Here is why you CANNOT travel faster than light!

Many people think of light speed as impassible, inconceivable, and many other adjectives which I don't feel like listing.(Mostly because I can't think of any more. And I would like to mention I am generalizing when I say many people.)

Then there are the ones who think light speed is attainable. I have come to dispute the facts that it isn't, and then explain how it MIGHT be.

We all know of the equation e=mc^2.

This is Einstein's famous equation that tells us how matter and energy are equivalent.

But how?

Well here is how it actually does look....

upload.wikimedia.org...


Well in order to help understand this we need the velocity c to be the velocity of something that has no rest mass.(Light.) We will see this as 1.

Then v^2 must be your velocity squared.

In the equation we have to subtract v^2 / c^2 from 1.(Just to be clear v ^2 is going to be less than 1^2 when an object has la lower velocity than that of light.)

The problem we run into is that 1 when the object velocity squared equals 1, then 1 / 1 = 1!!!!!!!!

This is NOT GOOD!!!

Because 1-1 =0!!

And dividing by zero is COMPLETE MATHEMATICAL NONSENSE. In fact back in 98 a computer on a ship called the Yorktown, I think that was it's name, tried to divide by zero. And guess what happened....

www.wired.com...

The source of the problem on the Yorktown was that bad data was fed into an application running on one of the 16 computers on the LAN. The data contained a zero where it shouldn't have, and when the software attempted to divide by zero, a buffer overrun occurred -- crashing the entire network and causing the ship to lose control of its propulsion system.

Crashed it's ENTIRE NETWORK.

Okay now we know you can't travel at light speed.But what about traveling faster than light?

It is wrong to because what happens?

The answer becomes a NEGATIVE SQUARE ROOT!

In english this means what number squared = -1 (when v^2 / c^2 is 2.)

When you multiply, or divide, 2 negatives you get a positive. This is a fact. Even when you square a negative number it is still a positive. Heck when you square a positive number it is positive too!

But you cannot find the square root of a negative number.

mathworld.wolfram.com...

In math this is an imaginary number.

So now we know that the domain of the function
f(x)=mc^2/ square root( 1 - x^2 / c^2)

f(x) = any real number where x < 1

So in english all of this means we cannot travel at a velocity faster than or equal to light.So to put it in real terms we knew our energy needed to become infinite.

Until now I haven't mentioned any of the other ways to travel at light speed.Well I just proved you can't travel at light speed. But WHO SAID I HAVE TO TRAVEL?

It was Relativity's ability to bend spacetime that led people to the belief that I can move spacetime in front of me faster than light and spacetime behind me faster than light.

In essence I haven't traveled. So since spacetime doesn't have any mass it is not restricted to a certain speed.

This is known as the Alcubierre warp drive.

Another thing that might be used for faster than light travel is a wormhole.

A wormhole is created by mass bending spacetime in such a way that 2 points in spacetime become connected and by traveling through, well you really can't say through do to the wormhole not having any width, the wormhole you are instantaneously at the other side of the wormhole no matter where it is in the universe.

Unfortunately wormholes are very unstable. Kip Thorne proposed using a form of exotic matter that bends spacetime differently than normal matter to keep wormholes from collapsing. The closest thing we have to this is the Casimir effect.

Here is a link....

www.scientificamerican.com...

Now, if mirrors are placed facing each other in a vacuum, some of the waves will fit between them, bouncing back and forth, while others will not. As the two mirrors move closer to each other, the longer waves will no longer fit--the result being that the total amount of energy in the vacuum between the plates will be a bit less than the amount elsewhere in the vacuum. Thus, the mirrors will attract each other, just as two objects held together by a stretched spring will move together as the energy stored in the spring decreases.

Hope that helps.

Post any questions, comments, concerns, and conundrums below.

[edit on 17-8-2010 by Gentill Abdulla]

Beautifully put

Visable light is one of the most misunderstood frequencies on the EM spectrum.

I remember quite some time ago having a discussion about relatavistic mass and photons.

The fact that according to relativity photons can exert pressure that is equivilent to the energy state of the photons in question causes a little conundrum.

If this is the case then light traveling through anything other than a vacuum would create a pressure wave front that would in theory be propagated ahead of the photons. Yet no wave front has ever been detected.

So something doesn't add up....

