• Welcome to BookAndReader!

    We LOVE books and hope you'll join us in sharing your favorites and experiences along with your love of reading with our community. Registering for our site is free and easy, just CLICK HERE!

    Already a member and forgot your password? Click here.

Warp 9, Engage!

Stewart

Stewart

Active Member
Is it possible to exceed the speed of light? Einstein didn't think so. Hawkins hasn't promulgated a definite opinion (that I have read).

I think that acheiving light speed is the next huge leap for our technological society. I also think it will require something unlike anything we currently have. I am excited about the folks in the upcoming generation who haven't been as steeped in the impossibilities like folks my age, and my parent's age were.

I believe that the new technology that enables us to break the light barrier will be the stepping stone, and that once we acheive 299,792,458 meters per second, multiplying that speed will be simply a matter of 'turning it up'. Obviously, this will only be possible with a new approach, a radical approach. Nothing we have ever seen before.

I think it is possible. This isn't based on any scientific evidence or theories, but solely on the romantic little voice in me that would be totally devastated to learn that it was impossible. I believe it because I really want it to be true!

Does anyone else share my opinion?

How many think I am off-base and unrealistic?

What technologies that are out there at the moment have the potential to lead to this next milestone?

I'm not looking for a debate, although one might be fun to watch, I am just interested in learning from this broad sampling of our World culture.
 
It was funny!

Okay, Dr Spock has just diagnosed my problem as 'Avoidance Behavior'. If you all see me around here anywhere anymore, will you please yell at me and tell me to get back to work?
 
I don't think the speed of light will be surpassed before I die. I don't even think it's possible, but then again, maybe I already think it's possible because it's already been surpassed by someone in an alternate dimension / parallel universe thingy... Maybe humanity will reach light speed a few thousand years from now... Maybe that's where all the Martians hurried off to...
 
StillILearn said:
Okay, Dr Spock has just diagnosed my problem as 'Avoidance Behavior'.
Click to expand...

He's a Doctor, not a Vulcan!

(Ha! I kill me!)

I think superluminous travel is, and always will be impossible. It violates all laws of physics.

leckert checks the other "Warp 9, Engage" thread to see if he has created a paradox...
 
leckert said:
He's a Doctor, not a Vulcan!

]
Click to expand...

I always make that mistake. No wonder I keep getting these bizarre misdiagnoses. It is quite apparent to me that it is much more beneficial to my mental well-being to hang around here chatting with you-all about the space/ time continuum than it would be for me to attend to my so-called 'real life' -- or even for me to be endlessly rewriting the first two sentences of my so-called book.

Maybe I'll go write five words in the Four Word Story instead.

Maybe one of them will be "putative". Or alleged.

:D
 
StillILearn said:
I always make that mistake. No wonder I keep getting these bizarre misdiagnoses. It is quite apparent to me that it is much more beneficial to my mental well-being to hang around here chatting with you-all about the space/ time continuum than it would be for me to attend to my so-called 'real life' -- or even for me to be endlessly rewriting the first two sentences of my so-called book.

Maybe I'll go write five words in the Four Word Story instead.

Maybe one of them will be "putative". Or alleged.

:D
Click to expand...

So tell Spock that you are cured, then start sending your checks to me!
 
jenngorham said:
stillilearn, get to work!!! :D
Click to expand...

I am always fascinated with the dilligence applied by the unemployed to make sure we the contributors remain employed!

:D (hiya, Jenn!)
 
The sloth of dark

I remember a hoary old chestnut of a physics problem about firing a bullet from the front of a speeding train. The bullet left the gun at 100 mph but the train travelled at 200mph so did the bullet ever get out of the gun. Of course it did with a total speed of 300mph. :confused:

So all you need is a bog standard spaceship with light speed or pretty damn near light speed capabilities. Get up to top speed and fire a second light speed capable craft off the front, and hey presto!

Of course there’s the minor problem of equal and opposite forces and that old bugbear friction. I would think it best to try this in a piece of fresh dark so there aren't any lumpy bits to get in the way.

Someone clever can check the sums; I’m confidant it will all add up.



Another thought, just how fast does dark travel because its always there as soon as the light has gone and how much dark is there?:D

(that will teach me to play with the edit button)
 
Aardvark said:
Another thought, just how fast does dark travel because its always there as soon as the light has gone and how much dark is there?
Click to expand...
From my head? A lot of dark... and fast...

According to physics, your bullet train example is correct. Now, substitute train for speed of light, and bullet for speed of light, and you get some strange problems. If one were to travel the speed of light or beyond, don't you think it would be difficult to navigate? One bit of space dust and you're toast...
 
sirmyk said:
From my head? A lot of dark... and fast...

According to physics, your bullet train example is correct. Now, substitute train for speed of light, and bullet for speed of light, and you get some strange problems. If one were to travel the speed of light or beyond, don't you think it would be difficult to navigate? One bit of space dust and you're toast...
Click to expand...


mmmm.... toooaaassssttt!!!
 
Originally Posted by sirmyk According to physics, your bullet train example is correct. Now, substitute train for speed of light, and bullet for speed of light, and you get some strange problems. If one were to travel the speed of light or beyond, don't you think it would be difficult to navigate? One bit of space dust and you're toast
Click to expand...

Ok, so if light takes 8 minutes to travel from the sun to earth and superluminous speed brings that down to say 7 minutes. The orbital positions of the planets will still be predictable so navigation in a know universe would still be possible.



(brain hurts must stick to counting ants, 1,2,4,3,5,8…)
 
I am 100% confident, after a thorough investigation of the topic, that the answer to the original question posed by the thread is "maybe". more details to come later.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top