If you travel faster than light, what happens?

[stpvoice]

According to every theoretical determination I've heard from various sources, including the discovery and science channels on T.V., Time would /seem/ to slow down, but aside from that, nothing would really happen.

Yes, I've seen some very interesting things about this, too. Stuff like travelling close to the apparent supermassive black hole at the centre of the galaxy allowing us to explore deep space within the lifespan of a human.

 

[elite.tech9147]

Aa someone how are tryng to go in black hole know answer that HARD Dimension epic question.



I love theys SyFy Shows!!!!

 

[Darkmere]

Highly simplified, think of the speed of light as the "cosmic speed limit". If nothing can go faster, then time actually slows down. Think about it:

If speed=distance/time, then a larger value for time results in a lower speed, thus preventing anything from reaching or exceeding the speed of light.

I can see what you mean but there is no proof that the speed of light is the limit we just it as the fastest any object can go. I mean photons are weird little particles and we do not still know how they fully function or do what they do. I mean they respond to gravity, they slow down when they pass through material, and they have mass. But we do not know why they travel at when unhindered at near 186000 miles per second. You know humans were actually able to get Electrons to accelerate to the speed of light, I read some wherer where they are going to attempt to accelerate an electron faster than the speed of light. I mean of course that wasnt a hard task, electrons travel at near speeds of light anyways so it wasnt hard to give them a push. But I think it would be ignorant of us all to think just because we cannot find any object traveling faster than the speed of light that it cannot be done. There has been a lot of people in history that did that exact same thing and 100% of them were wrong. I do not want to be a nay sayer so I say it is impossible now but may be possible in the future or it is improbabl.

 

[MusicBoy]

I am pretty sure that traveling at the speed of light is damn near impossible.... HOWEVER what if you could get space/time to move around you? Though it maybe be a very big stretch, it would seem there is a possibility. Read this article! All you Trekkies would like this too

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

 

[Darkmere]

I still do not believe you can say yes or no on the possibility. I mean people use to say it was near impossible for man to fly, and now we have planes. At the time people said that there was not enough proof to support the possibility of flight just like I do not believe there is enough proof to definitively state that faster than light travel is not possible

 

[carrock]

If you try to accelerate to or beyond the speed of light, you'll always find that the local speed of light is constant no matter how fast you are moving relative to, say, Earth.
You will perceive that earth is getting flatter and heavier with time passing more slowly while people on earth will perceive that you are getting flatter and heavier with time passing more slowly.
You are both correct.

A billion years of acceleration wouldn't make any difference.....

From its own viewpoint, a photon of light is created and destroyed instantaneously at the same place and time, even a photon that we see as having travelled from the Big Bang.

Relativity came about because Einstein realised that a wave of light travelling a finite distance in finite time was impossible.
If you think he's wrong better sell your computer quickly as relativistic theory and quantum mechanics were used in its design.....

While it is (apparently) impossible to send information or energy faster than light, Einstein and others, as mentioned earlier in the thread, did come up with 'spooky action at a distance' which was such a ridiculous logical deduction from quantum theory that Einstein hoped the whole thing would collapse.
This spooky action been demonstrated in various experiments eg http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/18574 esp second paragraph

So if you want to send some action FTL look at sunlight through a pair of polaroid sunglasses.
If you rotate the sunglasses the photons which hit them are/were/will be affected by the angle of your glasses when they left the sun eight minutes earlier.

An early researcher said that if you think you understand quantum mechanics you don't.

 

[ChatIndia]

I can see what you mean but there is no proof that the speed of light is the limit we just it as the fastest any object can go.

I wanna stop you here. There are proofs and i could write it down here but my fingers are getting bit lazy at the moment

 

[Darkmere]

I wanna stop you here. There are proofs and i could write it down here but my fingers are getting bit lazy at the moment

I would like to see that. A credible undefinable, and unchallenged proof that nothing can be accelerated beyond the speed of light. Last I checked it was all theory, even Einsteins Ideas are theory, or Unproven.

