Naked Science Forum

On the Lighter Side => That CAN'T be true! => Topic started by: simeonie on 29/04/2005 20:08:25

Title: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: simeonie on 29/04/2005 20:08:25

Do you think that if you go faster than the speed of light you would go forward in time or backwards or neither. I forget how the theory goes. I am sure you can't see or go forward in time because it won't have happened yet... duh!
However I am not sure about backwards in time or anything. I think if you went faster than the speed of light then I would have thought everything would go black and you wouldn't see anything.
Is this Einsteins theory or relativity?

mmm hi!
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: ADD HAHAHA on 01/05/2005 05:30:28
it u go forward in time and the only thing that in theory goes faster then light is gravity and ppl arnt exactly shore on what gravity is. so i dont no how u could go that fast.

Drew Rody
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: simeonie on 01/05/2005 12:53:28
Yeah but what I am saying is "what if" you went faster than the speed of light.


Simon
Trust me I am a doctor!
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: realmswalker on 03/05/2005 05:24:15
well i wonder if it could be possible to move to another faster than the speed of light without actually traveling faster than the speed of light.
ill try to explain.
lets say your in antartica  and penguins are running along on the ice, the fastest penguin running on the ice = speed of light. Well what if you broke off a chunk of ice and just floated past this fast penguin? Your not running faster than it (which is impossible) but are over coming it with out moving (spacially) faster.
Basically if you broke off a chunk of space some how and were in it, you could beat a light beam in a race but your not really moving...or something...
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: simeonie on 03/05/2005 07:57:08
How would the penguin be moving faster than the speed of light? And how would the ice be moving faster than the speed of light? That would have to be an olympic penguin! lolz


Simon
Trust me I am a doctor!
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: Ultima on 03/05/2005 11:27:47
That’s called reducing the distance you are travelling! If you start warping space; so that you are going the same speed but have less of a distance to travel, you get somewhere quicker (no ****). LOL sensor!

wOw the world spins?
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: daveshorts on 03/05/2005 12:07:52
Relativity is formulated on the assumption that the fastest information can travel is the speed of light. so even if you and your mate travel in opposite directions down the road and from a person standing still you both look like you are travelling away at 3/4 of the speed of light. If you each look at the other you think they are going away at slightly below the speed of light. All the inconsistancies in this are dealt with by changing time, and space so it all works.

It sounds crazy but it seems to work increadibly well, so why not go with it...
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: realmswalker on 04/05/2005 00:37:57
quote:
Originally posted by Ultima

That’s called reducing the distance you are travelling! If you start warping space; so that you are going the same speed but have less of a distance to travel, you get somewhere quicker (no ****). LOL sensor!

wOw the world spins?



How probable is it that humanity will ever be able to do this?

Warp 9! ENGAGE!
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: simeonie on 04/05/2005 21:04:12
I am wondering though..... you probably could move faster than the speed of light but whatever is moving that fast you wouldn't be able to see because the light wouldn't reflect off it because it couldn't keep up. Plus I really doubt we will be able to go the speed of light.... EVER. Also does anybody know what "warp speed" is from Star Treck? Is that supposed to be the speed of light or something?


Simon
Trust me I am a doctor!
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: diegostation on 09/05/2005 18:29:08
You don't have to beat the speed of light to travel in time. The more your speed gets closer to the speed of light the more you're traveling to the future. Just study Einstein's time dilatation.

The most popular example to explain this is the twin's paradox, when one of the twins travel with a speed of 0,5C out of earth and then returns with the same speed 40 years later, but to the traveler it only passed 17.3 years, so he sees his twin brother much older than him.

You have to use some formulas to calculate all this...
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: simeonie on 09/05/2005 21:17:37
well that is really cool.... But what it 0,5C ? That is a cool theory though!

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Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: diegostation on 10/05/2005 00:35:06
C is speed of light, 0.5C being 0.5 times the speed of light (or half the speed of light)
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: simeonie on 10/05/2005 16:00:28
yeah but hyperthetically speaking if you did go faster than the speed of light would you see things that happened before? Or would everything just go black and you would see no light? hmm

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Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: simeonie on 10/05/2005 21:54:32
hmmm I don't think time travel is possible but I do think that if you moved faster than the speed then you would see something weird.
The sun's light take 8 and a half minutes to get to here so if we traveled from earth to the sun faster than the speed of light abd looked down at the earth with a super cool telescope we would see things that happened so many minutes ago. :)

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Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: realmswalker on 13/05/2005 06:09:09
light travels through space though. I was using the penguin ice as an example!
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: simeonie on 15/05/2005 17:13:18
I think that you would only see the things that happened in the time you skipped when you were travelling at the speed of light.

