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Near Light Speed Travel Possible After All?
DrStrabismus writes "PhysOrg has a story about research that may indicate that close to light speed travel is possible. From the article: 'New antigravity solution will enable space travel near speed of light by the end of this century, he predicts. On Tuesday, Feb. 14, noted physicist Dr. Franklin Felber will present his new exact solution of Einstein's 90-year-old gravitational field equation to the Space Technology and Applications International Forum (STAIF) in Albuquerque. The solution is the first that accounts for masses moving near the speed of light.'"
Weapons don't need to stop..
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What was making impossible near-lightspeed travel? Only FTL was prohibited. Problems like engines, fuel, shielding etc. are only technological problems.
I honestly don't know, but the idea of stopping a meteor from hitting earth came to mind.
Theres no point in travelling at close to light speed if your have no way of stopping....SPLAT
Well, considering that the nearest star systems are greater than 4.3 light years away, you do not have to worry about it, as you would be dead from starvation.
It's the same reason that Nuclear subs are not limited by how much time they can stay underwater, but how much food they can carry. The need for food makes such long distances impractical, if not intolerable. "Growing" food along the way would mean a very limited diet for eight years (assuming you want to come home), something else that is intolerable.
The first use of this could be unmanned probes - but a four year wait time for signals to travel means that it would be impossible controlling it, and would have to have it's own artificial inteligence.
Of course, if you just wanted to visit the Mars and breath its clean fresh air and gaze upon its deep green pastures then this...oh wait...Mars doesn't have that.
I think the best way to travel long distances is by using a stargate. Mondays on the sci-fi channel.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Bussard ramjets are just cool and fine, and i liked the idea, too.
But the physics dont work out.
You get at most 2% or so of the mass converted into energy by the fusion process, even if you could fuse everything together perfectly efficient. But once your spaceship is moving quite fast (more than 10% or so of the speed of light), you will need to use more energy to move and collect the particles in your flightpath than you could possibly get by fusing them together.
It just doesnt work out if you look at the big picture.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
I think you need to reevaluate that.
h tml
For a traveller on the ship it would only seem like months. For the people left behind it would be years.
Look here. http://members.tripod.com/wmhxbigguy/Theory/time.
I think you have good reason to be skeptical, I'm not convinced this guy isn't a crank. Anybody can post a paper on a preprint server. Does he have any papers on this subject that have actually made it into a peer reviewed journal?
Also this story is basically based on a press release from Starmark, the company that this so-called "noted scientist" founded himself, so basically he wrote the press release I'm guessing.
Also the fact that he's giving a talk at a conference means nothing, I've been to plenty of conferences where they let a few cranks give talks. I sat through a talk on Creation and the Big Bang at a Astrophysics conference once and the guy was a loon.
That said the biggest proof that this guy could be a crank is the fact that this story got posted on Slashdot, where something like 90% of the science stories are crap.
No. No, no, no, no, no, no.
... well, actually, nothing - you just seem to think it applies to all parties, which is not the case.
If you were headed right at someone at the speed of light, you would just seem INCREDIBLY blue-shifted (more energetic). You would not, ever, at any time, seem to be moving faster than light.
If a person is travelling at substantial portions of light speed they will experience time dilation. People moving at near the speed of light would experience, say, a 4.3 LY trip at high speed as, perhaps, several months, but an outside observer would, from whatever position they were standing, see the trip as taking at a minimum 4.3 years + whatever extra time was needed because the ship was slower than light.
You seem to be confusing time dilation (an effect on those moving at high speed) with
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
"Everthing else [in science] is simply theory. Which is based on some authority and never allowed to be questioned."
Wrong, wrong, wrong, and a thousand times wrong!
The whole basis of science is that everything is open to question. There are few things more prestigious in science than to refute a previously accepted theory. Ever heard of a guy named Albert Einstein? Yeah, thought you might have. Used to be that Newton's theories were the accepted way in which the universe worked, but Einstein showed differently.
The main reason it seems like some theories are "unquestionable" is simply because most of the ways in which people choose to challenge them have been shown time and time and time again to be false.
If you get 100 people a day proposing a design for a perpetual motion machine using a series of cogs, wheels, and magnets, you're not going to take the time to explain to each and every one why their design won't work, instead, you're just going to tell them to bugger off and leave you alone.
Of course, scientists are human, and at times they will reject things inadvertently which they shouldn't. However, if you think you have a good explanation as to how/why we can, in fact, travel faster than the speed of light, instead of whining to Slashdot about how stuck in the mud scientists are, why not publish it? You'd be the next Einstein!
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.