Faster Than the Speed of Light?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
If you could move through space at the speed of light your velocity through time would be zero and you would appear (to yourself) to be moving infinitely fast, or equivalently, to be everywhere at once, or (again equivalently) that the universe had no spatial extent in your direction of travel due to an infinitely large Lorenz contraction.
This is the same kind of thing, except that when "at rest" in space (relative to some fixed point) you're moving at the speed of light in a pure time direction. When you move in space, you divert some of that speed from the time direction into the space direction you're moving in. Overall you're still doing the speed of light, just in a different "direction".
The length of the red arrow is always the same. When your velocity is zero, your "time speed" is 1.0. As you begin to move faster, the arrow tilts towards the X axis, decreasing your "time speed".
The biggest issue is that the interchange between speed and time is not linear. So that graph doesn't make sense as displayed.
At a minimum you have to understand that the time scale on the side of the graph is not linear, but rather exponential. And graphs with exponential scales are not easy to understand.
Making it worse is that there are other things that can slow down time - namely acceleration.
I was mostly responding to TomGullen's confusion about the GP's statement, rather than trying to paint a super-accurate picture.
"When you "move" through space, you're not changing the magnitude of your velocity vector, only its direction. So the more you move through space, the less you move through time."
I can understand what is being said here word-by-word, but the concept as a whole does not make much sense to me.
Brian Greene's "Fabric of the Cosmos" gives a good layman's exposition of this idea, using a loaf-of-bread metaphor (this was the first time I saw it explained this way and it made a huge impact on my way of thinking about SR)
Then you contemplate the kinetic energy that must be associated with c, and e=Mc^2 pops right out at you. Absolutely blew my mind when I first grokked that intuitively.
In the end, Greene failed to convince me that string theory was particularly interesting, but his descriptions of relativity are absolutely first-rate.
If you measure time in seconds, and speed in units of C, then vx^2+vy^2+vz^2+vt^2 is always a constant (in flat spacetime). So you have no choice over the matter. If you are stationary, time passes at a rate of 1 second / stationary second. If you move in space, rate of passage changes exactly by the amount required to compensate. So in a way, you always move at the same speed through spacetime, speed of light, and can only choose the direction.
The reason is that time dilation factor is the lorenz factor, (1-u^2/c^2). This is how much time will pass in your watch per one second of a stationary clock.
It is NOT true in general relativity, which means it's true only as an idea to understand things - the real universe does not follow that equation.
Or are you implying there is no time dilation?
vx^2 + vy^2 + vz^2 - vt^2
If it makes any sense ;-)
When moving through space at the speed of light one moves through time at speed zero. Likewise, when moving through space at speed zero one moves through time at the speed of light, which is one second per second. This is the normal state of affairs that you experience day to day. It is not possible to achieve zero movement through spacetime. In this universe, everything is always moving through spacetime at the speed of light. The only thing that changes is the direction of motion: more through space, less through time, and vice versa.
That is quite the understatement. From the original article:
"[I]t depended on large amounts of a little understood or observed type of “exotic matter” that violates typical physical laws"
But other than that, there's no problem :-)
The exotic matter is negative mass. In theory there is such a thing, and a quantum effect produces it at a very small scale. Whether it will ever be possible to produce it in large quantities is another matter.
But at least the quantity required isn't quite as large as it used to be. The original configuration need a negative Jupiter mass. Now it's down to several tons.
Based on my layman's understanding of relativity, I intuited this model on my own, but no physicist I've spoken with has verified it as a valid model. It just seemed so obvious to me based on the constraints. Thanks for verifying my intuition on the topic. :)
If we could somehow "get off" earth, "stand still" and let it "float away", would time would appear to move faster?
There's nowhere to "stand still" in the universe. But if you pick a reference frame where you're moving less fast in space your velocity has more of a time component to make up for it. If you pick one where you move very quickly in space (maybe one that doesn't follow the Earth's orbit) then you have less motion in time. That observer sees you experience less time.
And if they pick a reference frame where you move the speed of light - where your velocity vector is fully in space; with '1' for space and '0' for time - they don't see you experience any time.
What I don't understand is: does this still apply under General Relativity, or does proximity to the massive earth redefine acceleration?
A qualified yes, but it depends which time you mean by "time would appear to move faster". If you were "still", then those observed in motion would appear to have time pass more slowly.
