Light does vary in speed by a lot. I think the normal measured variation is 0.00000000000001 percent c.
Wow. I was not aware of that; thank you.
Your opinion of what is odd is obviously different to mine. Psychology isn't a subject I know much about (though I have my opinions) but from what I can see the reason you think of these as odd is because of the laws you formulated for yourself while growing up.
Fair enough; my personal idea of "odd" is different than probably 95% of the population.
When I call something "odd" in this respect I'm referring to what most (>66%) of the population regard as "odd" based on normal activities and observations in every day life.
For about 20 years now, we've grown up with G.R. as a given, with adults having learned enough of it
in this country that they understand it does strange things in strange situations. In other countries that level of learning isn't there, and the concept of "odd" differs.
... but I find you correcting me patronizing since I wasn't referring to them as they are completely out of context for this discussion!
Fair enough. I was not trying to be patronizing, and I apologize for it.
Mass can't reach c. Mass and information can't exceed c.
Right. One of the big surprises for me in physics was that light
can travel faster than C, and relatively easily. Apparently (if I remember correctly), in a wave guide you can get the light waves to twice the speed of C if the information carried by those waves drops to half C; apparently the actual constant is C squared, not C itself.
The point was that while you cannot exceed C while staying in normal space, nothing prevents you from doing odd things with space. Warping space was one of the things that I had read of; you indicated that it turned out not to work. Massive spinning objects (hello rotating super massive black holes) was another; you just indicated that the power consumption is ZPM-level (sigh, no stargates.) Wormholes are an often discussed idea, but what I've read indicates that the current belief is that they are probably either ultra-rare, unstable, self-collapsing, or just plain "untravel-able" by anything bigger than a photon (so at best they can transmit information, not matter).
So the only thing left may be an M-space bridge, but it would have to be portable and able to run both ways.
Please stop using the term "assume." Theory is a preferred word.
Now we're into nitpicking. "Assumptions", to me, are what you place at the start of any theory. Given those assumptions, the theory states what is predicted.
S.R. and G.R. each made two assumptions; then, based on those assumptions being true, some things come out to be true. The assumptions of S.R. are untestable -- you cannot get a true inertial reference frame, but it turns out that the predictions of S.R. match local observations for non-accelerating reference frames. G.R., on the other hand, DOES match predictions to observations, so the presumption is that the two assumptions made by G.R. are in fact true.
(as a side note: S.R. is not the only theory that manages to match observation and prediction. Lorenz, if I recall correctly, came up with a different set of assumptions that also match, and turns out to be 100% equivalent to S.R., but has very different assumptions about
why and what's happening than S.R. does. For example, does an object only appear to change size with speed, because the observer cannot see identical instants at different locations, or is there in fact a true reference frame, and objects really do change in size, but since your rulers also change, you cannot tell.)
That is what the term "assume"/"assumption" means to me. If it has a different meaning to you, then lets agree to disagree.
