Unless the story hinges on the mechanics of how they're going faster than light, they just do it. Presumably, the aliens don't worry about it being impossible (because to them, it clearly is possible). There have been several times in our history where as our understanding of science expanded, things formerly thought of as impossible became less so. So (for the purposes of the story), faster-than-light travel seems impossible until you make certain discoveries that we just haven't got round to yet. Now that's explained, let's get to the space adventure.
I agree. That's why in my space-opera novel I have a Tachyon universe employed as a means of FTLT and leave it to the reader to assume that all the nuances in relation to that accomplishment have been worked out. Of course that doesn't sit quite right with hard-sci-fi fans who expect explanations to be meticulously provided as in the Isaac Asimov novels and short stories. Others who want an adventure and not getting bogged down in the details won't mind. It's really all a matter of taste.
That would bug the hell out of me. The idea is fine, but the second you attach a known property like a tachyon to it, the “willing to suspend believe” feeling is gone. Major discoveries tend to be made after the people who made them and since your technology will be invented by something who isn’t born yet, just make up a name. “Engage the Chekhov drive!” Its pretty obvious that someone named Chekhov formulated the math required to move superluminally, but nobody will really care how. Of take something would have a similar meaning to what you want. “Entering anti-de Sitter space now.” Im not sure why tachyon is in the popular lexicon as a superlinumal particles. Physics have had a completely different meaning since the 70s.
True, the very moment we attach a known property then the reader might vehemently begin demanding an seek explanation and if none is provided the suspension of disbelief will be affected. But that tends to be the case more with fans of hard sci fi than it does with those who accept fantasy mixed in with sci fi. It all depends on the audience. Consider all the absurdities that are displayed in the sci fi series Star Wars such as light sabers, and that mysterious force that allows all sorts of ridiculous antics such as levitation and telekinesis. Fans of such a sci fi series are very happy, willing and able to refrain from demanding a detailed explanation. Why? Because they watch it to have fun. If they start demanding explanations then there goes the fun right out the window. Then you have the Superman character shooting heat-rays and X rays from his eyes. The X Men performing all kinds of insanities and the audience doesn't even blink but their attention is glued to the screen. So a mere mention of entering a tachyon space temporarily to travel at light or faster than light looks rather tame in comparison. In fact, I find the inertial dampeners and the artificial gravity without rotation mentioned in Star Trek the New Generation far more difficult to imagine. Not that theoretical explanations aren't good. Of course they are if kept within reasionable parameters. I personally as a reader tend to become impatient when the an author goes into several or more paragraphs of detailed explanations about any given tech and camouflages it via dialogue between the main character and someone else. To me that is a testing of my interest and I as an author would not test the reader's patience I that way unless I was sure that my targeted audience relishes that kind of thing. So to be on the safe side I would try to keep such extended explanations to a bare minimum. BTW Can you please provide a recent articled where it describes the tachyon as moving slower than light.
Sure. I think the biggest misconception is that tachyon is an adjective, not a particle. It’s like mass, there is no mass particle, it’s just a property. A tachyon field is any field whose units and formulations require complex numbers. Most other fields you are familiar with work with real numbers, but there is a set of numbers perpendicular to the number line called complex numbers (denoted as a + bi.). Any field that has this propert is called a tachyon field. The most famous is Higgs. Tachyon as particles were a hypothetical that were formulated by incomplete versions of the standard model long before it was complete and while tachyon fields have apparent temporary motion faster than light, it’s an illusion cause by motion though the imaginary plane. (Imaginary numbers are perfectly valid and the name causes a lot of confusion.). Any recent article on the Higgs field will certain make reference to its tachyon components, you can’t do Higgs field math without it.
I'm not sure if I'm more triggered by most people thinking they know physics or by the fact that everyone goes off-topic to try to proof themselves right or others wrong. Not to trigger anyone else, but to it seems @Lew and @newjerseyrunner are the only ones with backgrounds in physics further than secondary school, anyhow , back to the post. As someone else has mentioned, you could have these beings switch dimentions/make wormholes would be one option to prevent rapid aging of the surroundings, how this is done is entirely up to you. Or, maybe have a look in quantum entanglement, or basically teleportation of information. Maybe these beings found a way to entangle more than just information? Since there's a lot of unknown stuff about this you can prod around a little bit and not eveyone would be able to say: "Oi! You're wrong!" kind of thing ^^. If you have any access to full scientific papers - Loophole-free Bell inequality violation using electron spins sperated by 1.3 kilometers. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v526/n7575/full/nature15759.html?foxtrotcallback=true A simple explanation of it.
This was Red Dwarf's take on travelling at faster than LS. Sorry they all sound drunk and the picture's so crap ... obviously the uploader's method of getting round copyright laws.
