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Not the drug sadly. But, I know as it stands according to current physics, that we cannot go faster then the speed of light. But we have been wrong on many things, many times in the past. People once thought the Earth was the center of the solar system, and that we couldnt possibly go faster then 200mph on land (we blew that guess out of the water http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_speed_record)

Anywho, do you honestly think we could ever go faster then light speed? And for kicks, alot of theoretical physicists bring up worm holes and such to go around the light speed debate. They arnt really 100% sure if those are out there or not. Do you think thats possible? Of did some really clever guy come up with a reach around?

What are your thoughts on it all?

Lets hope so...
I want my interstellar empire.

I assume you mean "work around" in that last sentence.

FTL travel will never become a reality because it flies in the face of most of physics. However, someone might figure out how to work around the issue, although I don't think it's likely.

IIRC, the laws of physics as they stand do not allow us to travel FTL. As you get closer to light speed, your mass increases exponentially, until it gets to the point that it would require infinite energy to accelerate any faster.

That being said, there are theoretical work arounds for it. If there's anything science has taught us over the past few hundred years, it's that we should never call anything 'impossible'. Humanity seems to have a damn fine record of making things that were considered impossible a hundred years ago daily facts of life.

I think it's a mistake to think that we've been wrong in the past, therefore we can predict that any awkward rule of science will someday be proven wrong, therefore we can continue dreaming about spaceships.

The 200mph limit, for instance, wasn't a drawn from observed, reviewed and constantly re-reviewed theories that have now become the core of one of the most important theories in modern science. The odds of it being overturned are far less than the odds of overturning some guy who once speculated that we'd never go faster than 200 mph.

Basically, direct thrust cannot ever reach speeds that'll allow us to move from planet to planet in a practical timeframe. I'm pretty confident we're never going to stumble upon a new understanding of relativity that'll change that.

Now, maybe there's some other way we might be able to change that, I don't know. Some people who've studied this stuff for a living think it's possible, so I guess the theoretical physics of it must have some basis. Even if instant travel is possible in way or another, though, I can't help but think not only do we have to actually do it, we have to make the process safe for humans to use, then make it very reliable, and then we have to make it cost effective to actually do so (cost of teleporting a person compared to benefit of having a person all the way over there).

We then have to realise that there is a significant likelihood we're never leaving this solar system.

There are a number of theoretical and observed phenomena which involve things moving faster than light. For example, the phase velocity of several waves is greater than c. The rule as presently established is that neither matter, energy, nor information can exceed the speed of light, other "objects" are not so restricted. This has all sorts of interesting possibilities when considered in light of wave-particle duality.

Additionally, there are a number of theories regarding a variable speed of light that turn on c being a dimensional property of space as we observe it in the same way that things like mass are.

Then there are tachyons, theoretical particles that always move faster than light. This does not violate general relativity as accelerating to c is what is actually impossible.

Then there's entanglement, which might allow faster than light communication, and once you can send information a lot of the doors related to technical "travel" are opened.

To summarize, c is a pretty well support constant, but like any theory its far from impervious to change or revision. And, even if it is never revised, there are still some interesting possibilities.

Entanglement doesn't really transport information as it is atemporal and tachyons ignore linear time, other than that dogma is right.

Gravity is another interesting phenomenon, it is bound by an inverse square rule and thus has infinite range which in turn suggests it is faster than light yet it should be mediated by a boson.

Way back in the Late 50s - early 60s, a writer of science fiction took a theoretical (at the time) particle and wrote about capturing it for use as a power source.

This past week Canadian Scientists trapped and held these particles for what was considered an "impossible" 16 minutes.

How long will it be before the "theoretical" application of a Roddenberry Drive becomes possible?

corpsesarefun wrote:Entanglement doesn't really transport information as it is atemporal...

I was under the impression that the spin of an entangled quark was always predictable after its partner had been observed, which implies to me that information has been transmitted in the lose sense.

corpsesarefun wrote:
Gravity is another interesting phenomenon, it is bound by an inverse square rule and thus has infinite range which in turn suggests it is faster than light yet it should be mediated by a boson.

Provided the law of gravity is correct, at least. Seeing as the divergence between quantum mechanics and relativity is tightly bound up with c, and quantum gravity its likely that one of the two is wrong.

dogma wrote:

corpsesarefun wrote:Entanglement doesn't really transport information as it is atemporal...

