An interesting thought: What happens when you travel faster than light.

The thought came last night when I fell asleep in my back yard stargazing, I saw what could have been something other than a star. It was accelerating and it got brighter as it did so, I also add that it had no tail, it was just a white light very far away. Then nothing. it just went black, but it had me thinking about light and travelling at the speed of light, reading Erich Von Daniken books earlier hadnt helped this either.

Say you are travelling at light speed, would you appear as an intense light? as you are taking up space within light particles, Id think they couldnt reflect off of you as you are at their speed.

I believe this would lead to the idea that when breaking the light barrier, you would appear to have disappeared, no longer a bright light, you would be out of the space time continuum, leaving our 'reality' and this dimension so to speak.

The next step is I think where our extra terrestrial buddies are at. I think that rather than propultion resulting in speed, its rotating instruments within ships gaining such velosity reaching such speeds and somehow including frequency that the entire ship will be taken from the dimension...

I thought It an interesting idea,
I hope its reads clearer than any skunk works.

Any thoughts people?

reply to post by SageBeno


All the stars and planets we see several light years away are snapshot 'images' of these bodies as they were X number of years ago, depending on how far away they are in light years.

For instance, when Mars is at it's closest to Earth, it's about 4 light minutes away.
When you look at Mars during that time, you are seeing Mars as it WAS 4 minutes ago.

reply to post by Druscilla


its truly great. I wonder If we will ever be able to adjust light particles to propel us.

Unless you're traveling in a vacuum with no dust particles at all, then I think it would be almost impossible to travel at the speed of light or faster.

More speed = more mass.

Traveling at 186,000 miles per second would make you feel very heavy and would give you a tremendous amount of mass, if you hit a dust particle from an asteroid you would be disintegrated completely

What happens when you travel faster than the speed of thought?

reply to post by muse7


What if you were operating at a frequency which allowed things to pass through you?

Bah... to heck with travelling faster than the speed of light.

How about we travel at the speed of quantum physics instead ? This way we could be here and there at the same time...

Hell, I could be washing the dishes and doing laundry in one shot and have the rest of the day free to do nothing !

reply to post by SageBeno


I thought we were made of photons and all the little quantum buggers that travel as fast as light. If this is so, then when we reach the speed of light, wouldn't we disintegrate?

Light would travel away from you at the same speed. Time would slow down.
As mentioned above, your mass would increase tremendously:

As an object approaches the speed of light, its mass rises precipitously. If an object tries to travel 186,000 miles per second, its mass becomes infinite, and so does the energy required to move it. For this reason, no normal object can travel as fast or faster than the speed of light.

Read "How stuff works" to help make it a little clearer

What if you traveled 'almost the speed of light then'?

"What if you traveled almost as fast as the speed of light?" In that case, you would experience some interesting effects. One famous result is something physicists call time dilation, which describes how time runs more slowly for objects moving very rapidly. If you flew on a rocket traveling 90 percent of light-speed, the passage of time for you would be halved. Your watch would advance only 10 minutes, while more than 20 minutes would pass for an Earthbound observer.

Same source

As you near the speed of light, you form a "bow wave" of light particles bunched up in front of you similar to what happens when you approach the speed of sound. Eventually, as you go faster your mass increases, infinitely, and you collapse and form a black hole. The light particles continue traveling in a line along your original path as a powerful "laser" beam.

I really have no idea, but... well... why not right?

reply to post by SageBeno


Just because you travelled the same speed wouldn't mean that light wouldn't be reflacted off of you. It would simply comppress the wave lengths of the light out of visual light spectrums range, and up into more X-ray type spectrum.

That is if our assumptions about red and blue shift are correct.

If you were going the speed of light, you shinning a flashlight, would still make a beam of light, that would only travvel the speed of light, the wavelengths would simply be compressed if you shined it forward, and stretched out of you shined it to the rear. If you shined it to the sides, it would remain the exact same visible light it was emitted at.

I'd say it's almost paradoxical. You don't but you do. Relative to things in the universe you still can't go faster than light. But instead what happens is that time dilation occurs. So even though you can't go faster, the amount of time it takes for you to make that trip is what it would be if you were going a certain speed past the speed of light. (Things would blueshift or redshift in accordance with that gain in speed. Instead of light gaining additional velocity, the extra kinetic energy would shift to energy density of a given waveform as it approaches the limit of c.)

The current accepted theory says you'd gain mass, but I think the same energy density as that theory could be maintained if instead you lost time. No actual gain in mass would be needed then, but the apparent effect for an outside observer would seem the same. (Time dilation would produce an effect similar to an increased gravitational field, which could be translated to a gain in mass.) Sounds weird, but that's what I'd think would happen. (No I'm not a physicist, but I'm still willing to explore some ideas still outside the current norm. Stuff that's still in the realm of sci-fi, but seems plausible enough that it may be validated by actual physics sometime in the future.)

In other words, for everybody outside your spaceship, it would still take you four years to get to Alpha Centauri. But for you, it could hypothetically be something like a month long ride. And people thought synching clocks for travel between different time zones here on Earth was bad enough.

Other than that, we'd need some other loophole that would validate with known physics like wormholes or some form of hyperspace in order to have useful FTL travel.

According to Relativity, it takes energy to increase an object's velocity. As the velocity increases, the object becomes more massive (absorbing the energy: e=mc2), and time slows relative to slower moving objects.

The problem is, that as you pour more energy into the object to speed it up, the object gets more massive and requires more energy to keep speeding up. As you approach the speed of light, the amount of energy needed approaches infinity, as does the mass of the object. At the speed of light, the object becomes infiinitely massive, and time stops. But it would take an infinite amount of energy to accomplish this. So it is impossible. Sorry.

On the other hand, there are lots of hints in physics that "reality" extends beyond the four dimensions we experience today. If there is at least one more spatial dimension, then it would be easy to beat the speed of light by simply taking shortcuts. If you fold a 2-dimensional surface like a piece of paper, an ant walking on the paper could "jump" from one end of the paper to the other very quickly by passing through the 3rd dimension. Perhaps we can do the same thing. Maybe that is why your UFO disappeared...

reply to post by SageBeno


Well, I can certainly tell you what happens, you go bloody fast!

I imagine everything would look like a picture, nothing moving because you are moving faster than everything. Everything would be standing still.

It seems a moot point to use relativity this way. It isn't possible for anything with mass to travel at light speed or faster, according to known physics.

So if it were to happen, who knows? It wouldn't be restricted by relativity or physics as we know it, because that would be invalidated to begin with.

I wonder if you would even be able to see anything, considering you are moving faster than light.