10,000x light speed is about warp factor
9.9
Star
trek uses technobable - not jargon.
Their definition of warp factor depends on
what episode you are watching, so warp factor 9.9
does not mean
anything.
what do photons weigh at those
g-forces?
It is hard work trying to identify a meaningful
question in there.
Star trek is reasonably consistent about
warp factor being
a velocity. 10,000x light speed is
also a velocity. g-forces are caused by
acceleration -
the rate of change of velocity. If something were
travelling at
10,000x the velocity of light, its
velocity would be constant, so the rate of
change of
velocity would be 0. 0 acceleration means the g-forge
is 0. Weight
is the force of Earth's gravity acting on
a mass. At the Earth's surface,
weight is about
9.8 Newtons / kilogram. The mass of a photon depends
on its
colour. The formula you need is:
m = h / lc
h is Planck's constant
(6.6x10^-34 Js).
c is the speed of light (3.0x10^8 m/s).
l is the
wave length. The wave length of green light
is around 5.5x10^-7 m.
Put
those together, and a photon of green light
has a mass of 4x10^-36 kg. The
weight of that photon
is about 3.9x10^-35 Newtons at the surface of the
Earth.
would the photons create their own
cavitation black
holes?
That really is confused. Photons travel at the speed
of
light. The do not travel at 10,000x the speed of light.
In Juan Yin's
experiment, there are two entangle photons
16 km apart. Describing the
polarisation of the photons
in English is not easy. Before you open the box,
Schrödinger's cat is neither alive, nor dead but in a
superposition of both
states. Likewise before you measure
the polarisation of one of the photons, it
is neither
up nor down, but in a superposition of both states.
When you open
the box, you either find a live cat or a
dead cat. Likewise when you measure
the polarisation of
a photon, it is either up or down.
The fun part of
Juan Yin's experiment is that
there are two entangled photons. After you
measure
the polarisation of one photon, the other photon
is no longer in a
superposition of polarisation states.
Its polarisation is the opposite of the
first photon.
Somehow the results of measuring the first photon
change the
state of another photon 16km away.
Pretend this information is carried for one
photon to
the other by magic ghost tribbles. Juan Yin's
experiment shows that
if magic ghost tribbles exist,
their speed is at least 10,000x the speed of
light.
I think a part of your question refers to
relativistic mass
increase of matter. The mass of
a physical object depends on its velocity. If
you
plug a velocity faster than light into the appropriate
formula, the mass
is an imaginary number. If you try
to do an experiment to find out what that
means, you
find you need an infinite amount of energy to accelerate
a physical
object up to the speed of light. As most
people cannot afford an infinite
electricity bill,
they have to give up before their test object even gets
to
the speed of light.
If you try to apply that formula to a photon, you
do
not get anything useful. Photons only have one speed:
the speed of light.
You
know the mass of a photon when it is
going at the speed of light - remember
green photons
have a mass of about 4x10^-36 kg. If you use the
formula
backwards you can get the mass of a photon
if its velocity were 0. The result
is 0 kg, for any
colour of photon.
"Aha", you say. "I may not be able to
afford enough
electricity to accelerate a brick up to the speed
of light, but
what if I start with something that is
already going at the speed of light? I
can test
what an imaginary mass means! If I drop a brick down
a well, it gains
energy - goes faster. I am going to
drop a green photon down a well." The bad
news is
that does not work as you had hoped. The green photon
does gain
energy, but it cannot gain velocity as it
can only travel at the speed of
light. Instead, it
changes colour and gets bluer - and its mass
increases.
What about magic ghost tribbles? If they actually
exist,
there is no reason to assume that they use
the same formula for mass as a brick
- after all, photons
don't. Also, you would need to invent a machine that
measures the mass of a magic ghost tribble. Good luck
with that.
Next
up: Cavitation. When you spin a boat's propeller
really fast, the propeller
leaves the water behind
and creates bubbles. The bubbles later collapse with
a
bang and cause a shock wave that damages the propeller.
I am not sure what
cavitation is doing in the same
sentence as photons and black
holes.
There are some ways to squeeze your question into
something that
has an answer. Photons have mass.
Put enough mass in a small enough space and
you get a
black hole. 'Small' photons have a bigger mass than 'big'
ones.
Photons do not really have a size. If you know
the exact mass of a photon, then
the photon is an
infinitely long wave. If you restrict a photon to
a practical
length, you cannot measure its mass with
complete accuracy. The smaller the
space where a
photon can be, the greater the uncertainty in the
mass. There is
half an excuse for pretending
a photon is one wave length long. Now that we
have
a size and a mass, we can use the formula for the
Schwartzschild radius
of a black hole:
r = 2 G m / c^2
r is the Schwartzschild radius
(the name is black
shield, not child).
G is the gravitational constant
(6.7e-11Nm^2/kg^2).
c is the speed of light again.
Put enough mass
inside the radius, and you get a
black hole. If we set l (wave length of a
photon)
to 2r, the least massive photon that would be a
black hole would have
a mass of 2.7x10^-8 kg, and a wave
length of 8.1x10^35 m. That mass may look a
bit small,
but express it as an energy, 2.4x10^9J, and you can see
the
problem. A really big ultra-high energy cosmic
ray is about 50J (40,000,000
times the energy of a
particle at LHC). Pretending that a photon is
about one
wave length long is a small step compared
to using equations at energies 10^15
times bigger
than the experiments that have been used to test
them.
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