Posts tagged with "FTL":

Quantum Entanglement

Oh what a tangled state we weave,
When first we practise to deceive!

(With apologies to Sir Walter Scott)

Quantum Entanglement. Spooky action at a distance. Quantum teleportation. Instantaneous transfer of information. Oh, man, does the science media love to talk about this. As does everyone who read a few articles and starts thinking of the wild possibilities. But quantum mechanics is a very, very tricky subject, which may be why I've held off on talking about it until now. No doubt someone will find something wrong with what I say, because I don't have any sort of advanced degree in the subject, and hoo boy is it complicated. Today, though. we're just going to talk about entanglement, one of the fun aspects of quantum mechanics that doesn't really mean what most people think, in its simplest form (because it gets complex fast)...

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The Physics of Mass Effect

If you haven't played any of the Mass Effect games, you really should. However, sometimes the physics of the very wonderfully developed fictitious future galaxy doesn't quite hold up. In this case, the very effect they've named the games after. Now, I'm not going to discuss Element Zero or the idea of manipulating mass (which is the titular Mass Effect), but rather how this manipulation doesn't make possible many of the things they claim it does. But first, let's start with a primer for those of you whop haven't played the games, or didn't pay a whole lot of attention to the sciency stuff in them:

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