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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...)
traveling at the speed of light, only the view would be a smaller dot.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The A Slower Speed of Light game from MIT does the same thing, just by slowing the light down to your speed rather than speeding you up to light speed. It's the same, since its all relative.
Hyperspace travel != FTL
...is broke. Usually when you prove a theory wrong through evidence, it gets put away in a box. Not Special Relativity, it gets bandied about as being the most wonderful thing, we'll just modify it a little to make it work...
FTL travel isn't possible.
Now tell me what bigfoot looks like, so long as you're just making shit up and calling it science.
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.
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Big and hairy. Actually, a lot like your mom - but with better outdoor survival skills.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
So it must be real! Next up, my spreadsheet calculating my yearly income if I made a million dollars an hour.
Isn't the universe expanding from the center close to the speed of light, making the opposing side of the universe an example of this?
so when you die and head towards the white light, can it be said you are dying at the speed of light?
You wouldn't see anything at FTL speeds as even radio waves would come on as gamma radiation. If that doesn't kill you outright you can expect your clothes to no longer fit and your tan to turn a darker shade of green whereupon you smash the controls and die anyway.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Now I can start working on my spaceship.
Hyperspace travel wouldn't look like anything special since you're fixed in space (or traveling at subluminal speeds) and doing the bulk of your travel in hyperspace. (And let's face it - that's pure fantasy.)
FTL travel wouldn't look like anything at all either since as you approach the speed of light time slows down for you. If you traveled at the speed of light you would reach your destination instantly (and you'd only be stopped by either colliding with something or being slowed by something, likely a black hole sucking you in to your doom). If you traveled faster than the speed of light you would break all of causality. Not gonna happen.
surely the whole point of hyperspace is to be a plot device where one can avoid unfortunate physical laws that would otherwise mess up a story, like momentum (these star-ships routinely crash or make sharp turns at millions of miles per hour and the crew-members just fall over gently or brace themselves against pillars), where even Heisenberg experiences no uncertainty and in particular where special relativity apparently does not apply.
Nullius in verba
Newton's law of gravity is broken as well. The thing is that although it's inaccurate and broken, it's a really easy approximation to how gravity works that gets you results that work well enough that people still use it for most situations. SR is similar, it doesn't work in non-inertial frames but with inertial frames, it's good enough in most situations and a lot easier to use than GR.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
I giving all she got captain and I don't get the lines.
After reaching ludicrous speed, everything turns to plaid.
gate and my favorite ship troopers
Nothing. You would see absolutely nothing. Blackness. Empty space. Here is why:
The warp field used to push the ship would be a 100% metamaterial, which redirects all particles, including light, around the ship perfectly, and or, capturing the particles on the event shock, and preventing them from reaching you.
That's the problem with cheating by removing the ship from the causally connected universe, via a albucuierre warpdrive; being no longer causally connected means you can't see anything, because you stop interacting with the universe outside the warp field.
Ok, pedantically, you would see an insanely redshifted image of the universe you left behind, instead of empty space. But to human eyes, that heat map would appear literally black.
When you rupture the field, and spill back into being causally connected with the universe at the remote reference frame, a shitton of energy and radiation will blast out.
Piloting a ship with that kind of propulsion would require very precise calculations about the passing of local time inside the warp field, and the time frames of both site of departure, and site of destination. It would be impossible to measure spacial distance, so the unpredictable unit of variable time is all you would have to work with. Long distance navigation would be an almost absurd proposition due to this fact. This could be the fly in the ointment against this form of travel in fact.
In that movie, you also have laser guns that shoot slower that the speed of light! It was good entretainment when was just released and I was a little kid, but that is it!
He describes this in The City and the Stars, and possibly in an earlier work.
Lets start refering to The War Against Terror by it's initials. . .
Why is it that hyperspace looks exactly like what one sees after 8 beers?
Table-ized A.I.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwJtYmNpINI
Will I need to bring jelly babies?
This space for rent
Looks like we now know what slashdotting looks like.
http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/400x/33444159.jpg
If you figure time moves at 1C, since Sunlight takes 8 minutes to reach the Earth, the reflections of that are what we see on objects here... If you are traveling at 1C away from Earth, it will look like everything stopped right when you reached 1C. The light will be moving just as fast as you.
