Faster than light travel.

[Hubbe]

Travelling at FTL speeds is not possible. Not in this universe.

Not without breaking some fundamental laws of physics.

So either we find a way around them (e.g. by making Light travel faster)
or we break those laws, making sience as we know it, ALL WRONG.

My god I love physics

Or wait... We could potentially reach speeds close to c (c meaning the speed of light for you non-physics people) but we'd get all kinds of wierd paradoxes... We'd arrive before we started and shit. It would be wierd.


But if we find a way to make light go faster... It's possible to go faster than light travels normally... but we can't go faster than light actually goes without breaking physics.

And people wouldn't like that.

 

[Outright Villainy]

You're right in that changing the distance doesn't affect the speed of an object, so really the answer is no; nothing can go FTL.

However, imagine this:

Ship A wants to go to Planet A. It is currently 6 billion kms from Planet A. Ship A powers up their space-warping-drive, and arrive at Planet A in 1 second. Ship A did not technically move, but it did go through 6 billion kms in 1 second, which is an apparent 2C.

Again, you're right, that ship did NOT move faster than the speed of light, but it did cover the distance so in effect that's all that really matters.

Oh, I know that, I'm just a sucker for semantics, he did say faster than light travel.
Warping space seems far too energy consuming to be viable too though. I read somewhere before (so i could be wrong) that theoretically it'd take about a quarter of a solar mass to make one of them wormhole things... We're not going to be seeing one at any rate. I guess it could be possible.

Edit: while we'll never go faster than light, the universe is laughing at us as it can expand faster than light. What really bakes my noodle is that if an object a huge distance away was in a part that was expanding faster than your part, from the reference frame of the object, the light coming off it will never reach us (it can't catch up with us)
The speed of light is the same in all reference frames however, so in our reference frame the light should get here.
I haven't studied this though, so i'm probably missing something like expansion behaving differently to relativistic frames...

 

[DazBurger]

If only RAKtheundead was here, he'd have an answer.


OP: No, it's fundamentally impossible, but I believe it is possible to get very close to the speed of light.

Which is pretty fucking fast, so I wouldn't mind settling for that.

I'm no physicist by the way, and there's no telling what might be possible in the future, but I'm just going by what contemporary physics deems to be possible.

BUT! Accoring to who is it "fundamentally impossible"?
Scientist, who also belived that Earth was flat.. Or the center of the universe? We even believed that atoms was the smallest particle in existence.
Every law of physics known to man, is basicly guessing. Ofc its based on some math, but that math dosent include what we do not know.


Juuust think about it, if the fastest speed there is, is the speed of light, what happens to light when it gets caught by a black hole? According to the laws of physics, it SHOULD accelerate.. :/

 

[Axolotl]

Scientist, who also belived that Earth was flat..

No mainstream scientist has ever believed the world was flat.

But I agree with the cental message of your post. Science doesn't ever say something is impossible merely that we know of no way of achiveing it yet.

 

[yoshimickster]

Here's the thing folks, how do we know it's impossible? WE'VE NEVER DONE IT! We can't say it's possible nor impossible if we have no substantiated proof.

 

[Outright Villainy]

BUT! Accoring to who is it "fundamentally impossible"?
Scientist, who also belived that Earth was flat.. Or the center of the universe? We even believed that atoms was the smallest particle in existence.
Every law of physics known to man, is basicly guessing. Ofc its based on some math, but that math dosent include what we do not know.


Juuust think about it, if the fastest speed there is, is the speed of light, what happens to light when it gets caught by a black hole? According to the laws of physics, it SHOULD accelerate.. :/

Ah, but black holes have such huge mass that gravitaional warping of space-time would put the light right back in there, all paths lead to further in.
(by the way, einstein proposed gravtaional dilation back in general relativity over a hundred years ago. And yes, it's well proven. ^^)

 

[Visulth]

Snip

Yes, but would shrinking vast amounts of space be plausible?

Warping space seems far too energy consuming to be viable too though. I read somewhere before (so i could be wrong) that theoretically it'd take about a quarter of a solar mass to make one of them wormhole things...

Yeah, I have no idea how much energy it might take to change the shape of space. I have no idea how one might even do that. But it's happening right now. Space expansion is happening everywhere and seems to find the energy to do it.

Maybe space expansion can happen naturally but space contraction takes more energy?

No idea, just food for thought.

 

[Visulth]

Juuust think about it, if the fastest speed there is, is the speed of light, what happens to light when it gets caught by a black hole? According to the laws of physics, it SHOULD accelerate.. :/

No, that's not right. Things at the speed of light don't operate by "Newton Mechanics".

For example:
Car A is travelling South, at 100 km/h.
Car B is travelling North, at 100 km/h.

Since they're both travelling in opposite directions, if you're in Car A, it looks like Car B is travelling at 200 km/h, right?

Well, the speed of light doesn't work that way. If you replace both Cars with Ships and say they're both doing C (the speed of light), Ship A won't see Ship B doing 2C. Ship A will see B doing 1C, and Ship B will see Ship A doing 1C.