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Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: DoctorBeaver on 21/05/2005 23:41:14
AS far as I can make out, relativity doesn't preclude something from travelling FTL so long as it has no mass. If there were such a thing as negative mass, it wouldn't be able to travel SLOWER than C.
But at C time stands still. So FTL? Hmmmm... would it be like a photon for which time & space are meaningless?
*goes back to counting his toes coz it's easier to fathom*
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: simeonie on 23/05/2005 16:18:29
Right I think that is slightly beyond my intelligence at the moment... I am only at G.C.S.E level Science at the moment! lol But you seem to know your stuff! Are u lot like in university or something!?!

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Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: DoctorBeaver on 23/05/2005 18:08:27
quote:
Originally posted by simeonie

But you seem to know your stuff! Are u lot like in university or something!?!



I'm just good at bluffing! heh [:p]

It wasn't me - a big boy did it & ran away
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: chimera on 23/05/2005 20:21:20
Which is how he got his degrees, ofcourse. [:)]

Eth, now tell me: do you think that an upper limit to something implies there is a mirror function  at work on the other end? A realm where time would flow backward? Or where things only stayed in one piece as long as you kept using it and shelving something would mean instant decay, because of reverse entropy?

Isn't that just a bit of a philosophic twick with miwwows?

The living are the dead on holiday.  -- Maurice de Maeterlinck (1862-1949)
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: simeonie on 23/05/2005 21:11:39
I really think that, that is a kinda weird theory and is like a multi-story buildin....has lots of floors!!! lol

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Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: DoctorBeaver on 23/05/2005 21:28:58
I refer my good friend to the point I raised elsewhere concerning the 2nd law of thermodynamics  appearing to imply that there is an arrow of time that cannot be reversed. It just doesn't feel right to me that time could be mirrored, & maybe the 2nd law prevents such a thing.

If 2 timelines diverged as an exact mirror image of each other, surely that divergence would start when time began - i.e. the Big Bang. 1 would go forwards from that point & the other would go backwards. How could it go backwards in time by going forwards? (eh?) As such it would be absolutely impossible to ever know about it as one would have to not only travel backwards through time but back beyond the start of time. And if that happened, would the traveller then not become subject to the reverse flow of time there and hence not notice it anyway?

Staying in 1 piece only so long as it's used?... hmmm - that reeks of the "would a tree make a sound falling if no-one was there to hear it" problem. If the act of observing changes the state of that which is being observed then I suppose taking that to the Nth degree would allow for such a thing. It's not nice to think about though! I need a drink!!
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: DoctorBeaver on 23/05/2005 21:33:00
quote:
Originally posted by chimera

Which is how he got his degrees, ofcourse. [:)]



Lawks, I've been rumbled! [:0]
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: chimera on 24/05/2005 11:55:52
quote:
Originally posted by DoctorBeaver

 If the act of observing changes the state of that which is being observed then I suppose taking that to the Nth degree would allow for such a thing. It's not nice to think about though!



Now hold that thought: all forms of autopoiesis *are* struggling upstream in that exact fashion - any kind of 'order', self-imposed or not. Without constant fiddling it will fail.

So by turning things inside-out, you see some amazing Janus-faced similarity between supposedly orthogonally opposite things.

Also think on the statistic nature of entropy. In a simplistic realistic example with gas, there is the distinct statistic possibility of an exactly identical composition/configuration recurring given enough time, however small. This negates the idea of irreversibility, and effectively 'resets' time, since everything is back to where it was before, and whatever happened in between no longer of any interest, really.

On cosmic scales such total recycling would take near infinite time, though, but the chance is statistically not zero, and maybe more local 'resets' are a possibility, especially if chaos and order are something like different sides of the same coin.
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: DoctorBeaver on 24/05/2005 12:22:11
quote:
Also think on the statistic nature of entropy. In a simplistic realistic example with gas, there is the distinct statistic possibility of an exactly identical composition/configuration recurring given enough time, however small. This negates the idea of irreversibility, and effectively 'resets' time, since everything is back to where it was before, and whatever happened in between no longer of any interest, really.


I'm not quite sure what you're getting at here. Do you mean that if a volume of gas is left to its own devices there is the possibility of the same composition/configuration recurring? If so, surely that has nothing to do with entropy: it's just the molecules moving around in random fashion & by chance alone all arriving simultaneously at points where they simultaneously were at some previous point in time.
Presumably if all the particles had the same direction & velocity that they previously had the whole cycle would repeat itself indefinitely.

