Is anything faster than the speed of light?

reply to post by BetweenMyths



How about if you were on a large space ship in the future that was capable of going at light speed,and the ship was large enough to enable you to run from the rear of the ship to the front .Then you would be going faster than the speed of light ,wouldn't you?

Darkness comes to mind.

I think it's safe to say that nothing in this reality happened by chance. It's definitely not a coincidence. This reality has intelligent design written all over it and it would be a bit stupid to create such a big universe if you had no way of exploring it, so there must be some way to travel faster than light.

Was Einstein Wrong?: A Quantum Threat to Special Relativity

www.thothweb.com...

reply to post by Welfhard


Funny you should say that cos thats what i think too, if your travelling at the speed of light then you would be in total darkness & you would have to have a pretty good map so that you werent going to hit anything. I might be wrong but thats how i see it.

reply to post by cropmuncher


Well not total darkness, there would be light coming from the direction you are travelling and darkness behind you.

Nope

reply to posts by selfisolated, TopsyCret and Revolution-2012

According to General Relativity, the force of gravity propagates at the speed of light.

Time has no speed. It is a dimension of spacetime. Asking 'what is the speed of time?' is about as meaningful as asking 'what is the speed of length?'

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reply to post by dashen

The papers you posted are speculations in theoretical physics - mathematical exercises, essentially. They do not claim anything that moves faster than light actually exists, only that some solutions to the mathematics - under highly constrained circumstances and very, very briefly - allow room for the possibility that such things can be.

As I'm sure you're aware, no faster-than-light object has ever been detected.

* * *

and while we're on the subject

Quantum entanglement is not a form of faster-than-light travel; it is the instantaneous transmission of information (nothing else) from one point in space to another. It isn't travel because there is no movement through space.

As for extraterrestrials bending space, maybe it's possible, but that still isn't faster-than-light travel, is it? That's just taking a shortcut.

Darkness (rather obviously, I would have thought), is nothing but the absence of light and therefore, if it could be said in any sense to travel, it travels at exactly the speed of light.

As for the speed of thought, well, it takes about a second for you to become conscious of a thought your brain just had, so I'd say it was pretty slow.

But maybe the guy with ejaculatio praecox is on to something... more research wanted here, obviously.

Extreme Gravitational Distortions have the ability to "slow down" light waves. Therefore, anything, say a high energy neutrino, that travels almost as fast as light in a vaccum, when in a race with a slowed down light wave\photon wave, would essentially be travelling faster than light, swish.

Additionally the reference material that I provided earlier shows that the Speed of light is not necessarily the unchanging constant of the Universe, thereby toppling Einsteins theory in certain, admittedly rare circumstances.

[edit on 2-3-2009 by dashen]

[edit on 2-3-2009 by dashen]

Thought is faster than light, or if you prefer, 'awareness'

You can send your awareness to any point in any universe right now - instantly. That's pretty fast

Actually, awareness not only travels distance quickly, but time too.

Anyone read Jonathan Seagull by Richard Bach?

reply to post by dashen

Extreme Gravitational Distortions have the ability to "slow down" light waves. Therefore, anything, say a high energy neutrino, that travels almost as fast as light in a vaccum, when in a race with a slowed down light wave\photon wave, would essentially be travelling faster than light, swish.

No, the photon is merely deflected to follow the spacetime distortion caused by gravity. Its speed (as opposed to its velocity) remains the same.

And c is, specifically, the speed of light in vacuo. This means that the second part of your post...

Additionally the reference material that I provided earlier shows that the Speed of light is not necessarily the unchanging constant of the Universe, thereby toppling Einsteins theory in certain, admittedly rare circumstances.

...is also incorrect.

reply to post by Astyanax


That statement was meant in jest. However, at the time of the Big Bang very very early on into the "reaction", before the first photons were released from the primordial mega-dense pool/cloud of first muons and whatnot, the whole universe was moving faster than the speed of light, and you must admit, at that early stage, Mr. Einsteins Relativity Falls apart like a soggy falafel.

Quantum entanglement.... Well not that anything actually travels faster that light in this scenario data should be able to be transfered instantly over any distance!! So if you had a quantum telephone and the other end was a light year away your conversation would happen as if you were stood next to the other person... If the same data was sent via light a year after you said hello the other person would get that word, and then say hello back, 2 year round trip for the word hello!

if information can travel instantaneous between entangled bodies, regardless of distance, how is this 'information being transmitted?

It's obviously NOT through light, then thorugh what medium is this 'information' being transmitted?