When you fly towards something, it will seem like time is going twice as fast. The normal motion, and the amount of 'light' you are going through is twice as much as normal.
But Stars and galaxies next to you or off in the distance will 'move' a little, but are still going to be way too far away.
If it's warp speed, it's a compress space thingy. Lights should be able to pass through compress space, so, theoretically, people on spaceship that travels through warp space should be able to see light from outside.
But if that spaceship travels faster than light - that is, if that's possible at all - then no outside light should be visible.
About hyperspace - since it's a puncturing a hole in the space/time thing, ... light travels _within_ the space/time constraint, so, there should be no light in the hyperspace, either.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
This calculation isn't really relative to anything, so it could quite easily be wrong. What would be far more useful is if the students showed an animation of how perception changes as you *accelerate* *into* hyperspace.
What if in fact there is no way at all to exceed c? It could mean that the only way to really explore the galaxy would be with generation ships or with machines. It would be a quite depressing discovery, for it would place limits on our imagination. "Science fiction" would pass into the category of "fantasy".
The only other possibility that would work is travel that is faster-than-light from your own perspective, but not from others' - time dilation. You could make a trip to another galaxy in a single lifetime, but it would be millions of years to everyone else.
I think that some of the biggest scientific discoveries to come will not be of possibilities, but of limitations. Not what we can do in the future, but what we can't. Humankind is going to have to live with this.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Everyone knows that once you pass a certain threshold it goes plaid.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Don't go into the light, Luke!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Red Dwarf - Future Echoes
Leela: "Is all the work done by children?" Alien: "No, not the whipping."
I'm just curious.
Except: If you were traveling at the speed of light, time would stop. So you wouldn't see a damned thing because the universe would end instantaneously for you. Also you'd implode into a singularity and devour all the energy in the universe to achieve light speed, but lets not let physics get in the way.
not a screen displaying a graphic representation of data gathered from sensors way broader than visible light; Windows being, you know ... a bit leaky and fragile.
You seem to regard science as some kind of dodge... or hustle.
So, how do those Heisenberg compensators work, Scotty?
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Even so, if the universe is a simulation one would expect to see alert messages such as "Please wait... Loading level 2" or "Undefined pointer at 0xa0123ebf6a78ca2a@20010db8:00000000:0000ff00:00428329"
Still nobody has answered whether your headlights will work.
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my god these people are stupid, and so is just about every replier.
this is NOT what it would look like at all, the whole idea of red/blue shift is also incorrect because...
it fails to take into account perspective, the universe is a HUGE place, there's this thing called "distance"
you MAY be traveling at just under c, or at c or above c (relatively speaking) however this is NOT what happens and NOT what it looks like.
it just means you're moving faster, the distance between the stars didn't change,
ok, if you're at 0.5 above c relatively speaking, and the distance between two stars is 10 lightyears, it still takes a LOT of time to travel that distance,
your motion relative to them will just be faster, not beyond your ability to see them. augh!
if a star is 10 light years away from where you are traveling and you dont go near it, it will only move in your view a tiny bit relative to you and the other objects around you.
they've totally forgotten about RELATIVITY, all objects, not just one in reference to your ship. but everything else around you.
I bet these same morons think that FTL means time travel, guess what, it doesn't!
idiots.
(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.
I'm curious (but can't deal with 30 pages of relativistic physics right now). Can you answer one summarizing question, please?
Is the conclusion that such observers can't exist because:
1) tachyonic particles can't interact to form an observer,
2) if they could form an observer, the space of the observer would have something other than a 3 + 1 dimensionality, or
3) Such an observer couldn't interact with non-tachyonic matter in our 3+1 spacetime in a way that would qualify as "observing"?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Jan98/TigerBeetle.bpf.html
I assume The Programmers could handle a try-catch.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
You wouldn't see anything at FTL speeds as even radio waves would come on as gamma radiation.
