blogs_blog_698

I am no science geek in that area, but if you went that far out you'd probably have so many galaxies light-rays in the way that earth itself would be hard to find. Interesting idea though.

 

And I think Einstein once said reaching the speed of light is nearly impossible...but we'll see ^^

Arthur C. Clarke's novel The Light of Other Days is based on that concept. I highly recommend it, as it's a very well-written book, and you seem interested in the concept to have made this entry.

 

~B~

I am no science geek in that area, but if you went that far out you'd probably have so many galaxies light-rays in the way that earth itself would be hard to find. Interesting idea though.

 

And I think Einstein once said reaching the speed of light is nearly impossible...but we'll see ^^

 

I think it'd require more knowledge than we could offer, because you'd need to plot a way back. Everything would be in a different place, first of all, because of expansion. Then the galaxy would've moved, and the stars would've moved, and gravity would be bending light, but not the light you're used to... etc... You'd have to have a record of the galaxy for what time you want to go; how else would you navigate.

 

And you're right, Einstein said it's impossible. The reason's because, according to Special Relativity, the faster you go through space, the larger your mass becomes. To get to light speed, you'd need infinite mass, and that's impossible, at least until we find some new laws of physics.

 

However, Feymann proved that antimatter was just matter going backwards through time -- so there's a new law right there.

 

Doesn't mean we'll be able to exploit this. I think it was just another way of looking at the stuff, based more off the original ideas of the Dirac Sea, rather than the more standard way of it just being exotic matter.

Well, if the current model of 14 billion years -but I believe Earth didn't start to collect until about four BYA-, that'd mean you'd have to have an engine that not only goes faster than light but can outrace four billion years of light travel... you'd be going so absurdly fast that you'd be getting bad looks from Gene Roddenberry. I mean seriously, you'd have to be going a billion C just to get there in decent time.

 

If we could go that fast, I'd be more interested in catching up with the expansion of space and observing the very edge of the universe.

Actually, there is a theoretical particle known as a tachyon, which actually goes faster than the speed of light and can never actually slow down to the point where it goes at the speed of light.

 

In addition, going at the speed of light will not only flatten you down to two dimensions, but time would slow to the point of stopping. As such, an electron going forward in time is indistinguishable from its antimatter counterpart - the positron - when the electron is going backwards in time. This works the other way around. (This was touched on by Kiotu, but I wanted to include it.)

 

There is another theoretical concept that would, in fact, allow for faster-than-light travel. It involves the subject of exotic matter, a strange form of matter that behaves in very odd fashions. Exotic matter can bend spacetime. Exotic matter is claimed to have been discovered by an experiment of a man named Hendrik Casimir in 1948. If the force exhibited by Casimir's experiment is indeed exotic matter, instead of a manifestation of a force already known, then at some point in the future we should be able to produce enough exotic matter to put around spaceships. By bending the spacetime around a spaceship, one could move the section of spacetime to any point in the universe at, near, or even above the speed of light. The trick is to move the spacetime around the ship and not the actual ship itself.

 

Finally, if one were to go through a special wormhole to a point in the past, one would be able to observe the Earth's history much closer than flying out billions of lightyears. Normal wormhole openings are black holes, singularities in space and time. There is no way to get through them, as the singularity kills you in more ways than one. Fortunately, there are two solutions to this problem.

 

1) Send a probe at a certain angle towards the black hole. If this is executed correctly, the probe will not experience infinite distortions of gravity and time, only experiencing large amounts of them.

 

2) Create your own wormhole. Carl Sagan asked a theoretical physicist once about the best way to conduct interstellar faster-than-light travel. He wanted this information for his own novel, which he wanted to be as scientifically accurate as possible. The physicist and his team figured out the possibility of an easily-travelable wormhole, as well as the enormous energy required to make this wormhole open up.

 

Short answer: Yes, it's possible, but not anytime soon. We'd have to access enormous quantities of energy, larger than our largest atom smashers can produce - in fact, the energy is rumored to be stored in the Planck length - a couple billion times smaller than a proton. The Planck length may be the solution to probing a ten- or 26-dimensional universe, which has endured some success in the superstring theory of force unification in the universe.

*Looks at post above*

 

I can see why no one likes quantum physics; you have to study for ten years only to realize the stuff is crazy and doesn't make sense.

 

I'm not that keen on humanity bending spacetime, though; in the wrong hands, such a technology could and would be used for war. It teleports us across the galaxy in a second? Sure, it's cool, but what stops someone from teleporting France across the galaxy?

On the contrary, I think it's quite awesome.

 

And I learned everything in that paragraph in two weeks.

 

(I know what you mean, though - I don't agree with a few points that the theories of quantum mechanics "prove".)