I was under the impression that the spin of an entangled quark was always predictable after its partner had been observed, which implies to me that information has been transmitted in the lose sense.

corpsesarefun wrote:
Gravity is another interesting phenomenon, it is bound by an inverse square rule and thus has infinite range which in turn suggests it is faster than light yet it should be mediated by a boson.

Provided the law of gravity is correct, at least. Seeing as the divergence between quantum mechanics and relativity is tightly bound up with c, and quantum gravity its likely that one of the two is wrong.

Think of entanglement like twins.

If you know the twins are identical (knowing the particles are entangled) then by observing one twin has blue eyes you have determined the other twin has blue eyes, no information has passed between the twins. This gets more complicated on the quantum level as both twins are in a state of flux in which their properties are unknown however you still know they are identical, this means that when you observe that one of the twins has blue eyes then you logically assume and so observe (as the particles are essentially the same entity) that the other twin has and has always had blue eyes.

As for quantum gravity, I believe the problem is mass and that the fabled higgs boson is very much linked to the even more elusive graviton.

The first step has already been made. Now, it's the hard part: The engineering.

purplefood wrote:Lets hope so...
I want my interstellar empire.

You mean MY interstellar empire.

Yes, we will one day exceed the light barrier, how and when I cannot say, but it will be done, mark my words.

chaos0xomega wrote:

purplefood wrote:Lets hope so...
I want my interstellar empire.

You mean MY interstellar empire.

Yes, we will one day exceed the light barrier, how and when I cannot say, but it will be done, mark my words.

No i definately mean MY interstellar empire... you can by my vice-Emperor

AresX8 wrote:
The first step has already been made. Now, it's the hard part: The engineering.

So like what they did in Event Horizon?

purplefood wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:

purplefood wrote:Lets hope so...
I want my interstellar empire.

You mean MY interstellar empire.

Yes, we will one day exceed the light barrier, how and when I cannot say, but it will be done, mark my words.

No i definately mean MY interstellar empire... you can by my vice-Emperor

I think you're woefully confused friend. It's my interstellar empire, but its alright, I'll keep the position of eunuch pool boy open for you

LunaHound wrote:

AresX8 wrote:
The first step has already been made. Now, it's the hard part: The engineering.

So like what they did in Event Horizon?

Open a portal to hell?

chaos0xomega wrote:
Open a portal to the Warp?

Fixed it for you.
I continue to hold that Event Horizon is practically a 40k prequel.

corpsesarefun wrote:
As for quantum gravity, I believe the problem is mass and that the fabled higgs boson is very much linked to the even more elusive graviton.

I was referring to the theories of QG which postulate that the speed of light varies according to wavelength.

We can theoretically travel faster than light with current technology.

However, its not really a fair comparison.

Light, like all things, slows down when it passes through different materials.

In the vacuum of space, it's a million miles a minute.
Travelling through a block of sodium, its a rather sluggish 38mph.

So, if we took a mile-long block of sodium, and beamed light through it, while at the same time driving a car at 40mph next to the block of sodium, we can 'technically' travel faster than light.

But it's a bit crap, it's like saying you can outrun a cheetah, but the cheetah only ha 2 legs, and they are both on the same side...

Leigen_Zero wrote:
But it's a bit crap, it's like saying you can outrun a cheetah, but the cheetah only ha 2 legs, and they are both on the same side...

Well, the real issue is "Can we travel faster than c?" The speed of light is merely the layman's way of talking about c.

Let's get off oil and legalize weed and gay marriage then I'll have some more input on this matter.

dogma wrote:

corpsesarefun wrote:
As for quantum gravity, I believe the problem is mass and that the fabled higgs boson is very much linked to the even more elusive graviton.

I was referring to the theories of QG which postulate that the speed of light varies according to wavelength.

I've never heard of that before and it is a tad confusing to be honest.

The most simple equation linking velocity and wavelength is V=fλ and we use that equation to calculate the wavelength of any electromagnetic wave with a known frequency, however trying to use this equation with two unknowns (if V is an unknown proportional to λ and λ itself is unknown) is completely impossible with one set of data.