---------- Post added at 09:48 AM ---------- Previous post was at 09:43 AM ----------

But even Physics Laws are broken. Look at Water it is the only substance that breaks the State Laws on volume. Just because Photons are the only thing we know of that can travel at around 186,000 miles per sec, does not mean that there could not be something or some condition that can break that speed limit.

---------- Post added at 10:07 AM ---------- Previous post was at 09:48 AM ----------

I would also like to throw out. What if there is something that does travel faster and it is all around us right now but we do not currently have the means to detect these entities

 

[ChatIndia]

this is a very popular relation that you might know

$$t = \frac{t_0}{\sqrt{1-\frac{v^2}{c^2}}$$

so if v = c then denominator becomes zero and the value of fraction will become infinite.

Edit: @darkmere, so it is not possible.

 

[dinoian65]

I just read through a bunch of this thread but didn't see any mention of Cherenkov Radiation, where an object moves faster than light in a medium other than the vacuum. So while it would not be possible to accelerate to the speed of light relative to a stationary observer in a vacuum, you could accelerate to something like 0.8c and then pass into a dense glass where the speed of light is something like 0.7c, and therefore cause you to emit radiation as you slow down. The radiation emitted will still be moving at the speed of light in the material relative to you, an important result of the Michelson-Morely experiment which disproved the existence of the aether.

 

[garrettroyce]

As was mentioned before, velocity is inversely proportional to time. Even in jets at mach 2 (which is a tiny fraction of c) time slows significantly enough to be measured. As you approach c in your impossible ship impossibly somewhere in an impossible universe, time would slow enough to be almost stopped. The photons of light would be essentially stationary in space, which wouldn't matter because your brain wouldn't be able to interpret anything, because the electric signals in your brain would be essentially stationary as well. When you slow down to regular human space-time travel an infinitely short amount of time later, you wouldn't have even interpreted the entire voyage at near-c because it would have taken less time than your brain is able to perceive.

I'm not going to even argue the plausibility, but there's my idea of the question asked. I haven't read all the responses, so I hope I'm not repeating somebody.

 

[iearn.tk54]

let us try
hahahhaha

bit difficult que

u can just do it theoretically
practically may be not possible

 

[gouri78]

You physically cannot travel faster then light. You would get killed by the G force. There is so much pressure on your body traveling at 600MPH imagine 671,080,888MPH (The speed of light). Not ever going to happen. But you would pretty much disintegrate instantaneously.

ya you r correct i too have similar ideas about it.
anyways lets see what happens in feature......

 

[Darkmere]

I know this thread is pretty much dead but I wanted to share an article by Asscociated Press that was released to day stating they may have found particles that travel faster than the speed of light http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_BREAKING_LIGHT_SPEED?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

 

[cybrax]

Physicists have known for years that something was not quite right with Alberts work (see Cherenkov radiation) and in fairness he knew himself that not all the equations balanced beyond a certain hypothetical point and so began his quest to tie up those loose variables with the Unified Field Theory.

One interesting point to remember when discussing the 'Relativity' physics is just that... 'it's all relative' as Albert said and though he proved that time is a variable at revalistic velocities for light it's often glossed over that this is a special case scenario or tecnical fudge if you like as light has negligable mass and does little to distort space/time thus making the equations simpler. By contrast a 'heavier' object with more mass moving at these speeds does bend space so speed as viewed/measured by an external observer outside the area of distortion does not obey the rules of classical theory.