I see a lot of physics misconceptions in this thread. I will do my best to address the obvious ones that I see. I'm not trying to call anyone out or anything so don't take offense if I'm correcting something you said here. If anyone would like a source for anything I've said, let me know and I'll find a free paper detailing it. If anyone has further questions just let me know. E=mc^2 is a derived equation and physicists use it with not only an understanding of it's meaning, but also of it's valid range. Most equations that anyone in undergraduate or below is a derived one, and most ranges vanish when you put your values in the real equations. The most important one is Einstein's Field Equation: R[uv] - (R/2)g[uv] + CC = (8G(pi))/(c^4) * T. T is the energy density and R[uv] is the curvature. You should be able to integrate that in your head and see that T is perfectly valid being positive or negative. No, sorry. Negative energy density (I assume that's what you mean as negative mass has no meaning, you can't negatively interact with the Higgs field) behaves exactly the same as positive energy density, it just curves space outwards rather than inwards (which also happens to empty space.) Mass has no place in relativity at all, in fact, no field equations include it, just energy density. This is entirely true. It was probably one of the hardest realizations we've had in physics that a speed can remain constant by altering distance and time themselves. Yes, but it goes far beyond light. I will make sure I explain it when I get to one of the posts about General Relativity. It has to do with the fact that space and time are connected and you can stretch and squeeze it infinitely, but you can never fold it, loop it, or tear it. The faster you move through space, the slower you move through time. The equation that you are looking for is Time[relative] = Time[local] * sqrt(1 - v^2 / c ^ 2) What holes are you referring to? Can you refer me to a peer reviewed experiment? (I have more than enough education to follow your math.) Clocks don't move out of sync if you renormalize correctly, GPS wouldn't work without both GR and SR. There are no known holes in GR within testable energy levels and it's been very very heavily tested. Not random. We have very very exact mathematics to describe it. We just don't know why the math is what it is. The idea of "probability based math" confuses laymen, but the math is just as rigorous and would never be considered "random," the result will lie between exact values and have a particular distribution spread. The reason phycisists are so sure about this is because of the interaction between space and time. In fact, light is not useful to talk about here, physicists tend to call it the causality speed because light isn't the only thing to travel at that speed. In fact, everything does. The default velocity of everything in the universe is the speed of light, only massive things move slower and that's because they are dragging on the Higgs field. In fact, for a brief moment before the Higgs field settled out, everything moved at c. It doesn't actually. No relativity is required to explain inflation. Only information can not travel faster than the speed of light, space is allowed to expand at whatever rate it wants. If you have space in between two objects expanding at thousands of times the speed of light, those two object will move apart at that speed, they simply become causally disjoint. It doesn't violate the rules because neither of them exceeded the speed limit locally. Remember that this limit is a local limit only, in fact anything further away than 46.6 billion light years, is moving away from us faster than light. The equations are derived though from simple geometry. Velocity is distance traveled over time spent, it's very easy to create an asymptote when those two values are actually dependent on each other. The faster you move through space, the slower you move through time. c is in the equation because it's the translation constant between space and time, it does not represent velocity in that case. They hold together at high speeds because their local velocity is still zero. In fact, under regular circumstances some electrons approach the speed of light. The color of gold is due to the fact that their electron arrangement forces the outer shell to approach relativistic speeds. At. I've seen no theories where gravity travels at any velocity other than causality. Even in more exotic theories like string theories, the graviton is massless. Modified Newtonian gravity have some versions, but so far there haven't been any valid ones yet. That's because it's a classical physics equation. You can never mix the two. In GR, both d and t are actually dependent on v. You would have to normalize one of them first, which would add a c to the equation. I'll be glad to explain the color charge in more detail if you send me a message. The quark change actually is the same thing as the strong force. It's mediated by bosons called "gluons" and actually make up the majority of the mass of a proton (the quarks are like 1/100th of it.) They also don't nullify each other, the net result is 0, but the way they do it is a complex mess. I know plenty of people still hard at work on string theory. It doesn't seem to be going anywhere. It solves a lot of problem in the standard model such as the interactions between particles being points in space-time. It's even worse. String theory is a framework, not an equation. It does not describe our universe, it simply provides interactions that if configured correctly could describe our universe. Unfortunately, the number of variables is monstrous and we have no way to figure out which values are good for our universe. That said, there are predictive differences in string theory and QM. True, we've made huge strides in topography because of the insanely complicated manifolds of string theory. No, Time dilation causes the doppler effect to be different than what you'd expect but it's not the cause of time dilation. The observers don't just think the other ones clock is different, they physically are moving through time at different rates, it's not an illusion. I blame Richard Feynman for this. Mathematically, a positron moving forwards in time is exactly identical to an electron moving backwards in time. It's not a physical thing, but a mathematical trick. In QM calculations that include antimatter, it's almost always done as time reversed regular matter. Again, just a mathematical equivalence, not something physical. Simultaneity has no meaning in relativity. There can be great disagreement in the order of events depending on the reference frame of the observer. And it's not an illusion caused by the time delay of light, it's a real effect caused by the movement of time and it's easy to understand if you think of the universe as a 4D manifold that you have to reorient each time you do a calculation.
Here's what you do, if anyone tries to correct you on the science, just say something along the lines of, "The (name of space police species) understand physics far beyond how humans do, and they've learned to manipulate it far better than we can."
