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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.'"
Theres no point in travelling at close to light speed if your have no way of stopping.
Mind that planet!
What planet?
SPLAT
liqbase
all he wants is his name to be recognized by providing an unprovable, but "sounds good" theory.
Can't
Can
Can't
Can
Can't
Wake me when someone actually accomplishes something. I'm sick and tired or the back and forth debate over ethereal concepts that can neither be proven or disproven in our lifetime.
What was making impossible near-lightspeed travel? Only FTL was prohibited. Problems like engines, fuel, shielding etc. are only technological problems.
Where do I invest my Money?
Maybe the designer tested out the light speed travel, and accidently ended up in the early 90s?
Now, if health care will just advance enough to let me live that long, this will actually be useful info.
2 cents,
Queen B
HDGary secures my bank
For more information, see Dr. Felber's recent works on arXiv.org:
Weak 'Antigravity' Fields in General Relativity
Exact Relativistic 'Antigravity' Propulsion
Personally I'm a bit skeptical about his claims, however energy appears to be conserved. This method uses gravitationally-mediated kinetic energy exchange - this is the same principle that allows gravitational slingshot to work.
If I am reading this correctly (IIARTC), there is no way to safely stop with any foreseeable technology. If the anti-gravity wave reduces to near nothing, as you approach near nothing speed, than you have to be pretty damned sure that you aren't bumping into the satellite for Alpha Centauri news when you near it. With unchartered space, a collision is bound to happen when you slow down unless your sensors can detect something oh say the size of a buick from 1,000,000 miles ahead when you tap the brakes.
---
When you come to a fork in the road, take it! --Yogi Berra--
Wait, we can get close to light speed travel, but we cant figure out how to time travel?! This sucks.
Proudly posting without RTFA.
Um, except I need a star going more than 0.6c, passing close enough for me to whip in front of it... gee I hope this works....
Why is an exotic solution involving anti-gravity even necessary, when there's the Bussard ramjet? While certain versions of this concept are infeasible, there's plenty of room for technical improvement. The ramjet has been a mainstay of science fiction for decades such as in Larry Niven's Known Space universe, precisely because it seems the solution closest to actual development.
And we're not just talking about any old object here. From the article:
So we've reduced the problem of how to accelerate a ship to near light speed to the problem of how to accelerate a star to near light speed.
Big improvement.
-- MarkusQ
yes there is, actual news.
please excuse my apathy
One thing I have often wondered is if an object moves fast enough, could its relativistic mass become so large that it would look like a black hole relative to a laboratory frame?
No you don't. I don't know exactly what causes charge and the electric force either, but if I take a negative charge and bring it close to your positive charge it will cancel it nicely.
Light-speed travel is impossible, but near-light-speed travel is wildly impractical, because of the mass you gain. This guy seems to be saying that if you have an anti-gravity machine, you could counteract that. You couldn't get to FTL, but you could go a lot faster than without it. Heck, there's all KINDS of nifty things you could do with an anti-gravity machine.
And if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a wagon.
I think that this guy has been pushing his anti-gravity solution of general relativity for a while. IANAP, so I can't say whether he's right or wrong, though being a good skeptic I'm inclined to guess the latter.
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
You have to know the exact cause of gravity to negate it. Last time I checked they dont know what exactly adds to the weight of a single atom so I dont see how they can create antigravity.
What complete and utter nonsense. While I doubt I will see working antigravity in my lifetime (or if it is even possible at all), the idea that you must "know the exact cause" of something to manipulate it effectively is rubbish. Electromagnetic fields were not well explained until many decades after they had been successfully used in engineering applications (telegraph, lightbulb, radio). Even then it was much later that the much more accurate theory of Quantum Electrodynamics (widely considered to be the single most accurately tested theory in all of physics)...
Also you have to have good knowledge of the path involved. Imagine passing a asteroid 10m across at the speed of light. If your system cannot accomodate for the effects then most likely you'll be a smear inside the ship if the ship survives.
Ah ha, now there's a much more reasonable objection. The answer to this is simple - statistics. It's quite possible that near-lightspeed travel will be a tremendous gamble, one which will only be won by the use of massive redundancy. Instead of sending a single ship, we send hundreds or thousands, until one makes it. It's not like we're exactly running out of people any time soon.
Best bet is to hope that there's a nth demension you can pop into that allows you to travel the same spatime line without worrying about the mass of objects in the path.
That would be nice, but IIRC, there are no current theories that are either accepted or considered promising within the physics community that provide a mechanism for interdimensional transport using non-exotic mass/energy.
I dont see the two coming around anytime soon. It would be best to focus efforts on speedy travel between earth, mars, and the asteroid belt. Longer missions to the outer planets are fine but mars is our best bet for establishing a second colony of humans in case earth gets smeared by a large asteroid.
In 1900 people didn't see landing on the moon as coming any time soon, nevertheless it was written about and eventually studied. Our innate need to push the envelope in science and technology leads to many breakthroughs, intentional or not. More importantly it helps to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers. When I interned at JPL, my supervisor said that that was the primary goal of NASA, and I believe it is a valid one.
Disclaimer: I am not a physicist, but I do have a B.S. in Physics.
Autoporn? We were just talking about you on hulver.com earlier today...
- If you travel fast enough you can get as far as you like in as short a time as you like. There's an effect called time dilation. Maybe you haven't heard of it?
- Have you every tried to compute the distance you can cover assuming a constant acceleration of, say, a tolerable 2G. The distance you can get in a time t in your own frame of reference grows exponentially (well, hyperbolically cosinusoidaly which is much the same thing) with t because of time dilation. When you've mastered the physics required you may be pleasantly surprised by how far that distance is.
Methinks you know not of what you speak."The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
Since the dawn of special relativity, travelling near light speed has always been possible. Its going beyond the speed of light thats not possible.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
I'm not so interested in the mechanics (where do you put it, that allows you to use it as an accelerant?) but more in the effectiveness.
