trip legs about to get much shorter

[flyover]

If they can harness this for aircraft propulsion we can stop complaining about those long days.

Money quote:
Being able to travel faster than the speed of light would lead to a wide variety of bizarre consequences.
For instance, an astronaut moving faster than it would theoretically arrive at a destination before leaving.



http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2007/08/16/scispeed116.xml

 

[CapnJim]

Oh, great. Now I'll be ground stopped for EWR a week after I finish the trip.

 

[LoadMasterC141]

Sounds cool but go do a search for how many times someone has claimed they broke the speed of light in modern times, and it turned out to be false.

 

[flyover]

Sounds cool but go do a search for how many times someone has claimed they broke the speed of light in modern times, and it turned out to not be true.

Einstein always wins.

 

[LoadMasterC141]

For now he does. I refuse to believe that 186,000 MPS is a magical number nothing but light can surpass personally, but I do believe we are a LONG way from understanding how to accomplish it.

 

[CapnJim]

The Einstein loophole is "In normal space". Einstein is right, nothing can go faster than 186,000 MPS in normal space, but when that space is warped, in a gravitational field for example, light slows right down. "So," the quantum physicicsts ask, "if gravity bends space one way, what bends it the other way?"

Turns out, all manner of things do. Space, light, matter, and energy are bizarre little critters, and more are more we are fiding out that there just simpy isn't anything that they can't do. A caveat of that observation, of course, is that means there's nothing we can't do.

But naturally, no bucks, no Buck Rogers, and our current special-needs-child Administration has utterly no ability to see what pure R&D can do for America. And the world.

So it goes.

 

[Ralgha]

The only reason we think there's a barrier at lightspeed is because our perception is based on light. We have no ability to detect anything moving faster than light, so it effectivly doesn't exist. Same thing with time dilation and such. You wouldn't actually arrive before you left, time is mearly a means of measuring existance, and existance only moves in one direction. However, our perception of time is based on light, and hence we think that time reverses when we go faster than it (theoretically of course).

 

[drhunterr]

hey, if you read it on the internet, it must be true

 

[MQAAord]

"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so."

 

[Old Pete]

Sounds cool but go do a search for how many times someone has claimed they broke the speed of light in modern times, and it turned out to be false.

So you probably don't believe in cold fusion either?

 

[skidz]

The only reason we think there's a barrier at lightspeed is because our perception is based on light. We have no ability to detect anything moving faster than light, so it effectivly doesn't exist. Same thing with time dilation and such. You wouldn't actually arrive before you left, time is mearly a means of measuring existance, and existance only moves in one direction. However, our perception of time is based on light, and hence we think that time reverses when we go faster than it (theoretically of course).

:yeahthat: