What is the significance of space with a permittivity less than 1?
Speed of light becomes faster than "c"
What else?
While I do not like resurrecting dead threads, this was way too juicy to let go.
All of the cool sci-fi stuff seems to start happening at permittivity <1.Lets assume a bubble of <1 permitivity space:
Dielectric isolation:Because permittivity is a function of dielectricity, voltage/charge would be less likely to migrate across the bubble, and tending to conserve charge inside the bubble.
Radio signal compression:Radio transmissions entering this bubble would be up-shifted (low-frequency signals from outside would be shifted up in frequency as they enter the bubble, and be shifted down as they leave the bubble. A hypothetical signal of 1khz in normal space could appear as 1mhz inside the bubble.
This lets us exploit Shannon–Hartley bandwidth/information law, because now we can now pack 1mhz transmissions into what would appear in normal space to be a 1khz carrier. IE: encoding more data in a carrier than would normally be possible in regular space alone.
(I am unsure what the transmission velocity of these waves would be, but I suspect that the EM wave packet is conserved by stretching whilst retaining its own >C velocity.)
Refraction:Due to the upshift, waves approaching the bubble an angle would experience a negative refraction index, and would be largely bent around the bubble.
This would make that region of space largely invisible to microwaves at low excitation and largely invisible to visible light at high excitation.
Gravity/inertia:In order to conserve energy under E=MC^2, the apparent mass of objects inside the bubble will have to decrease opposite to the velocity of light.
Because of this, the mass and inertia of anything inside the bubble must decrease proportional to the increase in C.
Rate-of-time:The rate of time changes inside the bubble change would appear identical to gravitational time dilation (I think). Objects inside the bubble might experience 1 minute while the outside world experiences several hours.
Follow-up questions:There are probably even more effects that have yet to be considered....
Now the follow-up question to all this is, what means do we have of altering the permittivity of free space electrically? (pulsed opposed magnetic fields and high voltage impulses would be the logical first lines of experimentation.)
And the second question would be, is how could we design experiments to detect this change in permittivity of space (LC circuits, crystal oscillators, accelerometers, fiber optic delay-lines, spectroscopic measurement, refraction lensing?)
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Topic: Permittivity less than 1 (Read 1470 times)
