Faster than light travel possible?
 

[quote:662e0]Astronomers predict faster- than- light travel based
[From "The Sunday Times" (UK) 13th August 1995]

ASTRONOMERS PREDICT FASTER THAN LIGHT SPACE TRAVEL

It is boldly going where no reputable scientific body has gone before.
Contradicting Einstein, the normally conservative Royal Astronomical
Society is about to publish a report predicting that mankind will be able
to travel faster than the speed of light.

The breakthrough means that Star Trek fantasies of interstellar
civilisations and voyages powered by warp drive are now no longer the
exclusive domain of science fiction writers.

The report was written by Ian Crawford, an astronomer at University
College London, who believes not only that man will one day see stars at
close quarters, but that we had better start preparing ourselves for the
consequences, including contact with aliens.

His paper, Some Thoughts On The Implications Of Faster-Than-Light Travel,
has been validated by independent referees in the scientific community
and will be published next month. Its publication coincides with the
formation by British and American scientists of the Interstellar
Propulsion Society (IPS) which is dedicated to finding a means of taking
astronauts to the stars.

Crawford argues that modern physics may allow two possible ways around
Einstein's theory, which says that because bodies have infinite mass at
the speed of light, no amount of energy can make them go faster.

The first is to pass through "wormholes", rifts in the fabric of space
caused by intense gravitational fields such as those found around the
collapsed stars known as black holes.

Crawford says that such fields may allow the traveller to enter a
wormhole from one point and then to leave it at another, possibly
thousands of light years away.

Previously, scientists have assumed that any astronaut who was caught in
such a powerful gravitational field would be pulled into something
resembling a piece of spaghetti.

However, Crawford said last week that recent research had suggested
wormholes could be stabilised and manipulated to create short cuts
between any two points in space. "The proofs are complex and
mathematical, but more and more astrophysicists are satisfied that in
theory it is possible," he said.

Should wormholes fail, however, Crawford proposes a second possible route
to the stars. He draws on a recent paper by Miguel Alcubierre, of the
University of Wales, in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity to
suggest the possibility of propulsion systems which distort space by
compressing it in front of a spaceship while expanding it behind.

Such a system would effectively bend space, creating a form of "warp
drive" reminiscent of the Starship Enterprise of Captain James T Kirk in
Star Trek.

The theories will boost growing interest among scientists in the
possibility of travelling faster than light. The IPS, whose members
include several NASA engineers, starts its first conference shortly in
Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Patrick Moore, the astronomer and presenter of The Sky At Night, said he
believed interstellar travel would one day be achieved. "Television would
have seemed impossible 200 years ago and faster than light travel is no
more outrageous than that," he said.

Arthur C Clarke, the science fiction writer and futurologist, was equally
enthusiastic. His first novel, Against The Fall Of Night, published in
1932, presumed that man would be able to travel faster than light.

Speaking from his home in Colombo, Sri Lanka, he said: "That was just a
dramatic device which all science fiction writers have to use in space
travel, but I have always believed it may one day be possible."

Sir Martin Rees, the astronomer royal and professor of astronomy at
Cambridge University, was more cautious, however, saying the proofs were
purely theoretical.[/quote:662e0]

Astronomers need to stfu, they know nothing.

Re: Faster than light travel possible?
 

[quote=Trunks][/quote:3d869]

I know i just stumbled across it and thought it was kinda interesting...

[quote="Mr.Buttocks":86677]Astronomers need to stfu, they know nothing.[/quote:86677]

Although I aggree, That would be awesome to say, "Warp Nine.......Engage!!"

happy:

That poons but it's not happening in any of our lifetimes.

we wouldnt survive the ride...and there are many more problems than jus the idea of getting that fast

Frankly i dont see why we take one mans writings as the universal unchallenged stardards. I mean yes, Eistien was a brilliant man, but why must what he wrote be the only thing science accepts. Its nice to see "modern" science challenge some "set" ideas.

because he was the only scientist who could validly support his ideas in that section on science

[quote="Scorched Earth":3801b]because he was the only scientist who could validly support his ideas in that section on science[/quote:3801b]but science is all about change and disporving and explanding upon old theories. If we dont do that then there will never be progress.

we are yet to fully disprove some of science's original laws

It's all bullshit fellas, all bullshit.

Like proteus said, if it doesn't happen between now and 2080, then who the fuck cares... eek:

First off, worm holes don't allow you to travel faster than light. They would in theory allow you to travel up to 99.9999999999 etc. % the speed of light. And again, with warping space, your not really traveling faster than light.

Traveling faster than light is impossible. Bending time and space, may very well be possible.

If it is possible to travel faster than light then take this into consideration:

Say i'm driving my car at 50km/h. You are looking at the car. So the light coming off the car is going at the speed of light + 50km/h right? Infact, this is not the case. No matter how fast you go, 50km/h, 1000km/h, the image of the car will arrive at you at the exact same time. light travels at 300,000km/s. bottom line. nothing travels faster.

