Ways To Travel Faster Than Light Without Violating Relativity 226
StartsWithABang writes: It's one of the cardinal laws of physics and the underlying principle of Einstein's relativity itself: the fact that there's a universal speed limit to the motion of anything through space and time, the speed of light, or c. Light itself will always move at this speed (as well as certain other phenomena, like the force of gravity), while anything with mass — like all known particles of matter and antimatter — will always move slower than that. But if you want something to travel faster-than-light, you aren't, as you might think, relegated to the realm of science fiction. There are real, physical phenomena that do exactly this, and yet are perfectly consistent with relativity.
faster than light never violates Relativity (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:faster than light never violates Relativity (Score:5, Informative)
Relativity requires that nothing can move through space faster than light.
Relativity requres that nothing can move through space as fast as light (c). Nothing with mass moving slower than c can reach c by moving faster, due to increase in mass and infinite energy required to reach c, and nothing moving faster than light can slow down to c, for the same reasons. The quote from teh article is at best misleading and at worst, false.
Re:faster than light never violates Relativity (Score:5, Interesting)
we have no technology remotely capable of this, but:
1. a quantum entangled version of yourself moves away from you (at "normal" speed, less than c)
2. say... many light years away (i know, i said we have no technology remotely capable of this, bear with me here, just a thought experiment)
3. the "copy" of you can't violate c, but at the last moment, one version of you interacts with its surroundings, collapsing you to that single copy. such that you have achieved instantaneous transportation across light years of distances
doesn't that happen faster than c?
Re:faster than light never violates Relativity (Score:5, Interesting)
You're at a very straight, very long beach. Imagine parallel waves striking the shore at a vanishingly slight angle. The point that the wave meets the shore moves along as the intersection of wave and beach occurs. As the waves get closer and closer to parallel with the beach, but not quite parallel, eventually that intersection point will be moving much faster than c.
But the interesection point between waves and shore doesn't have mass, isn't really a "thing" that's moving.
Re:faster than light never violates Relativity (Score:4, Interesting)
that's an excellent analogy, thank you
and you are correct, there's no real movement, only a collapse to a single frame of reference
however, for the intents and purposes of outside human observers, haven't you instantly blinked across light years?
You mispelled "intensive purposes". (Score:2)
otherwise everything checks out.
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Away with your sophistry! Your angles, and parallels and intersections! When will you geeks come into the 21st century and present your ideas as sensible powerpoint presentations!
-- Yours, Management.
Re:faster than light never violates Relativity (Score:5, Funny)
You're at a very straight, very long beach.
But, I'm in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike [wikipedia.org] so I think I'm screwed.
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Re:faster than light never violates Relativity (Score:5, Funny)
must I do it with a pair if scissors, or can I just use one?
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Even simpler, you point a laser pointer at the sky, and sweep it manually over a very distant target (bigger than the moon, but further away as well). Clearly your hand is not going to move faster than light, but the point where the beam finally hits something very well might. Again, this intersection is not a "thing", and cannot be used to communicate faster than the speed of light.
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This would appear to run into the problem that quantum entanglement can't transfer anything FTL.
Also, when two particles are quantum entangled, they need to be kept from undergoing any changes that would break entanglement. Make another human body, quantum entangle it somehow, and how long is that entanglement going to last during normal living? I'm not real happy about being kept in stasis for five hundred years so the quantum entanglement doesn't collapse earlier.
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yes, agreed. the idea of keeping anything larger than an atom entangled for anything longer than a second over any distance over an inch seems like a colossal almost impossible task with today's technology
i was only doing a thought experiment
in the realm of way out there then: i wonder if you could entangle a number of "copies" of yourself: dozens, hundreds, millions
you just sort of disperse throughout the universe (not interacting with anything, i know, basically impossible by today's standards)
but in an i
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yes, only a collapse to a single frame of reference according to physics
but, for the intents and purposes of outside human observers, haven't you instantly blinked across light years?
it's a legalistic, semantic cheat, but... it "works"?
