Resolves to yes if/when any method of transmitting physical information faster-than-light is shown to be possible. Valid solutions of Einstein's field equations that may or may not be possible to actually construct (such as the Alcubierre drive) do not count. Resolves to no if/when this is shown to be impossible. I will probably require that we have a proper Theory of Everything before I feel comfortable resolving this market to no, but I could be convinced to resolve it sooner if given a compelling enough argument.
Specifically, the information must be able to travel from object A to object B and arrive before a beam of light that was sent at the same time and faced only empty space in between. Local FTL is not required; a traversable wormhole would qualify.
Update 2024-09-12 (PST): Breaking causality is not considered a disqualifying factor - solutions that violate causality may still qualify as valid FTL travel methods for market resolution purposes. (AI summary of creator comment)
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@Guilhermesampaiodeoliveir They're known to work with negative mass, but negative mass is not known to exist.
@Guilhermesampaiodeoliveir There are four different reasons why they are impossible.
Though I went to a seminar where someone proved you can work around the negative mass condition, reducing it to only three different reasons they are impossible! So we have:
Negative mass (no longer needed!)
Unstable
Uncontrollable
Breaks causality
Just need three more seminars from that guy.
@ConnorDolan Idk, it seems to me the negative mass was the biggest roadblock... now only breaking causality seems an issue...
Because the original warp drive metric has positive curvature, which requires negative mass, something that’s never been found. If it did, it would be repelled by positive mass objects through gravity so would be pretty hard to find anyway.
Causality is most likely not a physical property of a system, but a constraint on agents’ knowledge within it due to their partial information. From a god’s eye POV, there is no causality and everything in the system can be extrapolated by physics. But any agent within the system is a strictly less complex subsystem and therefore must contain less information than the full system. You can’t fully predict your own actions and feel free to act or predict other events, so I’d say it’s impossible for agents to break causality. Time like loops must be unstable or somehow not allow information to pass through.
https://manifold.markets/KnightMer/can-information-travel-faster-than?tab=comments#5wex3iuu3an
You might be interested in the discussion in the comments, about a possible experiment by Siddhant Das
@JosephNoonan No, they must be traveling faster-than-light relative to some local object. Or more precisely (since that doesn't account for wormholes), it must be able to travel from object A to object B and arrive before a beam of light that was sent at the same time and faced only empty space in between.
Since I'm being accused of, "lawyering," I'm going to do what a real lawyer would probably do--- I'm going to just sell out and wish you well on your ill-posed question...I don't have faith in the market-maker's ability to resolve this question anymore as I believe being attacked as being a, "lawyer," while simultaneously being asked by the market adjudicator, "what does the popular crowd want?" Nope, sorry...physical laws get adjudicated by precision and correctly posed questions, not based upon popularity, and researchers should engage in good faith.
@PatrickDelaney FYI, I am not the person who created this question in case you were under that impression. I also didn't mean my comment as an "attack," sorry if it camea cross that way, but my point remains -- I think you're simply failing to account for the fact that every manifold market, by its fundamental design, inherently involves an irreducibly minimum amount of ambiguity and trust in the market maker.
I just wagered $10M because the question does not specify a medium through which light is traveling relative to anything else traveling through any other medium specifically for the purposes of this market. The stipulation given is, "Resolves to no if/when this is shown to be impossible."
So basically, "faster-than-light," implies propagation of a pulse through a medium, also known as, "group velocity," - as, it's the measurement of the velocity of of the groups of waves.
This study from 1999 shows that researchers were able to use an exotic medium to slow light down to 38 mph over 20 years ago.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/1999/02/physicists-slow-speed-of-light/
So basically, to answer the market's question, "Is faster-than-light travel physically possible?" with the caveat that, "if when shown to be impossible resolves to no," and, "we will require a Theory of Everything before resolving to no," - which, we don't have a unified field theory and will arguably never have ... the answer is unequivocally, "YES, cars traveling on a road through air are faster than light traveling through a three-stage process of slowing light down, starting with a medium of sodium vapor and quantum interference caused by lasers, and followed by a couple more stages of exotic matter created by magnetic fields.
Even without using exotic materials, but just looking at a normal semiconductor, the velocity of light has been measured at about 9km per second.
NASA two-stage gas guns can achieve about 9km per second.
NASA's 1970's Helios satellites achieved a speed of around 70km/s
So again, "Helios satellites and other space traveling objects created by NASA have traveled faster through a vacuum than light does in a typical semiconductor in your phone or computer."