Then again, if it were an enclosed system totally free from any outside influence, the particles would eventually submit to the force of their gravity thus precluding any such re-occurrence.
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: chimera on 24/05/2005 13:02:23
Nope, all seemingly valid points, but look it up: Henri Poincare (with accent aigu) proved rigorously that a finite collection of particles confined to a box and subject to Newton's laws of motion must always return to initial state or (at least very close thereto) after a sufficiently long period of time. The Poincare cycles.

This forced Boltzmann to revise his earlier claim of the irreversibility of entropy to a less clear-cut statistical one, after which Planck stepped into view...

(I suggest Paul Davies' About Time (1995) Simon&Schuster, very good)

The living are the dead on holiday.  -- Maurice de Maeterlinck (1862-1949)
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: DoctorBeaver on 24/05/2005 17:53:42
quote:
Originally posted by chimera

...proved rigorously that a finite collection of particles confined to a box and subject to Newton's laws of motion...



But isn't that where it falls down? Don't particles comply to QM rather than Newtonian laws of motion?
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: chimera on 24/05/2005 22:39:44
QM is a refinement on Newton, can say things better than Newton at times, but will never contradict Newton.

Question is of course the fine print: at least very close thereto. Is that good enough. And that's where QM comes in, and says no, most probably not, since QM deals in probabilities. That's only my words, but I think it's safe to say. This is also based on experiments with inequalities between particle/antiparticle pairs that would indicate time indeed has an arrow points thataway and not the other. You could not run them in reverse, in short.

Frankly, it also appeals to other knowledge we both share, I think, about pure deterministic models breaking down in the face of sheer numbers of variables, like DNA and exact twins, and other stories. We could not even begin to retrace all the minute differences, let alone do anything important about them, or even swap them just for the hell of it.

Life is not a film that can easily be played back frame by frame, since in real life the next frame with all content is *built* by the previous one, and if they fail to act, these actors disappear from it. And living things themselves a good example of how difficult it is to undo certain things.

No, QM is superiour there, I think. Now just a simpler to grok QM, and life would be a lot sweeter.

The living are the dead on holiday.  -- Maurice de Maeterlinck (1862-1949)
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: DoctorBeaver on 24/05/2005 23:28:40
quote:
Originally posted by chimera

 Life is not a film that can easily be played back frame by frame, since in real life the next frame with all content is *built* by the previous one, and if they fail to act, these actors disappear from it. And living things themselves a good example of how difficult it is to undo certain things.



This is a problem I've come across a lot in psychology research. When looking for the cause of a certain behaviour there are just too many variables and interactions of them to be able to point the finger with any degree of certainty.

A pair of twins could grow up to be very different as the result of just 1 small difference. The earlier in their development that occurred, the more pronounced the difference (chaos theory in action).

I've had many arguments about spanking or caning children to do with this exact problem. It seems to be accepted that corporal punishment causes children to grow up with violent tendencies. I dispute the evidence for that. No account whatsoever seems to have been taken of the general environment of the children that have been researched - stability of family, hours worked by parents, hobbies, the behaviour of significant others in their lives, etc

I also think the genetics of it needs to be examined more closely. If a parent has a violent trait that is kept well in check, the child may not see that violence manifest itself but could well have inherited a "violence" gene.

erm... I seem to have digressed again. Sorry [:I]
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: chimera on 25/05/2005 00:22:40
quote:
Originally posted by DoctorBeaver


I also think the genetics of it needs to be examined more closely. If a parent has a violent trait that is kept well in check, the child may not see that violence manifest itself but could well have inherited a "violence" gene.

erm... I seem to have digressed again. Sorry [:I]



Interesting angle. Hadn't they already found some clear genetic correlation about that with children of violent abusers that  had a (far) greater chance of becoming violent abusers themselves even when placed into foster families at a young age? And compared that with children of people that were abused, but not by their parents, since these grow up normally nearly without exception?

Would have thought that report would put them high on some peoples sh*tlist when it ever comes to enforced (chemical) sterilisation or other such draconics...

