Whilst doing nothing of the slightest interest, I came up with this idea. It has two purposes.
Mechanically speaking, a rail-gun, capable of near c velocities would be capable of moving a sun, as the object fired increases in mass to a near infinite quantity. The objects are to be fired along a path that is a very close near-miss to the sun in question. In this manner, repeat etc etc.
First purpose is most trivial, being a way to annoy the hell out of horoscope writers, where Jupiter turns out not to be in the House of Aquarius, cos those stars are now somewhere else and they now spell out "Eat at Joe's".
Second purpose if elder god baiting, imagine Chulthu waking up, seeing the stars are right and then all of a sudden, they aren't any longer. Most vexing.-- not_morrison_rm, Apr 11 2016 Just a prank, bro https://www.youtube...watch?v=xQ2WrglmsJk [bungston, Apr 11 2016] Just my childish online poop-tossing website http://www.c4045183...ap'npoop/index.htmlcan't be highbrow all the time.. [not_morrison_rm, Apr 12 2016] I understand that a gun which shoots a star is called a sun-beam.-- Loris, Apr 11 2016 I have nothing to say about this idea, but the first word intrigued me and I used a halfbakery view to ask a question.
[not_morrison_rm], of your 350 ideas, only 66 have used the word Whilst, around 19%. Honestly I was expecting this to be closer to 95%, and I think you should work to rectify the situation.-- mitxela, Apr 11 2016 Tinkering with suns is a known method for genocide - choose your targets with care.-- normzone, Apr 11 2016 The bun is actually for mixtela's suggestion.-- bungston, Apr 11 2016 Of course the star images we see are as many years old as the number of lightyears away from us the stars were at the time. So for all we know, you've been using this device for centuries and we just haven't seen the results yet.-- Ander, Apr 12 2016 Hmmm, more of a case of fiction writers using "when the stars are right" without thinking that some time in the future we can move them* about. Would need some trial and error, one star in the wrong place and you get Chulthu left knee appearing, not a thing to show your maiden aunt, however many times removed**.
And while I'm on the topic, this might give some answer to the Fermi paradox, as there's bound to be collateral damage with all those near C projectiles wizzing about, displacing suns, dragging the planets with them. Could all the be put down to the Feringhi doing a spot of celestial advertising.
*The stars, not the writers.
**The aunt, not Chulthu, but possibly the knee-- not_morrison_rm, Apr 13 2016 It would be useful to know the Halfbakery average for "Whilst"-usage so as to have something to compare this against. One data point - only 3.77%* of my ideas use the word "whilst", so [not_morrison_rm] is about 5 times whilstier than me.[*] Although I'm worried now that that percentage includes occurrences of "whilst" in annotations.-- hippo, Apr 13 2016 I don't get the whole infinite-mass at light-speed thing.
Sounds as though speeding an object up to C creates the mother of all singularities and would suck in the whole universe....that can't be right.-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Apr 13 2016 You can't accelerate an object up to c - that's the point.-- hippo, Apr 14 2016 That wasn't a question.-- Voice, Apr 14 2016 // You can't accelerate an object up to c //
Wanna bet ?-- 8th of 7, Apr 14 2016 hmmm... could a magnetic field be made to spin faster than the speed of light since it has no mass?-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Apr 24 2016 I would think so. By the arc length formula, if you go arbitrarily far from the source, the tangential velocity increases to arbitrary values, linearly.
Also, consider that changes in the magnetic field propagate outward from the source at c. Therefore, any rotating magnetic field is twisted (though, especially for slow rotations, this is only apparent if you look sufficiently far out). So what's really going on is that the change in the magnetic field vector you experience at a given point is radiated directly toward you from the source, which is analogous to shining a laser pointer at the moon and wiggling it back and forth to send the dot across the moon's surface at speeds possibly higher than c (which is commonly known to be perfectly possible).
What really matters, though, is that no information is allowed to travel faster than c. Mass inherently carries information with it. The laser dot on the moon doesn't (tangentially, which is the direction in which it exceeds c). Does the magnetic field? I think not, because it's radiated from its source, rather than actually spun around tangentially—it just looks that way. (There may be disturbances in it that get spun, but those are really separate magnetic fields superimposed on the first and interacting with it, which separately radiate outward at c from their own sources.)-- notexactly, Apr 24 2016 //C isn’t object oriented.//
So the rail-gun has a preprocessor.-- pertinax, Apr 25 2016 Very nice walkthrough there, [notexactly]-- bungston, Apr 26 2016 Yes, thank you that helped me wrap my head around it very nicely.
...and it makes me wonder, if disturbances in a rotating magnetic field propagate outwards at the speed of light, does the vortex effect retain the field strength as it propagates, or does the strength drop off by the inverted square of the distance?
Also, if magnetic fields from two separate point sources converge, would there not be a tangential interference which would itself propagate in a straight line faster than light since the analogy would be similar to the laser pointer waggled at the moon?
If so, could a particle not be trapped between these two converging waves and made to surf faster than C?
...or did I just reinvent the LHC?-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Apr 29 2016 random, halfbakery