Although this domino effect is fast, it's still bulls*** slower than light. Hence why fibre optics are now used instead of copper wire for telecom.

Ah no. The twisted pair copper wires are transmission lines that transmit information at the speed of light (well, half the free-space speed of light typically). They absolutely don't transmit information at electron movement speeds (which are very, very slow).

Fibre optics propagate at about the same speed (50-70% of c), and are used mainly because they have incredibly low loss and are immune to EM interference.

last edited by parabol at 00:32:49 19/Mar/10

In it's purest form, does the theory work?

No. Special relativity says faster than light communications violate causality. If you claim to have discovered how to implement FTL comms by touching your rod, physicists would argue that you're only touching your rod.

It would take truly ridiculous amounts of energy to shunt your massive lightyears-long rod.

That's what she said.

Consider also the f***ing inertia of moving a rod several light years long ... even at a couple of atoms wide it would likely have more mass than the Earth!

Your understanding of kinetic energy and matter is flawed, that's all. You think of a physical object being moved all at the same rate when you push one end, because that's what happens according to your senses. This is the same reason people didn't realise that light 'travelled' for a very long time - they couldn't observe it.

Regardless of how it seems, a physical object isn't completely rigid, and a rod that behaved the way you want it to wouldn't just be be some sort of 'super nano thing', it would be a type of matter that simply has not been observed, basically a proton several light years wide.

I understand that a parallel wave affect will be created when energy travels through a median, this was more like a 'perfect scenario'. When studying kinematics we assume that the particle of mass is a singularity, which in real life it is clearly not.

This diagram should express my point in fun picture form:

http://imgur.com/rCOqQ.jpg

Sorry I have not yet mastered the art of posting an image, that is the velocity of the observed energy wave travelling through the median. I was ignoring it [just like in physics when they ignore particle's area and all other form of interference] so that it could be solved at a purer level.

That's why I was saying it was assumed to be a rigid body, when we analyse trusses at a low-level we ignore bending, stress etc. for the same reason.

http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_images.asp

< img src="http://www.xxx.com/images.jpg" />

so that it could be solved at a purer level.

You mean a wrong level?

when we analyse trusses at a low-level we ignore bending, stress etc. for the same reason.

Is that reason so you can get the answer you want?

blahnana, density is only part of the problem

Of course, I was trying to address Blue's specific concerns without get too tangled up.

Blue, seems like in your last post you're pointing out all the places the idea of this miraculous rod breaks down.

When studying kinematics we assume that the particle of mass is a singularity, which in real life it is clearly not.

That's why I was saying it was assumed to be a rigid body, when we analyse trusses at a low-level we ignore bending, stress etc. for the same reason.

So I guess you're the troll.

Btw, the red squiggly line comes from the spell-checker in your browser. Which gets its language settings from your OS, usually. Nothing to do with this site. Fix that.

last edited by blahnana at 09:38:00 19/Mar/10

so that it could be solved at a purer level.

You mean a wrong level?

when we analyse trusses at a low-level we ignore bending, stress etc. for the same reason.

Is that reason so you can get the answer you want?

Well it acts as a stepping stone to more advanced problems in the future [just like with physics] The answer is technically wrong, yet you need to understand the method to obtain those forces as most of these equations are dependent on the same variables.

That's why it takes 4 years to finish the degree, learning all of those stepping stones so that you can build up to the real thing eventually. With the rod, breaking was an obvious answer, the speed at which the energy travels through the median requires some thinking, as does the fact it has a large inertia. Yet if no rules where put in place on the question people would just say "no it would break" and that's not the answer I was looking for.

I'm not trying to troll, I was just trying to create some thread activity and these questions usually do, everyone who has answered has answered correctly so yea.

Dazhel gave you the best answer Blue.

Special relativity says faster than light communications violate causality.

You're basically trying to say that you can invent a time machine with a gigantic rod, or that special relativity (backed up by masses of empirical data) is somehow wrong.

Unless you can get around special relativity somehow, and to imagine doing so usually involves egghead theories about naked singularities, not gigantic rods :)

:P One answer, micro worm holes! Create a small worm hole in the direction of the messages destination and send it through, problem of FTL solved. /:P

Seriously, our understanding of physics says that FTL is impossible and our limited understanding of Quantum physics is even more limited. Give it all another 100 years and maybe something might actually be discovered.