Why Can't we travel faster than the speed of light?

reply to post by ALLis0NE


Hey ALLis0NE, I think I see your point. You have a different view of the speed of light from science and that is because you're measuring as distance the path that light really travels while science is measuring the staight line that connects
the start and finish.What is the real difference?Why measure your "type" of spee,which is normally the speed we refer to ,and science uses another speed?What is the real use of this perception?


[edit on 2-11-2009 by alexlo]

[edit on 2-11-2009 by alexlo]

[edit on 3-11-2009 by alexlo]

Simplest answer is , as matter approaches the speed of light, mass goes infinite.

Light, or photons, are both a wave and matter at the same time.

I suspect this is how it is able to do so.

Looks like some german scientists have clamed they can do it

what about the speed of thought.

I think an Idea can travel faster than the speed of light, Our bodies operate at extraordinary speeds.

[edit on 3-11-2009 by 10001011]

Originally posted by definity
Looks like some german scientists have clamed they can do it

Thank you for the link. This is a clear violation of the special relativity, and it should be on the front page of every news site, and it also should be the first news item in the evening news. Strangely, it is not so.

It's clear that the universe holds many secrets...

I still think light is 1 seconds to late to be the fastest source.

Light needs 1 second to travel 299,792,458 meters. That cant be infinite fast. Infinite would mean it would be there in zero seconds.

Originally posted by masterp

Originally posted by definity
Looks like some german scientists have clamed they can do it

Thank you for the link. This is a clear violation of the special relativity, and it should be on the front page of every news site, and it also should be the first news item in the evening news. Strangely, it is not so.

It's clear that the universe holds many secrets...

Unless you're a photon, that won't help you go faster than light. I think the reason that's not in the news is that it's not all that impressive nor unexpected given how odd the quantum world is, it doesn't follow the same laws as the macro world we live in and we've known that for a long time.

If you want to travel faster than light, what you need is something like an Alcubierre drive.

en.wikipedia.org...

In 1994, the Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre proposed a method of stretching space in a wave which would in theory cause the fabric of space ahead of a spacecraft to contract and the space behind it to expand.[1] The ship would ride this wave inside a region known as a warp bubble of flat space.

Also, this method of travel does not actually involve moving faster than light in a local sense, since a light beam within the bubble would still always move faster than the ship; it is only "faster than light" in the sense that, thanks to the contraction of the space in front of it, the ship could reach its destination faster than a light beam restricted to traveling outside the warp bubble. Thus, the Alcubierre drive does not contradict the conventional claim that relativity forbids a slower-than-light object to accelerate to faster-than-light speeds. However, there are no known methods to create such a warp bubble in a region that does not already contain one, or to leave the bubble once inside it, so the Alcubierre drive remains a hypothetical concept at this time.

So this propulsion system avoids the problem of infinite mass and infinite energy required to accelerate to light speed. However it would require a powerful energy source to create such a warp field with expanding and contracting regions of spacetime on either side of the warp bubble.

We don't know how to build this yet, but look at how many times science fiction has turned into science fact and it seems like there is a pattern of fiction becoming fact eventually.

reply to post by Warlon


ok i seen that you posted a blog on traveling faster than light so i can explane how it is posable and not all at the same time. (sorry about the spelling i like the math not the english).
the speed we travel through time = T
movement speed=A
The speed of light = C
we will use the equation T+A=C
ok if we say the speed of light is 8 and we want to be moving that speed we want A to equal 8 also.

T+8=8
T= 0 or in other words time would have to stop
because we cant stop time and we have to include it because its one of the 4 dimensions proven by Einstein long story short we cant. now there are other problems that also show y w can not travel faster than light such as e=mc^2 but there is no need.
now you can travel faster than the speed of light in theory if you bent space behind you faster than light and stretched it in front of you at the equal speed you would be moving faster than light but in your own bubble you would be moving much slower however that is still being debated.

I don't see why people associate light with time. Just because light hasn't reached a certain point in the universe doesn't mean that the events that are giving off this light haven't happened yet. Everything happens at the same time in the universe.

It's like back in the old days when we had no radios or televisions and information traveled slowly by word of mouth. I would take days or weeks before you've heard of some event happening, doesn't mean it didn't happen yet.

Also if you were moving at the speed of light, sure it would seem like time was standing still because the same light particles would be hitting your eyes, but doesn't mean that time is actually standing still (like running at the same speed as a moving bus).