Near light speed travel is a prett cool achievement, but it's completeley useless, here's why: We can't go faster than light (the speed of light is the maximum speed of "things in the universe" light just happens to travel that fast, simply because it can't go any faster). But even at light speed th closest galaxies are still years away, so we really can't 'go anywhere'
There are approximately 100 billion stars in our galaxy... all of these stars less than 300000 light-years away. I'd say that's pretty useful.
No. The problem is not the distances per se, it's the need for engines that don't need to carry all their fuel/reaction mass for the whole trip.
A ship accelerating at 1g half way to alpha centuri, then decelerating on the second half of the trip can get there in less than 10 years as perceived by the travellers. The problem is that no known engine system, with the possible exception of a Bussard Ramjet, could power the ship. In the age of sail sea voyages often lasted 5 years or more, just because we now think of travel times in hours doesn't mean that we couldn't handle more.
It's just an engineering problem.
While antigravity is a cool SciFi story device, it is quite possible that attempting to implement an antigravity device is like pulling yourself out of the swamp by pulling at your own hair like Munchhausen, or like protecting yourself from rain by sitting in an open boat on a lake.
:-P), then you'd have to get in front of it, and in order to avoid the star smacking right into your spaceship, you'd have to have a speed of 0.57c already. Moreover(guessing), when you'd accelerate over 0.57c to take advantage of it, as you move away, the antigravity cone probably would loose focus and dispel just like gravity with a spread function of 1/r^2, quickly rendering it useless unless you'd just float along with the star.
r avity) predicts similar behavior on a small scale and provides a simpler model for working out strange gravity effects.
Now even when Dr. Felbers calculations are true, you'd first have to find a star speeding at a speed of 57%+ of lights speed(or accelerate one yourself
obLinks: Google "pushing gravity" or (http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=pushing%20g
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Instead of sending a single ship, we send hundreds or thousands, until one makes it. It's not like we're exactly running out of people any time soon.
Ah ha. I see. May I be the first to volunteer you for the most incredible ride of your life? Or the shortest. We're not really sure. Game?
Actually it turns out that by accelerating at a constant rate of 1 g, you could (in principle) cross the known universe in an average human lifetime (as measured in the traveler's frame of reference). This is the result of the relativistic dilation of time. Of course there are practical problems with this, not the least of which is the fact that if you ever return to earth after such a trip, billions of years will have passed here. And it takes a lot of energy to maintain that acceleration for such an extended time.
But if you could overcome the other difficulties of near-light-speed travel (and of interstellar travel in general), then less ambitious trips, such as to stars in our own galaxy, would become possible if we can in fact build a ship with these capabilities. Those other difficulties are significant so maybe we still can't go anywhere, but your comment falls short of explaining why not.
The Relativistic Rocket
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
your a tool... SOS at STP is not 300m/s try 343m/s or 1127ft/s and totally depends on tempture and relative humidity. This is physics, they have laws not suggestions.
Put some money in a stock index fund then climb aboard your spaceship. Accelerate to near-light speed and take a cruise of some nearby solar systems for a few hundred years. Come back, having aged little, and collect your fortune.
Near light speed travel is a prett cool achievement, but it's completeley useless, here's why:
We can't go faster than light (the speed of light is the maximum speed of "things in the universe" light just happens to travel that fast, simply because it can't go any faster). But even at light speed th closest galaxies are still years away, so we really can't 'go anywhere'
Traveling at an appreciable fraction of c would NOT be useless. It could open up the solar system and beyond to us in ways we have barely imagined.
Even at short range this is still probablamatic. A ship can't accelerate to the speed of light too quickly otherwise all of its passengers (and equipment that's not bolted down) will crash into the rear bulkhead (because of your momentum, you won't accelerate as fast as the ship. Even if you're strapped in, accelerating too fast will cause MAJOR dammage to your internal organs.). You'd have to spend several hours accellerating, and then decellerating, so a trip to mars would still take a long time.
Do you realise how contradictory you are? A trip to mars that involved several hours accellerating, several minutes in transit and then several hours decellerating would be amazingly fast!
Right now you are experiencing 1g. If you accellerated through space in a straight line at 1g for 2 minutes you would be travelling over 1km per second (iirc). Do not under estimate long duration accelleration!
An advancement of the magnitude claimed in the article would be useful for virtually ANY space travel. Next time do your research.
This is wrong. As observed from Earth, it would take over 1000 years to travel to somewhere 1000 light years away. But for passengers travelling close to the speed of light, distances in the direction of travel are relativistically contracted, so it would take much less time. Provided we don't mind all our friends being long-dead when we return, the speed of light is not a limit on reaching distant stars.
Finding the energy to accelerate to such speeds is another matter.
noted physicist Dr. Franklin Felber will present
"Franklin Felber" has less than 40 hits on google. For that reason I very much doubt he is a noted physicist. By association, I am not going to take his claims seriously...
In a word: no. Wavelength*Frequency=Speed of wave. Propagation speed of a wave in a given medium is constant and solely dependant on the properties of that medium (in this case, Temperature and Pressure). Since speed of sound at STP is around 343 m/s, at 30 Hz, the wavelength will be much longer than it will be at 2975 Hz (2975/30 times faster, to be exact). As one goes up, the other goes down, but the speed is constant. If the speed was able to change, that simple relation would no longer mean anything...
I'm perfect in every way, except for my humility.
In the 'antigravity beam' of a speeding star, a payload would draw its energy from the antigravity force of the much more massive star. In effect, the payload would be hitching a ride on a star.
This has got to be the single best invention coming out of ursa minor - the hitchhikers guide to lightspeedVery interesting. If I understand it right, one of the big differences between this and most other proposals I've ever heard is that it is based on a gravitational field, not on propulsion methods.
Why is it so important? Because our bodies are too soft to accelerate over a few G's using standard propulsion methods. Bear in mind that some people have survived enourmous acceleration before, but always for a short amount of time; our circulation system can't handle it for a long time. It would take a very large amount of time to accelerate (or brake) up something like 0.8c -- not to mention that it could be very, very painful.