Either Light has no rest mass and no relativistic mass and something beyond our accepted understanding is going on to create the effect of relativistic mass...

or

Some mechanism is causing the wave front to collapse before it is detected.

Either way there is something going on that the standard model cannot explain…

Star and Flag!!

Korg.

I travel the speed of light everyday.

Physicists slow speed of light.

Light, which normally travels the 240,000 miles from the Moon to Earth in less than two seconds, has been slowed to the speed of a minivan in rush-hour traffic -- 38 miles an hour.

An entirely new state of matter, first observed four years ago, has made this possible. When atoms become packed super-closely together at super-low temperatures and super-high vacuum, they lose their identity as individual particles and act like a single super- atom with characteristics similar to a laser.[...]

I'll just say read my signature line and think about it.

If you eliminate mass, you can forget about Einstein limiting your space travels. It can't get any simplier than that.

Originally posted by eNumbra
I travel the speed of light everyday.

Physicists slow speed of light.

Light, which normally travels the 240,000 miles from the Moon to Earth in less than two seconds, has been slowed to the speed of a minivan in rush-hour traffic -- 38 miles an hour.

An entirely new state of matter, first observed four years ago, has made this possible. When atoms become packed super-closely together at super-low temperatures and super-high vacuum, they lose their identity as individual particles and act like a single super- atom with characteristics similar to a laser.[...]

That's a little pedantic don't you think?

What you are talking about btw is a BEC... or Bose–Einstein condensate

But this is not actually slowing light down.... Light is still propagated at the same speed, all that happens in BEC is the time it takes for particles to re-emit the photon is longer. Hence the appearance of light slowing down.

Do you see?

Korg.

reply to post by Korg Trinity


Little joke friend; don't worry yourself over it too much.

Didn't see your above post!

[edit on 17-8-2010 by Gentill Abdulla]

Don't forget about the possibility of things weighing nothing when used with exotic technology, tech us peons don't get to play with. With many pieces of supporting evidence including many witness statements, my own personal observations of UFOs performing impossible manuevers (I have 60 flying hours logged so know what to look for), radar tracks of right angle turns at supersonic speeds in the Stephenville ufo track - Radar report showing right angles (can't find it on mufon weirdly enough), such a technology is entirely possible. E=0x anything = 0. C is also dependent on gravity, as we cannot see black holes. E=mc^2 (and many others) in my books are equations which are never absolutely correct as it is a minimum of gravity (location) dependent.

Also don't forget perspective. In a dream you can instantly teleport from one end of the milky way to the other.. and sometimes it's more real than real life! Travelling faster than the speed of light being impossible - sounds all too much like when they said that we couldn't break the sound barrier.

[edit on 17/8/10 by GhostR1der]

[edit on 17/8/10 by GhostR1der]

Ahh! Learned heads but not street smart. Such is the curse of Science. You cannot leave yourselves open to what lays beyond Einstein's chalkboard.

Some of you will scream "Science fact! Science fact!" here, at the office and in the classroom. Yet some of you will go home or to some strange structure and pray to some whimsical deity and will argue strongly that all is rational in your world.

SandF
IMHO
Somehow I don't think something that still exibits interference patterns while occuring one particle at a time can be encompassed by a simple equation.
Somewhere in things like the three polarizor experiment where light disappears after a horizontal, then a verticle polarizor, are placed in the path of the light, and then reappears after a third (horizontal) polarizor is added to the chain, there will be an answer.

en.wikipedia.org...
Tesseract
second diagram down.

[edit on 17-8-2010 by Danbones]

E=MC2

You could actually travel 299792457 times the speed of light,
You wouldn't turn into energy until 299792458 times the speed of light

Mass X 299792458 X 299792458 = 8.987551787368176e+16 = Energy

And physicists have already proven that they can make particles travel faster than light,
Google it

reply to post by SupremeKnowledge



Better yet, since you already know where it is, how about providing a source for the ability to accelerate particles to beyond the speed of light.

[edit on 8/17/2010 by Phage]

Originally posted by Phage
reply to post by SupremeKnowledge

 

Better yet, since you already know where it is, how about providing a source for the ability to accelerate particles to beyond the speed of light.

[edit on 8/17/2010 by Phage]

Man phage beat me to it!

But make sure it isn't this one....

