Mr. Oragahn wrote:Moff Tarquin wrote:Yeah, there's a part of me that worries that this whole discussion is equivalent to somebody trying to use the Twin Paradox as a reductio ad absurdum of Special Relativity. But at the same time, there's a reason why High-School level courses still use Newtonian Mechanics: it works almost all the time. It's only when you're dealing with ridiculously small or ridiculously large amounts of energy that it breaks down, and 50 MJ is a fairly reasonable amount of energy to be dealing with. The black box of the mass-lightener aside, the Newtonian approximation should work here.
The thing is, this exotic process manipulates the very nature of mass. It may not annihilate mass, but it might very well do something still involving extremely high amounts of energy for a relatively small gain.
Plus, technically, if light is the lightest "pseudo" matter there is, granting it this fantastic property of the fastest thing ever, lightening a subject might involve a paradox of trying to get an object closer to a luminous state (for a lack of better words) without ever actually becoming real light, not even a percent of it. If it were the case, perhaps we might be dealing with a simpler case, well, a more traditional one of mass conversion and we'd be back to the idea of storing light but not at the expense of losing structural integrity. The overall structure of a subject, say a ship, would need to be maintained, projected and emulated at a lower level of rest mass. Honestly, I'm thinking this is seriously bound to step out of Newton's sandbox.
Italics added.
1. The italicized passage is pretty deep. I don't know whether or not it impacts my points substantially, but it's deep.
2. Well, whether we jump out of Newton's sand box depends on the details of the mechanism of mass lightening. Of the two unambiguous examples of mass lightening in Star Trek, one of them explicitly mentions the use of a warp field to accomplish the lightening effect. Which means that we don't necessarily need anything as complicated as the maintenance, projection, and emulation of the entire ship. While a "mass lightening ray" (when taken at face value) appears to have multiple, specific, mutually exclusive effects, if Bob were to use his device to generate a technobabble "subspace warp field" around the big dumb object, the final state is no longer specifiable. So in one sense, you're right: the right kind of technobabble does take us out of Newton's sandbox. But only the right kind of technobabble. If the technobabble is in the ray, and gets "turned off" leaving the final state of the object "mass-lightened" simpliciter, we run into all of my paradoxes. But if the technobabble ends up being in the BDO, and is primarily used to sustain an enduring "field," we suddenly have options - one of which is the production of a fourth, unique reference frame that relates to the other three reference frames in a consistent way. Moreover, to maintain consistency with conservation of energy, we can always use the idea that the BDO's mass isn't lost, but rather merely masked by the "field." If both effects occur at once (production of a fourth reference frame and mass-masking effects), we can dodge my paradoxes completely. It's a mystery how force vectors change upon crossing the field, but we can hand-wave over that.
Perhaps, but if the energy doesn't come from the device, then where does it come from?
Maybe some of the mass lost gets turned into kinetic energy. But what we'd get from 900 kg being turned into energy is some 8.1e19 J. On such a solution, we have two extremes: 1) all of that energy becomes kinetic energy. But in that case, Alice and Chris would say that the BDO suddenly accelerates to relativistic velocities (Alice saying it went one way, Chris saying it went the other way) breaking the law of conservation of momentum. And God alone would know what Bob would say happened, since from his reference frame, the BDO has no kinetic energy to begin with! Or 2) 45 MJ of that becomes kinetic energy and the rest is emitted somehow from the BDO. On the simplest such option, the energy would be radiated omnidirectionally from the BDO, vaporizing Alice, Bob, Chris, and the Mass Lightener. And Alice's Ghost would say that the BDO went in one direction, Chris's ghost would say that it went in the other direction, and God alone would know what Bob's ghost would say (actually, unless there's a medium out there who isn't a complete fraud, God alone would know what any of these ghosts would say, but that's neither here nor there). The rather more complicated idea of a cloud of phantom energy is interesting, and we'll return to it in a moment or two.
The energy is stored into tons of particles and kept spinning within some fancy cyclotron? :P
Themselves, of course, having their mass lightened and... it's like a hall of mirrors.
Or more like a fractal. A four dimensional fiber optic maze.
It's a mess, is what it is. A mass-lightening ray simpliciter breaks physics. More exotic mechanisms can leave physics intact, but only by obscuring their actual nature in a fog of technobabble that allows them to have the effects of a mass-lightener without actually changing the target's real mass.
Oh, of course. The "magic" is some uber complicated piece of equipment that, to us, must be regarded as a black box. I don't require that you open the black box, I'm willing to accept it and its functions for the sake of argument. All I want to know is how it fits in with the things that aren't black boxes - big dumb objects, Alice, Bob, and Chris.
This horrible little pesky problem would be so quickly solved if we could pinpoint a universal center of coordinates for the system we live in, upon which all motions would be measured.
So we would get to know each people's real, absolute speed.
Yup. Such a universal set of coordinates would let us have a lot of cool things, as I have mentioned several times now. But one of the biggest ones would be FTL travel without time travel - something that Trek rejects because it explicitly allows time travel.
I guess that canon examples of "mass lightening" can be hand-waved away with subspace fields in trek. But what if they show up in Star Wars? What sense are we to make of them there?
EDIT: I bring this up because the new Disney canon is going to pick up Saxtonian nonsense, if only via osmosis, and that means that "mass manipulation" could soon be Star Wars canon.
