posted 10-06-2022 12:50 PM               

But to think that FTL is forever impossible is silly. Just like going over 100 MPH was impossible for people in the early 1800s.

I can promise you this; if people someday manage to figure out FTL travel, it'll be something totally different than sci-fi talks about right now.

Just like how someone watching a biplane going overhead in 1922 couldn't imagine an afterburning jet engine, nor would they think it would ever be possible for such a thing to exist.

posted 10-06-2022 02:03 PM               

Einstein's theory of general relatively precludes anything from traveling faster than light because the closer you approach the speed of light, the greater your mass becomes until at the speed of light you are a singularity (a mass with infinite density). So before you can solve for FTL, you have to disprove general relativity and thus far, the theory has held up to test.

posted 10-07-2022 06:19 AM               

quote:

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Originally posted by p51:
Just like going over 100 MPH was impossible for people in the early 1800s.

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The sound barrier was also considered a barrier to aircraft until engineers and scientists proved it was possible to overcome. Then aircraft went faster and faster until the heat generated became a limiting factor. and so on and so on...

posted 10-07-2022 10:05 AM               

Relativity is not the only theory in the way of faster than light travel. Quantum physics also presents a challenge, as highlighted by the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics awarded a few days ago.

One of the more unsettling discoveries in the past half century is that the universe is not locally real. "Real," meaning that objects have definite properties independent of observation — an apple can be red even when no one is looking; "local" means objects can only be influenced by their surroundings, and that any influence cannot travel faster than light. Investigations at the frontiers of quantum physics have found that these things cannot both be true. Instead, the evidence shows objects are not influenced solely by their surroundings and they may also lack definite properties prior to measurement. As Albert Einstein famously bemoaned to a friend, "Do you really believe the moon is not there when you are not looking at it?"

This is, of course, deeply contrary to our everyday experiences. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, the demise of local realism has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Blame for this achievement has now been laid squarely on the shoulders of three physicists: John Clauser, Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger. They equally split the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics "for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science." ("Bell inequalities" refers to the pioneering work of the Northern Irish physicist John Stewart Bell, who laid the foundations for this year's Physics Nobel in the early 1960s.)

posted 10-07-2022 07:40 PM               

quote:

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Originally posted by Robert Pearlman:
There were no laws of physics to overcome.

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While it was understood that bullets and artillery projectiles were traveling faster than sound, the issues with aerodynamics and the behavior of airflow at transonic speeds had proven to be a barrier for many years.

Were it not for the work of many physicists and engineers to develop high speed wind tunnels and schlieren photography so that images of shock waves and how the air behaves at transonic speeds it may have taken many more years to achieve controllable supersonic flight.

Furthermore, a continual study in this area led to aircraft designs capable of supersonic flight without afterburner (supercruise) and is continuing with the development of supersonic airliners that combine the lessons from the past with the information gained from modern research.

Indeed, today commercial rocket companies benefit from the work done by NACA and others into aerodynamics and the study of air in the subsonic, transonic, supersonic, and hypersonic regimes and the physics related to each.

There was a school of thought that believed that to travel at speeds close to light, perhaps using a rocket with a huge light beam directed at a solid body could eventually propel the spacecraft away from that body at near light speed.

The first problem many come up with about this idea is how to navigate and slow down. A layman may ask what happens if, when we use light to produce near light speed travel, if we add yet more light energy to the spacecraft, does this allow us to travel faster?

Just as the airflow through a jet engine traveling at twice the speed of sound is traveling at half the speed of sound inside the jet engine, if we add energy to that energy as it exits the engine, can we go faster than light?

posted 10-08-2022 01:17 AM            

quote:

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Originally posted by oly:
I suspect that there is an entire stream of physics that may find your statement insulting.

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posted 10-08-2022 06:38 AM               

For instance, even the statement that mass increases as an object nears the speed of light is not quite accurate. As with most things Einstein, the important idea is relatively. If you are the object, at say 99% c, your internal experience is that your mass is exactly the same as before. Externally viewed you would appear to have increased in mass. Then again, the understanding of mass itself is still murky, even with recent papers indicating its a manifestation of the gluons within nuclei.

posted 10-09-2022 10:47 AM               

I understand how the engines work now. It came to me in a dream. The engines don't move the ship at all. The ship stays where it is and the engines move the universe around it.