Device Makes Radio Waves Travel Faster Than Light



[edit on 17-8-2010 by Gentill Abdulla]

Originally posted by Phage
reply to post by SupremeKnowledge

 

Better yet, since you already know where it is, how about providing a source for the ability to accelerate particles to beyond the speed of light.

[edit on 8/17/2010 by Phage]

'We have broken speed of light'


By Nic Fleming, Science Correspondent
Published: 12:01AM BST 16 Aug 2007

Comment

A pair of German physicists claim to have broken the speed of light - an achievement that would undermine our entire understanding of space and time.

According to Einstein's special theory of relativity, it would require an infinite amount of energy to propel an object at more than 186,000 miles per second.

However, Dr Gunter Nimtz and Dr Alfons Stahlhofen, of the University of Koblenz, say they may have breached a key tenet of that theory.

The pair say they have conducted an experiment in which microwave photons - energetic packets of light - travelled "instantaneously" between a pair of prisms that had been moved up to 3ft apart.

source 1

Source 2

reply to post by SupremeKnowledge

There is quite a bit of debate over exactly what Nimtz demonstrated. The results of the experiment is subject to interpretation. Nimtz and Stahlhofen believe it demonstrates faster than light travel.

Others believe it demonstrates that group velocity can exceed the speed of light rather than photons exceeding the speed of light (or travel at less than the speed of light), a well known phenomenon.

Others, that Nimtz overcomplicates things.

Here I suggest that all these claims are erroneous and are based on a misinterpretation of a purely classical measurement accurately described by Maxwell's equations.

arxiv.org...


It's got a long way to go before it's been proven.

this of course pre-supposes that there is light

or that there is a you to observe it

Originally posted by Hermes8

this of course pre-supposes that there is light

or that there is a you to observe it

Physicist have no problem showing that magnetic fields and electrostatic fields oscillate creating a photon, or equivalently an electromagnetic wave.

We can detect how it acts thought its interactions with matter. Such as the quantum electron photon interaction for example.(Explains the photoelectric effect.)

The observer is anything that can collapse the wave function of a quantum system.(i.e. In some cases an electron.)

The speed of light barrier is just that, a barrier. we (man) have already broken it sending and receiving photons faster than light, last i read was 15 miles distance. the universe itself is expanding faster than light according to hubble.
We had barriers before when science said if we travel more than 15 miles ph we will explode, next was the sound barrier which science said couldnt be broke by humans. between now and eternity everything is possible.

Originally posted by Aliensun
I'll just say read my signature line and think about it.

If you eliminate mass, you can forget about Einstein limiting your space travels. It can't get any simplier than that.

exactly.

meaning that thought, mind, spirit, etc. might have a cosmic autobahn.

i think thought definitely travels faster than light, and the means by which it travels is Bell's theorem and/or entanglement of Hydrogen atoms.

Einsteins theory is incomplete. Since mass is energy, and energy cannot be created or destroyed, his theory leaves only velocity as a variable. Visible light is static, in its mass and energy, and as far as we know it has a static velocity as well. The OP explained this in that 1 - 1 = 0 and that we cannot divide by zero because it is impossible. That zero is why his theory is incomplete; in his current theory visible light is absolute in mass, energy and velocity. While this would be nice if it was true, it is likely not. Light as we know it travels at a predetermined speed here, that is, our ability to measure and understand its properties is because what we know about it on our planet and in our solar system. How could you refute that light could travel at different speeds, or have a different velocity dependent upon what 'outlier' affect its path.

Take black holes for instance. In these places light is affected by gravity and does not escape the event horizon. How can something that is absolute be affected by such a weak natural force as gravity? The theory does not work in such a scenario, you would have to adjust at least one of light's static variables. This means a new variable "X" must be added to the equation. This new equation is e = mc^2+X, where X is the enviromental effect.

Now, since we know mass and energy MUST be equal, given that neither can be created or destroyed, velocity would be the only variable that would have to adjust for X. Again by using formal logic one can conclude that given X, c^2 must vary to acomodate fluctuations in X. In essence, the velocity of light maybe higher or lower depending on X; slower or faster. So, it is logical to assume that light does not travel unformly throughout the universe and that it does in fact have a variable speed.

This conclusion lead me to believe that the concept of faster than light travel is possible, given that we have created a benchmark for the speed of light as we have observed it.

This is just my personal take on it.