So that's my understanding: if the entire ship is accelerated by a field, and if the acceleration is relatively uniform over the distances involved inside the ship, then I assume that it's not going to be painful or life threatening. That's a really big development.
"If you travel fast enough you can get as far as you like in as short a time as you like. There's an effect called time dilation. Maybe you haven't heard of it?"
Which basically means, the faster you move, the slower time moves for you relative to a stationary observer.
Which basically means, when you move at the speed of light, no time passes for you.
So although you could get to a star 100 light years away in the blink of an eye to you, it would be 100 years to someone on earth. All the people you knew would be dead by the time you get back, even though you might have only aged a few days.
Not too helpful.
Pretty useless stat, unless you expect humans to increase life expectancy to 300,000 years TIMES two (the return portion of the trip)
.5c quite reasonable within a single human lifetime.
One doesn't need to return to explore the galaxy. Reports could be issued by pulse laser, or similar device. It is likely that cryonics can eventually solve the biological issues with surviving the long trip. Of course it might just be easier to send well-preserved zygotes which could then be gestated inside an artificial womb. OF course you'd have to have robots or somesuch raise the children, which would have interesting social implications, to say the least.
The real useful stat would be how many stars are within 3-4 light years and even then, you still have all the problems a trip to Mars using conventional technology has, the main ones being how to get enough food, water out there to support the astronauts for the duration of such a long trip.
According to this list of nearest stars, there are 61 stars known to be within 5 parsecs (~15.2 ly). This would make a one way trip at
Having enough food/water is not a very difficult problem - a small nuclear reactor could provide enough energy to recycle watter/biomass into nourishment. The actual problem at these speeds is shielding astronauts from radiation, and avoiding collisions.
There's a live culture HIV vaccination program you might consider too. And something that not quite resembles tea - or is it MDMA? Whatever. Me, I'll wait for the navigation computer to plot safe course before engaging the hyperdrive to jump to lightspeed... You could run into a star, or an asteroid, and that'd ruin a perfectly good day!
*cough!*
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
http://rebelscience.org/Crackpots/notorious.htm
There's a basic explanation of the known forces (Strong, Electronmagnetic, Weak and Gravity
n t Field,
There are quite a few ideas kicking about:
scalar-tensor-vector gravity (STVG)
Modified Newtonian Dynamics
General Relativity,
Quantum Gravity,
The http://www.halexandria.org/dward155.htm">Zero-poi
Superstring Theory,
M-theory,
Inflation/Cosmology,
Yilmaz gravitation, and
Membrane Gravity
Law of Universal Gravitation,
And there's also Intelligent Gravity
Unfortunately, there is no one simple experiment to prove any of these either true or false.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
The article said that the new theory explains we can go move in an instant.
I like it !
....slashdot did not figure out? "..back and forth debate over ethereal concepts that can neither be proven or disproven..." is what we do here. The alternative is spending time with our families. Can you imagine?
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
It was just a joke.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Well, if you could somehow make your mass negative, wouldn't you be able to go faster than light? I'm honestly curious. I'm not a physicist, but would it ever be possible to have negative mass, even theoretically?
today is spelling optional day.
I'll believe it when I see it.
Er, or maybe when I don't see it.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
The density of interstellar space is about one atom per cubic centimeter. If the spaceship were going near the speed of light (3 x 10^10 cm/sec), it would be hit by 3 x 10^10 relativistic particles per cm^2/sec. This is about the equivalent of one Curie per cm^2, which would kill a human and cripple any electronics on board
A very heavy magnet could deflect the protons, but the neutral atoms would be unaffected by the magnetic field.
Well, I suppose you could string two of them together with an elastic rubberband ..
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
we could do what this scientist proposes I think our biggest obstacle would be space debris. I know this is something each shuttle mission has to worry about. Even tiny objects can cause tremendous amounts of damage, given its speed.
Moving faster than 57.7% of c? Relative to what?
Right now, the earth is moving through space at a speed greater than 57.7% relative to something. No, I don't know what, or where, but rest assured there's some body out there somewhere in whose frame of reference the Earth is moving at greater than 57.7% of c. And there's some other body in whose frame of reference the Earth is moving at greater than 10% of c, and another body where Earth is moving at 95% of c, and another body where Earth isn't moving at all (Hey, like me!).
So why isn't the Earth emitting such an antigravity beam, repelling masses in its path? Rest assured that if it were, we'd be seeing its effect, like ferinstance as it played havoc with GPS satellites.
Or, heck, there are cosmic rays which occasionally smack into the Earth's atmosphere at a speed that's only infinitesimally smaller than c in Earth's FOR. They should *definitely* be emitting some sort of antigravity, if this guy's correct. Should be trivial to observe, but we haven't seen it.
This smells like bullshit.
Does this mean that Kirk really can go back in time? :)
Ok, I've worked in gravity for a while, but unfortunately I haven't time right now to go through this guy's paper. Several things are setting off my B.S. detector, though.
First, this guy is not a "noted" physicist, let alone a noted gravitational physicist, as far as I can tell. He published some papers in accelerator physics while affiliated with the Naval Research Lab. He has no publications, or as far as I can tell, training in general relativity. He's now affiliated with some company ("Starmark, Inc.") in San Diego. Furthermore, gravitational physicists generally give talks at gravity conferences (or at least physics conferences), not space engineering conferences (which have drastically lower standards when it comes to gravity, since the organizers of the conference typically have no GR background).
Second, I skimmed the preprint of his (unpublished) "antigravity" paper. He claims that a distant observer watching a particle fall into a black hole, in the (initial, local) rest frame of the particle, will see the black hole to approach the particle, and then cause the particle to accelerate away from the black hole. This is not in any weird "warp drive" spacetime, but in ordinary Schwarzschild spacetime — such as the spacetime outside of a star or a planet (!). Yes, you read that right, according to him, even planets create antigravity (if you're traveling fast enough). This bears no relation to anything I know about orbits of particles in Schwarzschild spacetime.
