I'm a bit of a physics/astrophysics buff... And I've been hearing a lot lately about people who are discarding Einstein's Theory of Relativity as false, in place of other theories that allow for superluminal (faster than light) travel.
Here's the thing. The closer to the speed of light that an object moves, the slower it experiences the change of time. This has been tested with fighter jets - one atomic clock in the jet and one on the ground. The jet moves at high speeds, and the clock inside moves slightly - very slightly - slower than the one on the ground. A clock moving at the speed of light would be at a complete standstill - the time on it would never change.
However! If you were moving at the speed of light, you would experience time normally - the clock in front of you, also moving at the speed of light, would tick away just as normally as if you were sitting still in your room at home. While it did, you would be experiencing infinite amounts of time - and your ship would rush to oblivion in an also seemingly infinitesimally small amount of time - faster than you could even observe it. You would be in stasis, relative to everything going on outside the ship - including your traversing of space.
In addition to all this, objects gain mass/weight as they approach the speed of light. You get heavier and heavier, and the amount of force required to accelerate increases exponentially. It would require a virtually infinite amount of force to make you reach the infinite speed - the speed of light. There cannot be anything past the infinite, and thus the speed of light would be as fast as you would ever get... assuming you could get that far.
Now, assuming you could get faster than the speed of light, a number of unusual things would happen. First, you would begin to go back in time. Also, unlike Asimov had some of his characters theorize in his fictional stories (particularly Nemesis), you would not gravitationally repel objects. However, you would become beyond infinitely heavy - a concept that simply doesn't make much sense with our universe. I imagine it would have near to the same effect as becoming a black hole... And would definitely end in your destruction.
I hate it when people who don't know what they're talking about try to say Einstein is wrong. Similarly, it makes no sense to say that he only said you couldn't accelerate to the speed of light - if you're at the speed of light at all, you're going to die, and you're not going to experience a thing.
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This may seem off topic, but are you a lucid dreamer?
ReplyDeleteI've commented on a few of your posts and I don't know if my email address goes through with it. (I'm on an iPhone so the site looks a little odd.) It's k3ll0ggz@yahoo.com. Feel free to contact me anytime. I think you're fantastic and I think being pen pals would be really neat!
I think being pen pals would be great, too - I'm interested in getting to know more about you. And thanks for the compliment. =P One thing, though - I hope you wouldn't mind my deleting this comment of yours? I don't want to leave your address out there for everyone to see.
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