Fifteen1413

This is not a sexy journal. I just feel like I need to share this somewhere. Look elsewhere for the sexy. This is about theoretical physics.

I watched the Veritasum video Why The Speed Of Light* Can't Be Measured right about when it came out about three months ago, which is about the difficulties of measureing the quantity C, the one-way speed of light. All experiments we've conducted, and most you can devise, can not distinguish between a case where C, the one-way speed of light, is a constant 299,792,458 meters per second in all directions, or if C is half that in one direction and infinite in the return direction. We can only directly measure the total round trip, so as long as the total trip time is right, it could go slower one way and faster on return. This quantity is α, the two-way speed of light. This is the only thing we've been able to so far measure.

I haven't really been thinking about this very much, given that I'm an engineer and it has litterally zero impact on how you interact with the universe, by defintion. It's so unimpactful that you can't ever figure out if it's happining or not. So it's really a non-issue.

But I got a random and possesive brainwave recently, and I think I have an objection to the video. I don't think the content inside is wrong, or if it is it's wrong in a way I missed as well. I agree that we haven’t ever actually measured the 1-way speed of light, the case is laid out very convincingly. However, I believe we definitely could. I think the assertion that we can only ever measure the two way speed of light is incorrect. We can't now, but inside the laws of physics, it's possible.

I will illustrate with a thought experiment:

Say I threw an omnidirectional light-source into a non-rotating black hole. If the speed of light is constant, there’s no mystery as to what will happen next. It will accelerate towards the black hole, and if it’s a small black hole tidal forces will tear it apart when it gets too close, if it’s a large enough one it will drift towards the Schwarzschild radius and pass over. In either case, I would see the light from this perfect light source redshift away until it was out of sight, beyond low-frequency radio and past detection. It will have passed beyond the event horizon, named such because it’s the horizon of events, everything beyond it might as well be in a different universe, there will by definition never be anything that happens inside which effects anything on the outside in any way at all.

Let’s use a very large black hole for this to avoid spaghettification, say Sagittarius A* that we’ve somehow slowed down so it’s not spinning. Galactically challenging, but something possible under our current understanding of physics. I’m sure you could get this to work with a smaller one, but conceptually it’s just much easier and “do’h!” levels of obvious if we use a big one.

Say I have a stationary mesh sphere out at 3 times the Schwarzschild radius lined with 1800 extremely high sensitivity wide-spectrum 2 gigapixel 100,000 fps cameras, spaced out evenly around the circle (1800 isn’t important, the point is there are cameras in basically all directions). I drop the omnidirectional light-source into the black hole. Again, if the speed of light is constant, nothing weird happens. The cameras see the light source pass into the black hole, all of them detect something from gravitational lensing which could be checked against theoretical calculations for timings, redshifts, and magnitudes. It passes beyond the horizon and all the cameras see it fade from existence, the final snapshot of it redshifted into oblivion at the Schwarzschild radius. If I then drop 1800 light sources, directly out from each camera, again, no surprises, all the sources disappear, you would be able to calculate exactly what it’s supposed to look like and you’d get exactly what you’d expect. And if I then extend 1800 light sources with ruler marks on them, the rulers all disappear from detectability at the same length mark.

Okay. So, what do those three experiments look like if the speed of light isn’t constant in all directions?

Well, the omni-directional light source falls into the black hole, and it redshifts away into nothing. Except, well, not all the cameras are agreeing where the event horizon is anymore. After all, that faster light could get an awful lot closer to the center of the black hole before it couldn’t escape. The light the cameras get really aren’t agreeing with theory, some see gravitational lensing sooner or later than they should, and for longer; depending on how fast the asymmetric speed of light is, some of the cameras might be seeing it for an uncomfortably and immediately obvious length of time, so long that they could radio back that something weird was going on while it was ongoing and have people come and watch.

When they all drop the individual light sources… chaos. Each one measures that it takes a different length of time for their ball to reach the event horizon. Doesn’t matter if they can’t synchronize with the other cameras, they’re definitely synchronized with themselves. Each one will report that their light source took a different amount of time to disappear. This is in addition to all the wrong lensing and timing seen in the first experiment, which would still also be ongoing.

And then, they all extend their ruler light rods. Each would physically measure a different distance between themselves and the event horizon. It would be marked out. On a ruler. The light in the directions where the speed of light was faster would be able to reach further in to the black hole because their event horizons would actually be different in different directions. Light could get closer to the singularity and still escape in some directions than in other ones. A 5th grade science class could curate the experiment and get serviceable results. You could get new rods, spin the sphere slightly, and measure more points as many times as you like to get a very high resolution vector field of what the speed of light was in every direction.