The living are the dead on holiday.  -- Maurice de Maeterlinck (1862-1949)
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: DoctorBeaver on 25/05/2005 00:57:13
Yeah, there have been a few studies but i've got doubts about the research methods & interpretation of the data. I think most of these were cases of finding what you want to find.
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: swim on 25/05/2005 04:23:23
so glad you came back around to discussing QM. I am trying to help give my kid some scientific ammo to support the possibility of say tractor beams or transporters "beam me up Scotty" stuff. Any takers?
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: chimera on 25/05/2005 11:50:58
quote:
Originally posted by DoctorBeaver

Yeah, there have been a few studies but i've got doubts about the research methods & interpretation of the data. I think most of these were cases of finding what you want to find.



Well, never mind. I doubt though that such 'guided' research in the end would work, since eugenics don't really have a leg to stand on, as has been shown in the past, already starting in the late 19th century in the States.

You cannot extinguish certain traits by pruning alone, since a DNA-pool works like a kind of holographic memory in that sense. Kill off all examples of one undesired trait, and over time they will be back to the old level, simply because it crawls back out of the woodwork, so to speak. It an expression of something deeper, like cutting your hair does not make it stop growing.

And they were sh*t out of luck when their first target was not gays, but schizos, very topical and interesting disease at that time, but from their own research it showed that those happened to come quite a lot from exactly the sort of families that produces the representatives voting on that type of bills in certain houses of parliament, so they could have probably kicked themselves for  beginning about that particular ailment.

Otherwise I agree in general those bastards can make life hell for a lot of innocent people, without any scientific groundwork whatsoever.

OK, back to the topic. Every realised that a beam-me-up-scotty drive would imply you die, and a copy of you, but not you, lives on? There is no 'transportation', just destruction at one end and creation at the other. No 'sending' of anything but information. That teleporter is a mini-meatgrinder, and they just slap some saucages together again at the other end and give it your name, is more like it.

[love this crap]
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: DoctorBeaver on 26/05/2005 00:26:02
quote:
Originally posted by chimera

quote:
Originally posted by DoctorBeaver

Yeah, there have been a few studies but i've got doubts about the research methods & interpretation of the data. I think most of these were cases of finding what you want to find.


OK, back to the topic. Every realised that a beam-me-up-scotty drive would imply you die, and a copy of you, but not you, lives on? There is no 'transportation', just destruction at one end and creation at the other. No 'sending' of anything but information. That teleporter is a mini-meatgrinder, and they just slap some saucages together again at the other end and give it your name, is more like it.

[love this crap]



NOOOOO... Captain Kirk is alive & well & living in Azerbaijan rearing goats!
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: simeonie on 26/05/2005 21:44:04
OO KK this is really strange stuff here and totaly off topic lol but W/E

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Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: daveshorts on 26/05/2005 22:02:54
quote:
so glad you came back around to discussing QM. I am trying to help give my kid some scientific ammo to support the possibility of say tractor beams or transporters "beam me up Scotty" stuff. Any takers?


You can move atoms around using laser beams
http://www.stanford.edu/group/blocklab/Optical%20Tweezers%20Introduction.htm
basically it works because when the atom moves off centre it tends to refract the light in that direction and bending light produces a miniscule force which pushes the atom back again. So not going to be able to move ships very fast...
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: drkev on 02/08/2005 21:18:14
E=MC squared (cant do the power signs so lets assumed sq means to the power of 2)

E = energy required, M = mass of object and C = speed of light

We find that if these are plotted on a graph the closer we get to light speed, the more energy is required and the more mass is generated. When we get to light speed we find that we require infinite energy and we generate infinite mass. This is a basic principle which was explained in About Time by Stephen Hawking. Therefore it follows that it would be impossible to travel at light speed.

Theoretically (assuming such a craft could be built) we could travel at 99.99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of the speed of light but never at the speed of light as we would require infinite energy and would create infinite mass.

Time travel is possible and has actually been demonstrated with two synchronised atomic clocks on various occassions.

Live long and Love life

Kevin Fisher
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: simeonie on 02/08/2005 21:27:49
why is the speed of light infinite energy?

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Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: Ultima on 02/08/2005 22:24:08
simeonie it's only like that when something has mass and is travelling towards the speed of light. Light itself is mass less and isn’t under the same constraints. The "speed" isn't infinite kinetic energy; the amount of energy required by the system to reach the sped C is infinite under those conditions. Since you can't have an infinite supply of energy something with mass can't ever reach the speed of light.

wOw the world spins?
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: ukmicky on 03/08/2005 01:32:43
simeonie
No matter how fast you go light will always pass you by at the same speed. even if you could travel at
186,000 miles per second which is the speed of light c. or even 200,000 miles per second
light would still go pass you at 186,000 mps.  but as to what would happen to time for you compared to earth at that velocity is anybody's guess
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: Ultima on 03/08/2005 08:29:33
ukmicky you aren't living up to your name; "miles" shouldn't that be km! metric, metric, metric! [:D] plus are miles an SI unit? I'd expect this from the US but not the UK! [:O][:D] Or are you of the older imperial generation? [:)]

wOw the world spins?
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: simeonie on 03/08/2005 22:48:52
wow that is actually really cool ultima but...... that doesnt explain WHY it has to be infinite energy coz really there is no such thing as infinite energy is there?