Then he mentions performing a Lorentz transformation of a particle trajectory into the frame of a distant observer. This is impossible. You can only apply a global Lorentz transformation to a flat (Minkowski) spacetime, not a curved spacetime (such as Schwarzschild). Well, you can apply a transformation to a flat tangent space at a point in a curved spacetime, but you can only transform a vector in the tangent space at that point, not an entire trajectory that spans a continuum of points. It is true that Schwarzschild geometry is asymptotically flat for "distant" observers, and he's speaking of transforming into the frame of a distant observer, but the fact remains that you cannot Lorentz transform a worldline that is not entirely within an approximately flat region of spacetime (and his trajectories definitely aren't always far from the gravitating body).
Now, you're free not to buy my suspicions, because as I said I haven't the time to go through all his calculations and see what's up (general relativity calculations are a pain in the ass). My bet, however, is that he's simply misinterpreting a coordinate quantity as having physical meaning. This is a common error for GR beginners (and you can see a prime example of it in the crackpot A. Mitra, who claims that black holes contradict the Einstein field equations based on his misinterpretation of coordinate derivatives in Schwarzschild spacetime). The thing about GR is that you can write solutions in any coordinate system you want, and you have to make sure that the quantities you're calculating are physically meaningful, and not just an artifact of whatever coordinates you happened to choose. Anyway, that's my guess based on what this guy has written so far and the kind of errors I see people make when making "wild" claims in GR. But it's also possible he simply made a math error. I am not betting, however, that he has suddenly discovered antigravity lurking within the ordinary Schwarzschild metric.
1. filter gold out of bottle of Goldschlager
...
...
2. squish bits of gold together
3. accelerate squished gold to near light speeds
4. Profit!!
(methodology also works if you do the same as above but with the dusty remnants of your last bag)
-----
so... lets say you did that with that tiny amount of gold... but also did it with a gold brick... what's crazy that at some point along their trek to near light speeds, both amounts of gold will have the same mass (albeit at different velocities)... crazy.
The Admin and the Engineer
You forgot relativity. The actual time depends of the reference point. I sincerely don't know how to make such calculation (I left my physics class about 20 years ago), but I'm sure that it would take a much longer time from Earth's perspective, making the mission not very practical. If you manage to accelerate faster (which is possible using a field), the actual difference, in absolute terms from each reference point, will not matter very much. For example, and by no means do not take these numbers as absolute, it's just an example -- it's like comparing 500 days to 500 years, versus 5 days to a 5 years in Earth time.
Actually, I'm much more concerned about our ability to find (or create?) a uniform field than anything else. At such huge scales, any tiny distortion would probably destroy the ship, tearing it apart. That's a really huge engineering challenge.
Whenever I run across a discussion of light speed or near-light speed travel, I always find myself asking, relative to what? Are people assuming that an object can be "at rest" with respect to the universe, such that it can then accelerate to a near-light speed? That would seem to be the tacit assumption of such discussions, because the only other alternative is that "velocity" is a vector relationship between any two objects. If that is the case, then any one object is at any given moment "traveling" at any number of velocities, depending on how many other objects in the universe you "relate" it to. And while our everyday experience tells us that mostly we are at rest - or close to it - with respect to our immediate surroundings, on the cosmic scale, and given the range of particles moving through this universe, it would seem pretty obvious that some of our exisiting velocities are already pretty close to light speed, even if those relationships are pretty far removed from us. To assume we are "at rest" and those other objects are "high energy" is pretty self-centered, which is intuitive and generally works for us, but doesn't really have a basis in science.
My fealing in the subject is that the speed of light is just a mental barrier.
Well, your feeling is wrong. There are very hard problems (i.e. all of Relativity) involved in making things go at lightspeed. The faster you go, the more you weigh - try getting around that.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Another week another crackpot theory lauded by Slashdot editors! Could you guys try any harder to make yourselves look ridiculous?
I want to ask if the type of storage ring used in the G-2 muon wobble experiment might be used to test the Felber antigravity theory.
In the G-2 experiment, the muon storage ring was able to extend the lifespan of the ordinarily short-lived muons relativistically by accelerating them to extremely high speeds.
I'm wondering if such high speed acceleration can be used to similarly study any possible "antigravity beam" phenomena, to see if it's real.
Comments?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
However, this is actually an underestimate since relativistic effects make it harder to get that close to the speed of light, the closer you get. If you could achieve a constant 1G, that is how long it would take, but this is physically impossible since effective mass increases with velocity.
I calculated it on Google calculator with the following formula (just type into search):
That's bullshit. Theory is based on experimental evidence, and there is a century's worth of experimental evidence supporting relativity, including accelerating particles to enormous energies to within a tiny, tiny fraction of the speed of light. We find, just as relativity predicts, that as the particle's speed increases, additional inputs of energy give rise to less and less change in speed, so that its speed always asymptotically approaches that of light, never reaching it. First 99.999% of c, then 99.9999% of c, then 99.99999% of c, etc.
More nonsense. There are many things in science that are not merely "guesses" or "rough estimates", but rather are established beyond all credible doubt. There are guesses and rough estimates too, as well as things in between. (There is never proof in the mathematical sense, because it is logically impossible to prove a scientific theory 100%.)
That's also wrong. Scientists are encouraged to communicate with the lay public. You're simply not supposed to announce brand new results to the public before they've gone through peer review. Unfortunately, funding crunches have made "publication by press release" dismayingly common in recent years.
One quickly gets the idea that you not only don't know how science works or what it is, but you also don't know any scientists personally.
What the hell are you talking about? Nothing in science is totally authoritarian. There is nothing more contentious than a group of scientists arguing with each other about who's right.
Idiot. The word "law" as it is used in science does not imply that "laws" cannot have exceptions. Where did you get your knowledge of science, out of an elementary school textbook?
Regardless of what an individual scientist may claim, the truth of the matter is ultimately sorted out in the peer reviewed literature. That's the whole point of the scientific process: it's self-correcting.
