Editor's Blog2 mins ago
Why Can't We Travel Faster Than Light?
144 Answers
....because we are already travelling through spacetime at the speed of light, there is only one speed in spacetime.
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Answers
// As you speed up mass increases ... //This isn't true, although is a common misconceptio
14:59 Wed 01st Nov 2023
It's great to have hope, Andy. Nothing wrong with that. The irony is that despite the point made by the chap in Tora's earlier video that we find it hard to imagine the vastness of the universe, our minds are noneless capable of imagining almost infinite possibility. I know that there is warp theory etc, and the notion (proved?) that you can "cheat" spacetime by interfering with the dimensions of space, but the way I see it, hoping that that one day we'll be able to do it is like hoping that one day 2+2 will equal 5.
AH: "In Shakespeare's time, talking about television or phones would have got you burned as a witch.
I remember life before colour TV, diesel cars, supermarkets, the Internet, and so on." - all of those have a clear line of development, and were predicted as possible long before the engineering was advanced enough to make them, the science is fully understood and repeatable. Discoveries waiting to happen. We are talking about an actual rule, one that the best minds in history have confirmed over again for over 100 years and yet an NME journo thinks he knowss better? Right oh!
"Science evolves continuously, and although I cannot say that space travel will happen, no-one cannot say that it will not." Of course space travel will and has happened but this post is about FTL travel - I can say there will never be faster than light travel.
General relativity is not necessarily the end of physics (I think that was first announced at the beginning of the 20th century).
In 1903 the Wright brothers made the first heavier than air flight. By 1914 planes were beginning to be used in warfare.
In 1909 Rutherford discovered that the atom is largely empty. Within 50 years, science and technology had advanced enough to enable atomic weapons.
Theoretical science and military development can produce amazing results.
// As you speed up mass increases ... //
This isn't true, although is a common misconception. To be more precise, your kinetic energy increases. Mass stays the same throughout. No doubt E= mc^2 tricks people into thinking that if mass goes up then energy does, but that equation only holds when you are at rest; otherwise, the equation reads
E^2 - p^2c^2 = m^2 c^4
where p is momentum. It doesn't really matter how, but the whole point is that you energy and momentum change in a way that ensures that the m remains the same at all speeds.
None of which undermines the general point. E does grow towards infinity as your speed approaches c, and it's enough to argue that you'd therefore need infinite energy to reach, let alone exceed, the speed of light.
Andy's response, meanwhile, makes the mistake of confusing an engineering barrier with a theoretical one. Even befoe we'd got to the Moon, or even conceived of rockets, it would have been obvious that you could theoretically get there. The Moon is literally in sight; sure, you can't jump to it, but at a minimum you could conceive of trying to build a ladder long enough to bridge the gap. What matters is that getting to the Moon is an engineering challenge: "do we have the tools to build a strong enough ladder?", or, more usefully, "Is there a powerful enough rocket?"
On the other hand, the speed of light barrier is theoretical. It exists because at the heart of the equations is a statement that any massive object travelling literally at the speed of light would imply a "division by zero". That's a bit loose, but it's the right idea: the point is that you cannot reach the top of an infinitely high hill. No rocket can overcome this. No exotic, if physical, energy source will get around that barrier. The only way around this is if the theory is wrong, or at least incomplete in a way that would defy a consistent set of observations, tested to absurd precisions, from the last century or more.
Even all of the crazy ideas that have been advanced that appear to break this limit don't, instead relying on some sort of trickery, that's equivalent to finding, or constructing, a shorter route to take. Say, finding a route to the nearest star that takes minutes to travel -- at a sub-light speed mind! -- rather than the light-travel time of four years or so.
It's true, to be sure, that any scientific statement is subject to potential revision in future -- and, as a result, it's dangerous to say "never". But it's still a far more fatal flaw to completely misunderstand the problem. Faster-than-light travel isn't a matter of finding a cool new energy source. It's a matter of breaking all of our current theories -- and in a way that has to explain why this "wrong" theory has been so incredibly successful.
AH: "TTT - I am happy to discuss this with anyone who wants to be reasonable, you simply want to be rude and patronizing." - err you started that with accusing people of having lack of imagination because they point out the flaws in what you are saying. Simple question. Do you think faster than light travel will ever be possible? Yes or no.
I'd like to add, too, that the same engineering/theoretical divide is one that separates this question from interstellar travel in general. The latter is manifestly an engineering problem: Stars in ou galaxy, and even other galaxies, are a finite distance away, and so can be reached in a finite time with sophisticated-enough kit.
Now, in practice I think we'd need more resources than are readily available to get very far, cosmically-speaking. Also, in practice I'm not sure it would be seen as a pressing-enough issue to even try to overcome: why spend all that money, use all those resources, to go to Vega, say, when there's so much to see and do in our own backyard still?
Also also, one of the limitations of interstellar travel, namely the long time, can be at least partially addressed by abandoning, for now, any idea of sending humans anywhere far. Costs too much, uses too many resources, requires many secondary problems to be solved. Many of these are beyond my imagination to solve right now, but whatever. All that matters is that we're discussing engineering challenges, or financial and motivational ones. All of those can be overcome with patience and with enough will, and none of those run directly into a theoretical wall that can (almost surely) never be crossed.
TTT - // Of course space travel will and has happened but this post is about FTL travel - I can say there will never be faster than light travel. //
And my entire point, is that you cannot say that, because you don't know, and no-one knows, because science evolves continuously as new informatyion is discovered.
There may be discoveries that mean that the current beliefs that FTL travel is impossible, will be superceeded, because of what we find out, that we do not know now.
For a very very long time, scientists could not understand how a bee defied the known laws of aerodynamics - specifically, that based on the ration of its body weight to it's wing size, a bumble bee should not be able to fly - but clearly it did, regardless of what science said.
Developments in slo-mo photography revealed that the bee's wings are not fixed, and its rotating wing movement allows it to fly, proving that the previous fixed law of aerodynamics was not actually correct, given additional information.
My argument is that, all the science minds agree that, at present, FTL travel is not scientifically possible.
But it may become so, in the future.
I simply argue the possibility, which is available, as against your dogma, which is on the lines of bee flight - simply waiting for the information to come along and disprove it.
retrocop - // Yes AH also. First UK supermarket was a Co-Op opened in Manor Park on 12th January 1948. I believe you may just be younger than that as well. //
Thank you - again I stand corrected.
I should have clarified my examples by saying these things were not as common as they are now, rather than they did not actually exist.
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