Will we ever travel at the speed of light?

[Magus22]

(move to Time-Space-Dimension/analysis if I was wrong putting it here)


I have been reading up on how to apply negative energy to rupture space so that when you move through it, you could techincally accelerate faster. There is no friction in space, no air (duh) and a lot of other things absent, but there is mass. If we were to over come mass, it may be possible.

However, with all the laws and properties and even with the publicity out there, what would be you your take on this?

Exceeding the speed of light in time, is it even possible?

[Radical_Dreamer]

Wait...what? Negative energy? What are you talking about?

The speed of light in a vacuum is as fast as things can get.

[Agent 12]

What I never understood about the speed of light was this.......

If you are travelling North at half the speed of light, and someone comes towards you at half the speed of light......they look like they are going the speed of light.

But supposedly, if you are travelling the speed of light north and someone comes towards you at the speed of light they look like they are going the speed of light.

IIRC, the only reason I heard about this was "that's the fastest anything can travel"......

Sorry I guess I went off topic there.

Will we ever travel the speed of light:  I'll go ahead and say no.....If we ever need to go somewhere where we need to go the speed of light I assume we'll find some other way to get there.......black hole or something.

--jp

[Burning Zeppelin]

Why would you want to go the speed of light? Slow down, take the world around you in...and breathe.

[Ramsus]

Why would you want to go the speed of light? Slow down, take the world around you in...and breathe.

That's not so easy to say when you're stranded with some several hundred light years of empty space around you.

[Lord J Esq]

The light barrier is not a barrier in the sense that there is something on the other side of it. It is more of a barrier in the sense that there is nothing on the other side of it. There's a lot of fancy footwork to be done in proposing clever new ideas as to how one might traverse a physical distance in a manner such as might be symbolized as having exceeded the speed of light, but the plain old physics say that it is not possible for anything with mass to achieve light speed, let alone surpass it. This makes sense, because the energy requirements for acceleration to light speed of a given mass approach infinity. Achieving light speed in your rocket would be like cutting a piece of string so short that it has no remaining length. You can't do it. Surpassing light speed would be like cutting the string so short that you would need a negative-length meterstick to measure it. These premises are absurd.

Could the physics be wrong, or incomplete? Sure, but that admission does not provide any evidence that it is possible to physically exceed light speed. For the time being, it remains the stuff of science fiction.

[Hadriel]

Strictly speaking, no.  Objects with mass can travel either below or above c, but not precisely at it.  Above c, an object's mass is denoted by a complex number.

In the actual spirit of the question, matter with a negative amount of inertial mass is theoretically allowable and could be employed for an Alcubierre effect via repulsive rather than attractive gravity.  The problem with this is that such matter hasn't been observed yet; if all of our equipment can't detect it, that's fairly telling.  Even if it is observed, it would require huge amounts of negative matter to create the desired warp field; the engineering problems in so doing would be enormous.

Negative energy is only "negative" because of where we define the zero point of energy, that of vacuum energy.  It is not actually negative in an absolute sense.  Robbing a vacuum of its intrinsic energy is called the Casimir effect, but it isn't going to generate wormholes or anything.

The short answer is that even if FTL does turn out to be possible, which is unlikely as hell to begin with, it still may not be plausible.  From a practical perspective, the answer is no.  That's coming from someone who'd like nothing more than to see workable FTL realized.  But for now, at least, it's one of those fantasies that I have to file away under the same category as having sex with the entire female cast of the X-Men.

[GrayLensman]

My answer is a firm maybe.

[but2002]

I see something like A "StarGate"  But I don't think actual Light Trasvel is possible No.

But If we could make use of Wormholes, I think it is possible to even use it to see into Time aswell as Fasteror=to light travel

[cupn00dles]

Well, if I'd say something about the subject right now, I'd say we already do.

That is, what we see isn't actual reality, but just our perspective of reality (geez, that oughta be the 110th time I write this line here at the compendium). So, assuming a watcher that is situated 200.000 lightyears away from earth, and has a lens powerful enough to catch its image, then he sees his perspective of "us", as there is no such thing as an absolute "us". Our image, which is actually what we visually perceive from the environment, is "us". So, thinking that way, we already do travel in the speed of light, from wherever we are to inside the mind of the watcher, through his eyeballs. Be it the 200.000 lightyears away fella, or be it that hot chick that lives next door.

