PocketMatrix

I don't have any friends in town right now since I'm a college drop out back home for a semester, so I had some time to think about weird things and discuss them with my dad. We got into the subject of faster than light travel and we've determined that it is highly unfeasible.

You see, many people thought that faster than sound travel was impossible. This was only because of their fears. But as you know, when you're moving towards a sound the sound becomes higher pitched. This is because the wavelength of the sound becomes shorter the faster you're going while moving towards it.
This same concept applies to the energy of a photon. The faster you move the higher the frequency of light becomes. Thus the energy that is exported greatly increases the great your speeds are. By the time you hit the speed of light a normal frequency of visible light will become as potent as an X-Ray, because you are moving at twice the speed of light relative to the light you're moving towards when you're traveling at the speed of light. Thus the various X-Ray and Gamma Rays in space would become quite high in energy when moving at this the speed of light.

Now, once the speed of light is broken, the faster one begins to travel the shorter the wavelength becomes, greatly increasing the energy output of a normal light particle. This, when travelling fast enough, will translate into extremely intense radiation. One second travel at such a speed would be like living your lifetime under an X-Ray machine.

So we just block these particles, correct? That would take an immense electro magnetic field, so immense that the amount of energy required to run this would be astrononmical, even on a small shuttle sized craft. This intense electrmagnetic field would also be harmful, so one would have to create a means to block the occupants of a ship from their own deflector shield. Also, the energy radiating off of the energy core that powered this device would have to have shielding of its own.

And while travelling at the speed of light, it would be very difficult to light the ship. Light being emitted from a light bulb in the middle of the room would never make it to the front of the room and act like a spot light hitting only the back of the room. At exactly the speed of light one would see a non-dispersence of light, light would stand still, it would be like what you see when you clip outside of a wall in Doom.

And what about the outside of the ship? The ship would be inundated with gamma waves with wavelengths all the way up to nill, meaning no wave, just a solid and constant exposure. The metal would absorb these particles and distribute them evenly throughout the ship, just like the heatsink on your computer's CPU. This would mean that the inside of the should would resemble the inside of a particle accelerator. Not quite liveable territory.

Would the particles themselves cause physical damage to the ship's hull, aside from exposing it to frequency infinity energy level radiation? Perhaps. Perhaps at such speeds photons manifest themselves in a physical form. Only at infinite velocity could this happen, but I doubt this is the case.

I do not believe humans will EVER reach OR break the speed of light, and these may be some of the reasons. I thoroughly discussed this topic, bouncing back and forth all ideas of compensating for these effects and what these effects might be while waiting for a pizza at Papa John's. There will NEVER be a starship that even begins to reach the speed of light.

we've gone over this before moose.

for someone who believes in a virgin birth, a bearded dude turning water into sweet sweet vino and feeding a few thousand people with loaves and fishes, you should at least be a little more open minded on this.

i say pretty much anything is possible with technology and 'miracles' its just a matter of time.

uhm... I'm not sure. I was just assuming they were a high frequency sound wave of sorts. Let me check.

[edit] all electromagnetic radiation -- from radio waves to x-rays -- travel at the speed of light

You are correct. But still my statement holds, with a slight modification. A teleportation device such as mentioned would NOT be able to break the speed of light because there is nothing connecting them that can transmit faster than the speed of light. And would a radio wave have enough frequency to transmit every molecule of the human body in a speedy way? At 80 MHz, how many periods of a radio wave would it take to transmit the entire human body in electronic form? And interference. There's TONS of radiowaves out there already. We'd have to find a wave length that is not used in nature so as to remove all interference. But there isn't one of those. And all of this just to travel near the speed of light? This isn't going to work either, but theoretically it's an interesting alternative. Also, it would have to be a direct line of site, or a highly calculated course, unless these machines were planet sized, because accuracy is impossible important.

The speed of light is 299,972 kilometers per second, just incase anyone wants to know specifically. This is where I got the information about all electromagnetic waves and such being the speed of light: http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/wa ... eed-1.html

Haha if radio waves were sound waves, don't you think you would hear all of the music stations play as they traveled across the country?

It would be perfectly possible to light the inside of the ship, since the light rays from the bulb would initially travel at the same speed as the ship.

If you drop a ball on a train, it falls vertically. Admittidly, it might be difficult to see inside the ship, but that's another arguement.

It's all about frames of reference.

Just out of curiousity, do you have any advanced knowledge of physics at all? Truthfully, or is it just what you learned at high school?

Well, I suppose it would "hover" inside the train, it'd be a bit odd if it would accelerate inside the train.

About that ball falling vertically inside a train. This can't really be compared to anything that has to do with light, since light always travels at a constant speed and isn't relative.
For example, suppose you fire a gun when standing still. The bullet then has the velocity v1. Now you fire the gun from a car driving with the speed v2. The bullet then gets (supposing you shoot it in the direction of the car's velocity) the speed of v1+v2.
Still the light from the headlights of the car don't move faster relative to the ground when the car is in motion than when it stands still.
I hope I didn't say anything stupid now

[edit] hmm, Brad seems to have explained it all far better, so I guess you can forget this post

I never took physics in highschool. All I know is the basic properties of light and some calculus 2 applications. I just thought it through and came up with this stuff. I have no formal nor informal education in physics.

I was wondering about the speed of light being emitted from a lightbulb inside a ship travelling faster than the speed of light. But the speed of light is constant, isn't it? Even if it's being emitted from a ship that's going faster than the speed of light the light bulb inside the ship would not be able to emit light that's going the velocity of the ship plus the speed of light, because the speed of light is definite. Light cannot travel faster than the speed of light, even when propelled by an external force... or am I mistaken? I thought about the lightbulb inside the spaceship theory for a long time, it took up about 15% of my time waiting for the pizza.
Such as a radio wave being emitted from a moving vehicle. The radio wave does not move at the velocity of the vehicle plus c. If I'm on a walkie-talkie in my car then the signal is not going to go faster just because I'm moving. The signal is emitted in an instant. It's point of origin does not change after the signal has been emitted. There are many more points of origin created because I'm moving, but the point of origin for every emittion as a whole does not change because there is no point of origin as a whole. The signal radiates outwards from the point that it was in in that infinitely small instance in time. And then in the infinitely small instance in time plus one a new point is created in which the signal radiates outwards from.

That is why I believe the light from a lightbulb will never reach the front of a ship moving faster than the speed of light. Especially since I don't believe it possible to reach this speed, but also because of the above stated theoretical grounds. Unless I'm mistaken.

And Warren, the rocket would just "hover" there, because it's initial velocity did not include the velocity of the train. Only if the initial velocity of an object is added to the initial velocity of the train will an object inside accelerate relative to the train.

well in star trek you arent even in real space, you're in subspace, inside a subspace bubble, so i'd assume everything inside the bubble would work as normal, its just that the bubble is moving at the speed of light, or something.