Further to “If spacetime is a superfluid, light speed could vary (that’s a new one in “Everything changes”!), Shaun Maguire explains at Quantum Frontiers,
Scharnhorst effect enables light to travel faster than in vacuum (c=299,792,458 m/s): this is about the grandaddy of all laws, that nothing can travel faster than light in a vacuum! This effect is the most controversial on my list, because it hasn’t yet been experimentally verified, but it seems obvious with the right picture in mind. Most people’s mental model for light traveling in a vacuum is of little particles/waves called photons traveling through empty space. However, the vacuum is not empty! It is filled with pairs of virtual particles which momentarily fleet into existence. Interactions with these virtual particles create a small amount of ‘resistance’ as photons zoom through the vacuum (photons get absorbed into virtual electron-positron pairs and then spit back out as photons ad infinitum.) Thus, if we could somehow reduce the rate at which virtual particles are created, photons would interact less strongly with the vacuum, and would be able to travel marginally faster than c. But this is exactly what leads to the Casimir effect: the experimentally verified fact that if you take two mirrors and put them ~10 nanometers apart, then they will attract each other because there are more virtual particles created outside the cavity than inside [low momenta virtual modes are inaccessible because the uncertainty principle requires \Delta x \cdot \Delta p= 10nm\cdot\Delta p \geq \hbar/2.] This effect is extremely small, only predicting that light would travel one part in 10^{36} faster than c. However, it should remind us all to deeply question assumptions.
After reading this, I hope that the next time you encounter an inviolable law of nature, you’ll apply the hacker mentality and attempt to strip it down to its essence, isolate assumptions, and potentially find a loophole. But while you’re doing this, remember that you should never argue with your mother, or with mathematics!
Mug’s eye view: Inviolable law of nature that has never been violated: If someone states an inviolable law of nature, someone else will come up with an apparent violation.
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I seriously don’t know exactly what point they were trying to prove in regards to memory, but as to the fact that memory, though it may be encoded on a material basis, is, ultimately, transcendent of any material basis,,,, well that Theistic position is well supported by the following:
it is now found that,,,
Yet supercomputers with many switches have a huge problem dissipating heat,,,
But the brain, though having as more switches than all the computers and routers and Internet connections on Earth, does not have such a problem dissipating heat,,,
Moreover, one source for the heat generated by computers is caused by the erasure of information from the computer in logical operations,,,
And any computer, that has anything close to as many switches as the brain has, this source of heat will become prohibitive:
Thus the brain is either operating on reversible computation principles no computer can come close to emulating (Charles Bennett) (which in a physical scheme would erase information anyway), or, as is much more likely, the brain is not erasing information from its memory as material computers are required to do, because our memories are stored on a ‘spiritual’ level rather than on a material level,,, Research backs up this conclusion,,,
To add more support to this view that ‘memory/information’ is not stored in the brain but on a higher ‘spiritual’ level, one of the most common features of extremely deep near death experiences is the ‘life review’ where every minute detail of a person’s life is reviewed:
Thus the evidence strongly supports the common sense conclusion that humans are not Turing Machines and that the memory of a person’s life is not stored on a physical basis but on a ‘spiritual’ basis!
Of related note to the second law’s relation to consciousness:
That consciousness did not ‘emerge’ from the entropic forces of the universe is perhaps most easily demonstrated by the ‘Quantum Zeno effect:
i.e. Why in blue blazes should conscious observation put a freeze on entropic decay in this universe, unless consciousness was/is more foundational to reality than entropy is? And seeing that entropy is VERY foundational to explaining events within space-time, I think the implications are fairly obvious that consciousness precedes the 1 in 10^10^123 entropy of the universe!
Quote, Verse, and Music:
Regarding the speed of light, I’ve sometimes (wildly) speculated what it would be like if the speed of light were actually infinite, but slowed by being absorbed and re-emitted by virtual particles of various wavelengths, and (drumroll) dark matter. 😉
-Q
I thought loopholes were only in the tax laws 😉