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isn't quantum entanglement a burgeoning field in quantum cryptography?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q... [wikipedia.org]
quantum key distribution would not be researched if what you say is true
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Actually, correlated random noise is extremely useful for cryptography. At its simplest, Alice takes their noise as received, Bob takes the inverse of their received noise, and since the noise source is entangled they are then guaranteed to have the same noise, which can be used as an encryption key, or even a one-time pad.
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i get it: they are guaranteed the same white noise, which is fine for encryption purposes (and know if someone snooped, because that would render their white noise dissimilar)
but there is no preserving the integrity of a particle/ wave for transportation purposes
thank you, i learned something
No interaction means you don't know (Score:2)
but, for the intents and purposes of outside human observers, haven't you instantly blinked across light years?
If you entangle two states such that the position is the only thing different between the two states then there can be no interaction with either 'copy' which differentiates between the two possible positions. The instant that there is an interaction which determines which state you are in (position A or B) that is the position you are in. It is no more mysterious than putting some one at the centre of a (very large) box and have them move away from that centre at almost the speed of light in an unknown di
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i understand that
but if there were some way to make sure the two "copies" do not interact with anything. i didn't say that was remotely possible today, or perhaps ever. just a way out there thought experiment
Re:faster than light never violates Relativity (Score:5, Interesting)
I realize that this is a very simplistic explanation, but think of quantum entanglement like this:
You have 2 cubes. Each cube can be only either blue or green. You have no idea what color each cube is as you packed them into boxes for mailing across the galaxy in a completely dark room. They are then mailed.
Now, you open your box. Turns out that your cube is green. You instantly know that the other cube is blue, even if it's on the other side of the galaxy, however, you have no way of communicating your discovery to the other party.
You now have instant knowledge of what color the remote cube is, but no information has been transferred.
Simple enough?
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i get it
so "he went to alpha centauri"/ "he didn't leave at all" isn't known until you interact
there's no guaranteeing you go anywhere
schrodinger's rocket ship
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What it really forbids is the transfer of information or objects through space at a speed greater than that of light in a vacuum.
What was the point of all this? Did anyone ever express an interest in FTL that did not include information or objects?
I want the last 5 minutes back please.
Re:faster than light never violates Relativity (Score:4, Funny)
I want the last 5 minutes back please.
Not until you violate the cosmic speed limit and go back in time..
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Relativity requres that nothing can move through space as fast as light (c).
Not correct - light moves through space as fast as light. Nothing can move faster.
nothing moving faster than light can slow down to c
Actually it is stronger than that - nothing moving faster than 'c' should exist because of causality. If something moving faster that 'c' exists then then some inertial frames it will be propagating backwards in time. We could then use whatever it is to communicate with the past and set up all sorts of nasty temporal paradoxes.
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Relativity requres that nothing can move through space as fast as light (c).
Not correct - light moves through space as fast as light. Nothing can move faster.
I've seen rumors that did....
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I think you've stated the main argument about stuff moving faster than c. But more abstractly, consider two events that are separated in both space and time, A and B. Let's say A happens first and "causes" B. Maybe A is "someone throws a ball" and B is "someone catches it." Or perhaps A and B could be sending and receiving a communication. In any case if B is outside of the light cone of A, meaning that light or anything slower could not travel from event A to event B, then there is a reference frame in whi
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Yes, the direction of the time axis is as observer-dependent as is the rotation of spatial axes. In Cartesian geometry the distance (dx, dy, dz) between points depends on the choice of coordinate system, but the length of that 3-vector is always the same (compared to the distance between some reference pair of points)
Similarly in space-time it is only the length of the 4-vector between events A and B that can have any physical meaning. This length can be positive, negative, or zero. A positive length means
C is not what people think it means (Score:5, Insightful)
It's very easy to travel 100 light years in less than 100 years. Thus for all intents and purposes, one can travel distances at faster than the speed of light. The theory of relativity does not prevent this. You can without violating any laws accelerate a rocket ship at a comfortable 1g for as long as your fuel holds out. You will not get more massive. It will not take increasing amounts of fuel to maintain the 1g acceleration. If you accelerate for 1 year at 1g then you will know that you covering the distance to your destination at faster than the speed of light.
