Speeding ticket?
You gotta catch me first, copper!
My magic/science explanation would be as follows.
First, you would not “accelerate” to faster than light speed. To do so would require infinite energy. Instead you would simply switch states from a slower than light object to a faster than light object. At this point you would be a tachyon, with imaginary mass. If we assume that the absolute value of your mass remains constant, then you will be probably traveling about sqrt(2) time the speed of light after this transition. Accelerating to faster velocities would produce energy but trying to slow down closer to the speed of light would cost more and more energy. You probably wouldn’t be able to interact with the real mass universe, but since all of this is fictional we might as well speculate that there is a whole 'nother tachyon universe that you can interact with. If at some point you pop back into this universe having appeared to teleport faster than light, you will probably theoretically violate causality, butmaking use of this requires hanging out in a relativistic reference frame that is probably unattainable so the universe probably wouldn’t end in a paradoxical poof of logic.
Chronos will be along shortly to claim that all of the above is bunk and a complete misunderstanding/debasement of science, but so was the OP so take what you can get.
Oh, I get it…
You get your wife back…
You get your dog back…
You get your truck back…
You get your grandparents back…
You get JFK back…
You get Mozart back…
You get the dinosaurs back…
That’s pretty much my take too. But with a different follow through.
The imaging is that all of spacetime is, will be, and has been. One object. We experience a path within that object on this side of the speed of light as going in one direction with laws of physics and causalities that make sense in that direction but we are running in reverse of the laws of physics and causalities that make sense as experienced from the tachyon POV. From the POV of that side we would be a tape running in reverse which makes no sense and which is, other than as an abstract construct, unimaginable to them.
My facile understanding of one method of FTL travel is to ‘bend’ space a take a shortcut from A to B. You don’t move IN space - you move space itself.
From the perspective of a person on the ship, you’d be in one place, push a button or whatever and POOF, you’re in another place.
Now, the forces required to do this are enormous and would destroy any living being attempting to accomplish it, but if that problem is ignored, it would be a pretty underwhelming journey.
I’ve always had this pet theory that the universe Big Bang/Reboots every time someone almost figures out how to do it.
I want to know what a photic boom (flash?) would look like once you passed light speed. Is photic to light what sonic is to sound?
Except they would be impacting with infinite energy, so even a single particle is going to impact with the force of, well infinite.
Actually this would be interesting. If you were passed by a ship going FTL (and had enough interaction with normal space to see, which causes a whole host of problems), then you would actually see the FTL ship appear at its closest point, and then recede in both directions.
There’s Cherenkov radiation, which is what you get when an object travels faster than the speed of light, in that medium. Neutrons off a nuclear reactor submerged is the most common example.
Not sure how that plays out if something is going faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, though.
The first thing that would happen is you’d have to dodge all the physics books being thrown out the window, followed rapidly by all the physicists. Because as you’ve seem the drive as you seem to see it invalidates a lot of physics.
If you need an ftl drive (and who doesn’t) why not make one that leaves physics more or less intact. Say you find a way of moving to a brane where there is a 1-1 connection with our brane, but where c is higher than here. Then you can travel in that brane, never go faster than light here, then come back here having effectively gone fast than light without ever doing it in our universe. You can’t drag things around so the causality problems of wormholes don’t exist. Since relativity assumes staying in one universe, it still works.
Lots of relatively simple calculations in one brane get real complicated as you have to sum over many branes, but hard math is not impossible math.
You posit being able to move across branes, and exist in other ones,but that is less impossible than hacking your way past c.
Well, remember, we’re talking as if the drive existed. Absolutes are for pure theorists.
In the real world of engineering, “close enough” usually works. “In theory” it would take infinite energy, but if the drive is working, obviously that isn’t true. So the impact would be big, but not infinitely big.
(Maybe it’s only infinite energy at exactly C, and not infinite once you get past C. How do you do that, you ask? Don’t ask me, ask the guy that created the drive. :))
Quasars are really the remnants of someone attempting their first FTL trip. FTL is possible, but surviving the trip is not! It leaves a… residue. :eek:
… it doesn’t. It’s impossible. Multiple posts have pointed that out so far.
Mostly-irrelevant side-note: If your acceleration is warp, as opposed to weenie, you will have a medium to travel through, due to the Unruh effect:
Really points up the centrality of the field in quantum field theory: Observers can’t even agree on how many particles there are, depending on reference frame!
One thing that people often overlook in this is that if you’re moving a ship at FTL speeds, it has an incredible amount of kinetic energy. If your drive turned off relativity around the ship (so it was just moving with Newtonian laws of motion), it would take you a year of acceleration at 1g just to hit c, so you can’t really go all that fast just by ignoring the ‘speed limit,’ you also need some super-acceleration. If your ship has super-acceleration that doesn’t squish the passengers and is travelling by sheer velocity (not tricks like folding space), it likely blows up because collisions with interstellar dust are going to have the kind of energy we usually associate with nuclear bombs.
Interestingly, the drives in the Lensman series worked sort of like this - there was no ‘c’ speed limit, and ships accelerated to incredibly high speeds with super-energetic drives. The maximum speed of a ship actually wasn’t determined by the strength of it’s drive, but by how well its shielding could push aside the local interplanetary/interstellar/intergalactic medium, and ships used aerodynamic shapes to cut down on their cross-section with the background.
