Scientists have answered the question. All over the world nerds are weeping.
It's official: FTL is impossible
- Thread starter Deckerd
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Seems to me more like the BBC distorted the reported purpose of the experiment to sensationalise the story.
No, the possibility for FTL still exists and it is just as big as it ever was, it's just that it is still very very unlikely. Unfortunately.
Not for the reasons in the article, but simply because there is absolutely no physical mechanism known to make it possible, and if it were possible very very strange and weird things are gonna happen.
Not for the reasons in the article, but simply because there is absolutely no physical mechanism known to make it possible, and if it were possible very very strange and weird things are gonna happen.
I thought this experiment only proved what we already know, that nothing can physically be accelerated beyond the speed of light. That's always been the case. The clever boffins around the world have said that you can possibly cheat that limit though and travel faster than light through other means. Those other means might as well be impossible, but theoretically the chance to achieve FTL still exists, just not through the conventional sense of making it go faster.
um, how is this a big deal? c is still the cosmic speed limit, same as it always has been. the only way you could ever hope to travel "faster than light" is by somehow bending of folding space itself, so an object is never actually moving faster than c relative to it's environment; rather it is the environment itself that is moving. this article changes nothing about that, merely disproves a certain minor theory that perhaps individual photons can actually break lightspeed relative to their environments, rather than simply giving the illusion of it. as far as I can see, it is no more reason for nerds to weep than the information we already have...
True enough. But what do sci fi nerds have to do with reason?
An analogy: A worm was in Long Island Sound, the oceans were filled with corn syrup, and the worm wanted to get to France. Dr. Einstein told the worm, "You cannot exceed the speed limit through syrup c (180 mph), and the faster you go, the harder it will become to fight the viscosity of the syrup. You don't have enough energy in your body to achieve even .00001 that speed for 10 minutes. It would take you millions of lifetimes to reach France. You can make it to shore. Go home." The worm was a great admirer of Dr. Einstein and felt his pain in still trying very hard after many years to work the bugs of his theory. But the worm then recalled the words of his greatest hero Commander Peter Quincy Taggart of his favorite TV series Galaxy Quest: "Never give up; never surrender." That thought quickly turned his frown upside down, and soon he was beaming from ear to ear and then noticed that he liked the taste of the syrup. The worm went into a feeding frenzy and got that obstructing syrup out of his path, rushing forward to get more, while his body processed it into energy.
Dr. Einstein, to his utter amazement, saw the worm's great burst of speed, pulled out his pocket theodolite to check the worm's trajectory, bought a map, and plotted the worm's course--sure enough straight for France. When he received the worm's e-mail from Nantes, he noticed the time stamp and realized that the worm's travel time was less than that of e-mail from across the ocean.
Resulting subversive hypothesis: Maybe a physical spacecraft can travel faster than light and doesn't need fuel, just a rechargeable battery to start its engine and boot its computer. It has to emulate the worm and eat its way through the as-yet-little-understood luminiferous medium, which scientists today call by many names. It may take a long time to get past the Keystone Kops stage, but we'll get there eventually.
Dr. Einstein, to his utter amazement, saw the worm's great burst of speed, pulled out his pocket theodolite to check the worm's trajectory, bought a map, and plotted the worm's course--sure enough straight for France. When he received the worm's e-mail from Nantes, he noticed the time stamp and realized that the worm's travel time was less than that of e-mail from across the ocean.
Resulting subversive hypothesis: Maybe a physical spacecraft can travel faster than light and doesn't need fuel, just a rechargeable battery to start its engine and boot its computer. It has to emulate the worm and eat its way through the as-yet-little-understood luminiferous medium, which scientists today call by many names. It may take a long time to get past the Keystone Kops stage, but we'll get there eventually.
If future people found enough material and the technology to create a wormhole, how would they transport people through it? I understand them to be sort of elongated black hole which means everything would be crushed by gravity and spat out at the other end as energy.
So the answer to breaking the galactical speed limit is to find worms that love to eat vacuum?
But vacuum may not be actually a vacuum!
There was actually an episode of Star Trek in which Captain Kirk said "no natural object can travel faster than light."
Confirmed...
Confirmed...
Use a Stargate.
But seriously, some mechanism to convert the matter into energy upon entering the wormhole and another mechanism to reconvert it back into matter upon exiting.
Bingo. In the 19th century they called it aether but assumed it to be static (which it isn't), just for convenience to simplify the math. But now it's called virtual particles, gravitons, zero-point energy, the fabric of space, vacuum fluctuations, and probably several other things. But empty space has an average temperature of about 3K (not solely for this reason, though) not 0K, and helium can't be brought down to the freezing point (which is due to this).
The Wikipedia article about the Casimir effect (a consequence of this aether (or whatever you like to call it), has been updated and covers a bit of it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect
Here's an article from Nature on repulsive Casimir effect achieved at Harvard, which is a small step forward in the field of nanotech, since the Casimir effect caused by the not-really-empty vacuum creates a problem with tiny gears, which repulsive Casimir could solve nicely once developed well enough.
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090107/full/news.2009.4.html
And Dr. Einstein, while not mentioning the worm (who wished to remain anonymous), gave his reaction, using the old term aether. Theorists over the years have sort of ignored it, but now it seems to be getting some new-found attention, as you can see from the above links and many other recent articles.
Dr. Einstein's comments:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yH9vAIdMqng
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So this means we have to stop watching Trek, SW and a lot of other sci-fi.
If the exponentially-increasing energy required for fast motion is due to drag from virtual particles (in some highly abstracted sense), then perhaps we can generate some kind of field which encourages virtual particles to form less frequently in a given area.
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