I’m just in from an early morning walk around the streets of Aosta, enjoying a brisk spring morning. The streets at this hour are largely empty and the Sun lights the nearby peaks. We have a heavy session of papers on this last day of the conference, and we had an even longer day yesterday, followed by my public lecture at the Aosta town hall last night. Following the talk, Giancarlo Genta, his lovely wife Franca, and Guido Cossard, the assessore of cultural affairs (who turns out to be an astronomy buff and something of an expert on archaeoastronomy), took me on a walk around town looking at medieval and Roman sites. We wound up having a late night beer and I didn’t get in until 1:30.
This is a travel day, as I change hotels in preparation for tomorrow’s flight from Milan. So I’m going to hold any of the discussion about the papers yesterday, which were so rich that I’d prefer to get into them when I have more than a few minutes. In particular, the solar sail sessions opened my eyes to a signficant problem in sail missions. Run a sundiver mission near the huge gravity well of our star and you experience effects including frame-dragging and other consequences of General Relativity that can have a serious impact on where your sail winds up going. The effect is particularly noticeable for fast, long missions and hence of interest to us here. More on this when I can — I hope I’ll have a good Internet connection in Milan.
yes sir! as i expected.we can all probe more deeply and have an excellent discussion or two when you get back and have time! glad that you seem to be having a good time and safe trip back my friend!!!!! hope i can someday have an expierience like that! all the very best george
Hi Paul and George;
George, I am happy to see that you are back with frequent posts at Tau Zero.
It is indeed interesting to consider general relativistic effects on high velocity systems especially special relativistic systems. Such reminds me of the return of the human crewed long flight duration interstellar space craft that came back to the 24th century Earth, or whatever, in the original Sci-Fi movie series, “The Planet of the Apes”.
Perhaps for macroscopic special relativistic systems, some sort of general relativistic effects can be made manifest in a controlled manner whereby the space craft can undergo novel or exotic transport effects, perhaps based on general relativstic gravatic or general relativistic electromagnetic effects.
My hope is that in consideration of the general relativistic effects on Sun Diver space craft in terms of reference frame dragging and the like, we may advance our knowledge of special and/or general relativity and perhaps even create a new theory referred to as special-general relativity.
Now I am aware that special relativity deals with inertial reference frames while general relativity deals with accelerated reference frames, however, I have often been intreagued by the prospect that reference frame rotation and distortion effects for highly special relativistic systems might somehow lead to novel kinematical or topological manipulations of space time. If special relativistic macroscopic objects have a slight higher dimensional space or space time extension, I would expect that special relativistic reference frame rotation and distortion would effect such higher dimensional topological characteristics also.
Perhaps such special general relativistic effects can be utilized to teleport an object forward or backward in time, produce some sort of space time warp, a multiple space time connectivity and the like.
Alternatively, perhaps magnetic, electric, and/or electromagnetic field patterns emmited by the space craft can be minipulated in a general relativistic sense via some sort of the proposed special general relativistic effects and/or the higher dimensional extension of such fields, however small such extensions may be. The fact that we have not observed sub-atomic particles and photons, or whole atoms and molecules, undergoing such exotic transport effects might be due to their high degree of symmetry, especially for massive particles, which display a high degree of rotational symmetry.
Alternatively, perhaps there is a certain 3-D spatial limit in the size of an object that must be loosely met before such special general relativistic effects become manifest, or perhaps such requires a certain macroscopic rest mass along with the weak gravitational fields produced by the macroscopic object such as a space craft.
I would write a lot more on this subject here, however, I do not want to hog this thread. I am however enamored by the effects of reference frame dragging and other general relativistic effects pointed out in the above article by Paul. There has just got to be some good use for such effects.
Paul;
That photo with the mountains in the back drop is beautiful.
Regards;
Jim