This would not catch the specific case where the speed of light is the same in all directions except an insanely narrow beam direction with a range of 0. 000001 degrees. We’d probably miss that. But that’s just with this simple version of the experiment; I’m sure an experimentalist could come up with a better design which had either so high sensitivity that even if there is something weird in a specific femto-arcsecond it really effectively doesn’t exist or straight up infinite resolution. I’m just a mechanical engineer, and this is just a first pass.

I can’t see anything wrong with the theory behind this experiment. Requiring a non-rotating supermassive black hole to conduct is a bit of an added difficulty, this isn’t an experiment we’d actually be able to conduct any time in the next 100,000-ish years, but it’s not impossible that we might conduct it sooner from now than when anatomically modern humans first evolved. It has a lot of practical issues, but not theoretical ones. This is something that we could do without breaking our current understanding of the laws of physics. I’m a solid 99% confident this could work, though if a black hole researcher told me I was wrong I’d listen. I’m good at this but I’m not anywhere near ‘Studied astrophysics and worked 30 years in the field’ good. It wouldn’t be crazy if this was still wrong, but I think it holds up.

If you want one we could conduct possibly inside our lifetimes, I’ve got one for you too. I’m less sure of the theory behind it, but I’m pretty sure it would work, and it’s a whole lot closer to achievable. 50 years might be optimistic, but 150 isn’t, and 50 is probably edge of possible.

Take a humble linear particle accelerator floating in well-studied space. A giant, 300 km aluminum foil sphere surrounds it entirely, preventing almost all external muddling factors like sunlight and solar wind and some of the cosmic rays, though high energy ones will get through (just like 1800 cameras, 300 km is not important. It’s a big zone that’s been isolated from outside interference enough that really sensitive measurements can be made inside of it.) We know all the gravitational forces that are acting on it meaningfully, we’ve done a bunch of static runs to verify it naturally floats around as we expect and nothing funny is going on, that we’ve actually got it isolated well enough. We know exactly how it accelerates normally.

We put it dead center, and power it up. Maybe it’s got a fusion reactor, maybe we’ve strapped a bunch of horses to a giant dynamo and ship up filled batteries to it. Doesn’t matter, it’s got power. We know where it is, we know how much it weighs, we know how much power it has.

We tell it to fire out protons at 99.5% of the speed of light. Very achievable speeds for a reasonable modern linear accelerator. We’re measuring it to make sure they’re actually coming out at the right speed, because if we’re basing it on having the right amount of energy drawn that’ll never tell us anything useful. We’ve got speed measurement. And we’re not just making it right at the end of the accelerator, we are doing it there but we’re also doing it throughout, so it can adjust the amount of power it’s giving to them to keep them at 99.5% of the speed of light or very close if it’s overshooting or undershooting.

That clock and ruler (thus velocity measurement) is never going to tell us anything interesting, no matter what we do to it. Could be speed of light, could be ½ C and infinite. That’s not what we’re measuring. Frankly, we don’t care in the slightest. We’re just checking the speed so we can calculate how much thrust it should be producing, and what we’re watching is how fast the particle accelerator accelerates and how much charge is left in its battery.

As particles approach the speed of light, their masses increase. Effectively. They carry more and more kinetic energy – and momentum. At the speed of light, they have infinite. That’s why nothing can go the speed of light. So this thing is spewing high energy particles out the end as fast as it reasonably can, and every action has an equal and opposite reaction. This particle accelerator is, in effect, the world’s least practical rocket engine. Specific impulse of nearly 30,000,000 seconds, thrust measured in hundredths of a dyne.

But not measured at zero. And, let run long enough, you’ll be able to get a good idea of what the thrust coming out the end is. Once you’ve measured it once, put the particle accelerator back in the center, point it in a different direction, and fire.

