[I changed the subject line to be more meaningful than "Digest #xxx" --
James]
> It is critical, especially in jump-capable vessels to have
> space-time as smooth as possible in and around the ship. The
> amount space-time is warped represents how much is not known
> about the ship's present position, or its destination.
> In general, "relativistic effects" means we become totally
> uncertain about everything; we can't "know" anything without
> altering the conditions upon which we "know" it.
I'm not sure what you mean by all this, but I think you may
be confusing space-time distortion with Heisenberg
uncertainty. The former is a relativistic effect, and the
latter a quantum mechanical one.
One of the beautiful features of Einstein's formulation of
special and general relativity is that the effects of
space-time distortion are deterministic, in the same sense
that classical mechanics is deterministic: If you have
complete information about the state of a system at time T,
you can perfectly calculate its state at all future times
T+t. (Note that the notion of time here *is* a little
confusing -- suffice it to say that any relativistic system
is completely causal, i.e. time flows forward only, and that
it is always possible to synchronize all the "local clocks"
to any causal "master clock", which you can then think of as
"the" clock...) Indeed, for any reasonably advanced society,
the calculations shouldn't be much more difficult.
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is a fundamental feature
of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics, unlike relativity,
is a completely non-deterministic theory: Even if you could
have complete information about the state of a system at time
T, you could only calculate the *probability* of the system
being in some other specified state at time T+t. (In fact,
for *any* state, the probability of the system moving to that
state is nonzero -- just so low that it will "never" happen
in the expected lifetime of this universe!). But
Heisenberg's principle says that you can't ever even
*acquire* complete information about the state of a QM
system. In particular, let the probability that a particle
has a given velocity be P(v), and the probability that it has
a given position be P(x). Then P(x)P(v) <= C, where C is a
magic constant. Thus, the more certain you are about *where*
a particle is, the less certain you are about where it's
going, and vice-versa.
Thus, the above-quoted statements probably should invoke QM,
or even QCD, the merger of QM with relativistics. However,
this opens up a whole 'nother nasty can of worms for the
gravitics theorist...
Comments or criticisms, anyone? I'm sure there's some real
howler lurking in my comments somewhere... :-)
Bart Massey
..[email removed]
..[email removed]
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