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Is Faster-Than-Light Travel or Communication Possible? (1997)

math.ucr.edu

61–70 of 88 posts

Re: Is Faster-Than-Light Travel or Communication Possible? (1997)

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly right given our current understanding of the universe. FTL travel violates causality, which is a fundamental principle of the universe. I wouldn't go quite so far as to say it's totally impossible though. There is a whole lot about the universe we don't understand and I can't rule out the possibility that there are entire branches of mathematics and physics that we don't know about.

Can you or someone else "explain to me like I'm five" why faster-than-light travel violates causality?

It's one of a bunch of mathematical conclusions of Special Relativity (the most famous one being that objects at rest have a "kinetic" energy of mc^2). I'll try to explain it simply, without the math:

Imagine a friend and you, moving very fast with respect to each other. You measure your friend's clock as advancing slowly (due to time dilation), on account of the fact that he's moving with respect to you. But your friend measures _your_ clock as advancing more slowly than _his_, because motion is relative.

The way to reconcile this mathematically is to give up on absolute simultaneity of distant events. In other words, when two things happen in different places, at the same time according to your clock, they happened at different times according to your friend's clock. This is analogous to how you measure your friend to be in different places in different times (because he's moving with respect to you), but he measures himself to be stationary, always in the same place. To recap: If comparing things at different moments, "being in the same position or not" is relative to the observer. If comparing things at different places, "happening at the same time or not" is relative to the observer.

That's how causality comes in. If your friend tosses a very fast ball at you, and the moment you receive the ball you start towards him faster-than-c, you'll arrive where he is before he tossed it (if you went fast enough). That's what the equations say. Now the breaking of absolute simultaneity allows naturally for disagreements on what of two things happened first, assuming they happened far enough from each other that light couldn't cover the distance in time. But by putting faster-than-c velocities in the equations, we have your friend and you disagreeing on what happened first (him tossing the ball, or you arriving where he is?) in what (to him) is the same place. And it's not just a confusion of the mind: all your measuring and recording artifacts will agree with you, and all of his will agree with him. The mathematical conclusion is that if you can send information faster-than-c, you can send it back in time and break causality.

Re: Is Faster-Than-Light Travel or Communication Possible? (1997)

#62
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The center of the galaxy is 32,000 light years away. 32,000 years will have passed at the center of the galaxy by the time you get there in your 3.2 second journey. If you then turn around and go back, another 32,000 years will have passed before you get home. It might feel more like time travel than space travel.

What I've always found interesting (not sure if there's a name for this) is kind of the idea that if you made such a trip, you might find by the time you arrive there in 3.2 seconds, the rest of humanity has figured out true FTL travel with the technology that was developed during those 32,000 years. As a result, you arrive in what might be the equivalent of a horse and buggy at the center of the galaxy versus what e…

Lots of science fiction stories have this concept, but usually they talk about Slower-than-light, multi-generational space ships that takes centuries to reach the next star, only to find that during the last 100+ years, the destination planet has already been settled by humanity.

Re: Is Faster-Than-Light Travel or Communication Possible? (1997)

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly right given our current understanding of the universe. FTL travel violates causality, which is a fundamental principle of the universe. I wouldn't go quite so far as to say it's totally impossible though. There is a whole lot about the universe we don't understand and I can't rule out the possibility that there are entire branches of mathematics and physics that we don't know about.

Can you or someone else "explain to me like I'm five" why faster-than-light travel violates causality?

My understanding of it is that it all goes to crap when outside observers manage to see the outcome of your event before they see the event started. Therefore, to be safe, keep your faster-than-light travel a secret.

Re: Is Faster-Than-Light Travel or Communication Possible? (1997)

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly right given our current understanding of the universe. FTL travel violates causality, which is a fundamental principle of the universe. I wouldn't go quite so far as to say it's totally impossible though. There is a whole lot about the universe we don't understand and I can't rule out the possibility that there are entire branches of mathematics and physics that we don't know about.

Can you or someone else "explain to me like I'm five" why faster-than-light travel violates causality?

It would allow you to send information backwards in time.

