Okay, so I know about as much about physics as friend14, the only difference being I never claimed to know anything about physics and to be frankly honest I don't really care about physics that much. It's not one of my "hot-button" issues. If someone wants to make a fool of themselves regarding physics, it doesn't rile me up.

But I was thinking about something today. Actually, I was thinking about Portal, then this idea kind of sprang from that. I was thinking about a way to get information from point a to point b instantaneously, like a portal would be capable of. Have you ever seen those things where five balls are suspended from strings next to each other, so that when you lift the ball on one of the ends and let go, that it crashes into the row of balls and the one on the far end gets knocked out seemingly instantaneously? Well, it kinda works like that. I've heard it said that whenever you move, you affect every particle in the universe at the same time. In a way, that makes sense to me.. it's kinda like that ball contraption.

So I was thinking.. what if you could make a material so dense that there is no gap at all between the "stuff".. it would be like shoving the nuclei of a bunch of atoms together so that they were touching. You could form a "cable" out of those smushed-together nuclei, so that when you hit the one on the far end, they all hit each other and thus exert a force on the next one instantaneously since there's no space between them.

How plausible is this?

It would be a black hole and everything nearby would be destroyed

But aren't neutron stars made out of that kind of material? They aren't black holes but they're close.

And keep in mind this 'cable' could theoretically be very small in diameter..

Yes and a teaspoon full of dust from a neutron star weighs 2 tons I think? Not plausible for working with I don't think...

More than 2 tons.

There's really no reason to have a teaspoon's worth of the substance in a single location though.. If the physics behind the theory actually works, then the cable could be very, very thin.

As far as I know that would be as instantanious as giving signals with a flash light. Information can't travel faster than light.

Quantum physics allows information to be passed instantaneously.

Freaky stuff - it's to do with transferring spin iirc.

Oh, and the thing you're talking about is called a Newton's Cradle.

'Squishing nuclei together so there isn't any space inbetween' is nuclear fusion, and we haven't any way to produce enough energy to initiate this reaction. The nuclei wouldn't stay squished together, this super-dense cable thing would just be a very long, very thin, very powerful fusion reactor.

Information being sent instanteously is not by spin transfer. Spin is an intrinsic quantity that is always conserved. You're thinking of quantum entanglement. Einstein called this 'spooky action at a distance'.

Well there you go then

Quantum fyzzix is mind bendingly funky.

Isn't that faster than light communication?

Yep.

*communicates with Martyn in a faster-than-light fashion, for reals*

Assuming you could take advantage of quantum entanglement, doesn't that just mean you could send one blip of information to anywhere instantaneously? Because if it's more than one blip of information, then the bottleneck is the thing that *sends* the blips. 2 blips of information would be sent not instantaneously, but however quickly the blip-maker could make a second blip..

I heard it weighs as much as a mountain

heh... sorry. i have nothing to ad to this thread.

haha that's what I should have said.. good call

According to Wikipedia, a teaspoon of the matter would weigh 100 million metric tons.