I'm probably not making masses of sense but I am inclined to disbelieve that theory dogma, it contradicts some well known and well tested scientific principles.

Cannerus_The_Unbearable wrote:Let's get off oil and legalize weed and gay marriage then I'll have some more input on this matter.

+infinity

I figure that today's science fiction is tomorrow's science. I know I have heard that somewhere else so don't quote me on that. Personally the only thing I have ever noticed holding people back from discovering really amazing things about the universe is other people saying it can't be done. We won't know unless we try to get a working model. If we fail then ok, but if we succeed then let the doubters come talk to you after that.

Leigen_Zero wrote:We can theoretically travel faster than light with current technology.

However, its not really a fair comparison.

Light, like all things, slows down when it passes through different materials.

In the vacuum of space, it's a million miles a minute.
Travelling through a block of sodium, its a rather sluggish 38mph.

So, if we took a mile-long block of sodium, and beamed light through it, while at the same time driving a car at 40mph next to the block of sodium, we can 'technically' travel faster than light.

But it's a bit crap, it's like saying you can outrun a cheetah, but the cheetah only ha 2 legs, and they are both on the same side...

Hmmm..... so if my mad science degree comes in the mail soon enough, Ill do just that, tear a hole in the fabric of space time, and at the same time become the master of it! BRILLIANT! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAA




But I also really think that we will, over time, find we are wrong on many things currently. Thats just the way science has worked since its beginning. To think we honestly know what the hell we are talking about now, is just ridiculous. Having an idea and a direction to go is how we should really look at it

KingCracker wrote:Not the drug sadly. But, I know as it stands according to current physics, that we cannot go faster then the speed of light. But we have been wrong on many things, many times in the past. People once thought the Earth was the center of the solar system, and that we couldnt possibly go faster then 200mph on land (we blew that guess out of the water http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_speed_record)

The problem with arguments like the first one is that they miss how science works. You start off with observations, make theories to fit those observations, then test to see how those theories work. People thought Earth was center of the universe at first because, well, that's where people are, and you just see little dots looking at the sky. Better observations showed that there even is a solar system, and early observations were consistent with everything orbiting the earth. As we got better data, the geocentric model required more and more corrections that made it complex, but putting the Sun at the middle made for nice simple arcs of motion instead of circles tacked onto circles and varying speeds. With even better data, it turns out that nothing in the solar system actually orbits a single object, they orbit a complicated center of gravity that is somewhere between the center of the Sun and the object, and that orbits are not smooth ellipses but have complications form other objects in the solar system.

While the specifics of the early theory on how the earth works turned out to be wrong, and so did the more advanced idea of planets orbiting around the sun, it's not like we actually overturned all of the earlier knowledge. The model of planets orbiting in simple paths around the sun is good enough that it is still what is often taught in schools, and for most practical purposes it gives you the information you need. That's what happens consistently in modern science - new theories fit onto the observations that were behind the old ones, they don't completely overthrow all of the old data, and the old theories are often good enough for general use.

I've never seen any of the 'if you go over 30mph your die' or 'it's impossible for bumblebees to fly' or the like actually substantiated. What it always ends up being is 'some guy said in a ranty letter to an editor' or 'we left off an important part of what the person said' or 'we left off the context of the statement', or the like. There are "people" today who don't believe in a round earth, that doesn't mean that 'we' believe it.

Faster than light travel is not at odds just with an abstract theory that's never really been tested, it goes against theory that explains data we've been able to see since the late 1800s and that is used in practical applications like GPS (syncing time between GPS satellites and ground units requires relativistic correction). It's not a matter of guessing that maybe we can't engineer something all that well, or someone making an off the cuff 'oh that wouldn't work' in response to a quick question, it means we'd have to declare completely invalid a huge amount of work that fits observational data extremely well and has strong predictive value. It's not just 'oh we think if you went over the speed of sound you'd break up', it's 'if you could go faster than c, you'd completely break most of our explanations of how things work, including the stuff we needed to use to build the ship'.

And even if you get around (or just ignore) relativity, you still run into lots of problems. Even with strictly Newtonian mechanics and a 100% efficient engine and fuel, you have to end up with a ship that spends around 90% of its mass on fuel to be able to just go up to C and back again. To get a typical SF ship that spends less than half it's mass on fuel but can zip between stars in less than years, you need a magic energy source.




