Bogie Flats wrote:
Bad Wigins wrote:
I didn't say angular velocity. Why would I try to express that in m/s units? What I plainly meant was the instantaneous speed of the edge of the saucer relative to its surroundings, i.e. Earth. The speed that, if it released galactic torpedoes from it, would fling them on a tangent line at Earth at that speed.
I already hinted at how that might be - around the hill. If we can view time as complex, why not velocity? As long as the imaginary value of v is nonzero, v^2/c^2 can never be 1, because c is a real number. There are many continuous paths through the complex plane from, say, (.1c, 0) to (1.41c, 0) that wouldn't push the Lorentz expression to absurdly huge absolute values.
Assuming such angular velocities were possible, how would these saucers "degauss" themselves? The magnetic flux densities of such saucers moving through the earth's magnetic field would be enormous - like orders of magnitude higher than an aircraft carrier crossing the poles during a solar storm. They would need a degaussing platform the size of Ethiopia just to keep from tipping over whenever someone opened a refrigerator door. There is no way such a saucer with performance characteristics could be built, much less operate.
well, again we see the usefulness of complex values for velocity. When the imaginary component is nonzero, then there is no unique solution to the Lorentz expression, because complex numbers have two square roots.
This means Earth's magnetic field can't tell how big the saucer is, or how much mass, or its time scale. All these properties have two values! If the aliens tweak the velocity right, e.g. by reducing the real component to 0, then these two values will be equal and opposite, and the UFO will interact with the magnetic field in equal and opposite ways, canceling out any effect.
So when they're hanging in midair, seemingly not moving but also seemingly spinning both clockwise and counterclockwise, is when they're degaussing.