What is true about relativity is this: and OUTSIDE observer will see you traveling at less than the speed of light. But from your perspective you can travel across galaxies in your lifespan with ease. So for all intents and purposes, you can go faster than the speed of light provided we everything from your point of view (which is all that matters). We define speed as the distance to your destination measured in an inertia frame, divided by the time it takes you to get there, all measurements from your perspective.
the way reletivity is taught totally confuses people on this point: A HUMAN COULD EASILY TRAVEL ANYPLACE IN THE MILYWAY WITHIN THEIR LIFETIME WITH EXISTING TECHNOLOGY, except for the part about bringing your own fuel. we just don't know how to bring enough fuel to maintain a 1g acceleration for 50 years. This is why these new reactionless EM drives that NASA and others are toying with are really interesting. No doubt they are bullshit since they seem to defy newtons laws, but if it turns out they work.... see you on on the other side of the galaxy baby.
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Or the pesky part that at relativistic speeds hydrogen atoms rip through the ship as if it was tinfoil.
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Or the pesky part that at relativistic speeds hydrogen atoms rip through the ship as if it was tinfoil.
well yes that too.
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Re:C is not what people think it means (Score:5, Interesting)
except for the part about bringing your own fuel
And the part about obliterating your spacecraft by colliding with interstellar dust at super-high relative velocities. The speed limit for arriving in one piece is way lower than c.
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Thus for all intents and purposes, one can travel distances at faster than the speed of light. The theory of relativity does not prevent this.
Except for the little problem of Lorentz contraction [wikipedia.org]. As you move faster and faster, to a fixed observer you are getting shorter and shorter in the direction of travel. The other side of this is that to you, fixed distances get longer and longer. So that star that was 100 ly away when you were on earth starts to get farther and farther away as you accelerate toward it.
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Bzzzt!!! Thank you for playing. Here's your lovely parting gift.
Let's rephrase... as an outside observer sees you go faster you get compressed to THEM.
From your frame of reference, the outside world is going faster and is compressed, so the distance to the star that is 100 ly away gets compressed by the gamma coefficient.
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so the distance to the star that is 100 ly away gets compressed by the gamma coefficient.
So, at .99c, what I saw as 100 ly standing still becomes 10 ly and I cover that in 10.1 years (my time). I just traveled at 9.9c (as I measure it).
I just traveled faster than light. Not the light coming out of my headlights. But in terms of distance divided by time (my time).
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In your terms, you travelled 10 ly in 10.1 years.
In terms of someone else (not moving that fast), you moved 100 ly in 101 years.
So you only moved faster than light if you use your time with someone else's distance. I mean, you can divide anything by anything else, but that doesn't mean the resulting number means anything. :-)
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sure it does: you can travel 100 light years in less than 100 years. that's the only thing that is meaningful. Arguing about whether you can go faster than light is not meaningful.
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The important point is that to an independent "observer" and to YOUR OWN measurements as taken BEFORE the trip, you travelled faster than the speed of light.
THAT, my friend, is what counts here for practical purposes.
What you are suggesting (practically speaking) is metaphorically akin to taking a velocity reading of your own body while seated on a supersonic jet and concluding you ar
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Wrong. But you illustrate perfectly what I meant when I said the way relativity is taught confuses people. You are actually a member of the vast majority of people that think you can't travel to a destination in less time than it would take light. You can!
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> Relativity requres (sic) that nothing can move through space as fast as light (c)
That is not entirely accurate.
Worm holes allow you to travel between points A and B; the Euclidian distance which means your effective velocity was/is significantly faster then 'c'.
--
First Contact is coming 2024. Are you ready for a new paradigm?
faster than light = time travel (Score:2)
Nothing can go as fast as light. Slower or faster, sure, but not c.
Light goes as fast as light.
More specifically, you can't send MATTER, ENERGY, or INFORMATION faster than the speed of light IN VACUUM.
The fact that there are "things" that travel faster than light (such as phase velocities) is well known; in these neither the matter nor the energy travels faster than light, and they don't carry information.
If you could, either relativity is wrong, or you can use this to make a time machine to access the past.
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"If you could, either relativity is wrong, or you can use this to make a time machine to access the past."
