Eugine_Nier comments on Particles break light-speed limit? - Less Wrong

9 Post author: Kevin 23 September 2011 11:00AM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 28 September 2011 01:51:58AM 6 points [-]

Yeah, see, I'm not betting against random cool new physics, I wouldn't offer odds like that on there not being a Higgs boson, I'm betting on the local structure of causality. Could I be wrong? Yes, but if I have to pay out that entire bet, it won't be the most interesting thing that happened to me that day.

How confident am I of this? Not just confident to offer to bet at 99-to-1 odds. Confident enough to say...

"Well, that was an easy, risk-free $202."

Or to put it even more plainly:

"You turned into a cat! A SMALL cat! You violated Conservation of Energy! That's not just an arbitrary rule, it's implied by the form of the quantum Hamiltonian! Rejecting it destroys unitarity and then you get FTL signaling! And cats are COMPLICATED! A human mind can't just visualize a whole cat's anatomy and, and all the cat biochemistry, and what about the neurology? How can you go on thinking using a cat-sized brain?"

McGonagall's lips were twitching harder now. "Magic."

"Magic isn't enough to do that! You'd have to be a god!"

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 September 2011 03:11:25AM 3 points [-]

I'm betting on the local structure of causality.

Not necessarily, there could be a distinguished frame of reference.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 28 September 2011 06:09:16PM 2 points [-]

That might preserve before-and-after. It wouldn't preserve the locality of causality. Once you throw away c, you might need to take the entire frame of the universe into account when calculating the temporal successor at any given point, rather than just the immediate spatial neighborhood.

Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 20 April 2012 07:27:54AM 2 points [-]

There could be some other special velocity than c. Like, imagine there's some special reference frame in which you can send superluminal signals at exactly 2.71828 c in any direction. In other reference frames, this special velocity depends on which direction you send the signal. Lorentz invariance is broken. But the only implication for local causality is that you need to make your bubble 2.71828 times bigger.

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