a reply to:
Dryson
It appears that getting from place to place with Newtonian physics will not work. Seems that the only two ways to get to far solar sytems or galaxies
is to create a worm-hole or use anti-gravity. The idea of anti-gravity isn't that hard to understand. One would create a "pinch" of space-time in
front of the craft and a "push" of space-time behind the space craft. The effect would feel sort of like going down a very long slide.
On to the other post, the limit of the speed of light doesn't hold up. Take galaxies for example, using radar type technologies shows that just about
every stellar body is moving away from all other solar bodies (red shifting) and moving faster and faster away from one another, thus the expanding
universe, but what about when those galaxies (from the force of anti-gravity) makes galaxies speed away from other galaxies at faster the speed of
light. The galaxies don't get destroyed, they are simply moving faster than the speed of light so we don't detect their presence.
As for H atoms, the question you should be asking is what effect dark matter has upon mass moving close to the speed of light. The expansion and such
are on a spectrum. Upon the approach to the speed of light the "background" becomes ever more present. Think of it like blood. Blood cells going
down an artery usually move quite fast and flow like water, but when there are clotting agents in the blood the blood gets "thicker" and the transport
of stuff goes slower. Perhaps that isn't a very precise description. I'll try another. I don't know exactly how to describe it. It works in a
similar way that the electromagnetic spectrum works. Different frequencies and wavelengths have different effects on matter. Microwaves are able to
cook food without expelling ionizing radiation. Higher on the EM spectrum that wave or partical (or wave-partical duality) behaves differently. It
turns those things that come in contact with it highly radioactive and destroys ("ionizes" or turns "radio-active") matter rather than just warming it
up. At some point in the spectrum there is a different reaction to that wave, the cycles per second (Hz) can produce many very different reactions.
Now imagine that spectrum in the terms of space-time. Different speeds of matter among the swimming pool can cause that space-time to be "thicker" or
"thinner." Thus if one "pinches" matter (makes it thinner) in the direction of desired travel , and "pushes" matter away from the opposite end, this
produces a slide effect. Weee!
The footprint on space-time would be an elliptical bubble, or perhaps different depending on the shape of the
vessel being propelled. As this bends space-time rather than typical flying there is not the inertia of massive G-forces being felt. You get to ride
the curve rather than being ripped to pieces.
Now to wormholes. They can be very scary things. You get a rosen-bridge (wormhole) that draws you in from some point in space-time. But where does
it send you? Unless the wormhole is artificial you could be on a trip somewhere so far out that there is nothing but blackness, some place far far
away with the properties of physics itself being different, you may find yourself very very lonely. No stars, no planets, possibly no matter except
what gets into it from the rosen-bridge. Now lets say they are artificial, it seems that the simplest way to make one would be to have a gate from
one point in space-time to another, where you would have to set up tests initiated by people for people at a not-so-far distance because you would
have to "activate" the hole using the same properties for each end. In simple terms you need a guy on each side of the bridge to synchronize the
"caller" to the "receiver," or to set up a two-way pipe. This can be thought of sort of like Mario Brothers. There is the "real-world" up on top of
the Earth and there are pipes bringing Mario "underground," think of "underground" as perhaps "sub-space." You can enter at one point, "go under," and
"back up" at a different part of "the world." The travel in sub-space can be a massively warped travel in both space and time. Where 10 miles
travelled in "normal space" one could instead have "origin -> sub-space -> exit" taking only (an arbitrarily small distance).
Background: Both of these, slipstreams and wormholes, are theoreticaly possible according to current quantum physics and super-string physics, see
university level general overviews of these topics to get caught up. There are teaching companies out there that offer general overviews and if you
are currently enrolled in university you can get papers on such topics for free as part of the tuition, even if physics is not your major. The most
entertaining stuff are the quarks and the ideas about there being 12 or so different dimensions in our reality.
btw, there is also the possibility of a self-sustaining slip-stream, where space-time is bent in such a way that it can be set to travel a certain
direction and speed and the slide continues on indefinitely until "cancelled," going back to regular space. Also, one of those university-equivalent
teaching comanies that I've heard about is The Great Courses, you can google it.