Will we ever travel at the speed of light?

[Magus068]

Here's a general rule... Anything is possible as long as it doesn't defy the Law of Physics.  In theory, its highly possible to travel the speed of light as long it doesn't exceed the speed of light.

As a side note, Albert Einstein formulated these theories.

[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

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

Exactly it's a bunch of gravity.  So I believe an existing theory is that all the gravity can bend space around it (much like userzero said), and you can travel through the folds of space to get somewhere much faster than if you had travelled along the folds.

On the topic of Time Travel....I don't think we'll ever be able to go back in time, but I do think we'll be able to "slow down time" for people.  So someone can sit in a ship for 100 years and it'll only feel like 70 to them.

--jp

[uzerzero]

Thanks for agreeing jp.

The theory about using gravity to fold the space time is much like folding a shirt. You compress things to fit a large object in a small space. There's also a theory about creating a negative energy bubble around a spacecraft and as it goes forward, it compresses the space in front of it, therefore making you closer to the object and effectively travelling at not quite the speed of light, but compressing space, therefore making it a shorter distance. However, once you arrived at your destination, the negative energy bubble would dissipate and you would fall back into normal time.

It's all still theories. By the time they actually prove anything or perform any major experiments on anything involving travelling faster than light, most of us will probably be dead.

[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

Exactly it's a bunch of gravity.  So I believe an existing theory is that all the gravity can bend space around it (much like userzero said), and you can travel through the folds of space to get somewhere much faster than if you had travelled along the folds.

On the topic of Time Travel....I don't think we'll ever be able to go back in time, but I do think we'll be able to "slow down time" for people.  So someone can sit in a ship for 100 years and it'll only feel like 70 to them.

--jp

unfortunately, its would be almost impossible to ever know that, because the moment you entered the event horizon, the black whole would absorb you to the singularity.

[but2002]

I see
   

Ever read the book "A Wrinkle in Time"?

It makes use of a Tesseract ( Hypercube, 4th Dimention )
to traverse in not a straight Line, ( the shortest distansce in 3-D ) but wrinkles that line

EX.

-------------------------------------------------------   Line

-   -      A shorter distance!
|  |
|  |
|  |
|  |       Now, this would also allow us to Manipulate time to suit a faster travel, to alter Time itself!
|  |
|_|

[uzerzero]

This falls under the wormhole theory. The shortest line isn't a straight line, but rather a line that goes directly through the two points once spacetime is folded.

And yes, I am quite familiar with a Wrinkle of Time. One of L'Engle's BEST works, by far. Very scientifically accurate for a children's book.

[but2002]

Quite, I read it back in 4th grade. 
Im a freshmen now, though I've been proven to me smarter in ways than most adults, thats why Chrono Trigger caught My attentiopn, because I was always interested in the theories of Time Travel.[

I guess Im a Dude Lucca

[Hadriel]

Time travel has problems in and of itself.  In Chrono Trigger, you have the Entity and the Tesseract to sort through timelines and make sure everything works.  In real life, there's no such thing; the closest we have is Hawking's "cosmic censor" which makes sure that paradoxes don't arise, and that's strictly theoretical.  Every time you travel back in time, you'd be going into a different timeline.  So really, in the original timeline you're still screwed; you're just hopping timelines to get to a better one.

[uzerzero]

Time travel has problems in and of itself.  In Chrono Trigger, you have the Entity and the Tesseract to sort through timelines and make sure everything works.  In real life, there's no such thing; the closest we have is Hawking's "cosmic censor" which makes sure that paradoxes don't arise, and that's strictly theoretical.  Every time you travel back in time, you'd be going into a different timeline.  So really, in the original timeline you're still screwed; you're just hopping timelines to get to a better one.

"Hopping timelines" is another way of saying that you're "dimension hopping". If you did this, then it would be completely hopeless, unless you just wanted to see what would happen if something happened, or if you wanted to observe how something happened, i.e. epic Roman battles, the creation of the world, etc. You couldn't change anything, because you're in this alternate dimension, which as soon as you left it, you would go back into your own world, where everything remained the same.

[V_Translanka]

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

1) why is RD's SN now missing the R at the end?

2) as people have already been saying, wouldn't instantaneous travel (aka teleportation) be faster?

[but2002]

Thats the "Stargate", Tesseract, Wormhole's whole point!

[Hadriel]

You aren't literally traveling FTL in a wormhole.  You're simply traveling "effectively" FTL.  Think of a wormhole this way; in order to get to the store from your house, you'd normally have to make a number of turns.  However, if you had a vehicle mighty enough to simply smash through all the obstacles in your way, you could use a true straight-line path and get there a lot faster.

[Lord J Esq]

It's at least a bit curious that the collective knowledge of physics in this thread is greater than that of the scientific community.

I'm not a physics graduate. But I am an engineer, which is related, and my interest in physics goes back far enough that I've been inspired to learn a thing or two along the way. I might not know enough to answer the question in the topic title, but I do know enough to smell all the bullshit floating around here.

We should be more careful to discern between our excitement about the prospects of this highly fantastic idea of light speed travel, and our expertise in regards to it. I admit to being guilty of this from time to time, too...but it is in the interest of science that nobody pretend to a scientific knowledge he or she does not posses.

[Burning Zeppelin]

Hm, being an idiot, I'm just wondering, "Why is it that light speed is THE fastest one can get? Why can't we go faster? How did we work out that speed? What is so special about the properties of light, and its speed?"

[grey_the_angel]

Hm, being an idiot, I'm just wondering, "Why is it that light speed is THE fastest one can get? Why can't we go faster? How did we work out that speed? What is so special about the properties of light, and its speed?"

no it is not. A black hole's escape velocity has to at least match the speed of light to get its unique appearance of light eating.  eventually, if someone was to surpass the event horizon without harm, they would be traveling at a speed faster then light. course, they'd also be moving into a infinited singularity, so only someone like Lavos, who can brake the rules of physics could actually...

oh shit... Lavos lives in a black hole O.O