Astronauts who spend time on the international space station age slightly less than people on earth (by 0.007 seconds behind for every 6 months) - time on earth goes faster than for them relative to those of us "stationary" on earth.
When two observers are in relative uniform motion and uninfluenced by any gravitational mass, the point of view of each will be that the other's (moving) clock is ticking at a slower rate than the local clock. The faster the relative velocity, the greater the magnitude of time dilation. This case is sometimes called special relativistic time dilation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation
(The whole Wikipedia "Time Dilation" article is worth reading)
A few years ago I actually read through most of the original paper[1], and worked out a lot of the equations.
Although I don't see it mentioned in the article, and I'm speculating here, the reason the approach described in the article might work out for photons is that negative energy has been discovered at the quantum scale in something called the Casimir effect[2]. The Casimir effect happens when you have two conducting plates which are placed very very very close to each other, then in the space between the plates, something which behaves exactly like negative energy exists[3], and it causes an attractive force to be exerted between the two plates.
A natural thing to try would be to harness this type of negative energy to create a tiny warp bubble, and try somehow to stick a quantum particle like a photon in it.
[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/grqc/0009013
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect
[3] http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/47922/can-negativ...
Velocities are only measured relative to other objects. The explanation given by lisper requires an absolute reference frame. Otherwise, you have no way to figure out how much you're actually moving through space, and thus, through time because you can never figure out your "true" speed.
Relativity tells me that no matter what speed I travel at, I will experience time at the same rate. From my frame of reference, I will perceive things to happen in other reference frames at different rates. When we calculate time dilation and length contraction, we're determining that if something took time "t_a" in Frame A, it will appear to have taken time "t_b" to an observer in Frame B.
Furthermore, it's impossible under relativity to have a frame of reference that moves at the speed of light in any other frame.
Suppose all objects have an 'energy', whatever that is, given by a vector sum of two components: P and M. Now every object may be distinguished by the distribution among those components: if, for a given norm, the energy is all in P, we say it is spacelike, it's energy is all in the space component. If it's in M then it's timelike.
So for us massive timelike objects at rest, E=M (in natural units) and for spacelike objects, E=P. Then it becomes clear that, since the mass is an instrinsic property of objects, any given object with M>0 cannot be spacelike: the energy vector will always have a time component, and likewise light cannot be timelike. You can however increase the spacelike component of the object and make it approach spacelikeness, measured by, for instance, the angle teta=arctg(P/M) with diminishing returns for each unit of energy (if you visualize it, you'll se at the start the return is linear -- teta ~ P/M and then it becomes very hard).
So the explanation above is telling in the sense that if you could be spacelike things would be weird, but doesn't reveal why you can't have massive spacelike objects -- namely, because we have a finite supply of energy.
"Suppose all objects have a 'snorble' (whatever that is) give by a vector sum of two components..."
You also haven't defined M and P. I know you mean mass and momentum, but only because I already understand this stuff. If your target audience is someone who doesn't already understand it, you need to define your terms or your explanation won't be effective.
It's important to realize that the craft is never traveling faster than the speed of light through the space in front of it. But there's nothing in relativity that prevents objects from apparently traveling faster than the speed of light "after the fact". The farthest apart objects that we can see are significantly further apart in light-years than the estimated age of the universe, which is generally thought to be possible because of the expansion of space itself as objects were traveling apart at subluminal speed.
I don't think that apparent FTL travel violates causality because it doesn't allow you to actually reach anything outside of your light cone. It took me a while to understand this, but you can't really view the light cone as something that is statically determined at a given point in time, because it depends on the geometry of space as over time. So a craft capable of distorting space just ends up with a really funky-shaped light cone that's warped wider than normal out in its direction of travel and narrower in the opposite direction as it moves (if you had a way of externally viewing the curvature of spacetime, which you don't).
But one thing I could not really figure out is whether this so-called FTL travel has the potential to violate causality, because I don't fully understand how causality and FTL are related.
The relationship is that FTL in one reference frame is travel backwards in time in another.
If you're able to travel FTL in 2 different inertial reference frames, then you should be able to travel backwards in time and violate causality. Note that the "should" here is important - I can think of lots of possibilities for how that should could be prevented.
That said, I'd be much more optimistic about the plausibility of a proposed warp technology that only lets you go FTL relative to the implicit reference frame of the distant stars. Because that avoids any possibility of causality violation.
