never mind the "minor detail" of the fact that "stationary" doesn't 
>> exist in outer space.
> 
> Sure it does.  There does exist absolute motion that can be measured 
> even if there's nothing else in the universe--rotation, for instance. 
> And I personally suspect that there's some subtle difference between 
> gravity and motion affecting something that we just haven't thought of 
> yet, which will allow distinguishing between whether you're moving vs. 
> just feeling the pull of something else.

Not if Einstein is right. And he seems to have been right about a pretty 
lot of things he didn't even dream of.

Note that rotation is not just movement - it is accelerated movement 
(with the direction of acceleration changing over time), which is why 
you can tell that you're not just moving linearly.


> Actually they do.  It can be safely assumed the ship is constantly 
> leaking some negligible amount of atmosphere, and if you get within the 
> envelope of that, you can hear it swooshing as it moves past!

... at the incredibly deafening level of -1000 dB I presume. With your 
own ship's engines roaring along at some 1000 dB to make up for it.

Yeah, technically you're right :-)


>> Well, the fastest starships reputedly reach Warp 10 (i.e., 10c). Never 
>> mind the "minor detail" that this would cause the ship to travel 
>> backwards in time, and have an imaginary mass. (Irony?)
> 
> Actually, from what I remember of the Technical Manual, it's not a 1:1 
> multiplicative correlation between warp speed and c, more like 
> exponential.  Warp 1 *is* c, but warp 10 is 'occupies every point in 
> universe simultaneously' and requires theoretically infinite 
> energy...warp 9 is Really Really fast.  Because just 10x the speed of 
> light still leaves months, if not *years* between most stars.

... and it tears holes into the subspace, though they kept that secret 
until some seasons into TNG. What was the speed limit after that? Warp 
5? Or was it Warp 3?

But then again, Warp isn't a multiple of c anyway, it's a level of 
distortion of spacetime (hey, it messes seriously with /normal space/, 
so how could they possibly expect to not affect /subspace/?) while you'd 
still travel sub-lightspeed, possess a finite real mass, and just need 
to travel a significantly shorter distance.

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