12/12/2023 0 Comments Travel faster than light![]() This means both radio waves and gamma rays have the same speed," Rhett Allain, a physics professor at Southeastern Louisiana University, told Live Science in an email. "All light is a type of electromagnetic wave, and they all have the same speed in a vacuum (3 x 10^8 meters per second). When light travels through a vacuum, however, the same is not true. The most obvious visual example of this occurs in rainbows, which typically have the long, faster red wavelengths at the top and the short, slower violet wavelengths at the bottom, according to a post by the University of Wisconsin-Madison (opens in new tab). One such reason, she said, is that "as light travels through a medium - for instance, glass or water droplets - the different frequencies or colors of light travel at different speeds." ![]() If we look at light as a wave, then there are "multiple reasons" why certain waves can travel faster than white (or colorless) light in a medium, de Rham said. Light exhibits both particle-like and wave-like characteristics, and can therefore be regarded as both a particle (a photon) and a wave. But there are certain caveats to consider, she said. At the very least, such probes could help carry the dream of faster-than-light travel and space exploration."Technically, the statement 'nothing can travel faster than the speed of light' isn't quite correct by itself," at least in a non-vacuum setting, Claudia de Rham, a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London, told Live Science in an email. ![]() These starchips could potentially travel at 20% light speed, which doesn't cover a lot of ground compared to "Star Trek's" warp drive, but could still arrive at Alpha Centauri within 20 years. Rather, it uses microchip-sized "starchips" buoyed by super-thin, reflective sails that catch photons. This removes the need for fuel, which is the heaviest part of a spacecraft, and less mass requires less energy to move.Īs Scientific American continues, this solution doesn't include human passengers. Next best option? Another water-and-wind-inspired tech-like warp bubbles riding soliton waves: "light sailing." The idea here is that light itself, composed of particle-energy packets called "photons," could propel a spacecraft forward provided it's got big enough mirrors. This type of wave, a soliton, could bypass the light-speed barrier.Įven if we can't go as fast as the speed of light, though, practically anything would be better than rocket-fueled, 78,000-year-long journeys for a meager 4.3 light-years to our nearest neighbor, Alpha Centauri (as EarthSky quotes). Sit a ship inside the bubble, release the tension, and watch spacetime itself carry the ship like a wave. ![]() According to Lentz, a power source "30 orders of magnitude to be in range of modern nuclear fission reactors" could stretch spacetime like fabric and create a bulge, or warp bubble, on one side. This is how we can explain the inflation of space from the infinitely dense Big Bang.Īs Science Alert explains, such negative energy could power an Alcubierre warp drive, named after the Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994 (per ). As UCLA describes using a helpful, syringe-like illustration - if you pull a stopper out of a vacuum, the outward-moving force creates more vacuum inside the stopper, meaning the vacuum was full of negative energy that it already contained. Lentz's warp bubbles would be powered by "negative energy." This doesn't refer to negative particle charges, like an electron's, but the energy within a vacuum. Slip through the throat? You've bypassed the light-speed barrier. Einstein-Rosen bridges bypass speed (distance over time) altogether by describing "mouths" at different points in space connected by a "throat." Mathematically, one mouth bends towards negative infinity, the other towards positive infinity, and both flatten out on either side into normal, minimally curved space. To light, there is no past, present, or future. The reason being that the speed of light - 299,792,458 meters per second (983,571,056 feet) - is a mathematical constant that defines causality across all of reality, as Space describes. Nothing can actually "speed up" fast enough to reach the speed of light, "c," because at that point, it would stop experiencing time. Going back to Einstein's Theory of General Relativity in 1916, subsequent work in quantum mechanics, and a heckuva lot of brain-melting math, an Einstein-Rosen bridge derives from the axiom "space tells matter how to move, and matter tells space how to curve," as the Initiative for Interstellar Studies quotes from American physicist John Wheeler. This is a simplified version of what's called an "Einstein-Rosen bridge" - a theoretical tunnel connecting two regions of spacetime.
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