I don't understand what you're getting at. It would be trivial for someone close by to match that reference frame, and then what?
And then nothing. :-)
My point is that being able to go FTL relative to distant stars does not allow time travel relative to distant stars, which means that there is no possibility of causality violation.
Being able to go FTL in 2 arbitrary reference frames leads to potential causality violation.
Feel free to express yourself in more technically/mathematically: while GR is certainly not my field, I took classes in grad school that covered the material.
In SR, if A and B are two events and B is outside of the light cone of A, then reference frames can be found where A happens before B, A and B happen at the same time, and A happens after B. Therefore FTL travel in one reference frame is traveling backwards in time in another.
The ability to travel FTL in a single preferred reference frame is not sufficient to cause causality violations. That is because all trips move me forward in time according to the preferred reference frame, so I can't wind up at the same time and place that I (in my personal history) was at before. But if I can travel FTL in my choice of reference frame, in my choice of direction, then I can plan a trip from A to B which is FTL in one reference frame, then switch and travel from B to A FTL in a different reference frame. From the original reference frame I first traveled FTL, then backwards in time. In the second reference frame I first traveled backwards in time, then FTL. But both agree that two copies of me wound up at the same place at the same time, and I can try to violate causality.
Suppose that you go from SR to GR but are dealing with a large region that is approximately described by SR though locally it may look different. In my "warp drive" there is no local FTL. But the observations about SR, reference frames, and simultaneity still hold between two distant locations. The ability to warp as fast as I like but only relative to one "approximate SR reference frame" does not let me violate causality. But the ability to do it in any direction relative to any reference frame that I like, gives me the ability to construct "closed time-like loops". Which is what is required to try to violate causality.
Note that I say "try". It is possible that a unified theory of GR and QM could allow for closed timelike loops, but (thanks to quantum decoherence) would not allow you any meaningful interaction with the previous copy of you.
all the machinery of the SR is valid only on the background of the fixed spacetime. Once you start to massage the spacetime itself, the SR is only approximation which is good only to the extent of how good fixed spacetime model is approximation of your real spacetime.
That sounds like a stationary ether; where there is some 'true' reference frame in the universe. The main intuition behind relativity is that there is no preferred reference frame.
In the case of general relativity, even when there is no preferred reference frame in the theory, there is an obvious one that is still special. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach%27s_principle for more on that.
Quantum causal relations: A causes B causes A
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-10/uov-qcr100212...
> But one thing I could not really figure out is whether this so-called FTL travel has the potential to violate causality, because I don't fully understand how causality and FTL are related.
They are not directly related, as I wrote above, nothing special happens except you find a 'shortcut.' So at every point there is still a nice lightcone ( locally) and every event is caused by events in its past lightcone. However, you can have global causality violation, that is closed timelike curves, a fancy way to talk about timetravel. The idea is, that you travel always forward in time and you reach the same space time point at which you started. Much in the same way that you can travel always forward on a tire (torus) and still reach your starting point. Something like this may or may not happen on a metric which permits FTL, for example the Alcubierre metric does not permit travel on such curves. [1] But it would actually be easy to perform the same analysis on a Godel solution [2], which would permit closed timelike curves.
Edith: Added the comment about the Godel solution.
[1] Alcubierre, 2000 http://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0009013v1.pdf
I'm not sure what they say about causality, but there's been some work suggesting causality doesn't have to be absolute. Imagine a billiard table, with a wormhole that curves and goes three seconds backward in time. You aim a billiard ball through the wormhole, such that it will emerge earlier and knock itself off the path, never entering the wormhole, and creating a paradox.
But what actually happens is, the ball emerges on a slightly altered trajectory, striking itself a glancing blow, and the ball enters the wormhole.
And why did it emerge with an altered trajectory? Because it was struck a glancing blow.
Physicists have worked out some math on this, and haven't managed to find any scenario that results in inconsistency.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self-consistency_princi...
The other thing is the "sort of" parenthesis, the Lorentz transformation is directly linked to the causal structure of special relativity. A statement like "if* you could go faster than the speed of light, then you could violate causality" is somewhat nonesensical, since if you could go faster than the speed of light, then you would break local Lorentz invariance and therefore you break your very definition of causality.
A quite interesting paper on the topic is McMonigal & al. [1], it is a bit technical but they discuss the Alcubierre warp drive quite nicely.