Your are not the daring unconventional thinker you fancy yourself to be. In fact, kneejerk dismissal of perceived "authority" by self-proclaimed "freethinkers" is part of Slashdot groupthink. Intelligent people question claims (which has nothing to do with "authority"), but they also make sure they are informed, and you are not remotely informed about science, the scientific process, or the scientific community.
Time Dilation doesn't actually help much here. You have to accelerate to high speed and deccelerate at the end of the journey. Human beans can handle high accelerations for brief times with few ill affects, but we're talking months here. I suppose if you remain strapped into a squishy chair without having to move around too much then two or three g's might be more reasonable, but I'm pretty sure noone's done the studies.
Anyhoo, I typed "relativistic acceleration" into google, and two clicks later I was here.
It's a little disappointing. A traveller would only get up to 95% of the speed of light before it was time to start deccelerating. For longer trips, however, the effect would be greater.
Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do. (Isaac Asimov)
Do you know this or do you just think you know this? It might as well just be that that perticular way of thinking by a coincidence fitted into the theory. The mass is just the energy of movement. What says that the mass is infinite at light speed? If it takes x amount of energy to acceletate an object 1 km/s it should take just the same amount of energy to accelerate from lightspeed to lightspeed + 1 km/s.
HTTP/1.1 400
Except that experimentally, this is not true. The amount of energy to accelerate from v to v+dv increases as v approaches the speed of light (c), even for fixed dv. This is demonstrated in particle accelerators every day.
Why the hell would we build near light speed weapons?
They would be more difficult to intercept.
They could be smaller, same kinetic energy yield for less mass.
You do realize we nearly have light speed weapons? Lasers. One of the benefits is that for practical purposes flight time from weapon to target is zero. No more having to lead the target. It makes interception of fast moving things far more practical.
Are you comfotable with the notion of time travel?
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
I'm thinking that whether you have a hole straight through you, or a bullet embedded in you, you're not gunna be particularly happy.
Happier no, but possibly healthier if it made a hole. Bullets that stop dliver all their energy into you, those that pass through do not. That energy, and the resulting shock waves, is part of the lethality of a bullet. Also, since we are talking near light speed it might be worthwhile to mention that the intense heat from friction may result in no bleeding.
Now we have replaced the problem of "how do we travel to distant stars by going near the speed of light" to "how do we travel to distant stars so that we can accellerate near the speed of light so that we can travel to distant stars?"
Hmm... Seems very practical.
Oh, and pardon me if I am wrong, but I think you would still have a decelleration problem.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
There is also the assumption that no particle smaller than light photon exists---or does it?
The point is: what if there -are- smaller particles, but we haven't found'em yet (maybe they're the stuff that makes up dark matter, or something else completely), and they move faster than light.
I think it's just an instance of `never say never'. Everything we see around us tells us light speed is the max... but how can we be so sure about things we -don't- see? (haven't discovered yet).
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
But it wouldn't be MAD, if you could instantly obliterate an opponent. The deterrent effect of MAD hinges on an opponent being able to retaliate. An instant attack would essentially nullify this, as they would not be able to respond.
"Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer." -Adolf Hitler
"We are one Nation, we are one People." -The One 'leader'
3 things about computers: they're alive, they're self-aware, and they hate your guts.
I think it's best to do it the Little Prince way, by catching a shooting star in a net and "sail away".
I thought the little prince made his own stars by rolling up garbage.
"An example of this is NASA's James Hansen. He speaks out directly to the public and is mobbed by his peers as a result. More power to him."
His peers DID NOT MOB HIM. Bush's fundamentalist political appointees are suppressing scientists all over the spectrum (as you know, of course). On global warming, reproduction, evolutionary biology, space science. Fundamentalist overseers and corporate lobbyists are running the show at all the agencies.
His peers have more to lose than Hansen does. Everyone is just waiting for the Democrats to take back the government so they can breath again.
Any of you guys Star Trek fans?
Apology: I didn't mean for that post to be as cranky as it sounded.
I have read some books about time and still, even if i really put my head into it i still cant come to terms with the notion that time changes (with) speed. To me time must be constant and absolute, not relative. The reasoning i have behind this is that time is just the order and speed in wich events in the universe happens. Its not a force or energy, its really nothing at all. Time has no meaning and no value in itself. Its just a way we humans describe series of events and in wich order and speed they occur.
This makes time travel pretty impossible. You cant change the events of things that has already happened since time isnt anything in itself. You cant alter time or change time. You can change what happens right now, like how fast something travel or in wich order an event occurs. When Einstein says time is relative he is making the assumption that time is linked to events and speeds. It has a corralation but only a one way corralation. Time just is and you can change how things happens and how fast they go in time but you can in no way change time in itself.
I wish i was better at explaining exactly how i think.
HTTP/1.1 400
So I click on the story link, and in the sidebar I get ads like: Negative magnetic energy cures cancer, magnetic unipoles, alien autopsies, levitation techniques, etc, etc, etyechhetera. If this story is as reputable as the sidebars, it's more than totally bogus.
Top Ramen has fueled many a university student for 4 years why not astronauts? The last .3 years could be spent drinking the remainder of the animal beer in celebration of making the trip!
I've often felt the same way about 2+2 never getting up to 5. Come on science, you can put a man on the moon but you can't get 2+2 even a decimal place past goddamn 4?
"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.
It might as well just be that that perticular way of thinking by a coincidence fitted into the theory.
Speculating about theorries working by simple coincidence is unproductive. Until you can find data that falsifies the theory, it stands.
What says that the mass is infinite at light speed?
General Relativity, backed up by experimental evidence.
it should take just the same amount of energy to accelerate from lightspeed to lightspeed + 1 km/s.
It does. The only problem is that you can't accelerate to c - as you accelerate, you stretch out (or space compresses if you like).
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
This could be just what we need to get rid of all the religous wackos who are so eager to meet God.
With the ability of the device to accellerate large masses they could even take a few hundred pounds of inflatable virgins with them, just in case.
Bon voyage!
there is no such thing as decelleration, it's just accelleration in the opposite direction of travel.
in other words, anything that can accellerate TO near light speed can stop FROM light speed just by doing the exact same thing but in the opposite direction. The only reason we find a difference is due to friction, gravity, air resistance effecting us, which doesn't happen in space.
being vague is almost as cool as doing that other thing...
