question about faster than light travel?

Question

if space is being distorted say by a blackhole, is it possible for light to travel faster to an outside observer. if a black hole is sucking everything inside of it including space and time and light is caught inside of that space that is being pulled around the blackhole could the light in that space be moving faster than the speed of light to an outside observer where space is standing still.

Answer 1

In fact, there are many ways to transmit information faster than light, and some of them have ALREADY been constructed. Here are the four options I'm familiar with:

TUNNELLING. Tunnelling is a quantum mechanical effect where a particle simply shows up on the other side of barriers that are impossible to breach. The interesting thing about tunnelling is that the particle does not go through the space in between... it just disappears at one point and appears at the other side. There have been experiments performed where coded signals were beamed into a solid bar and they tunnelled through and were decoded on the other side. Since they skipped the space in the middle, their overall speed was measured at four times the speed of light. It bears mention that more than 99% of the energy in the signal was lost, so although there's no theoretical reason why larger objects couldn't do the same, it's not exactly something I'd try, myself.

WORMHOLES. Theory predicts these guys, but nobody's ever really found one yet. It's thought that they might be around but just really, really, really small. If so, it might be possible to obtain one, stretch it out, and move it around. It would be like a tunnel except with movable ends. You could keep one end in your living room and send the other end to a pizza place to cut down on delivery times. Or send the other end to Alpha Centauri, and then you could hop back and forth across light years in pretty much no time at all. But since there's no experimental evidence of even the existence of these guys, much less being able to do all the other stuff you'd have to do, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for this one, either.

TACHYONS. Interestingly enough, while theory says it's impossible to go faster than light from a slower-than-light condition, there's nothing to prevent the existence of particles which are ALWAYS faster than light. These show up in some theories and have been dubbed 'tachyons', though they also have never been found. And who knows... maybe there's some way to translate from normal material to tachyon material and back. Many suggest that presence of tachyons are a sign of a flawed theory rather than any actual physical thing.

WARP SPACE ITSELF. As we all know, the universe is expanding. Space itself is stretching out and separating objects, and the expansion and contraction of space is not bound by rules of motion. If things only moved at the speed of light and the universe started at a point, then it would be impossible for anything to be farther away than we could see. But current theories suggest that the universe is at least TWICE as big as the time it would take light to travel across it in the billions of years it's been in existance. Though the speed of light at any point is still c, expansion of space itself makes it SEEM to move at less then that when crossing huge distances. There are even theoretical ways to use this to our advantage, but they also require a theoretical negative energy which has never been actually established either. Alas.

None of these methods are undisputed... quite the contrary, they are all VERY heavily contested. But they are, at least (for the time being), all theoretically possible.

Answer 2

In short: No. Nothing can travel faster than light that we know of or can prove yet. If you want a longer, more comprehensive answer then: One way I think about these kinds of problems is to think about motion. Basically if you have two points of a set distance, lets say A and B. If we travel from A to B at a set speed we it will take a set amount of time. Now if we travel from A to B at a faster speed, the time it takes will be less. So really the faster you go, the the slower your perception of time (this is called time dilation). Now what if you continue to increase your speed, faster, until you reach the speed of light. In theory the time should get shorter and shorter until you reach a point where you should cross over and then start travelling back in time (as time reverses)! This of course is completely hypothetical, as Einstein's special theory of relativity tells us nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. If you want to know why, there are several reasons. If you take Einstein's equation: E=mc^2 it is only the short form, the full equation is actually: E = mc^2/squreroot(1 - v^2/c^2) and this tells us that mass and energy are the same thing in different forms and can be converted between each other. The equation also tells us that as velocity (speed in a direction) increases - and approaches infinity you would need an infinity amount of energy! We can't produce infinity energy and so can't accelerate a mass faster than light! That's the simpler explanation, unless you want to start considering more physics and advanced theories! The last point about your question is that if you are just concerned with reaching a point faster than light, there are other theory's on how to achieve this - i.e. wormholes, etc, but that then becomes advanced physics again! Although much of this is considered quite disprovable theory we are always discovering new things (and particles) all the time, so there is always a possibility that theories can change, that's just how science works. So we may discover something new! :-)

Answer 3

First of all, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, even to an outside observer. This fact is according to Albert Einstein's Theories of Relativity. Light travels at the same speed (about 300 000 000 m/s) for any observer. Second, a black hole actually "pulls" light into itself all the time. Also, a black hole does not "pull" space and time in it...But it distorts the spacetime fabric that it is in (also according to Einstein).

Answer 4

Einstein's theory of relativity states that the speed of light, 286,000 miles per second is an absolute limit for the velocity of any object, light or anything else. It's really strange that even though you may be traveling in a space ship at half the speed of light and then turn on a flashlight in the direction you are traveling, the light will travel away from you at the speed of light. However , to a stationary observer, the light will not be traveling at 150% the speed of light, it will be 100% the speed of light. It's all relative to one specific observer. Wikipedia has a great explanation of Einstein's work.

Answer 5

Information cannot propagate faster than lightspeed. If it did then causality would be violated. The universe does not tolerate contradiction.

Since no information may leave a black hole and physics is helpess to model the singularity, the inside is open to speculation. Outside the event horizon... no cheating.

However - Scharnhorst effect, but no experimental reduction to practice,

http://arXiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0107091
http://arXiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0010055
Phys. Lett. B236 354 (1990)
Phys. Lett. B250 133 (1990)

Answer 6

According to Einstein, the speed of light is the maximum speed limit for the universe and NOTHING can go faster, ever.

Answer 7

Light paths are well-defined for all reference frames so light can never travel faster than itself.

Answer 8

owing to such extreme conditions inside the black hole,determination of events inside same is impossible.