Well there are 2 methods that anyone ever talks about.
Wormholes and alcubierre drives. Most physics think both are impossible because there is a way to “misuse” each one that will take you into the past.
But there is a way to use them ‘properly’.
Alas, neither is very interesting. If you use a wormhole, you just see, well, a distorted fisheye ‘hole’ in space that shows the other side funhouse style. I think you actually wouldn’t be able to use one as macroscale object, you’d have to get converted to a stream of particles or information, making it even less interesting.
It doesn’t look like a portal or stargate gate, because it’s a 3d object.
An alcubierre drive would presumably have some cool light effects from trapped photons between the warp bubble. But you wouldn’t see anything from inside, all the light would get blocked. But when you come out of warp, there would be an enormous flash, as trapped energy on the outside of the warp bubble gets released all at once. Better have some really good armor.
Of course, the really cool thing happens if you try to misuse a wormhole. Apparently the instant you bridge to the past, you short circuit across spacetime, basically*, and all the mass-energy in the wormhole gets converted to energy instantly. You get an amazing flash.
*what is thought to happen is that you have made it possible for a particle to go from one wormhole mouth to the other and encounter itself right as it left. Particles leaving a wormhole subtract mass from the exit wormhole, which makes them useless for sending raw materials, only information, and this particle “looping” infinitely will exhaust all the mass of the wormhole and cause it to detonate.
As an aside, if you want to see what a wormhole would “really look like”, see the movie Interstellar. That was literally the first ever accurate (according to the best equations we have) depiction of a wormhole, and yes, I’m including ones made by scientists for their own purposes. Kip Thorne (Caltech physicist and now Nobel Laureate) came up with the equations to describe wormholes, but didn’t have a computer system to turn those equations into imagery. Hollywood did, and they used his equations.
That’s called The Spaceship of the Imagination, thank you.
Unfortunately, the rest of the film is basically bunk, from lumbering ATM machines to the notion that “love” is some kind of pandimensional extrasensory capacity, although Matt Damon proves again that he’d destined to be trapped on a desolate alien world like some kind of extraterrestrial Groundhog Day.
Stranger
My utterly un-physics-educated WAG:
You see nothing but black, and get to your destination (wherever it is) really, really, quickly.
I think the OP question is similar to the question, “Suppose they could take a ball and make its diameter negative. Would it float, and have negative weight, and be able to lift things like a balloon?”
The point is that the evolved English language facilitates asking questions that, from a grammatical point of view, appear sensible, but that actually pose nonsensical hypotheticals.
One, just one, of the consequences of the hypothetical in the original question is that mass or information traveling faster than c (which is the physical constant representing a limit to relative velocities at which information can move from place to place) can put effects before their own causes. If you could “go faster than c”, you’d be at your starting point, then appear simultaneously at your endpoint, then appear simultaneously at the starting point, endpoint, and a point in between which is moving from endpoint to starting point, and then wind up exclusively at the endpoint. That is, for other people who move the right way, that’s what you’d really be doing (not just what you’d appear to be doing).
Being able to ask a question doesn’t mean it’s a real question.
Now, it’s a real and valid question to say, suppose you were in a ship that some fantastic external machine could push on as hard as you wish. You could set it to push the ship at an acceleration of 1g, or 10. Or, hell, a trillion trillion g. It’d crush whatever and whomever was inside, but suppose there was some futuristic technology to handle that too, the ultimate inflatable trousers or something. So now we have a ship that can accelerate at 10^24 times the acceleration of gravity on Earth’s surface. We climb aboard and hit the Go button, and what? We see our home recede away alarmingly. We wait a minute, an hour. A day. A year. A thousand or billion years. Still, nothing very special. We never measure any relative velocity between us and anything else that is equal to or greater than c. It never happens. Speeds gradually get greater and greater but as they get close to c they do so more and more gradually.
So, you can have a phenomenon or location move faster than c, as long as it carries no information or mass. Imagine you squirt a tidy stream of water, one that holds together and doesn’t break into separate droplets, from a nozzle that can pivot, like some lawn sprinklers have. The stream spirals away from you, first up, then down, and lands throughout a circle. You can spin the nozzle as fast as you like, so that it looks like you have a very closely wound spring of water in your spray pattern. The location where the stream lands at any moment is a location that is circling around you at the same speed you spin the nozzle. You could make this go very fast indeed. That doesn’t mean the water itself is going fast. On a local scale, the water is arranged in a string that is almost horizontal but not quite, and it’s falling, and the landing point travels sideways quite rapidly.
You could do this with a laser pointer, too. It wouldn’t even be all that hard to spin a tiny mirror to aim a laser beam around the interior of a large round enclosure, so that the spot where it’s hitting the wall travels faster than c, from your point of view. But somebody flying sufficiently fast overhead watching it all, who of course properly accounts for the travel time for light to reach his eye, will observe that there are sometimes no spots where the light hits the wall, and sometimes multiple spots, and they may move in either direction. Which breaks no laws, noting that the spot doesn’t have any mass on its own and can’t convey information as it moves. The photons traveling from the laser pointer and mirror to the wall never exceed c, even if they wind up in the shape of a growing watch spring.