JGA@MIT-MC@sri-unix (08/09/82)
From: John G. Aspinall <JGA at MIT-MC>
(From SPACE Digest V2 #266 )
On the topic of FTL, an interesting philosophical note: Why are people
so hopeful about the existence of FTL and indifferent about the law of
conservation of energy? It seems to me that people will bend over backwards
to try and find a loophole in physics or some specious argument that will al-
low FTL to exist, but when it comes to violating energy conservation (e.g.
perpetual motion machines), anyone suggesting it is labelled a crank!
Don Chan
This is an interesting point you raise. I believe the difference is
in the utility of the two theories. Conservation of energy is used
over and over by chemists, biologists, engineers, and many others to
design and analyze large parts of our daily lives. It works. It
works, for many, not because it is "proved" in Chapter 1 of Goldstein
[ask anyone who took a basic classical dynamics course], but because
they (chemists, etc.) see their results confirmed every day.
>From the miles-per-gallon estimates for your automobile to the
recommended caloric intake of a marathon runner; from the wattmeter
measuring your utility usage to the "R" value of the insulation that
you install to cut those bills down: conservation of energy enters the
analysis. If conservation of energy was broken, violated, or even
relaxed, there would be a hell of a lot of unexplained things going on.
Faster Than Light travel (FTL), on the other hand, doesn't impact our
daily lives in nearly the same way. Oh, there are a few examples: I
work on a Cray-1, and I've been told that its speed is limited by the
speed of light transmission time, but frankly, that is of intellectual
interest only. The theory has much less utility in my daily life.
A good counter example to reinforce the point - I bet if you talk to
physicists who really depend on the speed of light in their work,
you'll find them as ardent defenders of the speed of light as they are
of conservation of energy.
John Aspinall.