Students Calculate What Hyperspace Travel Would Actually Look Like

cylonlover writes "The two Star franchises (Wars and Trek) and countless science fiction movies have given generations of armchair space travelers an idea of what to expect when looking out the window of a spaceship that's traveling faster than the speed of light. But it appears these views are – if you'll excuse the pun – a bit warped. Four students from the University of Leicester have used Einstein's theory of Special Relativity to calculate what faster than light travel would actually look like to Han and Chewie at the controls of the Millennium Falcon. The fourth year physics students – Riley Connors, Katie Dexter, Joshua Argyle, and Cameron Scoular – say that the crew wouldn't see star lines (PDF) stretching out past the ship during the jump to hyperspace, but would actually see a central disc of bright light."

Comments

inaccurate slashdot summary; not a new result

[bcrowell]

The slashdot summary is totally inaccurate. It makes it sound as though the paper calculates what would be seen by an observer going faster than c relative to the stars, but actually the paper calculates what would be seen by an observer going at v=0.9999995c.

There is also basically nothing new in this paper. The effects they describe (relativistic aberration and Doppler shifts) have been well understood for a long time. ANU has made a nice educational video showing these effects.

The question of how things would look if you could go faster than c relative to the stars is a whole different issue. Special relativity doesn't forbid relative motion faster than c, but it puts a bunch of constraints on it: (1) it can't be achieved by a continuous process of acceleration from velocities less than c; (2) if it exists, it violates causality; and (3) although special relativity is consistent with the existence of faster-than-light particles (tachyons), it is not consistent with the existence of faster-than-light observers in a universe with 3 spatial dimensions and 1 time dimension, a.k.a. 3+1 dimensions. Result #3 (no tachyonic observers in 3+1 dimensions) has been known for a long time, but it seems to keep getting rediscovered.