Probing Question: Can anything travel faster than the speed of light?

PhysOrg.com ^ | 23 March 2006 | Joe Anuta

[PatrickHenry]

Wait a minute now!

This is an intro-type of article (from Scientific American) that may get you going in the right direction:
Misconceptions about the Big Bang.

[RightWhale]

the espansion at the beginning

That was inflation, a different mechanism from expansion, acting on space itself rather than on the material bodies in space.

[baltodog]

It seems to me that the speed of color exceeds the speed of light:

The sine wave for white light is a straight line. Color is a wave...therefore color has a higher frequency than white light.

White light travels, and is equal to, the speed of light.
Color, on the other hand (represented by a wave), must travel farther in the same period of time (because it is a wave)...otherwise, everything we see would be void of any color...

[adorno]

This is an intro-type of article (from Scientific American) that may get you going in the right direction:

So, then, the universe didn't expand at a speed that would seem to violate the speed of light?

Perhaps I didn't get it. Can you give me a shortened explanation of what exactly happened in the beginning?

[onedoug]

..."wormholes" -- shortcuts through space-time that would permit point-to-point travel faster than light -- and "warp drives," a kind of bubble created in space in which relativity wouldn't apply.

Though in order to accelerate through time one would presumably have to alter the entire universe's expansion.
That is, shrink it to go back, or expand it to go forward.

This may well be impossible.

[wildbill]

Chuck Schumer to the lens of a TV camera.

[RightWhale]

Not the entire universe, just the part between where you are and where you want to be for reasons known only to yourself.

[Rightwing Conspiratr1]

Didn't scientists, a couple of weeks ago, tell us that the universe expanded in something less than a trillionth of a second from virtually nothing to something larger than the parts of the universe that are observable by us?

One pill makes you larger and one pill makes you small.
But the ones that mother gives you don't do anything at all.
;-)

[AntiGuv]

I just want to add that, whereas tachyons and wormholes remain purely speculative, there is nothing about them that violates the Theory of Relativity. Einstein himself very swiftly recognized that his equations permitted wormholes - indeed, one might say certain of his equations predict wormholes (or the equivalent), although that is quite controversial.

[AntiGuv]

Now, 'warp drive' on the other hand..

[RightWingAtheist]

John Edwards can, we he spots an ambulance.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[onedoug]

That would seem to mean removing one's self from, then reinserting it back into the universe.

Too tough for me.

[RightWingAtheist]

Into Infinity!

[JoeSixPack1]

An American Express Gold card on Black Friday during a blue light special at Macy's cosmetics counter!

[Paul C. Jesup]

Very interesting post. Considerations of maximum speed, from Einstein to the present, have been predicated upon travel through space-time. But what if the fabric of space-time, itself, could be compressed in the path of the traveling object, so that the traveling object would always be approaching space-time, but not traveling through it? Like I said, very interesting post!

There is a scientist working on using light/lasers looped on each other in a clinder shape to warp time and space to possible time.

I am just cannot remember the man's name. But it's interesting in that he uses Einstein's theory that time and space can be warped by speed, gravity and light.

[drypowder]

Speaking of trains traveling at the speed of light, if the headlight of the train was turned on would it light the tracks in front of the train?

[AntiGuv]

Oh, and it's also important to note that: Nothing travels faster than the speed of light when moving through a wormhole. This seems to be a point that many people stumble over, when thinking of the concept. In order to travel faster than the speed of light, you must move through spacetime. In the instant of stepping through a wormhole, you haven't moved anywhere.

To visualize this, one can think of Stargate SG-1. When the characters step through the Stargate, they might end up on the other side of the universe, but they haven't travelled anywhere. The just took one step.

[AlexW]

"The sine wave for white light is a straight line. Color is a wave...therefore color has a higher frequency than white light."

I was taught in elementary school that white is the combination of ALL colors.

[AntiGuv]

So, a better way to put it is: When stepping through a wormhole, one arrives at one's destination faster than if one had travelled there at the speed of light.

But, if you step through a wormhole to the other side of the universe, you haven't travelled across the universe to get there. It's as if the universe is folded up like a sheet of paper with two distant points touching one another. All you did was take a step from one end of the folded paper to the other end it touches.