Problem with the iron staff

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by PheoniX_VII</i>
<br />Almost off-topic but this question has been in my head for too long now and I realy cant come to an good solution. Please posts whatever thoughts you have about this as Im eager to know what you think.

<i>In this I take no mind to potential gravity fields and other things that might change the outcome to something impossible. Try to think about it as a pure mind experiment. What would really happen?</i>

Imagine yourself doing an experiment together with a friend. You stand on earth and he on a planet 300 ly away. You are holding the end of a 300 ly long iron staff and your friend is holding at the other end. You make a pull towards you at about 1 meter. When will your friend notice the movement?

1. Instantly- The impulse moves faster than light.
2. After 300 years- The impulse gains speed close to c.
3. ¤Im sure there are more alternatives¤.

Those are the ways I’ve been able to think of. The first option is the one that makes most sense to me but it breaks several laws of physics. The second produces a paradox when you can keep pulling the staff for 300 years ending up with a (300ly +(amount pulled))long staff before the staff at the other end would begin move at the same speed.



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1. Perfect supersolid rod: Instant action at a distance. However, no such thing exists (yet).

2. Perfectly uniform medium rod: speed of sound in that material

3. Imperfect rod (dislocation, cavitation, etc): probability P. Almost never reaches the other side because of absorption along the way.

In reality, this is a probability problem dealing with material uniformity. It's one you wouldn't want even to start working with.

Makis

Thanks for your answers both all of you, Even though I might not have understood everything I do feel I got my answer.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">1. Perfect super solid rod: Instant action at a distance. However, no such thing exists (yet). <hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

So, if the impulse could move faster than light that would prove in favor for LR and in disfavor for ER as in ER the speed of light cant be achieved. Which also means in ER no super solid materials exists.

Suppose that my 300 l.y .rod is old fashioned ether but it has a new rigidity due to gravity being many times faster than light. Then I can establish a gravitational standing wave in about a second. To make it more fun, let's make this rod have visco elastic properties, such that it's easy to move through this tremendously rigid material, as long as it's done very slowly. i.e. less than light speed.

If my planet moves about a tenth of a light year in a thousand toward the other planet, then the standing wave will change constantly but the nodes will moveat less than light speed.

Th fun bit is that the rod is a non newtonian solid [8D]

Looking at this again, it might appear that I'm blithely inventing a whole new bunch of "space." Well, that's because we were talking about rods. I'm an old fashioned cove and like to think that waves wave in things. So ignore the mental picture of our 300 l.y viscoelastic ether rod being in some sort of absolute nothng space for now.

The thing about viscoelastics to note is that the stress and strain are not in phase. So they produce heat, which can be used, for example, for underfloor heating in tall buildings. We get a Young's modulus that gives elasticity of, "e to the power i phi". Phi being the phase difference.

So how to work out the strain on my 300 l.y. rod? Horror [] If I take the gravitational centre of the two planets as a point then my rod will have zero cross sectional area, and thus an infinate force on it [8D] For the stress the elasticity is almost zero as well[8D]

Then, I think that my rod is in the "space" of my base planet and will have an altered refractive index.

Anyway, the upshot of all this drivel is that we need to give any space ship we build a negative refractive index paint job to get it to really shift. A google search of "super lens" gives food for thought here, and I'm monkeying about with the idea that cooper pairs might have an alternating refractive index, between solutions, and therefore a total internal reflection.

Don't hold your breath though, as I'm a bit of a moron

[)]

Let's say for the moment that space does have viscoelastic properties and we have a super massive imploding star. it has to conserve angular momentum. When its angular velocity hits c the viscoelastic space puts the brakes on. The inside of the star continues its collapse but the now slowed down outer shell is transparent to the visco space. The inner new shell also has less mass, so we brake again.

The result should be an ordinary burnt out black dwarf inside of a lot of onion shells. A stange beast but a lot less strange than a singularity with infinite angular velocity.

Remember that the stress and strain on a viscoelastic is out of phase. If our outer star shell is going at faster than c, then we have heat generated which is this phase difference. I'm stuck on the nature of this "heat", is it some sort of Cerenkov gravity radiation?

Would the visco space peel back the onion over time? Oh, I think I have to mention here, that i simply don't buy into the idea that time stops at an event horizon.