What that means for light (and actually anything) entering a black hole is this: light stays at C as it falls into the hole.

 

[Ganthrinor]

Theoretically implausible, as of now, effectively impossible.

 

[cuddly_tomato]

Well, einstein hypothesized that if you approach light speed, time slows down, but to my knowledge, this is only the theory that currently makes the most sense, and hasn't been verified with an experiment,

In short, we think not

It has. It wasn't until recently that we had clocks capable of verifying it but its true. In fact, if you get two identical clocks which go at identical speeds, put one on the top floor and the other on the ground floor of a skyscraper, the one at the top will eventually tell a different time from the one at the bottom, because it is moving slightly faster.

 

[Outright Villainy]

Yeah, I have no idea how much energy it might take to change the shape of space. I have no idea how one might even do that. But it's happening right now. Space expansion is happening everywhere and seems to find the energy to do it.

Maybe space expansion can happen naturally but space contraction takes more energy?

No idea, just food for thought.

That's the whole dark energy thing right there, some inherent force that overcomes gravity and pushes space apart. (well without it we'd be getting a little claustrophobic at any rate)
To contract space would indeed take a lot of energy when you have to match something that makes up over 70% of the energy in the universe (from current estimates. by comparison, mass related energy is 4%. dark matter is the rest.)
Boggles the mind, don't it?

 

[Outright Villainy]

Well, einstein hypothesized that if you approach light speed, time slows down, but to my knowledge, this is only the theory that currently makes the most sense, and hasn't been verified with an experiment,

In short, we think not

It has. It wasn't until recently that we had clocks capable of verifying it but its true. In fact, if you get two identical clocks which go at identical speeds, put one on the top floor and the other on the ground floor of a skyscraper, the one at the top will eventually tell a different time from the one at the bottom, because it is moving slightly faster.

Well actually that's graviational time dilation, but yeah, lorentz transformation (the speed one) has been proven too.

 

[cuddly_tomato]

Well, einstein hypothesized that if you approach light speed, time slows down, but to my knowledge, this is only the theory that currently makes the most sense, and hasn't been verified with an experiment,

In short, we think not

It has. It wasn't until recently that we had clocks capable of verifying it but its true. In fact, if you get two identical clocks which go at identical speeds, put one on the top floor and the other on the ground floor of a skyscraper, the one at the top will eventually tell a different time from the one at the bottom, because it is moving slightly faster.

Well actually that's graviational time dilation, but yeah, lorentz transformation (the speed one) has been proven too.

I am on about the speed one. You know the Rossi-Hall thingy were they measured the decay of muons from two clocks, one on a mountain and the other at sea level? That was a velocity related experiment I thought.

 

[Outright Villainy]

I am on about the speed one. You know the Rossi-Hall thingy were they measured the decay of muons from two clocks, one on a mountain and the other at sea level? That was a velocity related experiment I thought.

I'm not going to pretend I know enough to disagree, I'd be interested to hear how it relates to velocity though!
I just naturally assumed it'd involve gravitational potential seeing as they're at different distances from the centre of the earth. Where does velocity come in?

 

[Withard]

Scientists discovered there are basically currents in space that you could effectively sail to get faster speeds than capable right now. Right now the only way I can see it conceivable is if space is torn open and we pass through an artificial black hole designed for the purpose of maintaining a gateway. I mean rather than simply sucking us through and spaghettifying us into oblivion.

If we CAN get to faster than light by means of simply speed then we need to have runways in space to avoid gravitational effects or collidable objects. Even something small as a shuttle colliding at light speed would be devastating.

 

[Hashime]

It is not physically possible for you to travel faster than the speed of light, but using earth as a reference point you can appear to move faster, and can in terms of displacement, by bending space with gravity. How is a whole different issue.

 

[cuddly_tomato]

I am on about the speed one. You know the Rossi-Hall thingy were they measured the decay of muons from two clocks, one on a mountain and the other at sea level? That was a velocity related experiment I thought.

I'm not going to pretend I know enough to disagree, I'd be interested to hear how it relates to velocity though!
I just naturally assumed it'd involve gravitational potential seeing as they're at different distances from the centre of the earth. Where does velocity come in?

The earth spins. The higher up you are, the faster you have to move in order to remain "in line" with whatever is underneath you. At a metre from the earths exact core it takes twenty four hours to travel (roughly) 7 metres in a circle. On the surface of the earth you have to be moving thousands of metres per second in order to maintain parity with whatever is down in the depths.

 

[Outright Villainy]

The earth spins. The higher up you are, the faster you have to move in order to remain "in line" with whatever is underneath you. At a metre from the earths exact core it takes twenty four hours to travel (roughly) 7 metres in a circle. On the surface of the earth you have to be moving thousands of metres per second in order to maintain parity with whatever is down in the depths.

Ah, i was considering the earth as a static reference frame, I forgot angular momentum...