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Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: kenshin on 28/08/2005 17:17:52
Quote
Originally posted by diegostation

You don't have to beat the speed of light to travel in time. The more your speed gets closer to the speed of light the more you're traveling to the future. Just study Einstein's time dilatation

well! dont you think that we are going into future every moment?At higher speeds,time gets dilated and hence the rate at which we are going into future decreases.At v=c, time dilation is infinite and we always stay in present.So, as I see it, only way to go in past is to move faster then c.
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: YaleL on 07/08/2006 12:47:37
quote:
Originally posted by chimera

quote:
Originally posted by DoctorBeaver

 If the act of observing changes the state of that which is being observed then I suppose taking that to the Nth degree would allow for such a thing. It's not nice to think about though!



Now hold that thought: all forms of autopoiesis *are* struggling upstream in that exact fashion - any kind of 'order', self-imposed or not. Without constant fiddling it will fail.

So by turning things inside-out, you see some amazing Janus-faced similarity between supposedly orthogonally opposite things.

Also think on the statistic nature of entropy. In a simplistic realistic example with gas, there is the distinct statistic possibility of an exactly identical composition/configuration recurring given enough time, however small. This negates the idea of irreversibility, and effectively 'resets' time, since everything is back to where it was before, and whatever happened in between no longer of any interest, really.

On cosmic scales such total recycling would take near infinite time, though, but the chance is statistically not zero, and maybe more local 'resets' are a possibility, especially if chaos and order are something like different sides of the same coin.



Anyone able to tell me if Chimera is still active on this forum?

This Time
-- In Time
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: another_someone on 07/08/2006 13:28:35
quote:
Originally posted by YaleL
Anyone able to tell me if Chimera is still active on this forum?



His last post was on 19th August 2005 – beyond that, I cannot say whether he continues to visit the forum or not.



George
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: neilep on 07/08/2006 13:41:14
quote:
Originally posted by another_someone

quote:
Originally posted by YaleL
Anyone able to tell me if Chimera is still active on this forum?



His last post was on 19th August 2005 – beyond that, I cannot say whether he continues to visit the forum or not.



George




I am afraid he met with a nasty car accident..HE is FINE !!...no worries....but it was such a close call that it completely changed his outlook on life. I am afraid his change of lifestyle is our loss.

Men are the same as women, just inside out !
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: RMorty on 15/08/2006 22:45:45
Well as far as time travel goes, assuming that time is eternal. No one will ever accomplish it or we would have met somone from the future already because they could come to our time.  Right? Unless those people at the looney bin are telling the truth... lol.
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: another_someone on 15/08/2006 23:34:26
quote:
Originally posted by RMorty
Well as far as time travel goes, assuming that time is eternal. No one will ever accomplish it or we would have met somone from the future already because they could come to our time.  Right? Unless those people at the looney bin are telling the truth... lol.



Please explain what you mean by 'time travel'.

We are all travelling in time – what we cannot do is to jump discontinuously through time, but we cannot do that through space either.  The other thing we are not able to do is reverse the direction of time (at least on a macroscopic scale), and that is something different to space, where we can move both forward and backward.





George
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: Radrook on 03/09/2006 19:05:41
The faster we travel the slower we age. This conclusion is partially based on experiments done on the atomic and subatomic levels where these particles are accelerated to near light speed in a cyclotron and their normal decay duration is extended. So since we are made of atoms composed of subatomic particles the slowdown would cause us to age slower than people who are moving at the earth speeds we left behind. So on ship, we might feel we have travelled only a few days. But back on earth, decades might have gone by. The closer to light speed we come the slower our time passes in relation to those on earth. So those who attempt such a trip would have to carefully way the consequences of their choice.

BTW
One thing to keep in mind, is that we don't know the physical effects of near light or faster than light speeds on the human body. In any case, the acceleration would have to be gradual in order to prevent inertial forces from killing us by having us slam against the ship's wall.