Now I'm no scientist and don't take astronomy or any hardcore math so this is all just my basic understanding and interpretation o:

well if we did go the speed of light we would have infinite mass and would need infinite energy which if an object had infinite mass at that speed it would create it's own gravitational field so strong it would become a black hole which then we would just become a sigularity. Which then who know mabey these sigularities are qutumly tangled so we come out some where else in space! but i think that traverling time through speed is not really an effcient way to travel from point A to B best way would be use gravity or Alcubierre drive like Arbitrageur said

Originally posted by 10001011
what about the speed of thought.

I think an Idea can travel faster than the speed of light, Our bodies operate at extraordinary speeds.

[edit on 3-11-2009 by 10001011]

The action potential in nerve fibers has a speed of about 110 m/s.
In order to comprehend some stimulus, you need hundreds of miliseconds.

But if you mean thinking about being on Earth and then suddenly about being on Mars, then it is almost infinite, of course.. But in reality, you didnt move anywhere

Originally posted by Maslo

Originally posted by 10001011
what about the speed of thought.

I think an Idea can travel faster than the speed of light, Our bodies operate at extraordinary speeds.

[edit on 3-11-2009 by 10001011]

The action potential in nerve fibers has a speed of about 110 m/s.
In order to comprehend some stimulus, you need hundreds of miliseconds.

But if you mean thinking about being on Earth and then suddenly about being on Mars, then it is almost infinite, of course.. But in reality, you didnt move anywhere

We understand a lot about electromagnetism (electricity and magnetism), but there's a lot about the brain we don't understand. One of the few things we do understand about the brain, is that it operates on electrical impulses. Your speed estimate about how fast those nerve impulses travel through the body sounds about right, it's fast enough for us to react but not blazingly fast because the electrical signals have to travel from cell to cell. Even pure electricity can't travel at the speed of light.

Now as for thought, if we hypothesize for a moment that thought might be transmitted in the form of electromagnetic radiation, then that thought would basically travel at the speed of light, since light is just a form of EM radiation in a certain range of frequencies.

So respectfully have to disagree with 10001011 about thought traveling faster than light. I think that if thoughts travel at all, and they might, I suspect it would be at the speed of light in the form of EM waves. I also disagree with the statement "Our bodies operate at extraordinary speeds." because 110m/s is not very extraordinary, not only is it far below the speed of light, it's even far below the speed of sound (about 343m/s). So while speed may not be the most impressive part of our bodies, complexity probably is, as we have more processing power in our brain than a supercomputer, now if we could just figure out how to use the other 90% of the brain we supposedly don't use, we could really impress someone (the savants do that somehow)

Now I agree with Maslo that we can think about things faster than light. In fact scientists created an imaginary point in space that travels faster than the speed of light, that is the subject of this thread:

Scientists Make Radio Waves Travel Faster Than Light

Now most people who read that thought the title was correct and that radio waves had traveled faster than light, but if you read the article, that's clearly not what happened, they only made an imaginary point in space (something they thought up) travel faster than light.

You can do that yourself in a thought experiment. Imagine a point traveling from the sun to the earth in the 8 minutes or so it takes the sun's light to reach us, that point travels at the speed of light. Now imagine a point traveling twice as fast, leaving the sun and arriving at the Earth in 4 minutes. You can imagine it and think about it, but nothing physical ever moved at that speed.

Originally posted by definity
but i think that traverling time through speed is not really an effcient way to travel from point A to B best way would be use gravity or Alcubierre drive like Arbitrageur said

Yes the Alcubierre drive will be cool if we ever figure out how to make one. It's a little bit like surfing, where the water is expanding or rising behind you, and the water is dropping or contracting in front of you. The expanding or rising water of the wave behind you pushes you forward, and the wave travels along with you so it's always there pushing you (until it breaks on the shore). The Alcubierre drive is similar except what pushes your bubble forward is the expanding space-time behind you and the contracting space-time in front of you, so you're riding a wave of space-time and your warp bubble is like the surfboard in the water analogy. But the reason I like it is because it supposedly would allow faster than light travel without violating any of the laws of physics.

I didn't read every post so this might have already been mentioned. Even if we could go even the speed of light the time dilation effects would render it useless for interstellar travel. We have to make it so time will still travel at Earth speed, that way what takes one man a year doesn't take the earth a lifetime.

I personally believe space bending or perhaps the ftl transfer of quantum information will be the method used for extrasolar travel.

Also, what many people dont realize is that we can travel "faster than light" from a traveller´s point of view.
For example, you want to travel to a star that is 20 light years away. If you travel at the speed of light, stationary observer would see your journey took 20 years. But from your point of view, the journey would take far less than that (maybe few months, depends on the kinetic energy), because since you are aproaching c, your time contracts (relativistic time dilation)..
With enough kinetic energy, you could travel across the whole galaxy in a single lifetime. But for the stationary observers (Earth), thousands of years would pass during the journey.

