Thu, 12 June 2008 When trying to think about FTL travel, there are so many things that are overlooked. What are the problems that prevent us from going the speed of light or faster than the speed of light. Its called mass, this little thing prevents us form getting there and beyond. The other problem in space is that current propellan rockets, need to carry there own mass to have something to push against so that they can move. Now with mass come inertia, and when looking at the two and thinking of light speed. You come up with a problem, as we mentioned in the episode it looks like an Asymptote line, where the line never touches 1 or X. it goes on to infinity alwasy going on. They look like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymptote. Now that being said with any amount of mass you could not get your self to light speed let alone beyond light speed. In order to do so you would need to remove all mass or atleast your inertia, because that is what makes your mass become so massive you cant push yourself to that marker. Now with removing inertia other things start to happen. If I understand what im reading, normal propellant rockets would not work because without inertia they have no mass to push against in space causing no force to be directed. So you would need some other means than standerd propellent rockets to move you to say the nearest star. As in episode 4 we discuss the issues that happen when you take in the effects of the Higgs feild. That and the fact that the math of moving something faster than light, tends to spiral out of control, with negative mass and negative time. In doing some research into how NASA is presuing FTL travel, they are looking into a warp travel, where the ship will warp spacetime around them. http://www.nasa.gov/lb/centers/glenn/research/warp/ipspaper.html. This is an interesting read, on the things to think about when trying FTL travel. Now since Jim nor I or PHD scientest we have to look at what they are doing and the problems that they are running into. We hope to come up with a creative way to solve this problem, eventhough it technically may not work in reality, we will put rules to it and see where it takes us. If I find any further info on this subject I will add to this. Category: Encyclopedia -- posted at: 8:44 AM Comments[2] |
This also has the problem of making any object, even the smallest particle, much more massive than the ship, so if it were to come in contact with even a mote of dust during its flight, the ship would be stopped in its tracks.
At least that's my understanding of the principles involved.
We did not correctly state what the higgs feild did. It removes the higgs particle, which technicaly remove interactivity with gravity. the mass is still there I believe but the inertia caused by gravities effect on something with mass is no longer preset. thus still resulting in problem 1 that you stated.
We are going to take a small break from FTL, and try to figure out what other cool tech they would have, and possible see if anything else would help advance us with the FTL problem. Thanks for the comment
posted by: redearthsaga on Wed, 6/18 09:12 AM EDT
