Quote:
Originally Posted by Buddahaid
Ah, but the cause and effect is then instantanious and faster than light. FTL communication via the cans and string?
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No, because then you are in situation 1, where energy is traveling along the string in a wave.
What is 'possible', though, is to build a 'stick' of great length, but it's internal components must be completely static, and then you could kind of swing it back and forth and do a morse code over great distances. But there are two problems with this:
1) For this to be faster and more practical than light speed transmissions, ie radio waves and the like, the 'stick' would have to be of immense length. Off the top of my head, the minimum would have to be something like the distance from Jupiter to the sun, or Earth if you like, around 5-6 AU (500,000,000 miles or so). This alone makes it impractical to build and maintain, let alone finding the energy to move such a mass, and then stop it after only a few inches of movement.
2) Even the electron bonds of the component molecules are not static, and have some give to them. Thus you would get some accordion type effect within it's structure. Thus, it would not be a solid object, but a string transmitting waves.
This type of transmission could only be of the morse code type, 1's and 0's, complex data streams would be practically impossible.
Nothing is technically moving faster that light, aside from the information contained in a forward/back position.