Also makes you wonder about the holographic universe, as it has no real distances in it, everything is at the same point of origin.

Also makes you wonder about the 'All is one' statements, and what is the nature of consciousness.

reply to post by scratchmane


hehe... Welcome to the weird ass world of quantum physics my friend - in all honesty I don't get it either. try this wiki page

Did you ever hear of the thought experiment dubbed 'Schrödingers cat'?... You have a cat (alive) in a box with a bottle of poison, a hammer and a mechanism to break the bottle of poison with the hammer - the mechanism works with a Geiger counter, and a slightly radioactive substance... Now the substance may or may not decay during the time scale of the experiment - the Geiger counter may or may not register it, the hammer may or may not swing, the bottle may or may not break, and the cat may or may not die!

The only possible way to confirm the cats well being is to open the box and view the cat... (this is the weird bit) right up untill the point that you open the box and observe the cat - the cat is both dead and alive! - it occupies BOTH states! only by observing the animal have you determined it's state, so (in the quantum world at least) the mere act of observing something can determine it's state.... Now of course in the real relative world we live in, yep sure the idea is bonkers but apparently on a quantum it is possible...

Quantum entanglement is a possible property of a quantum mechanical state of a system of two or more objects in which the quantum states of the constituting objects are linked together so that one object can no longer be adequately described without full mention of its counterpart — even though the individual objects may be spatially separated. This interconnection leads to non-classical correlations between observable physical properties of remote systems, often referred to as nonlocal correlations. For example, quantum mechanics holds that states such as spin are indeterminate until such time as some physical intervention is made to measure the spin of the object in question.

So if you think of entangled particles as gloves, left and right, each placed in sealed boxes and seperated by a million light years... No one knows which box contains the left glove, no one knows which box contains the right glove, a illion light year apart - both gloves are both left and right.... until one of the boxes is opened! at that very instant on glove is observed and instantly both gloves determine their state! Et Voilà! Data has instantly been transmitted the distance it would of taken light a million years to travel

Now quantum particles can have different spins the spins are the hypothetical cats or gloves... Understand now? No? Well neither does anyone else

My head hurts now.

reply to post by Now_Then

These things aren't as scarily paradoxical as they're sometimes made out to be. For example, Schrodinger may not know whether or not the cat is alive till he opens his box, but you can bet your life the cat does.

You have to understand that quantum mechanics is an explanation of real-world phenomena in mathematical terms. The equations imply certain other physical consequences, which can even be verified experimentally. However, their paradoxical nature is mainly due to our observing them from our own perspective and scale. If we could make ourselves quantum-sized, I'm sure we'd see most of these paradoxes disappear.

Finally, don't forget that both general relativity and quantum mechanics, our great theories of the world, are incomplete and incompatible. They offer only a partial map of reality; we don't have the whole picture yet.

Originally posted by Astyanax
reply to post by Now_Then

 

These things aren't as scarily paradoxical as they're sometimes made out to be. For example, Schrodinger may not know whether or not the cat is alive till he opens his box, but you can bet your life the cat does.

Well duh... :lol; the cat is an analogy, a cat would be aware... Particles are not.

And this is all on a quantum level... You cannot compare it to any thing on a relative level unless you are the one who unifies physics!!! And if you are that person we should go for a beer, I could be your agent!

And who gave him a star for that post? Sheish edit: I could'a sworn that post had a star, never mind - I'm loosing mine

[edit on 5/3/2009 by Now_Then]

Good post. Time and speed are all relevant of course... We as humans, don't know the slightest bit about the universe and everything, that's why we just have theories... So I do believe, that the speed of light, is possibly, not the fastest attainable speed... There could be a faster speed, and hopefully with CERNS research and new LHC, they can debunk this more...

I'm still convinced that when I'm driving on the highway at night, my headlights are traveling at the speed of light plus 65 mph, so I'm not gonna try and figure out quantum entanglement. But how much mass can be entangled? Could a wafer thin sheet be entangled and used as a faster than light speed chalk board of sorts?

eb

Originally posted by BetweenMyths
Is anything faster than the speed of light?

What, you mean apart from your bowel movements after eating a bad Mexican restaurant?

Light may be the limit traveling through space, but there might be some tricks to get around this limit.

For instance entanglement works without any traveling required. Like nature's version of teleportation.

Also, what if you could move the space around you? You wouldn't be traveling through space then.

please dont flame me for this, but i have a question, and ive been trying to get the answer for 22 years. say you have a vehicle capable of light speed. you turn on your headlights. do you see them?