If you’ve ever taken a physics course, you know that nothing can go faster than the speed of light, 186,000 miles a second. Seven-hundred-million miles an hour. Everything physicists know says you can’t go faster. But some physicists and engineers think they can do an end run around the speed-of-light limit.
They say that ideas developed about 50 years ago by a German scientist named Burkhard Heim suggest that we could use a very strong magnetic field to push spacecraft into another dimension. A dimension where the physical laws that make the speed of light as fast as anything can go don’t exist.
They say that ideas developed about 50 years ago by a German scientist named Burkhard Heim suggest that we could use a very strong magnetic field to push spacecraft into another dimension. A dimension where the physical laws that make the speed of light as fast as anything can go don’t exist.
Read full article by Gene Charleton on Discovery News
3 comments:
As I understand it, modern physics says that an object with mass can't achieve the speed of light. It has no problem with things being able to go faster than light—you just can't do it via normal acceleration from sublight speeds.
I remember reading about an interesting side-effect of being able to travel faster than light: cause and effect don't always occur in the correct order. Very few science fiction books/movies take this into account.
By special relativity, you can get just about anywhere in any amount of time.
For example, if you want to get across the galaxy in just one hour, you can -- no problem: Just as long as it's one hour your time.
Everyone else will perceive you as moving at a speed very close to the speed of light, and they will observe you moving very slowly.
But in your own reference frame, you can always always always go faster.
Well, with one exception: There's nothing faster than instantaneous. And that's exactly how light perceives the trip: Instantaneously. It's just us slowpokes out here who perceive light as taking a trip from point A to point B.
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