Isaac Asimov pointed out in one of his books that hull friction caused by dust and gas would also have to be taken into consideration.  True, these are tenuous but at light speed they become significant to the point of causing hull breach. There is also the impracticality of coming back to family members who have aged while we remain relatively young.


There is interesting info at the following site:
http://www.crystalinks.com/timetravel.html
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: bostjan on 10/09/2006 03:03:14
I'm travelling forward in time right now.  So yeah, time travel is real.
But you cannot move faster than light.  If you could somehow make space appear and disappear, then you could travel at any speed less than the speed of light through a smaller space, but if you were moving space somewhere else, it would take time to do that as well, and there is no known way to move empty space.

Any negative mass stuff moving faster than light would probably not interact with us in any way, like a parallel universe or something, except you would never ever see it nor feel it, so it's essentially not there.
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: Radrook on 07/10/2006 00:54:31
quote:
Originally posted by simeonie

I am wondering though..... you probably could move faster than the speed of light but whatever is moving that fast you wouldn't be able to see because the light wouldn't reflect off it because it couldn't keep up. Plus I really doubt we will be able to go the speed of light.... EVER. Also does anybody know what "warp speed" is from Star Treck? Is that supposed to be the speed of light or something?


Simon
Trust me I am a doctor!



Warp is the bending of space so that two distant points are forced closer to one another making the trip shorter. Take a piece of paper and place a grasshopper on one edge. The time it takes for it to leap from one edge to other is-let's say, one-second.  Now bend the paper so that its edges are now closer together. You have just warped the paper and the grasshopper can now traverse the distance quicker.
That's what is meant by warp when applied to space travel.

Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: M on 12/10/2006 07:37:45
When traveling faster than the speed of light, an object behind you will appear to recede in time then "disappear" when you outrun the first light reflected or emitted by the object. Conversely, objects in front of you will appear to move forward in time until you reach them. This is not "time travel," however.
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: lightarrow on 12/10/2006 15:47:19
quote:
Originally posted by simeonie

why is the speed of light infinite energy?
A body with non zero rest mass (rest mass = the mass it have when it's still) requires an infinite amount of energy to be accelerated to the speed of light, because: E = m*c^2/SQRT[1-(v/c)^2]

E is the total energy of the body
m is its rest mass
v is its speed
c is the speed of light

As you can see, when v approaches c, v/c approaches 1 (and (v/c)^2 too) so the term inside the square root approaches zero (and the square root too), so E approaches infinity (the less the number under a fraction, the greater the result).

Now, where this infinity comes from?

The fact is that in practice the speed of light is infinite. What I mean: when a body's speed is not much, our definition of speed: v = space/time is a good definition, but when the body's speed is very high (that is, near the speed of light) our definition is not good anylonger, because space and time are not (enough) independent each other anylonger.

If you were inside a space-ship moving faster and faster, you would see planets, stars, approaching you in greater and greater amount, without any limit, that is, the number of stars you would see passing by you in one second, e.g., would approach infinity.

Of course we are assuming the average number of stars in a volume of space is constant, but this doesn't change the essence of the concept.
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: Zeig on 13/10/2006 00:45:51
IFyou go faster than light i'm pretty sure you would go back intime. when they tested E=MC2 they droped a bomb from a plane at normal flight speed and another at a much much more rapid speed and the faster bomb acuay went off eighther1. somthign seconds later or.0 somthing seconds later. but the point is they were made to go off after so long after being droped and the faster oen was late. This atleast is what i can remember from hearing it or where ever i found out about it.
Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: M on 13/10/2006 04:18:52
No, and it's relative: fixed receding objects would appear younger (as if we or they were moving back in time) and fixed approaching objects would appear older (as if we or they were moving forward in time).  Neither we nor the objects under consideration would actually move in time, however.  Only objects newly occurring before we reach them would cause an apparent increase in the numbers of objects ahead (and we would see them only when we encounter the leading edges of their respective light waves).  Objects behind us would appear to decrease in number only as we travel beyond the leading edges of their respective light waves.  As an aside, in this simple model, the possibility of leading objects appearing to decrease in number is self-evident and self-explanatory.  As far as I can see, however, lagging objects remaining fixed behind us would never appear to increase in number so long as we travel away from them at greater than light speed.

Title: Re: Faster than the speed of light?
Post by: simeonie on 06/11/2006 23:15:53
one guy who was up in space or something for too long apparently went through time travel for like a fraction of a second or something, it in guiness book of records and can find out more exact if i go get book