Well from what I gather, you need to have No mass to be able to travel faster then Light, But i think this is where other Civilizations have said well if we can't beat em lets join em. how else can a object of dense mass be able to travel faster than light?

Kinda like surfing, if your out there and a big wave is coming up on you and you have no speed to swim over it, you go through it.

Once a Civilization needs to go faster than light, thats the point in time they start working on Bending space/time.

they had a good show on the history channel, Called " The Universe " and they have talked about creating a bubble ( so to speak ) around your craft, and bending the space in front and behind of the craft essentially moving them faster than the speed of light while they aren't actually moving that fast inside their manipulated bubble.

a phenomenon such as quantum tunneling suggests that it is possible.

Dr Gunter Nimtz and Dr Alfons Stahlhofen, of the University of Koblenz say they have broken the speed of light as reported
here,

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.

I believe the key to this theory is the word
"travel".
If travelling faster than the speed of light could cause one to arrive at the destination before departing for it, then it may be physically improbable, but what if it were not the physical change in locality but rather, a force causing the movement of elements simultaniously beyond light speed.

Take electricity for intance. Would it not be possible to charge a stream of electrons through a conductor whos length exceeds light speed, causing the electrons, with sufficient amperage and unrestricted resistance, to flow at both ends simultaniously when charged, thus creating movement at faster than light speed, although the travel would not be the physical electron but the movement in respect to flow forcing the electrons at the end of the conductor whos length exceeds light speed to move since space and time are in my thesis, singularities whether relative or not?

I realize that such a conductor at such a mind boggling length is fantastic, but theoretically, it could be built. It would take less than eternity in linear time, however long the construction of such a conduit in real time or by generations,

I highly recommend you watch the 20 min. video discourse from astronaut Wubbo Ockels in
this thread.
Ockels explains how ‘time’ is created by human beings, as a way our brains can make sense of gravity. The speed of light is constant, because it is made by us: it’s the clock by which we have calibrated our existence. Based on this premise, Ockels proposes a new way to explore life in our galaxy.

Anything's possible, but we'll never be able to get enough energy behind us to be able to accelerate to and pass that point.

On a personal note, I'm totally good with walking at normal speed to wherever I need to go, but if we absolutely insist upon going at light speed to our various destinations, we had better get a move on and become a type III civilization so we can get on with it.

I believe we can actually faster than the speed of light. Why? well let's say you're on a spaceship that goes 1mph away from the speed of light, then, you throw a ball in the same direction the ship is going at a speed of 30mph, the ball would surpass the speed of light by 29mph, don't you agree?

Some say that the faster we go, the more we will take mass and that's the reason we can't go faster than the speed of light, because the energy it takes to move us is never enough to push us beyond that speed. The closer from the speed of light we get, the heavier we get, and the harder it is to be propelled faster. According to this theory, if we push on a wall with our body, we need to push against the floor to make that effort. The floor and the wall, resisting our attempt, pushes our limbs back and stops further movements which would result in destroying the wall/floor. If we rely on Einstein's theory, the wall, the floor and us would take mass and energy enlessly and so much that we would and up weighting up to a hundred tons... does that make any sense? that's why i deny this theory.

The reason i deny this theory is because no mass or energy is ever lost, ever created, it's transfering from one to another. Let's say you float in space, then you throw a ball, Einstein would say that the ball gains energy and weight. But what happens to you? even if the weight of the ball is really small compared to you, you will still get propelled backward. Does that mean you're gaining mass and energy as well? No because it would come against the above rule.

To maintain the same speed in space where there are no atmosphere it requires no energy, to accelerate though, energy must be spent.

Let's confirm what i say:
Spaceship with internal fuel: To accelerate, the ship would burn the fuel, the fuel would propel the ship by sending energy backward and in fact, the ship would become lighter this way.

Spaceship with external fuel: lets say the ship fuel itself by pumping into the ''dark matter''. The ship would pump energy from the external source, to redirect it backward. The mass gain would be lost in the process.

Sorry if this wasn't maybe really clear. I'd like any of your opinion on what i think.

Light speed travel is very possible, it just requires that you move in short 'jumps' rather than continuous travel, Simplest way to power a 'ship' designed to travel in such a way is with an 'engine' that is powered by innertia (think along the lines of kinetic powered watches), as the immense forces applied to the 'ship' when it first starts its 'jump' and when it exits the 'jump' will be sufficient to power the jumps themselves

however that form of travel is very inefficient (for distance covered & practicality) when compared to forms of slower travel