Well, relativity is most certainly 'wrong', in the sense that there is more to the universe that it does not cover. Of course, that's not really wrong, any more than Newton was wrong. Newton was not attempting to model relativistic effects, and Einstein was not attempting to model string theory.
And luckily, we are not made out of light, so the speed of light has little to do with a machine designed to a
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Sorry; if special relativity holds, FTL travel is equivalent to time travel.
Let's assume two spaceships pass each other at a speed giving a contraction factor of 2, and attune their ansibles. You're on one spaceship, and I'm on another.
Now, I knock my water glass into the main computer an hour later. This is bad. I send you a message saying that I did that, and ask you to repeat it. You receive it at the same time as I send it - but how is that measured? If I perceive you as receiving it at the sa
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"ansibles"
Hey, I love thought experiments and speculation as much as the next guy, but that is a fictional device without even an idea as to how it would work.
I'm also not sure what a contraction factor of 2 means, I assume you mean Lorentz contraction, but I don't know what 'speed' that would be. It really doesn't matter though, for the thought experiment of 2 FTL ships passing; anything over c will do. And I assure you I would never try to dis' special relativity.
Two ships pass each other, let's say each
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"If you could, either relativity is wrong, or you can use this to make a time machine to access the past."
Well, relativity is most certainly 'wrong', in the sense that there is more to the universe that it does not cover.
Saying "there are things it doesn't cover" is not the same as saying "it's wrong."
Of course, that's not really wrong, any more than Newton was wrong. Newton was not attempting to model relativistic effects, and Einstein was not attempting to model string theory. And luckily, we are not made out of light, so the speed of light has little to do with
The phrase "speed of light" is historical usage. An equally accurate phrase would be the universal conversion factor from units of space (meters) to units of time (seconds). It doesn't apply just to light, it is a universal constant that applies to pretty much everything in the universe, not just light. Most particularly, it applies to gravity.
a machine designed to alter a local region's gravitational constant,
If you alter the gravitational potential, the gravitational time dilation will me
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"Yeah, but WORMHOLES!!"--which to me sounds an awful lot like the secular version of "Yeah, but MAGIC!!"
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Every massless thing not only can, but must, go at c. That's the very reason light does.
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Height, width, depth, time, ... and gravity. Gravity is not a force, it's a dimension. It might be more accurate to say it is an attribute of dimensions.
In any case, it travels nowhere; it was already there. So there is no speed of light, or speed of anything concerning gravity.
That doesn't violate relativity in any way. If they find a gravitational quanta, then I'm wrong. They won't.
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Except that according to general relativity, gravitational _waves_ also are limited to C. As long as people confuse the current state of the system and what are basically "phase velocity" of changes in that state with the limitations of the "group veolocity", which is limited to C, we'll continue to see this sort of confusion.
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Wow, you sort of got that all wrong.
First off, light does have mass. Everything that exists has mass. How would a solar sail work if light has no mass?
You might have meant rest mass, but even so, you're still fairly wrong.
Good thing you posted AC.
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Light has energy and momentum. It does not have rest mass, and physicists usually use "mass" to mean rest mass nowadays.
If light had positive rest mass, it's fairly easy to show that, to travel at the speed of light, it would require infinite energy.
Medium.com Alert! (Score:5, Informative)
Danger Will Robinson, Danger! This article doesn't actually provide what its title claims. Clickbait, pure and unadulterated. Plus, it's not even that informative. All stuff we see in Slashdot comments any time anyone mentions FTL travel.
Re:Medium.com Alert! (Score:5, Informative)
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With a bit of creative interpretation, it does. For example, you could mimic the beta-decay electrons in nuclear piles:
1. Start out traveling at almost c.
2. Slam into a medium with a refractive index > 1.
For a brief period of time, while your body is being vaporized by the impact, and before Cherenkov radiation robs you of your kinetic energy, you will be traveling faster than light.
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Yeah by the standards of this article sound waves travel faster than light, at least if you're talking about their speed when passing through a sheet of tin.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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This means we've already got a plentiful source of fuel to go faster than light: Politicians! I *knew* there had to be some reason we have them.
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Light speed (Score:5, Informative)
Except, you know, cases where we slowed down light itself. By a lot [slashdot.org].
