Science Forums 2

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by ErlyRisa

but like a game of Chinese Whispers... I can tell my foot to move... faster than what a light beam would take to reach it...

The game of Chinese Wispers – also called “telephone” or “rumor” – is simply a demonstration of how information can become distorted in the retelling. One person recites a message to another, who recites it to another, etc., then the last person recites the message to the first, who compares them to see how they changed. Obviously, this means of communication – which is not a bad analogy for how signals travel in a human (or presumably a bigfoot) body – is much, much slower than light.

I believe what ErlyRisa is suggesting is the “long, rigid stick” scenario, which ask, if I push on one end of a long rigid stick, won’t someone on the end immediately feel it, or at least feel it before the light image of me pushing it occurs.

Practically the answer is no. In ordinary materials, the end of a long stick doesn’t experience a push on its opposite end until a “pressure wave” traveling at the speed of sound in that material reaches it. In a material we think of as very rigid, such as steel, the speed of sound is 5000 to 6000 m/s, or about .00002 time the speed of light.

In principle, the stick could be made of some “super material” (such “neutronium” or “quarkium”, degenerate matter equivalent to a giant atomic nucleus or a giant neutron), but even then, it would still be made of fundimantal particles interacting via bosons limited to the speed of light (in this example quarks interacting via gluons), so could only approach, never match or exceed, the speed at which the signal could be sent using light.