Re: Is Faster-Than-Light Travel or Communication Possible? (1997)

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of my theories about why there isn't any alien life around. There is some party far in the future with a beacon or message that shouts "JOIN US HERE IN THE MIDDLE OF GALAXY R345Q2 10 BILLION YEARS IN THE FUTURE!" After about 10 thousand years of hearing the beacon and being alone we finally get restless and just build a couple thousand giant spaceships and join the rest of the universe in the most cosmopo…

> This is one of my theories about why there isn't any alien life around. Do we need a theory on this yet? I mean... out of all the planets we've explored reasonably thoroughly so far, 100% have had life at some point.

I've not heard that Mars had life at some point in its history. In fact I've not heard mention of any planets hosting life in their past, do you have some sources that you can point me to?

Re: Is Faster-Than-Light Travel or Communication Possible? (1997)

#66

The thing is that subjectively "FTL" travel, a la Star Trek, is totally possible thanks to special relativity contracting distances between objects. A little math shows the relative velocity in which you travel one light year measured in a rest frame, in one year in your spaceship's frame, is 70.7% of the speed of light. If you happened to be moving at the ludicrous speed of the "Oh-My-God" cosmic ray recorded in 199…

That bit about the particle is fascinating, but I am struggling to understand why a particle that travels at 0.99x of the speed of light is faster than a ship that travels at 1516x the speed of light. Is the Star Trek universe not subject to time dilation?

The star trek universe is not subject to physics in general. Sound traveling without air, time travel, FTL, Newton's Law being ignored, Creating/destroying matter, "beaming" people down to a planet, etc.

Re: Is Faster-Than-Light Travel or Communication Possible? (1997)

#67
post #2

Nice list and currently no. But many theory's that say it is possible, no experiments shown it to happen and indeed faster than light gets for many down to causality. Not saying it is impossible, but in theory anything is possible until proven or disproven. Another article that raises the same question is http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150318-will-we-ever-speak-... Now one aspect I'll add is that it may be possibl…

When exactly were people burned alive, or killed in general, for saying the earth isn't flat? The first article of the _Summa Theologica_ discusses how to prove that the world is round; no Christian took Genesis' cosmography particularly seriously until biblical literalism and the Reformation.

You might be thinking of the heliocentricism mess; but Bruno was burned for beliefs that had nothing to do with heliocentricism, and Galileo was only confined to house arrest -- and that after the Pope had tried to compromise with him, and Galileo responded by putting the Pope's arguments into the mouth of a simpleton in a revised version of the _Dialogue Concerning Two World-Systems_.

This is a tangent to your main argument, but it's an important thing to get right; you can't reach truth if you start from misconceptions...

Re: Is Faster-Than-Light Travel or Communication Possible? (1997)

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly right given our current understanding of the universe. FTL travel violates causality, which is a fundamental principle of the universe. I wouldn't go quite so far as to say it's totally impossible though. There is a whole lot about the universe we don't understand and I can't rule out the possibility that there are entire branches of mathematics and physics that we don't know about.

Can you or someone else "explain to me like I'm five" why faster-than-light travel violates causality?

Effectively, the speed of light is the rate at which Cause and Effect propagate through the universe.

The speed of light isn't an intrinsic property of light, it just so happens that light travels that fast and it was the first thing we were able to measure that was traveling at the limit.

If you were traveling at FTL velocities, you would effectively get there before you left.

Re: Is Faster-Than-Light Travel or Communication Possible? (1997)

#69
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is one of my theories about why there isn't any alien life around. Do we need a theory on this yet? I mean... out of all the planets we've explored reasonably thoroughly so far, 100% have had life at some point.

I've not heard that Mars had life at some point in its history. In fact I've not heard mention of any planets hosting life in their past, do you have some sources that you can point me to?

It's about the definition of 'reasonably thoroughly'. We haven't explored much of Mars, having covered only single digit square kilometers up close (and most of that geologically).

Re: Is Faster-Than-Light Travel or Communication Possible? (1997)

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of my theories about why there isn't any alien life around. There is some party far in the future with a beacon or message that shouts "JOIN US HERE IN THE MIDDLE OF GALAXY R345Q2 10 BILLION YEARS IN THE FUTURE!" After about 10 thousand years of hearing the beacon and being alone we finally get restless and just build a couple thousand giant spaceships and join the rest of the universe in the most cosmopo…

> This is one of my theories about why there isn't any alien life around. Do we need a theory on this yet? I mean... out of all the planets we've explored reasonably thoroughly so far, 100% have had life at some point.

Uh, yeah? Von Neumann machines should be everywhere by now; yet there is no evidence of them.
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