That simple thought also eliminates the struggle about time travel. There is no such thing as time alone, it's one thing together with space, which is experienced the way stated above, and so we already travel time, in the speed of light. We are here, but we are anywhere any watcher might be as well. "Time travel" would depend on how far you are from the object you're observing and having a lens powerful enough to catch its image. The further away you are, more will be the time light will take to reach you, and therefore sooner in the history object you would be than if you were closer to it. There'd be no such thing as time travel to the future, you'd only be able to observe the past.

I was thinking about this stuff one of these days... It sounds so simple that it shouldn't actually make much sense.

If someone would be kind enough to point out some kind of contradiction in there I'd be grateful.  =]

[Radical_Dreamer]

I see something like A "StarGate"  But I don't think actual Light Trasvel is possible No.

But If we could make use of Wormholes, I think it is possible to even use it to see into Time aswell as Fasteror=to light travel

Assuming you could find a stable wormhole, and it was going somewhere usefull, and you could build a ship to traverse it, you still wouldn't be travelling faster than the speed of light. An outside observer, who just saw you pop in one side and out the other might think that that is the case, but really, you'd just have travelled a shorter distance at whatever <c rate you were travelling anyway.

[uzerzero]

Even if time travel were possible, there's all sorts of causal problems, paradoxes, time loops, etc. that follow as a result. Time travel would be feasible if it was like the children's story about how scientists created time travel and allowed people to go back in time to hunt specially created dinosaurs. There was a set path that they could walk on, and certain animals they could kill, and certain plants to touch. As long as they didn't touch anything they weren't supposed to, nothing in the future would change.

Consider the Chaos Theory for a moment in regards to traveling to the past. One small insignificant change could mean the difference between the Allies winning World War II, or the Axis. And the further you go back, the results exponentially increase.

Personally, I feel that time travel could be feasible, but you could only be an observer.

Theoretically, you could create a bubble of negative energy in space time and "push" the space in front of you, therefore compressing it and making it easier to get to a destination. You would be in a bubble of negative energy where time would be locked in. Yes, you would be travelling faster than light, and therefore supposedly crossing into the future, but the moment the negative energy bubble dissipated, you would drop back into normal time. This would be the most applicable and feasible use of time travel that I see.

[grey_the_angel]

What I never understood about the speed of light was this.......

If you are travelling North at half the speed of light, and someone comes towards you at half the speed of light......they look like they are going the speed of light.

But supposedly, if you are travelling the speed of light north and someone comes towards you at the speed of light they look like they are going the speed of light.

IIRC, the only reason I heard about this was "that's the fastest anything can travel"......

Sorry I guess I went off topic there.

Will we ever travel the speed of light:  I'll go ahead and say no.....If we ever need to go somewhere where we need to go the speed of light I assume we'll find some other way to get there.......black hole or something.

--jp

you do know a black hole is just a gravity pit right?

A black is the ultra compressed remains of a red drawf that exploded, packing its millions of miles of gravity making materials into a space about  500 times the size of our sun. its not a hole in space, doesn't go anywhere, has such a powerful grip on gravity that not even light can escape it, which doesn't even seem possible when you think about, considering light has no mass >.> that I know of....

I think the word you were looking for was "worm hole" a tear in time space. in which case you basically just tore reality a new one. literally.

reading material! :http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole

[uzerzero]

Technically, there is no exact data on what a black hole is. Nobody's gotten a satellite or anything near it, for obvious reasons duh. Theoretically, it is basically an old star that has imploded and all of it's gravity is compacted into one big ball which is so gravitationally strong that not even light can escape from it. But because of that gravitational phenomenon in which it's so powerful, it could very easily rip a hole in spacetime. Never really know.

A wormhole, yes, is the shortest path between two points in space. Rather than taking a straight line, a wormhole folds spacetime, and goes right through the hole. Put two dots on a sheet of paper, draw a line, then fold the paper in half so the dots are right above each other and poke a hole through it. That's the basic wormhole theory for you.

One theory states that if there's a blackhole on our side of the universe, then travelling through it would cause you to arrive in a parallel dimension at the same location. To do this though, we'd need a ship of some sort built out of a material that could withstand the immense pull of gravity. Negative energy bubble seems like the only feasible way to go.

[Hadriel]

Hawking radiation seems to have disproved the idea that black holes actually go somewhere, though.  I'm not sure how much of a radiator it is; theoretically, it's a pretty poor example of one.  Black holes are just huge concentrations of mass in a very short distance; light not being able to escape from it is due to the problem of potential escape velocity being greater than c.  Depending on how much greater than c it can go, an FTL ship can get out of its gravity well.