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Ways To Travel Faster Than Light Without Violating Relativity
StartsWithABang writes: It's one of the cardinal laws of physics and the underlying principle of Einstein's relativity itself: the fact that there's a universal speed limit to the motion of anything through space and time, the speed of light, or c. Light itself will always move at this speed (as well as certain other phenomena, like the force of gravity), while anything with mass — like all known particles of matter and antimatter — will always move slower than that. But if you want something to travel faster-than-light, you aren't, as you might think, relegated to the realm of science fiction. There are real, physical phenomena that do exactly this, and yet are perfectly consistent with relativity.
we have no technology remotely capable of this, but:
1. a quantum entangled version of yourself moves away from you (at "normal" speed, less than c)
2. say... many light years away (i know, i said we have no technology remotely capable of this, bear with me here, just a thought experiment)
3. the "copy" of you can't violate c, but at the last moment, one version of you interacts with its surroundings, collapsing you to that single copy. such that you have achieved instantaneous transportation across light years of distances
doesn't that happen faster than c?
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You're at a very straight, very long beach. Imagine parallel waves striking the shore at a vanishingly slight angle. The point that the wave meets the shore moves along as the intersection of wave and beach occurs. As the waves get closer and closer to parallel with the beach, but not quite parallel, eventually that intersection point will be moving much faster than c.
But the interesection point between waves and shore doesn't have mass, isn't really a "thing" that's moving.
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except for the part about bringing your own fuel
And the part about obliterating your spacecraft by colliding with interstellar dust at super-high relative velocities. The speed limit for arriving in one piece is way lower than c.
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I realize that this is a very simplistic explanation, but think of quantum entanglement like this:
You have 2 cubes. Each cube can be only either blue or green. You have no idea what color each cube is as you packed them into boxes for mailing across the galaxy in a completely dark room. They are then mailed.
Now, you open your box. Turns out that your cube is green. You instantly know that the other cube is blue, even if it's on the other side of the galaxy, however, you have no way of communicating your discovery to the other party.
You now have instant knowledge of what color the remote cube is, but no information has been transferred.
Simple enough?
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