Speed of Light Barrier

Not in the sense that is being discussed. To say so would be messing up definitions badly. Velocity is through space.

I believe if we can warp space itself we can simulate the wormhole effect and in truth travel faster than light. This gets around the paradox that the faster something gets to the speed of light the more massive it becomes.In essense, a spaceship would be stationary and would bend the space around itself using massive quantities of energy. This is similar to the effect that gravity has on the fabric of spacetime. Thus it is not really that you are travelling faster than the speed of light to get to the stars/galaxies/etc but rather you are shortening the space in between you and your destination.Of course this is all hypothetical and the energy required would be enormous. However, possibly by harnessing the energy from antimatter and matter collisions this energy could be tapped. Also, the implications of how this effects the 'fabric' of spacetime and matter in between these two locations is unknown.BTW, Gene Roddenberry was a science fiction genius and well ahead of his time, techonologically speaking (though he did get many of his ideas from just perusing contemporary theoretical physicists and other futurologists speculations and ideas).Cavediver (and other resident physicists), do you see this as being plausible or just science fiction?Edited by DevilsAdvocate, : No reason given.

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For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
Dr. Carl Sagan

There isn't any physical object that's actually moving faster than light speed in the expansion. Galaxies appear to excede light speed, but the galaxies themselves aren't actually moving very quickly through space, it's the space itself which is expanding away, and the galaxy is being carried along with it. As long as the galaxy doesn't try to move quickly through space, no physical laws are broken.

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"I smoke pot. If this bothers anyone, I suggest you look around at the world in which we live and shut your mouth."--Bill Hicks"I never knew there was another option other than to question everything"--Noam Chomsky

My point exactly.As a thought experiment in my younger days with some friends, we imagined an engine or device that bends space in front of a spaceship in a certain way and space behind the spaceship in a certain way causing the ship to get carried along in the expansion and contraction of space. It's sort of like riding along with the waves. Because the ship isn't technically going through space, the ship could be exceeding the speed of light without actually breaking the light barrier.

Sounds like the Alcubierre drive:

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In 1994, the Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre proposed a method of stretching space in a wave which would in theory cause the fabric of space ahead of a spacecraft to contract and the space behind it to expand. The ship would ride this wave inside a region known as a warp bubble of flat space. Since the ship is not moving within this bubble, but carried along as the region itself moves, conventional relativistic effects such as time dilation do not apply in the way they would in the case of a ship moving at high velocity through flat spacetime. Also, this method of travel does not actually involve moving faster than light in a local sense, since a light beam within the bubble would still always move faster than the ship; it is only "faster than light" in the sense that, thanks to the contraction of the space in front of it, the ship could reach its destination faster than a light beam restricted to travelling outside the warp bubble.

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I just have to say, the crap you people know is astounding. I never fail to learn something new every day I come to this forum.Thanks to all of you in keeping me enlightened and continually educated.

I think it's better stated that the ship itself would arrive at a certain location in space faster than light would, but certainly it would not exceed light speed, right?

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"I smoke pot. If this bothers anyone, I suggest you look around at the world in which we live and shut your mouth."--Bill Hicks"I never knew there was another option other than to question everything"--Noam Chomsky

That is a sensible way of describing the situation.

Thank you good sir.

Plausible given a sufficiently advanced technology. Mod has already mentioned Alcubierre's idea, and this was suggested before we knew of the accelerative expansion of the Universe (very odd to think that...) Dark energy is precisely the type of field we need to manipulate to generate this warp field, or create worm-holes. But we are talking engineering and energy scales on the order of stars... so say a 1000 years to get to that stage, and then another 1000 to fit it into your car

Yes, but a few hundred years before that, we'll use it as a weapon.

Haha, thanks mod, I'm sure one of us unknowingly got the idea from Alcubierre somehow.

Electro-magnetic radiation?No object has been observed so far. Can it be ruled out? Our technology is severely limited.What is mass of objects travelling at c? Like photons. ZERO. Why are not photons and such like particles impossibly massive?It appears that relativity does not hold good at c.

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Not in the sense that is being discussed. To say so would be messing up definitions badly. Velocity is through space.

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Let them be messed up, so at least the drawbacks are exposed and rectified.But are they really messed up? Universe is expanding faster than light. It can happen only IFF objects at its boundary are moving faster than c.

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There isn't any physical object that's actually moving faster than light speed in the expansion. Galaxies appear to excede light speed, but the galaxies themselves aren't actually moving very quickly through space, it's the space itself which is expanding away, and the galaxy is being carried along with it. As long as the galaxy doesn't try to move quickly through space, no physical laws are broken.

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Whether you drive or are driven, it is the same thing: you move.Unless space is a real, physical object how ccan it expand?Lots of semantics to save relativity.