🚀 go-pugleaf

On Tue, 25 Mar 1997 08:29:04 GMT, malcolm@pigsty.demon.co.uk (Malcolm
McMahon) wrote:

>On Tue, 25 Mar 1997 03:27:28 GMT, ykhan@achilles.net (Yousuf Khan)
>wrote:

>>Ah, but there's more to it than that, which I didn't mention previously.
>>It's now also thought that the very concept of mass itself has a very
>>smallest particle associated with it. 

>Hm.. that would create an interesting theoretical possibility. Suppose
>you could exclude the Higgs field from and area of space. Would this
>not result in everything in that area becoming massless and therefore
>instantly achieving light speed? Seems like this could be a basis for
>something like Larry Niven's "displacement booths".

I'm _almost_ proud of you, you nearly came up with the answer, but you went
the wrong way. You would not want to get rid of Higgs bosons, you'd want to
attract more and more of them. 

Think of it this way. We are trying to warp space right? You warp space by
concentrating particles inside it. If you can attract lots of Higgs bosons
to a volume just in front of your ship, you have created a gravity well
there. Manipulating the Higgs field may be the secret to warp travel. 

>Myself I've long suspected that "rest mass" is actually caused by
>particles travelling at lightspeed in one of the collapsed dimensions.
>This allows them to have relativistic mass without actually going
>anywhere.

What purpose would be served by this? This is based on the assumption that
nothing can be _not_ moving: if it's not moving in the familiar dimensions,
then it must be moving the invisible dimensions. It's an interesting
thought, but why do we need it?

					Yousuf Khan
--
Yousuf J. Khan
ykhan@achilles.net
Ottawa, Ont, Canada
Nation's capital