There's a nice line in the latest Star Trek movie where Spock shows Scotty some equations and he goes
"Wow! It never occured to me that space could be moving"

 

[dkstiler97]

well according to known physics we cant or we need enormous amount of energy in order to do that ... but physics knowledge base its still to low to find that ....

even now we talk the known Schrodinger equation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger_equation
... witch is a pain to be solved even in 1 dimension by hand and withought time depedent ..... imagine if we try to solve it with 3 dimension and time depedent ..... since that many parts of the equation we don't know what it is and what it does ... the only known solution for now is through pc and they solve it with trial and error most of the times by just making the electron wave graphs paters and if those are following the given specifications


as of light speed electromagnetic waves are limited to c speed aprox. 3*10^8 m/s
now in order to travel at faster than light an object that has mass well according to relativity today's equations its not possible and maybe never be. The only way to travel great distances could be through an alternative universe of some kind according to babylon 5 seires and that assuming that the theory of the strings is correct http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory .
I dont know according to star trek theory ... if the object is inside a certain field of some type i cant even guess what properties it must have .... etc what can be done but only the future will tell ...

 

[Darkmere]

well according to known physics we cant or we need enormous amount of energy in order to do that ... but physics knowledge base its still to low to find that ....

even now we talk the known Schrodinger equation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger_equation
... witch is a pain to be solved even in 1 dimension by hand and withought time depedent ..... imagine if we try to solve it with 3 dimension and time depedent ..... since that many parts of the equation we don't know what it is and what it does ... the only known solution for now is through pc and they solve it with trial and error most of the times by just making the electron wave graphs paters and if those are following the given specifications


as of light speed electromagnetic waves are limited to c speed aprox. 3*10^8 m/s
now in order to travel at faster than light an object that has mass well according to relativity today's equations its not possible and maybe never be. The only way to travel great distances could be through an alternative universe of some kind according to babylon 5 seires and that assuming that the theory of the strings is correct http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory .
I dont know according to star trek theory ... if the object is inside a certain field of some type i cant even guess what properties it must have .... etc what can be done but only the future will tell ...

They just proved that objects with mass can travel faster than light ... it has been all over the news

 

[stiler]

They just proved that objects with mass can travel faster than light ... it has been all over the news

what exactly are u reffering to neutrino that in cern may travel faster than light ?

in any case much remain to be seen ... but still neutrino particles dont have any mass ..... or its mass can be considered that has no effect ...

 

[essellar]

Neutrinos are massive (well, the mass is neglible, but it's still mass). The apparent results of the CERN OPERA experiment, though, are not the final answer -- they've asked for everybody's help in analyzing the experiment, the equipment, and the data. One of the current hypotheses is that the apparent results are an artifact of the FPGAs used in the apparatus.

Another possibility, one that I mentioned much earlier in the thread, is that tachyons are common, but must have extremely high energy in order to become slow enough to measure. (Theoretically, and it's only a mathematical possibility, a tachyon of zero energy would move at an infinite velocity. It's essentially the reciprocal of the sub-c computation.) There is nothing in "classical" relativity to prevent tachyons -- it's the transition between tardyon and tachyon that moves through the posited infinite energy bound and informational singularity.

 

[garrettroyce]

The other thing to consider is that the calculated velocity of these neutrinos is only 5600 m/s faster than the speed of light. This is not 1.1C or 1.01C, it's 1.000002C. It would take a whopping 14.6m over 730km to produce this error; about the distance from your car to the stoplight if 3 usual SUVs or trucks were in front of you. The difference in time it would take would be .000000005s; this time interval passes 20,000,000 times when you blink. The good people at CERN have put in a ton of time and effort making these calculations as precise as possible, but these are not large errors. At the same time, the Earth is moving at 298,000 m/s, rotating at 465m/s, the pitch of the Earth's axis is changing, and natural events (disasters) are slowing and speeding up the Earth's rotation. Measuring a great distance precisely and accurately down to the nearest 1/10th of a millimeter isn't trivial and, in my humble opinion, some error will show up in the calculations (probably the distance) and the greater than C measurement will be discredited.

Should it be correct, it would be an interesting phenomenon, but it probably will end up being some sort of new coefficient on an Einstein equation rather than an entire new branch of science. Neutrinos can pass through solid mass as thick as 500 Earths without interacting with another single fundamental particle (if one were to interact with your body matter, it would feel like getting hit by a tennis ball from a professional's serve [paraphrasing the professor at Fermilab, where I took physics classes]).