If you could travel faster than light would you get younger?

Question

or would you still be the same age but see things that happened before?

Answer 1

OK. Here's the deal...

First, attaining that speed is impossible because your mass would reach mind-boggling amounts. But, for the sake of argument, let's assume you conquer that problem...

Second, (this argument is based on the fact that your first argument is false), let's assume you WERE ABLE to travel away from the Earth faster than the speed of light for 5 years and then immediately stop dead in your tracks ("stop", compared to what...?) relative to Earth. ((Now, before you continue, take a quick glance at the first 2 sentences in this link. It's easy to understand and shows my point about "stopping"...)):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_relativity#Special_relativity

The light that was chasing you from behind from Earth would start catching up to you because that light was travelling slower that you were. That is assuming that we have the universe's strongest telescope to "see" the Earth's light that was chasing you. So, relatively speaking, you would be able to "see" the past.

That's what we look at when we peer out across the Galaxy: light that is Billions of years old that is just now reaching us here on Earth.

Third, a good example of this "special relativity" would be to imagine youself on the back of flatbed truck and trailer traveling 60 mph down the road. You throw a baseball (speed= 25 mph) to your friend standing at the front of the trailer. To your friend, the baseball's speed "looks" like it is 25 mph, but to someone standing on the ground next to the truck when you go by them, the ball "looks" like it is going 85 mph. That is Special Relativity in a nutshell.

Space is constantly moving:
The Earth is orbiting the Sun.
The Sun is orbiting the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.
The Milky Way galaxy is moving through space.
So even if we sere to completely "stop", we would still be moving through Space in some sort of direction.

You would age in your normal fashion, but any light that you saw would have some "catching up" to do before it reached you.

Finally, if we were to turn around after our super-fast 5-year journey and head back towards Earth, we would be able to see the light from our past "catching up" with us as we approached Earth. When we got ready to land, the light would've brought us to the present time, only in the terms what we see with light.

There's scene in the movie "Contact" (a link is below) where a message received on Earth from outer space , but it is overlapped onto the first television transmission powerful enough to travel into space, and that the aliens would not have understood WHAT they were looking at or WHO Hitler was. By the time that signal went out, and was received by the lifeforms, and then returned to us, a 60-year round trip had occured with that primative TV signal. That's exactly what would happen with the light as you approached Earth.

Are you thoroughly confused now?

Cheers!
Mack

Answer 2

No.

Travelling at all slows down time... when you're inside something that's travelling, outside appears to be slower. And if you're outside, the people inside the craft look like they're going slower. It's all pretty confusing. But it doesn't make you younger.

If you were on a distant planet... say, 100 light years away - instantly, or way faster than the speed of light, and you had a powerful telescope, you would see 100 years or so into the past because the light from earth wouldn't have reached there yet. But this isn't getting younger - and what you can see on earth 100 years ago isn't really happening at that second - the light just takes a while to reach you.

So, no, you wouldn't get younger. Time, space, etc. are twisted and maybe there is a way but I don't think so.

Answer 3

Simple answer is No, Nothing that has a mass can travel at the speed of light, and the maximum speed a mass less particle like a photon can reach is c (or speed of light), this is a fundamental law in general relativity, laws of physics stop anything with a mass reaching the speed of light. There is a Theoretical particle called Tachyon that cant go slower than the speed of light, but such a particle has never been observed. I saw some person refer to Quantum Entanglement as a way for information to travel faster than light (indeed when scientist first observed this effect, they were a bit shocked because this effect seems to violate the laws of Relativity) but it has since been discovered that you cant use quantum entanglement to send information thus not violating the laws of relativity

Answer 4

No.
Possibly.
If you were to exceed the speed of light, and turned around at the right place, and had proper optics you could see events from the past. Besides the speed this is trickier than it sounds. Since the earth rotates and orbits a stellar body that moves, you would need a means to plot thee path of light from the surface and intercept the wave at the proper point in space. If the plot and speed issues were conquered, you could watch events from the past, but be unable to interact.

Let's say that you have a clock in space, and you back away at the speed of light. The second hand would appear to stop. The hand is stll moving, but you are seeing the same image of the clock because you and the image share the speed. If you accelerateyou will see older images of the clock. The clock will appear to go backwards. If you continue, eventually you will see yourself placing the clock in the starting place. As often as many like to say that aging slows at higher speeds, I have never heard a decent explanation for the mechanics of the effect.

Answer 5

No - and yes. Its all relative. Whilst travelling, your perception of elapsed time would be normal. If you travelled for a year, you would be a year older. However, thanks to the time dilation effect, when you returned home, everyone else would be much more than a year older. So, relative to the age you would have been had you not gone, you would be younger.

This has been verified experimentally - they made two atomic clocks, synchronised them and then flew one around in a plane. It ended up slightly ahead of the one on the ground. The Apollo Moon orbit and landing mission astronauts are a second or so "younger" than the rest of us because of the speed at which they were travelling to and from the Moon.

Answer 6

Einstein and Heisenberg may have been at loggerheads with each other, but both their theories (relativity and uncertainty) go hand in hand. Travelling faster than light is impossible in reality, but not in theory. There would be an inversion of reality and time.
Would we want to become younger as those around us age?

Just as we cannot reverse time, except in the movies, we cannot get young again except in heart, we wouldn't see things again as the space-time continuum would have become warped.

Answer 7

Apart from the fact that travelling FTL is impossible, you would not get younger, no. Even travelling at 99.99% the speed of light, time would slow down for you (relative to an observer) so you would theoretically age slower (but again, only relative to anyone observing you - you would notice no difference).

Answer 8

If you were in a spaceship travelling faster than light and your feet were behind you, you wouldn't be able to see them. That would be weird.

If you wanted to see anything behind you (like past events) you'd have to slow down a bit, and even then you wouldn't see anything directly behind you because you would leave a sort of wake behind you.

There would also be something like a sonic boom but with light waves.

I can't see how you could get younger though.

Answer 9

Yes you would, better more you would age far less slower than average. As einstein said 'time travel can only be done by going extremely fast. the faster you are going the slower time goes. so if you are traveling at a phenomenal rate such as light you would not only lose track of time but will be thrown into the future. depends on how long you will be traveling at the rate of light. but also traveling at the rate of light can kill you, to much g-forces pressured on you.

Answer 10

not likely, but you would definitely age much more slowly than normal. it's physically impossible though for a human to travel at the speed of light without destabilizing one's atomic structure (the infinite mass conundrum). realistically, long distance space travel will be enabled by the discovery of seams, or wormholes, that compress and transverse vast stretches of space. the idea is to think of space as 4-dimensional, not 3-dimensional.