If the speed of light is the same in all directions, each test will give you the same results (or at least results completely consistent with the calculations from actual speed, there will be some variability). If the speed of light is variable, 99.5% of the speed of light won’t have the same momentum everywhere, and thus produce differing thrust. Oh, it’ll have the same momentum from the relativistic effects to be sure, but it’s not like the Newtonian effects just stop. If the speed of light was half and infinite, the most desperate case, the relativistic effects demonstrate that it would take exactly as much energy to speed each 99.5% C particle up the next mm/s^2, but you’d have been passing through an awful lot more mm/s^2 on your way to 99.5% of infinity. At some stage, the energy required by pure normal momentum for the object would be more energy than your particle accelerator has, no matter how much that is. (This is why 99.5% was chosen, we can make particle accelerators that could give much higher thrust than that, normally 99.5% light speed should take a reasonablely small amount of energy to do for high-energy particle accelerators, but no so much that you’d need ridiculous variation to detect anything.) If you point it in the infinite direction, you’re never going to reach 99.5% of the speed of light, because you won’t have enough energy to get anything to any percentage of infinity ever. It will have an exit velocity of the roughly 298,500,000 meters per second which is what 99.5% of the speed of light equates to, but it’ll come out with way, way less kinetic energy and momentum, because it’ll only have the Newtonian effects, none of the relativistic ones. The momentum, and thus impulse, of something moving at 298,500,000 meters per second without relativity is way, way less than the impulse of something moving half that speed (because we’re saying the speed of light is halved in this direction) but getting it’s mass ‘effectively’ increased by a factor of 10 due to relativistic effects. In fact, that second case - half speed, 10x effective mass - would generate nearly 5 times the impulse. This would be something we could reasonably easily pick up. We could probably tell just from the battery readouts pretty quick.

Okay, so, that would work if it’s half and infinite, but there are a lot of other possibilities. It could be 299,792,457 meters per second in one direction and 299,792,459 meters per second in another! There would be a difference below which our instrumentation wouldn’t be able to measure. But, depending on the precision and accuracy of our equipment, there would be a difference above which we could. If the difference is smaller than half and infinite, like 2/3 and 2x, the difference will be much less pronounced, more like a 2-fold difference in impulse instead of 5-fold. But we could probably tell if it was putting out twice as much thrust in one direction. If it’s 95% and 105.53%, the thrust difference would be something like 7:9, but we could probably figure that out too. They’d have to be within a couple of percent, possibly less than 1%, before the difference would be too small to detect. And then we’d have truly measured the 1-way speed of light – with error bars, but there are error bars on every measurement ever made, and as our technology improved the error bars would shrink.

The only reason that I question if this is definitely a solution is that it’s possible particles just can’t go faster than 299,792,458 meters per second, and it’s got nothing to do with the speed of light. That’s secretly just the ‘speed of infinite particle push’, which is a different quantity. So even if the speed of light was higher in one direction, getting up to 298,500,000 meters per second would have exactly the same effect. It would be really weird that the speed of infinite particle push was exactly equal to the two-way speed of light and they had nothing to do with each other, but I suppose it could be possible. There might be other ways to verify that they do match up, for instance, if the speed of particle push is higher than the speed of light in some direction, which it would have to be if the one-way speed of light is variable, that should be detectable! The far receiver would definitely notice the particles get there first, even if their relative clocks said that a beam of light took the right amount of time. And, again, if the speed of infinite particle push varies with C in exactly the same way, you’re back to the original scenario where you’d be able to detect the group of particles that was secretly way farther from its local speed of light because of impulse differences. You’d have to be able to do one of the two. But I’m less confident that I fully understand the theory here because there are far more moving parts. I think I’m right, but I’m only 80% confident this one would work, and could be convinced otherwise by a competent non-expert.

Greetings,

I have found that many people recently have been praising my tallent for writing. It's very nice to see, but I feel like something might be getting lost here that I think should be mentioned, something that I fear may be negitively impacting people.

I have no natural writing ability. I was not born able to do this. In fact, I was far below average. I'm not trying to be glib here when I say I had none - In 9th grade, starting high school, I was called 'functionally illiterate' by my English professor. I scored one point above the line for developmentally retarded for vocabulary and spelling ability. It's hard to really get across how bad I was at writing at that time; I'm incapable of writing something incoherent enough. I had to ask people how to spell 3 letter words. I would get confused on how to spell words like 'how', 'them', 'our', 'dumb', etc. I was writing on maybe, charitably, a third-grade level. It would have been difficult to discern what I was even trying to say, let alone what I hoped it would mean.

I had a really good 10th grade English professor. I had them for all of 3 weeks, just until the first essay. She got my first essay, and told me that I was a poor fit for her class. She told me that my argument style was way, way more advanced than what she was teaching, and that my vocabulary would just catch up eventually. She recommended me to the advanced class.

