Faster-Than-Light Communication: Exploring Possibilities

[Jarfi]

1.
Say there are two Earth's and many light years apart. You have a very long pole which is connected to both Earth's. And one guy on Earth 1 starts pushing/tilting the other end forward. So the guy on Earth 2 feels the pole being pushed forward. guy on Earth pushes pole forward in morse code... Faster than light communication wtf??

2.
say you have a very long pole many light years long pointed out from the earth. It is stuck in a machine that can move it right and left. Let's make the machine move the pole 90 degrees right. Moving the pole takes only 1 second so next to the machine the pole went maybe 5 km p hour i don't know. But at the end of the pole many light years it went much much faster than light... Wtf?

Can anyone explains what happens? and the poles can't break or something like that we assume nothing goes wrong

 

[Dmitry67]

All mechnical movement - pushing, rotation etc - propagates at a speed of sound in matrial, in metals - about 3-5km/s, about 100000 times slower than c.

 

[JesseM]

Heh, was the title inspired by http://anonlinks.blogspot.com/2010/10/troll-science.html ). For a more detailed discussion, see here:

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SpeedOfLight/FTL.html#4

 

[Jarfi]

A ok so the pole would bend and when pushed the movement would travel like a wawe

 

[PAllen]

Actually, with modern measuring technology, the measurement of the delay between hitting one end of a 'rigid' ceramic rod and the other end responding can be done over distances like a meter. This is used to study certain bulk properties of ceramics.