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dogma wrote:Then there are tachyons, theoretical particles that always move faster than light. This does not violate general relativity as accelerating to c is what is actually impossible.

The problem with tachyons (aside from the fact that current observations point to them not existing) is that they can't interact with slower than light matter. This makes them useless for science-fiction style FTL, since it's all about people moving faster than light. Also, it's technically not just accelerating to c that's impossible - it's impossible for a particle with positive or negative rest mass to move at c or faster than c, impossible for a particle with zero mass to move at anything other than c, and impossible for a particle with imaginary rest mass to move at or slower than c.

Then there's entanglement, which might allow faster than light communication, and once you can send information a lot of the doors related to technical "travel" are opened.

If information is being transmitted through entanglement, how do you send a message using it if you and I each have some particles in a box? You can only observe the state of the particle, you can't force it to be a 1 or 0 (if you could, you could force mine to be a 1 or 0 and send a message in binary). Observing the particle won't tell you whether I have observed mine, or whether they're still entangled. If we make some plan ahead of time like "I'll kill Ron if it's a 1, or give him a hug if it's 0", the plan is the only information we've exchanged - you might see a 1, but don't know if I'll really be willing to kill Ron, or if I even still have the box to observe a 1, or if Ron is even still at the destination.

You can't get any more information from entangled particles than you could from sealing two copies of a letter in a pair of envelopes without reading the letter first.

One problem if your going faster then light it means that your going faster then anything known to man; which means how would you know where are?

heacy hitter wrote:One problem if your going faster then light it means that your going faster then anything known to man; which means how would you know where are?

Math.

You started at position x. You traveled a y mph for z hourz. You are now yz miles from position x.

corpsesarefun wrote:
I've never heard of that before and it is a tad confusing to be honest.

The most simple equation linking velocity and wavelength is V=fλ and we use that equation to calculate the wavelength of any electromagnetic wave with a known frequency, however trying to use this equation with two unknowns (if V is an unknown proportional to λ and λ itself is unknown) is completely impossible with one set of data.

I'm probably not making masses of sense but I am inclined to disbelieve that theory dogma, it contradicts some well known and well tested scientific principles.

I'm not saying I believe it or disbelieve it, only that it exists. I'm not a physicist, I just read physics journals.

But, as I recall, the theory proposes to determine V by measuring the speed of light emitted at different wavelengths.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

BearersOfSalvation wrote:
The problem with tachyons (aside from the fact that current observations point to them not existing) is that they can't interact with slower than light matter. This makes them useless for science-fiction style FTL, since it's all about people moving faster than light.

Sure, the point was that c isn't quite the type of barrier that is often assumed.

BearersOfSalvation wrote:
Also, it's technically not just accelerating to c that's impossible - it's impossible for a particle with positive or negative rest mass to move at c or faster than c, impossible for a particle with zero mass to move at anything other than c, and impossible for a particle with imaginary rest mass to move at or slower than c.

Yep.

BearersOfSalvation wrote:
You can't get any more information from entangled particles than you could from sealing two copies of a letter in a pair of envelopes without reading the letter first.

Yes, that was my mistake.

dogma wrote:

corpsesarefun wrote:
I've never heard of that before and it is a tad confusing to be honest.

The most simple equation linking velocity and wavelength is V=fλ and we use that equation to calculate the wavelength of any electromagnetic wave with a known frequency, however trying to use this equation with two unknowns (if V is an unknown proportional to λ and λ itself is unknown) is completely impossible with one set of data.

I'm probably not making masses of sense but I am inclined to disbelieve that theory dogma, it contradicts some well known and well tested scientific principles.

I'm not saying I believe it or disbelieve it, only that it exists. I'm not a physicist, I just read physics journals.

But, as I recall, the theory proposes to determine V by measuring the speed of light emitted at different wavelengths.

Interesting... As I said the theory violates some quite basic elements of physics that have been proven time and time again but who knows, I'll look it up. Do you remember which journal it was in dogma? or when you read it?

I believe it was in Science, though I don't recall what issue. It isn't my field, so I don't read on date of publication, so it could be any of them; though I would guess in the 90's given that questioning c was in vogue then.