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Burn! /Michael Kelso
TL;DR (Score:5, Informative)
You can go faster than light goes in certain materials because then it travels slower than c. If you do that, badass things happen [wikipedia.org].
That said, the article is pretty well written IMHO, so if you've never heard of this before, go ahead and read it.
So if we fill space with water... (Score:3)
So if we fill space with water... we can have fast space travel.
Article's summary (Score:5, Informative)
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And even then, light in a vacuum goes slower than the actual speed of light.
The truest speed of light can't be attained in nature due to the fact that the vacuum is not, in fact, a true vacuum. There are virtual particles popping in and out of existence constantly, which light interacts with.
Creating 2 casimir plates to create a true vacuum would give you the true speed. What that speed may be is not known since, as far as I know, nobody has made such an experiment. But it is theorized to not be that big
Don't bother reading (Score:5, Informative)
The whole thing hinges on the phrase in the first paragraph; "depending on what you mean by a "thing", "faster-than-light", and "travel""
If you want to play around with semantics and definitions, then you've got an article. Otherwise, nothing new here. Speed of light unchallenged.
Really Though, DO NOT Bother Reading (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole thing hinges on the phrase in the first paragraph; "depending on what you mean by a "thing", "faster-than-light", and "travel""
If you want to play around with semantics and definitions, then you've got an article. Otherwise, nothing new here. Speed of light unchallenged.
Yeah ... came here, read the article, want my money back.
... however if you shout at the door, the sounds will be heard softly on the other side? In this case of "breaking the light speed barrier" our calculations show that not only are your vocal sound waves traveling faster than the speed of light but since light never got through the door and time still marches on, you are approaching a speed infinitely faster than the speed of light!
What a complete waste of time this article was!
Did you know that if you try to send a photon through a solid wooden door, it won't ever make it
Mind blown? Or are you just angry that I got you to read that horseshit?
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In that case, I've banged a lot of chicks, depending on what you mean by "banged", "a lot", and "chicks".
Light itself will always move at this speed- false (Score:2)
Poorly written (Score:2)
Poorly written article and misleading summary. Basically the article says you can "travel faster than the speed of light" without violating relativity...but neglects to mention which "speed of light" you're beating. Light speed is different in depending upon what medium -- or lack thereof -- it's traveling through. It's possible to slow light down to the point where you can walk faster than that speed of light. But you're not violating relativity by doing so because you're moving through a different med
Light speed also depends on time (Score:4, Informative)
And time itself is also quite complex. Here's a quote from someone who explains time:
"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff." - The Doctor.
Your listening to slashdot fm (Score:2, Insightful)
"All Ethan, all the time. Now lets go to Ethan for the forecast"
"Thank you Ethan, today will be mostly medium.com with some light links to other sites"
"Well that's the weather, now over to Ethan for the business"
"Well Ethan, Dice Holding have announced a shocking drop in profits after letting once popular Slashdot.com devolve into a medium.com link aggregator. Sharholders are angry, but DHI spokesperson Ethan Siegel insists the firm is making all the right moves, and it's purely market forces outside there
To sum this up: (Score:2)
1. Nothing can travel faster than light in a vacuum.
2. Some things can travel faster than light in a medium (when it is always slower by some factor).
Unfortunately the later is just an exploration of a pedantic nature and would never lead to any meaningful definition of FTL travel. it's like saying an ant is faster than a car but only when the car is stationary or moving extremely slowly (duh).
What was interesting about the article however was the part about cosmic expansion, even though again it does not p
Not scientific (Score:2)
TL;DR (Score:2)
The article says that things don't actually go faster than c. It is possible in a certain medium (example of water) for things (like electrons) to go faster than light does, but not faster than c.
Not even information can go faster than c, because we haven't discovered quantum entanglement to work that way.
The end. A dumb article; not worth reading.
Missed an example (Score:4, Funny)
I am surprised that it did not mention tachyons (Score:2)
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Tachyons are nasty negative mass states; really just weird mathematical solutions. You would expect the Spanish inquisition more than the observation of a tachyon anytime soon.