To elaborate on the second paragraph about special relativity, one way to define Lorentz transformations is, that they are the transformations which preserve the causal structure of Minkowsky space. On the other hand, the speed limit is a direct consequence of the Lorentz transformations. So the causal structure and the speed limit are directly related. To look again at the argument that a velocity larger than the speed of light implies causality violation: The moment you argue that a speed faster than the speed of light is possible, you implicitly change the meaning of causality. Then you use the Lorentz transformations to conclude that in on frame of reference event A precedes B and that event B precedes A in another. So you first deny the special status of the Lorentz transformation, just to go on and use Lorentz transformations. And my take on this is a strong maybe, the moment you start talking about local Lorentz invariance violation, anything goes. Perhaps there is causality violation, perhaps not, but this depends on your specific meaning of 'causality' and 'faster than light' and not very much on special relativity.
Alcubierre's work on "warp bubbles" has been known for years, but as even this article points out, there are enormous roadblocks to making it practical. For example, it requires matter with properties that have never been observed in the universe (namely, violations of the positive energy condition). If this NASA scientist thinks that he has a way to produce such matter, that would already be a bigger deal than any scientific finding in (conservatively) the past thirty years. Why hasn't he announced that?
Also, Alcubierre himself is quoted in the article pointing out that no signal from inside the warp bubble can ever reach the front of the bubble to "turn it on" in the first place. (As I recall, Alcubierre's equations describe an "eternal" warp bubble, moving forever with no beginning or end.) Has the NASA team found a way around that? The article doesn't give any hint that they have. (Nor that they haven't, but as a theoretical physicist myself I'd like to think that I'd have heard of a breakthrough like that.)
So what I want to know is, first, why did the NY Times decide this was worth reporting on (while leaving out any evidence that this NASA team is capable of making meaningful progress)? And second, why is NASA devoting multiple salary lines to this particular project? (There might be good answers, but they aren't evident here.)
At first I thought about this, but then its for us to really ponder on a simple fact. You can achieve a X goal by doing Y, but to say you can achieve only by doing Y is wrong.
Scientific history is standing testimony to that. People have expressed skepticism about anything and everything, stuff like airplanes, nuclear energy, mobile phones, internet anything you name it. 50 years before they were all invented and put to use, they would have all seemed pointless directions of pursuit- yet all of it makes perfect sense today.
Yet some tangential line of thinking causes a major technology break through every now and then we are left wondering what we where thinking all along.
Now these guys don't even have a hypothesis on how to turn the machine on. Forget the engineering. They can't get an idea to work. I'm with the GP, this is not very exciting. Even having a working idea on how all the parts may work would be more exciting than this article.
No, Scientists are human beings too. And the fact is, a scientist's thoughts are biased based on what the person knows.
People co relate the events to happen in future on the basis of what they know right now. Which is the root cause of all problems. Though sometimes skepticism is perfectly valid.
>>Now these guys don't even have a hypothesis on how to turn the machine on.
These guys are not working on building the machine.
>>Forget the engineering.
Exactly. The first rockets were not built by directly opening up the lab and making the prototype in the first hour.
Even while building things like the first rocket, or the first viable airplane a lot of math and physics work had to be done. Which is what is happening now.
>>They can't get an idea to work.
Seems like they already have experimental test bed to verify their math.
>>I'm with the GP, this is not very exciting. Even having a working idea on how all the parts
I'm excited. Its not like software where you fire up your IDE and just get down to coding. That works with software because 100% of whatever we do is already done and proven by nearly everybody else. We just exercise the same to our domains of business.
Building some thing like a warp-drive may very well require some years of work on math and physics before any field trials are started. Basically nobody has done anything like this every before. No one knows the consequences, or the side effects or even the kind of effort such an endeavor would demand.
If you want an easy analogy, Alonzo Church died finishing his work on the lambda calculus before he could see a working electronic computer. Same could be told about Alan Turing. Yet these guys had mathematically demonstrated all they said was possible.
When the first gates were built, people expressed the same skepticism if the combination of these AND-OR-XOR gate will ever achieve something substantial. Or when the first brick was built, and when the first wheel was built.
Maybe a computer analogy would be useful: Imagine reading an article about someone working on a revolutionary new image compression algorithm. He claims that it's lossless and that it can achieve at least 99.4% compression on arbitrary photographic input. But all he's willing to say about his technique is that it's based on wavelets, and he has no actual evidence to show. How excited would you be?
