just doing the math to calculate the length of a trip while the ship is accelerating is hard enough add in relativity, no way...my head iz exploded O__o
So literally nothing can go faster then the speed of light? I remember watching some program that briefly touched on this subject but they didn't seem to explain it properly. What I remember was the concept of Nothing being able to go faster then the speed of light. The Universe is an amazing and yet weird place.
It's not very intuitive, but yes, it's true. Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. The full explanation is considerably more than can be properly explained here, but there is around a century of so of science backing it up (the story begins before Einstein's Special Relativity). The science is sound, and bulletproof unless you consider the possibilities of hyperspace. But in ordinary space, travel of anything, including information, faster than the speed of light is unequivocably impossible.
No object can be accelerated to light speed. But I have read that objects/particles that always move at or beyond the speed of light are possible. Maybe not proven, but theoretically possible. I don't remember where I read that, so I don't know if it's true, but I don't recall it being a minimal-effort blog or anything obviously disreputable like that.
You're referring to tachyons, theoretical particles that cannot travel slower than the speed of light. They are a mathematical oddity incapable of carrying information, and their existence would "begin" with their destruction, and their mass would be imaginary in the mathematical sense. They could be theoretically be detected by Cherenkov radiation appearing in a vacuum, but this has never been observed.
This stuff is making my brain smoke. Will leave this to you the smart ones. If I have to do SF I will just make up my own place and laws to go with it. Muahahahaha
I love all this quantum theory / time travel / wormhole / 4th dimension stuff! Anyway, all these posts got me thinking about a short story I read recently called "The Star" by Arthur C Clarke. You can find the story online. It's a bit slow going in the beginning and to be truthful early on I was thinking, "what the hell is going on?" but it's a very worth while ending despite that. And for anyone wanting to know more about wormholes and Einstein's theory, paradoxes and determinism H2G2 offers are really fast nutshell version. Have fun!