[quote="Carl Sagan":fa4bf]Can we travel close to the speed of light. And what's magic about the speed of light? Can't we travel faster than that? It turns out that there is something very strange about the speed of light, something that provides a key to our understanding of time and space. The story of its discovery takes us to Tuscany in Northern Italy.

There's something almost timeless about this place. A century ago it probably looked very much the same. If you had traveled these roads in the summer of 1895, you might have come upon a 16-yr. old German high school drop out. His teacher had told him that he would never amount to anything, that his attitude destroyed classroom discipline, that he'd be better off out of school. So he left and came here, where he enjoyed wandering these roads and giving his mind free reign to explore.

One day he began to think about light, about how fast it travels. In our everyday life, we always measure the speed of a moving object relative to something else. I'm moving at about 10 km/hr. relative to the ground. But the ground isn't at rest. The earth is turning at more than 1600 km/hr. The earth itself is in orbit around the sun. The sun is moving among the drifting stars, and so on. It was hard for the young man to imagine some absolute standard to measure all these relative motions against.

He knew that sound waves are a vibration of the air, and their speed is measured relative to the air itself. But sunlight travels across the vacuum of empty space. Do light waves move relative to something else? And if so, he wondered, relative to what?

That teenage dropout's name was Albert Einstein, and his ruminations changed the world. He had been fascinated by Bernstein's 1869 "People's Book of Natural Science." Here, on its very first page, it describes the astonishing speed of electricity through wires, and light through space. Einstein wondered, perhaps for the first time here in Northern Italy, what the world would look like if you could travel on a wave of light, to travel at the speed of light. What an engaging and magical thought for a teenage boy on the road where the countryside is dappled and rippling in sunlight.

You couldn't tell you were on a light wave if you were traveling with it. If you started on a wave crest, you would stay on the crest and lose all notion of it being a wave. Something funny happens at the speed of light.

The more Einstein thought about such questions, the more troubling they became. Paradoxes seemed to pop up all over if you could travel at the speed of light. Certain ideas had been accepted as true without sufficiently careful thought. One of these ideas had to do with the light from a moving object.

The images by which we see the world are made of light and are carried at the speed of light: 300,000 km/sec. You might think that the image of me should be moving out ahead of me at the speed of light plus the speed of the bicycle. If I'm moving towards you faster than a horse and cart, then my image should be approaching you exactly that much faster. My image ought to arrive earlier. But in reality, you don't see any time delay. In a near-collision, for example, you always see everything happen at once: horse, cart, swerve, bicycle, all simultaneous.

But how would it look if it were proper to add the velocities? Since I'm heading towards you, you would add my speed to the speed of light. So my image ought to arrive before the image of the horse and cart. I'd be cycling toward you quite normally. To me, the collision would suddenly seem imminent. But you would see me swerve for no apparent reason and have a collision with nothing.

Now the horse and cart aren't headed toward you. Their image would arrive only at the speed of light. Could it seem to me that I just missed colliding, while to you it wasn't even close? In precise laboratory experiments scientists have never observed any such thing. If the world is to be understood, if we are to avoid logical paradoxes when traveling at high speeds, then there are certain rules which must be obeyed. Einstein called these rules the special theory of relativity. Light from a moving object travels at the same speed no matter whether the object is at rest or in motion. Thou Shalt Not Add My Speed To The Speed of Light. Also, no material object can travel at or beyond the speed of light. There is nothing in physics that prevents you from traveling as close to the speed of light as you like, 99.9% the speed of light is just fine. But no matter how hard you try, you can never gain that last decimal point. For the world to be logically consistent, there must be a cosmic speed limit.

The crack of a whip is due to its tip moving faster than the speed of sound. It makes a shock wave, a small sonic boom in the Italian countryside. A thunder clap has a similar origin. So does the sound of a supersonic airplane. So why is the speed of light a barrier, any more than the speed of sound? The answer is not just that light travels about a million times faster than sound. It's not merely an engineering problem, like the supersonic airplane. Instead, the light barrier is a fundamental law of nature, as basic as gravity. Einstein found his absolute framework for the world, this sturdy pillar among all the relative motions of the cosmos, light travels just as fast no matter how it's source is moving. The speed of light is constant relative to everything else. Nothing can ever catch up to light.

Einstein's prohibition against traveling faster than light seems to clash with our common sense notions. But why should we expect our common sense notions to have any reliability in a matter of this sort? Why should our experience at 10 km/hr. constrain the laws of nature at 300,000 km/sec? Relativity sets limits on what humans ultimately can do. The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.[/quote:fa4bf]

[url="http://www.american-buddha.com/journeys.space.time.htm"]http://www.american-buddha.com/journeys.space.time.htm[/url]
[url=http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000055ZOB/qid=1105564157/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/002-9848388-4377608?v=glance&s=dvd&n=507846:fa4bf]http://www.amazon.com/cosmos[/url:fa4bf]
This quote is from the series Cosmos by Carl Sagan. If you can find it to rent, do it. It's amazing. I bought it. It cost me $100 but its worth it. 13 hours of the best miniseries ever.

I think it would be so awsome to have a starship. Man that would rock. its amazing how many of the technologies from star trek end up appearing in real life. Id say it happens alot more than any other show.