> You can achieve a X goal by doing Y, but to say you can achieve only by doing Y is wrong.
The trouble in this case is that the guy at NASA has said that his warp drive ideas are based on Alcubierre's work. Alcubierre's results are very explicitly constructed within the framework of general relativity, and that framework puts some pretty strict constraints on the content of space-time near an Alcubierre bubble. So it doesn't matter whether he's satisfying those constraints by doing X, Y, or Q: anything that met the necessary conditions would be one of the biggest scientific achievements in our lifetimes. (It would dwarf the Higgs discovery, just for instance.)
The article indeed gave no indication of hope on the central problem, obtaining a violation of the weak energy condition. However, there is a relatively easy way to violate the weak energy condition using binding energy.
If one binds M_1 and M_2 with binding energy M_B such that M_B > M_1 + M_2, then one can violate the weak energy condition. I know for a fact that the above inequality is satisfied for some multi-brane configurations in M-Theory. So, there is hope.
But the point is (and I don't think you'd disagree), if this guy wants to be taken seriously, he needs to tell someone what he's doing. If he thinks that he's creating a system with vast binding energy (greater than mc^2), that would be pretty easy for him to say. If he thinks he's constructing a bound state of branes or manipulating the size of an extra dimension, that would be easy to say, too. And even moderately convincing evidence for any one of those things would immediately make him one of the most famous and respected scientists on the planet: the warp drive aspirations aren't even necessary.
The complete lack of such details is a pretty compelling argument that he's not in that position.
Interesting, I hadn't heard of that one.
> But the point is (and I don't think you'd disagree), if this guy wants to be taken seriously, he needs to tell someone what he's doing.
I agree 100%.
PS: In the interest of full disclosure, a lifetime (AKA 14 years) ago, I did some research for NASA looking into such "negative mass solutions" in M-Theory that arise as a result of hep-th/9507022.
Cool! The most informative thing about that to me is simply the knowledge that NASA has a history of investigating this sort of thing. Maybe it's a good thing if they keep a trickle of resources pointed in that direction, just in case there's something really there to be found. I hope they've got good people assessing whether it's worth it. (It's still odd for that sort of speculative work to be getting substantial press attention, though.)
Hell, I remember explaining to my dad when I was a kid that someday there would be a way to watch whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted, simply because that's what people wanted to exist. In my mind, it was an inevitability, and he felt it would never happen. This was only a scant 20 or so years ago.
Pretty far back. Even Dick Tracy had a similar thing.
I think you would have to go back before Marconi and Tesla.
As soon as we have real science (i.e. post-Descartes) anything mechanistic seems possible. There was probably a point at which we had insufficient knowledge to say one way or another, but this isn't the kind of thing that's ruled out by physical law in the way that FTL travel is.
>Hell, I remember explaining to my dad when I was a kid that someday there would be a way to watch whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted, simply because that's what people wanted to exist. In my mind, it was an inevitability, and he felt it would never happen. This was only a scant 20 or so years ago.
You were lucky that time, but it's not a reliable heuristic. Plenty of people want to be immortal, but it hasn't happened yet. (OTOH, human immortality seems a lot more plausible than FTL travel - we can't see how it would work yet, but there's no law that rules it out - which puts it in the same category I think a phone would have seemed like in Newton's day).
the idea that space expansion generates effect that looks like FTL in fixed space model doesn't violate any known physics - just look at the highly red-shifted galaxies.
>The fact that we achieved sufficient advances in circuit miniaturization and battery technology to build a hand-held smartphone does not in any way imply that we'll be able to build a warp drive for a spacecraft.
we just need sufficiently advance (increase) energy production and learn to focus it so that the density in a given volume will reach the "mass density of black hole multiplied by c-square" - that will be a good start to manage the shape of the spacetime
Actually, hard scifi is loaded with stuff that falls under the category of "We can't yet prove it's physically impossible, but neither has anyone actually proposed viable non-crank theories on how it really works."
It's simultaneously infuriating and awe-inspiring that something that's visible to the naked eye - stars - could be so completely out of reach for us.
However, with the recent work of Drs Alcubierre and White, it's clear that cracks are forming in the Impossibility of FTL travel.
That leads me to believe the FTL is inevitable, because in the history of science, whenever we begin to see how maybe something could kinda, sorta, maybe exist, it's usually just a matter of time (perhaps centuries) until we crack it.