Thus began my journey of actually learning how to write. I learned how to write. I was not gifted with language. I was explicitly the opposite. But with people who believed I was capable standing behind me, I tried. I pushed myself forward to not let them down. And it turns out, I happen to really, really like writing creative fiction and explaining technical processes through writing. So I wrote. And wrote. And wrote. Academic essays, technical papers, journal articles, short stories, and novels. Everything. All the time. For years.

What you see here is not the result of some God-given talent. What you see here is 8000 hours of practice. I went from not knowing how to spell the word 'how' reliably to winning my university’s undergraduate writing award in 4 years. This is a learned skill, top to bottom. It's something anyone could do, if they are willing to put in the time.

Sure, some people do have it easy. Some people were born with natural talent. And if they honed it, yeah, they’re going to be better than you or I ever will be. But a practiced average joe is going to crush an amateur talented tammy, every single time. Don’t ever let anyone make you feel like you can’t write because they’re better than you are. Everyone on earth had a better starting position than I did, and I’m hanging out comfortably inside of the top 1% now.

Anyone can write. There is no magic pouring from my pen. I am pure hard work and learned skill. You don't need talent. You don't need a gift for language. Anyone, anyone, can get to my level at least. Many will surpass me. You’re going to suck when you start, but everyone sucks when they start. It’s going to take you a year, maybe more, before you write anything you wouldn’t be embarrassed to have read aloud. And two or three before anyone else will think you’re any good. But it’s not outside of anyone’s reach. If I could do it, you probably can too.

Anyone can write. Anyone can write well.

Would anyone be intrested in joining a giantess and power-fantasy themed discord run by me, or are there already enough of those floating around? I don't want to tear away too much attention and split communities, and I don't know if you all are already part of something like that. Mine doesn't have to be your only, but I don't want to add something in if you're already in 6, that seems counterproductive.

The discord would have general discussion chanels, places to talk about my writing, a general writing advice chanel, some interactive community story projects lead by me, and other chanels as became aproprate.

If people would be intrested in something like that, please let me know.

So, it seems the people have spoken! The majority of people would like to see me put most of my time and effort into a continuous story/universe, and the vast majority of people would like to see some time spent doing so, with almost no one being against the idea entirely.

The point of this was to judge interest. I wouldn't have proposed it if I didn't want to do it. I'm probably going to stick to option 2 - something like half, I have too many other random ideas, at least for now - but clearly this is something people do want to see, so I am going to do it! Doing a more continuous universe is more work, so if people didn't want to see it I'd be stupid to add the overhead. But it seems like people do, so the project is a go.

I have no idea how good it will be, and I might abandon the project at some point. I'm not one for worldstate literature, I care much more for characters and events; If I find this to be too much of a hassle for my sexy girl fiction, then I might not keep it up. But I *do* like worldbuilding, and I think it could go really well, should we be so lucky.

I do want to dispel too much excitement and set expectations to a reasonable level. I do plan on writing more stories in general, but you still shouldn't expect a lot of them. I did great with one story every two weeks in the early part of this year, but I only managed to keep that up for two months. Which means I wrote more stories this year than any year before, but still, not exactly bleating out stories. 10 this year will be great, and with luck I'll get that to 12 or 13 next year, but I'm never going to be fast outputting. And, as I indicated, this is going to be a connected universe - not a single connected story. Think more MCU than LOTR. Elements will cross over, sometimes characters will be together, and everyone will follow the same rules, but it's not going to be one great continuous epic. I might do that at some point, but that's not what this is.

But, yeah. I'm going to do this project. Expect the first information documents on the universe and mythology in the next few weeks, and the first story by the end of this year, though probably not soon.

So, for the second part - updates. First, I just want to thank LarxGTS once again for the amazing picture of my OC Gwyn. It really means a lot to me. We already plan to do more collaborations in the future - but we don't have plans to do so. We agree we both want to but haven't scheduled anything. So that will happen, just at an indeterminant point in the future.

Second, the 2020 project. Definitely not going to continue at this stage. But the two stories that I started releasing parts of, Kitsune Breakout and Feed the Beast, will be finished at some point, probably by Spring 2021. I'm not going to have 26+ pieces of 5 stories like originally planned, but those two will be continued and completed. I will probably finish Feed the Beast first, but I'm not certain. And, should things improve on my end, I might try a 2021 project, or a 2022 project some point in the future. It did work for a short while!