Cartman
just made by the Presbyterian Church
Member # 256
posted
Photons do not possess mass (at least, not rest mass).
Registered: Nov 1999
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Mountain Man
Ex-Member
posted
Thats always been one of the mysteries.How can an object tranfer energy if it has no mass.Recently they have been talking about the force of gravity being governed by the speed of light.I'm about twenty years behind on the science of all this as it is.Some of the stuff they talk about now(real science,not techno babble)just doesn't seem to match up.Of course that has always been true about any advance in science.Still Photons deliver kinetic energy.Light pressure.No way around that.P.S. when you think about it a Photon can't remain a Photon without motion.It would be something else then.
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Cartman
just made by the Presbyterian Church
Member # 256
posted
"How can an object tranfer energy if it has no mass."
Because photons have an impulse p=E/c, where E=(h*c)/l (the relationship between energy and wavelength). Mass is just another form of energy.
[ September 01, 2003, 12:56 PM: Message edited by: Cartman ]
Registered: Nov 1999
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Mountain Man
Ex-Member
posted
Like I said this is all greek to me.I did find a website that trys to break it down in laymans terms.Not that they have much chance of that.Anyway the model you use here seems to be the Dirac.I'm still not sure about the whole thing but it seems to be that the momentum and spin give the Photon it's existance.Then it all seems to lead back to Heisenbergs uncertainty.No wonder Trek gets into all the techno babble the real answers are even harder to believe.Wild how the spin is not really a spin.I heard once that Chinese was the only language flexable enough to explain Physics. Maybe they were on to something there.
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posted
The lightsaber page you're thinking of is Bob Brown's. Unfortunately, his predominantly "Movie Purist" stance made him the sworn enemy of some SW fan groups (a condition with which I am familiar). He eventually tired of both the battles and Star Wars, and shut down his site in February.
Anywho, here's a "Wayback Machine" version of that page:
posted
Man that dude has really put a lot of thought into reverse engineering the Light Saber.Really though it was originally meant to be a laser sword just as I discribed.The special effects that had been planned for it just did not work out in practice.Personally I like the less is more approach to special effects.Seeing a good job done under adverse conditions makes the whole thing that much more enjoyable.Shoveling money at a problem ends up with every thing being remembered as a white elephant like "Cleopatra" or any Kevin Costner Movie.As long as you don't end up with another "Plan 9" or "Robot Monster" you are ahead of the game.
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quote:The problem is that Kraus is trying to explain things with real world physics as much as possible, which states that the cellular information is essentially copied, wheras the Trek tech explanation is pseudo-science, and states that the cells and particles are actually moved.
Exactly. But it's not that the Trek approach is necessarily less realistic. Krauss makes a very fundamental error when he assumes that all particles are actually stored. We know that they are not (the exception of "Our Man Bashir" came later). No one less than Rick Sternbach once wrote in a newsgroup that the transporter is working like a TV broadcast, not like a video recorder. And I may add, not like a *digital* video recorder, which is exactly what Krauss assumes.
BTW, even if Krauss were right with his assumption, I can't follow his argument where he ridicules the principle by stating that light years of staggered hard disks would be needed for that purpose. But a memory cell may and will be as small as one atom some day. The pattern tank, if it really were something like a computer memory, has an absolutely realistic size to store one or a few human atomic patterns.
-------------------- Bernd Schneider
Registered: Mar 1999
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Mountain Man
Ex-Member
posted
In one of the TOS novels part of the crew were sent on what was basicly a suicide mission. None of the original matter survived transport but the pattern with missing parts filled in from the logs was used to rebuild them as complete people. It was disscussed as to whether they were actually the same person and in this story at least they were accepted to be the same. The pattern was considered to be the person. Not sure if that makes any sense or not and it was never really explained to my satisfaction. They seem to have meant for this to be used as another Dues Ex Machina to resurect characters lost along the way.
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capped
I WAS IN THE FUTURE, IT WAS TOO LATE TO RSVP
Member # 709
posted
of course, that novel has nothing to do with the way it actually happens on Star Trek. it was just a non-canon novel
posted
Not so much that, as it was one of the lame early-to-mid novels in the TOS line. They've had some clinkers in there...
--Jonah
P.S. My all-time "goat" award goes to David Bischoff for the TNG novel "Grounded", where not only do none of the characters sound right, but he has Picard impatiently waiting outside the main shuttlebay for the doors to close and the bay to repressurize. And yes, this is after the TNG TM was published.
-------------------- "That's what I like about these high school girls, I keep getting older, they stay the same age."
--David "Woody" Wooderson, Dazed and Confused
Registered: Feb 2001
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posted
*chuckle* Hard as it may be to believe, Magnus.
Careful, I think someone's left your sarcasm valve open a bit too far in recent weeks. Hate to see you have a meltdown.
--Jonah
-------------------- "That's what I like about these high school girls, I keep getting older, they stay the same age."
--David "Woody" Wooderson, Dazed and Confused
Registered: Feb 2001
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capped
I WAS IN THE FUTURE, IT WAS TOO LATE TO RSVP
Member # 709
posted
i'm not trying to be negative, anyone who reads my site knows i'm a big supporter of extra-canonical trek.. but its ridiculous concepts like those old novels that make people not want to follow them in the first place, since they have nothing in common with the source material, desite saying STAR TREK on the cover...
Registered: Sep 2001
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