Like mermaids, magic, the halting problem, ESP, and religion?
If a missionary religion is the correct true religion, and FTL exists anywhere in the galaxy, then by definition we should have already been contacted by missionaries and "civilized". Yet we're clearly not civilized, so at minimum at least one must not exist. So its not looking good for the FTL hopefuls.
There is another fun one in that if an all powerful being exists, it seems a bit presumptuous for a mere moral to limit "it" to sublight. Therefore if the concept of FTL exists and an all powerful being exists, then FTL must exist in practice unless we're placing irrational limitations on an inherently unlimited being. Therefore if FTL can be imagined, but not implemented, that proves scientifically most conceptions of "god" do not exist; Or at least "it" is not all powerful. Unclear what impact that logic puzzler would have; probably just about none.
That would make a much more fun rabble rousing article than "yet another star trek communicator / iphone analogy"
Not nessasarily. Assuming FTL does not imply time-travel, FTL still does not imply the ability to search the entire universe. The alien missionaries would still be limited by their sensors to scout X cubic-meters/year/ship. They would also have a limited supply of spaceships (that may grow exponentially with time).
You could have a non-missionary religion (like Judaism). You could have a missionary-religion that considers humans unsuitable for conversion. You could have a missionary-religion that puts some kind of restriction that says they have to wait for some trigger event before contacting humans.
As for God why do you assume God is inside this universe? God could be causing the universe. (Like God would be the computer and the program, and we the results of running the program.)
Or you can say that the all-powerful being exists outside spacetime, and FTL is impossible to anything within spacetime.
So the all-powerful being sees all of spacetime laid out in front of it, like a canvas. The painter dabs paint on the left margin and they streak out toward the right in interesting patterns. The painter dabs paint here and there, the patterns respond, and he continues until he likes the picture.
Asimov had a concept like this in The End of Eternity.
Who says we weren't?
Yet we're clearly not civilized
Says... you?
Or it could just be that God adjusts His teachings to each sapient species's psychology, so having us contacted by Starfish Aliens would be kinda useless.
Or the true religion could be a non-missionary religion, like, as someone so astutely pointed out, Judaism.
Magic: We call it technology.
Halting problem: Closed time like curves can solve this.
ESP: Brain implants to interact with external tech.
Magic: Any sufficiently advanced technology
The halting problem: I got nothing for this
ESP: neural interfaces
Religion: given the above our descendants are destined to practically become gods, assuming they exist
A matter of advanced genetics. ( See C. Stross "Neptune's Brood" ;)
> magic
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Arthur C. Clarke
> the halting problem
Any super Turing machine that can calculate busy beaver is sufficient. ( And creates a halting problem of its own.)
> ESP
Let me guess, live TV does not count?
> religion
I am pretty sure that we developed organized religion eons ago.
First of all FTL travel involving information transfer would have some interesting implications for the existing automated market high freq trading systems. Your proximity to the central clearing house no longer limits your profits. In fact the whole concept of HFT and a central clearing house and "A" individual market price might no longer have much meaning in that kind of economy. And that might be good, or bad, or not matter much.
Another aspect given ridiculous paranoid military industrial complex would be anything capable in theory of eventually delivering an a-bomb would be classified and hidden until an area defense exists. In fact a rational participant in MAD would immediately nuke any MAD member who got "close" to inventing actual FTL because they would insta-win any MAD scenario, therefore bomb them before they FTL bomb us. Aside from any direct weaponization of FTL "things" materializing in .mil owned reactor cores or .mil strategic targets. Shields materializing at FTL speeds in front of the laser beam headed toward the target. FTL drones to spy on people so quickly they're out of range before the target sees they were there. Yeah I think the first country to develop FTL will probably get nuked by everyone else, unless the discoverer is legendarily neutral (the swiss?) or ... Which would suck if the USA "wins" because it means I'd be getting toasty unless every other nation is suicidal and refuses to strike. Bummer for me and the rest of the usa. So I sincerely hope this dude fails.
Another interesting aspect vaguely hinted at in Ian Banks culture series is a FTL-ish universe culture by its very geography/technology inherently ends up much more libertarian than our own rapid descent into "1984". So there's interesting political issues where any group of modern "pilgrims" can at will escape the clutches of the evil empire. On the other hand small festering groups of true believers like to fanatically drink the koolaid, so I donno whats worse, one evil empire or a billion little clans of crazies all disconnected from each other.