...but nobody really understands it. Main issue seems to be adding a couple of dimensions to our existing model of space-time: http://www.newscientistspace.com/article/mg1892533 1.200-take-a-leap-into-hyperspace.html
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Replying to my own post, as I forgot to mention something else, and Slashdot's "edit post" button has undergone a total existence failure...
The parent also mentioned that scientific theory is based on authority. This is utter nonsense. Authority counts for nothing in science.
We accept Einstein's theories as being correct. Why? Because he was a really smart guy, and therefore must have been right? No. Because he showed exactly how and why his theories were correct.
If I tell you that water turns to ice or steam sometimes, and that's the way it is, because I say so, and because I'm smarter than you, then you'd probably tell me to get stuffed (and rightly so)
On the other hand, if I tell you that cooling water to 0C causes it to freeze into ice, and heating it to 100C causes it to boil, giving off steam, then you can try for yourself in your own kitchen. It doesn't matter if you think I'm a genius or a raving lunatic - it doesn't even matter if I actually AM a raving lunatic. The only thing that counts is whether it works or not. And the things we accept in science are those that work - and if we don't know, we run with our best current explanation based on the avaliable data until a better one comes along.
That's the wonderful thing about science. It's perfectly possible for some unknown, uneducated nobody with a bright idea to overturn hundreds of years of accepted science.
(of course, it's also rather unlikely, as the simple fact is the vast amount of unknown, uneducated nobodies who try to do that are completely off the mark, and don't have the first clue what they're talking about... doesn't mean it can't happen though.)
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
Fuck me!
Could you just write a full fucking sentence please?
I'm not "Arguing from ignorance" I'm just pointing out that accellerating to near light speed is hard enough - getting all the crap out of the way (like one random hydrogen atom every cubic meter - at light speed the energy adds up...quick) would be really difficult, and even a grain of sand (of which there is a lot) drifting through space could prove explosively dangerous at near light speed. Accleration is only one part of the game. The other part is preventing collsions with tiny objects and the rest is delivering your payload (probe, nuclear bomb, whatevaahhhh) to your target (planet, space colony, etc.)
I'm of the opnion that the vast majority of people who will EVER go into space have already been there.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Yes, but 1G is an enormously difficult acceleration to sustain for any length of time. Any technology capable of sustaining that for even a few days, let alone a few months, and still delivering a useful payload, would definitely be in the indistinguishable-from-magic regime.
Basically, controlled fusion and a whole lot of engineering should get you there (days, probably not months, unless you're talking some sort of tam jet). Certainly not doable today, but not that far past (say) a beanstalk or reasonable intellectual property laws.
--MarkusQ
Oh really? What about this or this? Granted, this is transparent Alumina, which is aluminum oxide - Al2-O3 but it's close enough in my book.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
So this is how physicists spend their Valentine's Day?
Libertas in infinitum
I wondered for a while, and recently found out; what's the speed of gravity?
Aperently it's the speed of light; which lead to my next thought; If an object moves at nearly the speed of light, would it build up a 'gravity boom'; like a sonic boom before an aircraft moving at the speed of sound?
If you imagine the effect of gravity as a dip in 3 dimensional space (like a bowling ball on a mattress) imagine the theoretical near light speed object as putting a serious kink in the mattress. I'm thinking it would be shaped like a convex lens, and would distort any matter or energy that intersects it, pulling the photons toward a 'focal point' behind the wavefront. Perhaps that point would be an ideal place to collect hydrogen and photons to use for supplemental fuel. Eliminating the need for the large magnetic field that a Bussard Ramjet would use.
If you traveled close enough to light speed, perhaps the gravity dip could become intense enough to collapse into a 'Black Wall' which would obliterate anything in it's path, and be undetectable until the wave crashed over your unsuspecting planet.
At least it probably wouldn't hurt for long in absolute time; but perhaps the crushing would take an eternity in subjective time.
Would the astronauts get paid for their local elapsed time or for the huge time that passes by on Earth?
The whole anouncement (which was put out by inventors own mini-company) is not a sound physics. There is no way 'of finding a way to move near speed of light' for the first time since we are all, whole Earth, moving at near speed of light already (with respect to some remore objects, like quassars) http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=60 5720
A common mistake is to consider 'moving at high speed'
to be a state of the object - like high temperature.
People moving at high speed (with respect to us) do not see
themself squashed into a pancake.
In 'reality' - they are not squashed at all.
This is re:
Re:Make sure you account for everything (Score:5, Informative)
by Plunky (929104) on Saturday February 11, @05:51PM (#14696407)
Surely time dilation [wikipedia.org] effects would significantly lessen the
amount of air and food that needs to be carried?
2) It is necessary to differentiated between 'B looks like a pancake'
(to A but not to B) and 'is a pancake' . The 'is' is reserved for invariant
concepts (such as Minkowski distance, see 1)
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=43 3561
Relative to it's fixed point of ORIGIN a photon travels at C, this does NOT mean that a photon leaving the same point of ORIGIN but traveling in the opposite direction causes both photons to travel at twice C. It DOES mean that the SPATIAL distance relative to each other is increased over TIME at a rate of twice C. But not the velocity of either photon, which is of course still C. The same logic applys roughly to any other object at any other velocity. Space and time are the relative factors in the equation not the velocity. This how I understand things anyhow.
I would love it if some nut in a basement could find a way around these things. But I expect to wait until I die to explore the far reaches of the universe, and thats not exactly a sure thing either, again in my view anyway.
Matthew
Why does my firewall report port scans by slashdot.org @ ports 6588 and 3382 when I first select to preview this post?
Dude, this is wrong even in Newtonian Mechanics. E = 1/2 m*v^2. Given an object of mass 2 kilograms, it takes 1 Joule to accelerate it to 1 m/s, but 4 Joules to accelerate it to 2 m/s. Therefore it takes 3 Joules to accelerate it from 1 m/s to 2 m/s.