@PatrickDelaney I'm aware that light travels at different speeds in different media, but you haven't provided an argument for why I should resolve this market contrary to how the other 28 traders presumably expect it to be resolved. It's well-understood in physics that the term "the speed of light" refers to the physical constant, not its speed in some arbitrary medium.
@IsaacKing Wait a minute, wait a minute...bro...were you aware that light could be slowed down in any medium such that something man-caused, such as a minivan driving down the road, could go faster than light in another medium? Was anyone betting on this aware of that fact? I definitely think not. I think I have brought new information into the marketplace and I'm arbitraging that new information (at least from the market participant's standpoint, the information has actually been out there for a while). I say this as an electrical engineer who actually had to research your question to verify that its assumptions were correct - I do not think 99% of the population on manifold would go into that depth, I think they just click, "yes/no," and look no further into it. I'm sorry that you believe you were bringing a virtually impossible market into being, but strictly speaking, my argument above absolutely fulfills the market conditions as written in the original description. Now, you could go back and put another caveat on your marketplace in retrospect and say, "I meant in a vacuum," -- but that actually just means your market was unclear in the first place and you should resolve it as N/A, and you should start another market.
@PatrickDelaney Yeah this kinda of rule lawyering isn’t going to get you far around here. Some degree of ambiguity is part and parcel with manifold. I’m more than sure that the majority of bettors here are happy with OP’s resolution of the market in good faith.
Also anyone who’s taken physics is aware that the speed of light can change in medium, this isn’t new information to most of us.
@PatrickDelaney The question is not, "can the speed of light change in a medium?" Let's be super clear -- the question posed is, "*any* method of transmitting physical information faster-than-light is shown to be possible?" Any means, any. Presumably what you are referring to is high school physics, or some form of elementary physics? One of the things I remember most clearly from high school physics is the teacher going through student-submitted instructions on how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, wherein he followed the submitted directions with 100% precision, e.g. for Step 1. Put the knife into the peanut butter., he would just jam the peanut butter directly into the jar without opening it. Step 2. Spread the peanut butter on the bread, where he would just smear peanut butter and plastic haphazardly on all sides of an entire loaf of bread, etc... and so on. The most important part of how experimental science gets conducted is precision, and the entire body of academic physics is set up to reward precision in research via clarity and replicability. In this instance, I have brought new information to the marketplace of participants for those who were not previously aware, by taking time to look things up and clarify an ill-posed question, namely, that there has already been demonstrated the capability to slow light down in a medium such that even basic information transfer in an everyday medium will be faster than light. This is not covered to any degree of clarity in popular / high school physics. I believe that science-based markets on manifold should reward clarification and punish lack of clarity. You could call that, "lawyering," but I would say that's just fundamental experimental research, like Fischer hypothesis testing, if you can't disprove the null hypothesis, you just throw the whole experiment out and start over again. Lawyering would be more like saying, "no, that's against Manifold's rules." I'm not appealing to Manifold's rules and I recognize that ultimately @IsaacKing is going to adjudicate the marketplace and may even do so in bad faith...that's fair and understood.
@PatrickDelaney Again, "faster-than-light" is pretty much universally understood to mean "faster than 299,792,458 m/s".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light
You have not brought significant new information into this market. You have misunderstood (or at least claim to have misunderstood) a well-known term of art that was used in its appropriate context.
If I were to respond in kind, I would point out you never said that your usage of the word "medium" refers to the physics term, so I have to assume it's the normal adjective that means "bigger than 'small' and less than 'big'", which renders several of your sentences grammatically ill-formed and semantically meaningless.
Precision and clarity are indeed an important part of science, and it's good for people to communicate in ways that other people will understand without confusion and ambiguity. Long paragraphs of caveats and underlying definitions can make understanding harder, so it's useful for people discussing specific concepts to agree upon a single term to use for that concept. Due to the nature of how language evolves, those terms will often not be entirely new but instead be a repurposed word or phrase that already existed. People do not have to preemptively clarify the meaning of every homonym they use in order to be communicating clearly.
@IsaacKing I don't care, I'm not in the market anymore. However, I will point out that you said, "significant new information" not, "no new information." So I think your entire market is invalid and still think you should resolve it as N/A, to be a good sport, and I'm even saying this as someone not participating anymore. Good luck, thanks again for making yourself available to jump back on.
@PatrickDelaney the market creator said he means in empty space https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/is-fasterthanlight-travel-physicall#vI4xjJHVST0M6iufRIDs -- if other media counted, this would have resolved no in 1934 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation#History
@ArmandodiMatteo I think there's no need to reopen settled arguments from a year ago. :)