How do you know? There is no known physics which can predict what FTL travel will look like because all the known laws of physics forbid FTL. This makes as much sense as using newtonian mechanics to explain quantum tunnelling: the existence of the phenomena you are trying to explain is forbidden by the very physics you are trying to describe it with! However that is NOT what the students did - they assumed a velocity very close to the speed of light but not greater than it then threw in the word "Millenium Falcon" which clearly excited the submitter so much they didn't bother to read the article and made up what they though sounded cool.
Having now got into a thoroughly grumpy mood I'm also astounded that what used to be one question on an assignment when I was a first year physics undergrad in the UK has now somehow morphed into an undergrad journal article. These used to publish original research done by senior undergrads not act as a means to publish first year assignment solutions, especially ones which even have existing web pages providing the answer with pictures generated by a computer program that not only solves the physics but generates the actual pictures too!
The only viable stardrive is one that alters the local gravitational constant. It takes it way down, (or up maybe) in a bubble around the ship. Although it may, this mechanism doesn't necessarily alter any wavelengths of any EM inside it. So starlight that you ran up on, would enter your local bubble as you approached, be affected by your warp drive the same as you, and strike the surface of your ship as starlight, relative to you. In your local bubble, you're not going very fast; nothing approaching c.
So, starlight is still starlight, not gamma rays or radio waves when you see it. A useful stardrive would go some hundreds of times c. Then the fun part is the fact that you're running up on light that was emitted behind you, as well as the light in your path from stars in front. Also, light traveling perpendicular to your path; you're going to run up on that too.
I gotta believe that what ends up shining through the window would be a jumbled mess.
Quite well, thank you.
The paper talks about traveling at 0.9999995c, i.e. definitely relativistic speeds but not any kind of hyperspace travel.
They made some fairly straightforward blue-shift and pressure calculations. The bright spot in front of the travelers is actually the Cosmic Background Radiation, normally microwave radiation, but blue shifted towards the visible end of the spectrum. Starlight would be shifted toward X-rays in front of them and microwave behind them.
The authors don't talk about any acceleration phase, they assume the travelers simply travel at that speed and what they would see.
Essentially nothing new in this paper, but just some fun calculations.
The Bloater Drive: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloater_Drive#Bloater_Drive
I always thought that would be neat.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
"Han and Chewie at the controls of the Millennium Falcon [...] wouldn't see star lines stretching out past the ship during the jump to hyperspace, but would actually see a central disc of bright light."
George Lucas will need to re-edit again his movies with up-to-date CGI.
Taking their investigations one step further, the students calculated that, despite being the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy, the Millennium Falcon would also need to pack some extra energy to overcome the pressure exerted from the intense X-rays from stars that would push the ship back and cause it to slow down. The students say the pressure exerted on the ship would be comparable to that felt at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
Pressure? Really? Photons have no mass, how are they expected to apply a pressure on the hull?
It's going to be great. ET will shoot at TIE fighters with a walkie talkie while the genie from Aladdin flies around on a magic carpet. Harrison Ford will probably play a cameo both as Indianna Jones and as an octagenarian Han Solo.
Without the SSL error on it?
Very well, but they do tend to act up a bit every few years.
...by Carl Sagan, among others
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPoGVP-wZv8
The relevant bit comes at about 1:30
"celeritius" is velocity in Latin. Scientists used to write mostly in Latin until the 1800s.
If you are going ~1/3 the speed of light a red light at a traffic intersection would appear green.
http://what-if.xkcd.com/14/
Probably violating several sacred canons of Trekkerdom here, but: what if warp speeds are in fact achieved by a high-frequency sequence of micro-warp jumps, with brief instants of sub-FTL speeds in between? Then the observers on the ship see a blended sequence of images of "realtime" space. This would give the screen-saver-style illusion of stars emanating from dead ahead and zooming around the ship. It wouldn't provide any color shift, though.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
with a little uncertainty
YAB - http://blog.beemandave.com/
Can't wait for the re-mastered Star Wars 40 years edition...
but close to the speed of light.
Secondly, I also made these calculations as an excersice in high school over 20 years ago...
So, how do those Heisenberg compensators work, Scotty?
Very well, thank you!
I describe what FTL is like in en.wikipedia.org/User:Teknopup kinda like witnessing the souls of the tormented slip past your spaceship window