Patent something and transmit the patent FTL such that you can deliver a cease and desist at FTL speeds before a non-FTL player even gets to see they've been checkmated?
The press is hugely missing the point when they steam ahead using nonsense StarTrek analogies without an apparent clue of what's (im)possible with today's technology, but neither are the people in here getting it who are stuck lecturing each other about causality violations. This is not about speed or acceleration, or even the transmission of information. It's about bending space time. Let's not forget the enormity of that concept, but let's also admire this potentially useful shortcut that might open up for us in the far future.
Current models are purely theoretical and work on a basis that is pretty similar to carrying a black hole around. Needless to say, in an age where we don't even have the energy to reach Earth orbit economically, the power requirements of such a technology are nothing but prohibitive.
But even if we had enough power (and hence mass) to warp space by brute force, it would be a huge event that needs to happen far away from planets. While the general principle is interesting, I think what we lack is a more sophisticated method of modifying the properties of space time, something that works on a smaller scale and can be more easily contained. "FTL" neutrinos were interesting for this exact reason (before they sadly turned out to be a measurement error) because they would have opened a door for us to access and manipulate space itself without having to resort to enormous and ultimately wasteful energies. I sure hope we'll discover how to do that in time.
I believe it will be the case even with warp-drive technology too.
As always some people will always have something to fight on. I don't believe situation will change once we get access to colonizing the vast size of the universe. We will have everything(good and bad things) except that at the scale of universe now.
[1] http://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of-light/ [2] http://www.spacetimetravel.org/ueberblick/ueberblick1.html
The milky way has around 100 billion stars. Searching 100 billion stars for some meaningful results is not a Joke. Even if we do divide and conquer or do the equivalent of map-reduce approach to exploring space. There is no way we can get to meaningful results even in several thousands of years from now.
There fore the biggest challenge after the invention of FTL will be how quickly we can multiply spread and explore.
Trust me once we get FTL technology, the biggest challenge will be the dealing with overwhelming size of universe. In fact just within a few years we may even think FTL was an easy problem to solve. Our problems will be exploring the universe within human life timescales, multiplying fast enough to occupy and explore it.
So an alien civilization in some really far galaxies even with FTL technology possibly cannot search for us in the size the universe is.
It would change everything. Especially if Kepler announces a boatload of stars with perhaps-habitable worlds around them.
If you can transfer things/information faster than light, then link-state routing protocols no longer would have a meaning in a network containing at least some FTL links. Therefore some startup should create an internet scale distance-vector routing protocol. OSPF is dead, long live RIPv4 or whatever. Cisco would be an obvious candidate to purchase the startup. Obviously demand would depend on FTL deployment rates.
I'm only half kidding, I think...
Ned Ludd, IV
Kittyhawk - 1903
Interesting thought imho, the way to ensure our species survival also has the potential to do just the opposite.
It is ridiculous to think that physicists get any ideas from science fiction. It happens the other way around. All he did was use it in a presentation. I'm nerd raging like hell here.
I'm curious what sorts of things the current twenty-somethings consumed while working on twitterscapes.
Its entirely possible "something" going FTL will eventually happen. For some peculiar value of "something" and some peculiar value of FTL. However, it will probably resemble stereotypical deus ex machina sci fi reimaginings of classic WWII battleship and aircraft carrier movies about as closely as a modern helicopter resembles a really big hummingbird.
Unfortunately, much like flight, preconceived notions will probably hold back R+D in FTL until long past its possible start. Possibly if we'd just focus on "something else" then in 2013 we'd already be 50 years into practical FTL deployment.
> Physicist has an idea -> Science fiction author writes idea -> Future physicist now has (dumbed down version of) idea.
As a physicist, I find sci-fi inspiring.
I'm reminded of a story about how the science fiction writer Katherine MacLean [1], who predicted the role of computers in communication and music in her 1947 novelette Incommunicado, accidentally stumbled into a conference of electrical engineers and found herself quickly surrounded by Bell Telephone researchers who were inspired by her ideas to build the next generation of communications equipment.
As a software engineer, I have to admit to being inspired by near-future software engineering fiction that explores new ideas, many of which are quite achievable.
I really just thought the original statement, that he "gets his ideas" for "a warp drive" from Star Trek, was kind of ridiculous. The author of the article actually edited it, so I guess they felt similarly.
What are some of your favorite examples of this genre?