I know relativity says no, but there are ways around it. Assuming you had infinite resources, what are some ways of doing it? What would the machine to do it look like? Ignore the survivability of the transit for organic lifeforms, or if your idea requires a black hole or three and is impractical.
Most novel means of travel gets ten points.
2006-11-17 21:34:01 · 6 answers · asked by Wise1 3 in Science & Mathematics ➔ Physics
Also, ten points to the first person to explain what would happen in kenshval's scenario. It can't possibly work or someone would have thought of it already!
2006-11-17 21:59:48 · update #1
Probablly the most novel one that I've heard of is in the "lensman" series by EE doc smith, and it involves inertialessness. He had a device that would somehow remove the inertia of the object it was hooked to, thus making it unneccesary to accelerate. I thought this was cool; it had some really interesting ramifications. Good series, too!
2006-11-18 00:07:31 · answer #1 · answered by png_pyro 1 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Well..... At least Kensval saw his error âº
Fact is, SR says absolutely *nothing* about travelling faster than light. What SR *does* say is that *information* cannot be transfered between two points in less time than it takes a photon to make the trip.
But there has been some interesting work done recently with 'entangled' quantum fields that make it appear that, in some 'spooky' quantum field manner, information may be getting propagated FTL in some cases. Lots of controversy about it, the experiment(s) used to gather data, and, worst of all, even if it turns out that it does represent some 'special case' in which information can transfer FTL, there's still no known way to 'modulate' any desired information onto the experiment.
And it really sucks because I've been a 'Trekkie' since Cpt. James Tiberius Kirk first assumed command of the Enterprise back in '66 âº
Doug
2006-11-18 06:21:05 · answer #2 · answered by doug_donaghue 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
I'm afraid even with infinite resources its not possible.
The problem is that special relativity tells you how velocities add. And as you get near the speed of light, they always do so in a way that gives a result less than the speed of light. So if you are in a rocket going at 99% of the speed of light and you boost off from it at 99% the speed of light your total speed will still be less than the speed of light.
Quantum entanglement doesn't help either. This is a hugely misunderstood quantum behaviour, but the essence is that you have to create an entangled system of particles in the first instance, and this requires lots of information transfer all of it sub light speed. Whats more, when you collapse one quantum state by measurement, you are not helped in conveying this information to the other particle because you cannot get the info to it any faster than the speed of light - its only alternative is to make the measurement itself, which defeats the entanglement.
The only particles that could travel faster than light would have had to *always* travel faster than light. No such particles have ever been observed, and nor are they seriously expected.
2006-11-18 08:26:47 · answer #3 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
Infinite resources, eh?
Build a ship that's extremely long, and hollow on the inside. Power it with enough ion drive (like on the probe Deep Space 1) capability to achieve .999999 c and maintain it. Park inside the hollow ship a smaller ship with a powerful mass-ejection engine. When the larger ship is traveling as fast as it can go and is no longer accelerating, get inside the smaller ship, and fire the engine so that you are traveling forward inside the larger ship. You should accelerate so that the aggregate speed of you traveling very fast inside a ship that's traveling at near c will put you past c from the frame of reference of someone outside the larger ship.
Of course, to travel nearly c will require near infinite amounts of energy.
ADDENDUM: Never mind. It wouldn't work, and I just realized why: The smaller ship would only push the inside back end of the larger ship backwards, slowing the larger ship by the same amount as the smaller ship accelerated. Net effect: Zero.
I got nothin'
2006-11-18 05:52:11 · answer #4 · answered by kensval 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Rectum ejectum. Just eject a body of mass when approaching the speed of light, it would reduce the mass of the object but maintain it's accelaration.
2006-11-18 21:09:41 · answer #5 · answered by Qyn 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋
All of the energy in the universe would not be enough to accelerate one electron to lightspeed.
2006-11-18 18:35:09 · answer #6 · answered by Nomadd 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