/fail (Score:2)
This article was a total dissapointment. So things can technically go faster than light when light is slowed through a medium. BFD. This has nothing to do with FTL travel.
There may be a way (Score:4, Interesting)
But I'm not sure TFA deals with it. Nothing can travel faster than c in a vacuum. Light travels at c (in a vacuum). However, light cannot escape from inside a black hole. This isn't due to classical speed limits, but the way space time curves near the black hole's event horizon.
However, gravity can escape a black hole. Otherwise, how would they exist and grow? So gravity is not constrained by the same space-time curvature as light. Therefore, over long distances, the curvature of space time (even a slight effect caused by the masses of nearby galaxies) would cause the vacuum velocities of gravity to excced that of light. Or, to put another way, the path through space time for light is slightly longer than that for gravity. So gravity gets there first.
Hint: Think about this effect as an alternative to dark matter/energy.
The Usenet Physics FAQ did it better (Score:5, Informative)
For a more thorough and slightly more technical approach to the same subject, check out the Usenet Physics FAQ's article "Is Faster-Than-Light Travel or Communication Possible?" [ucr.edu]. Here's the conclusion:
it's a freaking theory... (Score:2)
Even Einstein himself said it was a theory and he might be wrong...... Just like any 'laws' of nature aren't set in stone, they are 'laws' created by humans to help us puny humans understand what's going on, at least what we believe is going on...
Let's not forget, scientists a long time ago said the world was flat, and if you said otherwise you were a heritic... Now we know better...
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How exactly is space expanding, and what exactly is expanding into?
This is difficult to answer without getting into a long discourse on spacetime. However, you have to get away from the notion that there is some kind of "edge" to the universe and space is somehow expanding that edge into infinite nothingness. There is no "edge" to the universe anymore than there is a definable "edge" to our planet (i.e. a flat earth).
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No.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity-addition_formula [wikipedia.org]
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Unfortunately, that's not how it works. You can't just add up the tube's velocity (0.75c) and your velocity (0.75c) and get 1.5c. To put it another way, if you somehow got a spaceship to move at the speed of light (c) and then turned on the ship's headlights, the light coming out of them wouldn't be travelling at 2c, it would be travelling at c.
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Well I realize the OP wasn't attempting to be serious, but I'll ask a serious question anyway.
A long, 3m diameter tube is moving at c. You set out to propel yourself from the aft of the tube to the fore, maybe with a power winch. What happens?
Does the tube disintegrate?
Does some physical phenomenon prevent you moving forward?
If you can move forward, by what magic are you still not travelling any faster than the tube?
Or are you indeed travelling faster then the tube but somehow not faster than light? If so p
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You (and the tube) can't move at c, because you have mass.
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OK so the correct answer to my question, which imposes a tube moving at the speed of light whether there be a means of getting it there or not, is b) some physical phenomenon prevents me moving forward, that physical phenomenon being my outrageous mass, since to move anywhere at all I would have to accelerate or decelerate that mass.
Thank you.
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Moreover, if you're at the speed of light, time is stopped for you. You can't move without taking time to do so. This, I believe, is how we know neutrinos don't go at the speed of light: they can change neutrino type as they move, and so they have to be experiencing time, and therefore they can't be going exactly c. (They go really close to it. In a supernova, the neutrino burst will leave the core immediately, while the light takes a few hours to get out of the star, so the neutrinos have a head star
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Your mass prevents it from happening. As you get closer and closer to c, your mass increases, requiring more energy to accelerate you further.
To actually move at c, you'd require infinite energy. You don't have infinite energy, hence you can't hit c.
Now, the trick with the tube would be this:
Take, say, a six foot by six foot square of material. Lets say light can move 3 feet/second, and you can move 1 foot/second, and you want to get a dinky car, represnting you, from the middle of the left edge to the m
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wrong, you are not even subjectively going faster than C, rather you observe a different shorter distance to Alpha C. Nice try.
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A perfect example of "solving the wrong problem".
"Astronaut: We want to travel faster than light."
"Scientist: Easily done! I'll just slow down light!"
"Astronaut: You missed the point."
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Whish that would work for the 2nd law of thermodynamics.... No THAT would be something...