🚀 go-pugleaf

> As I understand it, If you want to use the whole "mass increases"
> thing, you have to differientiate between inertial and gravitational
> mass (even tho every thing we know of has equal amounts of each, and
> prolly everything does). Otherwise, the explanation of just having the
> 
> momentum increase is good enough. it's all just how you look at it.
> That whole mass increase thing always bothered me too, btw. But not
> nearly as much as people who state that warp drive works by lessening
> a ships mass. Gah! An infinite amount of 1/2 of something is still
> just as infinite as a whole something. 

It's quite true that any object of non zero mass accelerated will increase
in mass, especially as it approaches the speed of light; so that the energy
expended in acceleration doesn't result in a proportional increase in
velocity... instead, you have the situation where more and more of the
energy used in the attempt is transmute to the mass of the object, until
the limit of an infinite amount of energy being required to accelerate a
massy object to the speed of light (different rules apply if it started off
at faster than light speed; c.f. tachyons).

However, some objects, like photons, have a rest mass of zero. If they have
any energy at all, they must move at the speed of light; no faster, no
slower. Things which we would expect to change it's velocity, such as
intense gravitational fields, merely rob it of energy, thus increasing the
wavelength... the light becomes red-shifted. (the reverse would occur if
you were able to survive and see on a neutron star; the incident light
would be blue shifted.)

I don't remember hearing that warp drive had anything to do with altering
the mass of the ship, ala Doc Smith; anything which could do that would
have all sorts of bizarre effects i expect; all such values are
interconnected, and if some electrons mass more than others despite having
the same velocity, it seems reasonable that some might have more charge
than others, etc; the explanation for warp drive i heard was that space was
compressed in front of the ship and stretched behind it... this has more
scientific credibility than hyperspace, although where the energy required
to do this comes from is necessarily obscure!

Brett Caton.


And let's not even get into if 
> 9.999... = 10. Remember that? :)