So does it really matter whether "time itself" is slowing down or everything is simply going faster? To me, they're the same thing. Of course, the whole "backwards in time" thing is a bit iffy, but the main point of relativity is that time dilation and space contraction effects (as well as enegry stuff) approach infinity as the your speed approaches c. Whether these effects are "time itself" changing or just the way you see things doesn't really matter. The effects prevent you from going above the speed of light anyway. On that note, when people discovered that light was observed to move at the same speed in all reference frames, they tried to stick with the idea of ether, and put it a bunch of math that would account for the fact that light always travels at c. Well, all of this math eventually ended up being equivalent to relativity, as in, it made the same predictions. Your idea of "time itself", like the ether, is simply an artifact of your intuition. Your intuition was developed by observing things at small speeds moving relative to an absolute frame of reference (the Earth). As such, it is normal to expect that it might not apply in other environments, such as very high speeds, in the same way that your social experiences don't apply if you move to another country with a totally different culture. This is all assuming, of course, that you agree with the mathematics of relativity. Recall that special relativity assumes only a few facts, such as that light travels at c whatever reference fram you're in, and derives all the math from there. In order to disagree with relativity you'd need to either disagree with those facts (which have been experimentally confirmed, mind you), or disagree with the derivations, which have been checked and rechecked a bunch of times. Note also that relativity, especially special relativity, has a whole ton of evidence backing it up. Particle accelerators give electrons energies that, under Newtonian mechanics would put them well above c, but we observe them going no faster than c. The more energy you put in, the closer to c they go, but no matter how much you put in, the speed of the particle never surpasses c.
Felber's research shows that any mass moving faster than 57.7 percent of the speed of light will gravitationally repel other masses lying within a narrow 'antigravity beam' in front of it. [...] In the 'antigravity beam' of a speeding star, a payload would draw its energy from the antigravity force of the much more massive star.
So, in order to accelerate close to the speed of light, you just need to accelerate "a massive star" to more than 57.7% of the speed of light? Well, that sure makes things easier.
Seriously, effects like this have been known for a while, but it's unlikely that they help getting close to the speed of light for practical reasons.
Personally I'm a bit skeptical about his claims,
Why? For rotating masses, you get frame dragging (experimentally verified), so for masses moving linearly, it seems like you ought to get something. Whether his particular solution is correct remains to be verified.
no physical phenomenon can operate only for masses travelling above a fixed speed like that because such a phenomenon would violate Lorentz invariance.
The "0.577 c" threshold seems to be the relative velocity of the two masses, which makes sense for this kind of effect if you think about it.
That means he's made up some new physics, something completely untested, and is therefore a crackpot.
I like that definition, because it supports my long-held assertion that most mainstream physicists are, in fact, crackpots as well.
First it came from climate science, but now we have have wholesale abuse of the scientific method in other disciplines where we don't bother submitting research papers for even the limited review of scientific peers, let alone skeptical review, replication or empirical testing (which used to be the cornerstones of science).
Now we have the internet, we don't have to sweat the small stuff. We announce our results, get slashdotted, and behold! A new scientific paradigm is born!
Only a few days ago, a schizophrenic got his anti-science drivel slashdotted, for which this loon was immensely grateful.
The TFA mentions that this is a "noted physicist". Noted by whom? Was he noted for actually producing useful theory, a better mousetrap? Or was he simply noted by the article author?
This isn't science. This is a celebrity system based on spin, hype and wish fulfillment.
If I had a genuine solution to the "Pioneer Anomaly" for example, I would not dare announce the result like this, for fear that my scientific career would be permanently tarnished.
But then, I'm not a "noted physicist", am I?
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
I'd like to note that I, for one, would rather not have anyone have the ability to direct anything, weapon or not, into the planet at an apreciable fraction of c.
How much damage would 1 ton of Jell-o brand instant pudding(just because that would be degrading to be beaten by pudding based weaponry) hitting Moscow at
--- As to make my comment seem, by comparison, more intelegent... doodie doodie doodie poop poop poop!
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
True, that's how science is supposed to work - and mostly, it works this way. Being a scientist myself, I have to add that unfortunately, the whole show is run by humans. So, every now and then, you still are confronted with arguments from authority, and in some cases, new views are only able to be established by waiting for the current authorities to retire or die. As every human business, science ain't perfect in this regard.
This comment does not exist.
57.7% the speed of light relative to what? Measured relative to the light itself, you're always stationary (c is constant, so if you tried to measure speed in the normal way you'd come out with 0), measured relative to the object you're trying to accelerate you're going to get all kinds of confusion with the speed changing as you accelerate it, and measuring relative to anything else doesn't make sense because the speed required would no longer be constant.
If the "pusher" is travelling at exactly 0.557c as soon as the object in front is accelerated at all, it will stop, so you can only actually accelerate an object to the speed of the pusher minue 0.557c, and as c is the max speed of the pusher the max speed of the pushee is 0.443c, which hardly counts as near the speed of light.
I'm guessing the guy that worked this out isn't that stupid, but the guy that wrote the article clearly is, or he'd have explained it better.
Engineering ? Status report.
Thursters. online.
Warp engines. online.
Lieutenant ? WARP 1 !
not worthy of an article here?
Yes, that's what Fark is for.
Blank until
"Why do you hate God?"
Because EVERY YEAR as a kid I wrote a letter to him asking for a Junior Evil Mastermind Science Lab Kit, and EVERY year the smug bugger flew in on his reindeer, came down the chimney, and delivered nothing but SOCKS. I WILL have my revenge.
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
Yes, sad but true. I probably should have mentioned in my post that I was talking about how science is meant to work - and naturally, due to human failings, that isn't always the case.
As you say though, it's the same in all human endeavour - a doctor's job is to heal people, and for the overwhelming number of cases that's what they do, but sometimes they make things worse, usually by accident*, but sometimes even on purpose**. Again, that's human falliability.
*recent case springs to mind of a girl in the UK who was given 17 overdoses of radiotherapy treatment, and may be left with brain damage or even paralysed.
