RE: starship-design: Wild thoughts

["L. Clayton Parker" <lparker@cacaphony.net>]

Steve,

This last response of yours reminds me of something that has been nagging at
me for a few weeks now.

> -----Original Message-----
> One amusing feature of relativistic kinematics is that while one
> photon is massless, two or more photons treated together as a
> system usually aren't (unless they are all traveling in exactly
> the same direction).  So, for example, if you could create a
> fiber-optic ring and pump a large amount of laser light into it,
> you would make it heavier; ...[clip]


It seems to me that there isn't any real difference between a supermassive
ring rotating at the speed of light and a great deal of energy rotating at
the speed of light. Although it would probably require more energy than we
can possibly generate to actually produce the sorts of space warps predicted
by theory, I would think that we should be able measure some effect inside
the ring of modern accelerators. Has anybody ever checked for some
measurable phenomenon such as frame dragging or such?

Lee Parker