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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."
There are two methods of FTL being talked about here, but they are conflating the two.
Traveling via "warp" means warping space and time itself so you're moving through space at less than C, but space is shrinking in front of you and expanding behind, so the net effect is that you've moved from point A to point B in less time than it would take light travelling without warping space. (Your actual velocity may actually be zero with this method.) This is how Star Trek does it (sort of).
Traveling via "hyperspace" means punching some type of hole in space and traveling "somewhere else". Sometimes it is just a wormhole between points A and B, but it is commonly (like in Star Wars and Babylon 5) some other space within or without normal space. It's a short cut.
Nerds should know this, and yet this is the second time within a week I've seen these two ideas talked about as if they are the same thing.
(I'll leave it to someone else to explain how traveling by Guild vessel works...)