**For example, Harold Shipman, who used his position as a doctor to murder his patients (and I'm not talking about euthanasia)
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
Time dilation has been experimentally verified in several ways. Two experiments that I know of are roughly as follows:
1) Physicists know the half-life of sub-atomic particles (how long it takes a particular particle to decay into a shower of other, less heavy particles). When a particle with a half life of say x is acceleraated to a high fraction (> 90%) of the speed of light, it is observed that it's half life is MUCH higher than the usual value. Furthermore, the dilated half life EXACTLY coincides with what special relativity predicts.
2) Another experiment that has been performed is as follows: two cesium atomic clocks are synchronized. Note that cesium clocks are so fantastically accurate, that many physical values are now defined in terms of time. For insance, the meter is now defined as the distance that light travels in a certain amount of time. Anyways, so one of the clocks is placed on a jet plane and the other is left at ground level. The plane than flies for several hours at a constant speed. When the clocks are then later compared, the one on the plane is found to be a tiny bit slower. Note that the velocity of a jet plane is microscopic compared to light speed, but the relativistic effect is sufficiently large to be measured by a cesium clock. Again, the discrepency exactly agrees with special relativity. Finally, it's not as if the discrepency was just a coincidence; the experiment has been repeated many times.
So time dilation has been experimentally observed, many times, and is not considered some "esoteric, werid, hypothesis". It is more or less an artifact of our universe.
I would love it if we could travel at super-luminal velocities, and explore the universe, etc etc. Unfortunately, conventional travel based on trying to figure out how to move fast is probably not going to be the way we explore the universe.
I usually make myself feel better by reading about worm holes and warp metrics (like the Alcubierre warp drive) but they are merely theoretical fancies, and even if they were possible, they would not be practical (infinite energies, "negative" energies, etc start coming into play).
Before we get to the near lightspeed antigravity technology, lets do the warping of spacetime with the magnets that was in the previous article, or better yet, the mars base Russia keeps saying they're going to build over and over and over.
I have developed the technology to make myself travel at the speed of light to any location. the technology is called mirror. Basicaly the device (mirror) has to be at my destination and i can transport directly to the new destination instantaneously. the only problem is gettin out of the mirror (device) into the new location. but new research is looking into resolving this problem all together.
Those who have read the article say that he's not making that claim, but one which is much more reasonable. (I haven't read the article, but I tend to believe the reports of those who claim to have done so over the /. summaries.)
He's actually claiming that the anti-gravity field exists at all velocities, but that it's normall so weak that it's imperceptible, however as the relative velocities increase, it's relative potency increases. The 57.7% of C comes from the relative speed at which the anti-gravity effect balances the ordinary gravitational effect.
This could be wrong, but it's not inherently implausible.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I wish /. would quit promoting physorg, all they do is grab news and press releases from other sites and post them WITHOUT LINKS TO THE SOURCE as if they originated the story.
Another copy of the press release.
STAIF 2006.
You fail at logic and science.
Amm... I don't think so.
Your logic: Relativity seems to work well so far and explains everything we know right now---therefore, it is the complete and only explanation of how the universe works, and -nothing- can ever contradict it.
I fail to see how your logic is not flawed.
All generalizations are dangerious, even this one.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
Hehe, I thought I'd get knee jerks out of that.
I'm glad to see that not everyone is a robot. Though I did not spot one scientist in among the responses.
Authoritarian is what the school system is.
As far as Einstein, would it not be interesting if it turned out he was not correct. Not being able to go faster than light is a hypothesis based on this mans work. You call it observations. I put it to you to review how those observations were made. Since he made them they have more or less been followed blindly.
According to the impact effects calculator, a 1-meter, 1000-kilogram object hitting rock at a 90-degree angle at 150000kps would (assuming the atmosphere had no effect on it) release about 1410 megatons of energy. Splat.
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
Effective relativistic travel is better than no effective relativistic travel. However, though I hope he's right, I doubt it. Oh well.
I have a girlfriend whose name doesn't end in
I bet that's because you forgot to put a tooth under your pillow first!
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
At best, we still could only get to around .001 percent of light with todays technology. Even if what this guy claims is true, and I'm far from believing it, it still would take alot of progress to achieve 57 percent the speed of light. no weapons, no spaceships for a long while.
so....laser guns are out then? damn!
Try this calculator to see the highly nonlinear effect of increasing distance on elapsed shipbord journey time. With acceleration equivalent to earth-normal gravity throughout the trip (switching to deceleration as you pass the half way mark) it takes 9 years to travel 100LY. It only takes half as much again to travel ten times as far. So you may as well just point your ship in a direction where there are plenty of stars, launch, and decide where you're going while you're actually en-route.
Not to mention the fact that if we had robots that were well-programmed enough to be able to raise zygotes into intelligent, sane human beings that could function effectively as explorers (assuming here the goal is exploration rather than brute-force colonization), wouldn't the robots also be intelligent enough to function as explorers themselves, thus obviating all the ethical quibbles about zygo-nauts ?
Read the best of all of Slash: seenonslash.com
I remember reading a few years ago in Discover... this ... (this was just the first link google turned up, but it looks like a similar story...) matter attaches, yada yada yada, photons slow, yada yada, still about 186,282 mps through a vacuum, yada yada...
also interesting, if not related, try googling "loop quantum gravity"... neat little idea there...
*Note the use of elipses; I don't care much to finish a thought when I'm already workin' on a new one...
Paul: If you're reading this, pick your shoes up out of the hallway. I keep tripping over them. Slob.
Although it is impossible to travel and exceed speed of light, Einstein would love to see yur face shrinking inside the spaceship. Everyone knows that time stops, gain infinite mass, and would shrink if u travel at the speed of light, right? So, even if u travel close to speed of light, there is no point going anywhere else with that speed. Just let photons have fun travelling with that speed. And I have a question, Does light have mass or momentum even if it's not trapped inside the box?
Look, not at sqaures and force. We revolve around circles. Travel, not by energy or mass. You'll see. 2042.