No doubt:
Posted on 07/24/2013 11:36:33 AM PDT by GrandJediMasterYoda
NASA starts building faster-than-light warp engine Get short URL Published time: July 23, 2013 19:06 Edited time: July 24, 2013 14:39
Researchers at NASA’s Texas-based Johnson Space Center are trying to prove that it is possible to travel faster than the speed of light, and hope to one day build an engine that resembles the fictional Starship Enterprise.
NASA physicist and engineer Dr. Harold G. White, 43, believes it is possible to bend the rules of time and space that Albert Einstein constructed when he postulated that it is impossible to exceed the speed of light.
White's research is based on the theories of Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre, who in 1994 theorized that exceeding Einstein’s galactic speed limit was possible if scientists discovered a way to harness the expansion and contraction of space. And Harold and his team are trying to do just that.
(Excerpt) Read more at rt.com ...
So? I couldn’t care less if you agree with it.
That's like saying the Mona Lisa was just some dudes color photo...
If they can prove the theory on the small scale, the rest is just an engineering problem.
The numbers work. Latest research says it may not even need as much energy to initiate a "warp envelope" as previously thought. Instead of the amount of energy in a mass the size of Jupiter, we're down to asteroid sized mass/energy requirements. Still not feasible at current tech-level, but not as fanciful as it once was.
Now... Back to building space ships...
Until we get them cut completely, I'd rather the Feds were doing this rather than sending fighter jets to Muslim extremists or adding more sub-Departments to the BATFE.
If you don’t want people to agree or disagree then don’t post your opinions. I was simply pointing out that you’re wrong.
Are the only two choices doing this or sending fighter jets to wack jobs who hate the usa? How about doing neither and TAXING LESS and spending less. Something that neither the Republicans or Democrats want to do.
Things like this are only impossible until someone figures out how to do it.
In an Alcubeirre warp-drive, your ship is subjectively sub-light. Warping the space-time around the ship causes the apparent movement. Space-time being essentially mass-less, the Einsteinian “speed of light in a vacuum” doesn’t come into play.
Ok... You just answered your own question. It'd be easier to warp space-time than to change Congress.
Fallacious reasoning shared by some others on this thread. Some things are simply impossible given the nature of the universe. Finding "unknown elements" somewhere out in space is impossible. Violating either the first or second laws of thermodynamics is impossible. Exceeding the speed of light is impossible.
Einstein’s speed limit is for communicating as we presently do it, because photons are the mediator of electromagnetic energy as we understand it. Your assertion of ‘impossible’ is, well, silly. The poster posited the ‘so far’ and you made an assertion that you cannot guarantee so don’t use ‘impossible’ unless you too are prepared to use the qualifier.
No doubt:
Agreed. And some rather surprisings things are very possible.
This could very well be one of those things.
Again, just because you can't see how this can be done, doesn't mean it won't work.
Man I sure hope it works. I want either me and most conservatives or all of the liberals on the first flights out of here. I don’t really care which, but one of us has GOT to have some relief.
I think it had better be us though, because they definitely can’t survive for long on their own.
Consider that the time span between the first Wright Brothers flight (1903) to the first jet fighter (Me-262, first flight 1942), was less than 40 years. Things can advance rapidly once a breakthrough has been made.
Consider that if you brought somebody from 1 AD to George Washington's time, he would not see a huge difference in lifestyle. Horses still dragged carts. Ships still moved by wind-power. People still heated their houses with burning wood. Gunpowder would be a big change, but what else beyond that?
Now, bring somebody from 1776 up to 2013, and he would think he was in a world of magic.
The rest of us will head off that'a'way <-----
I stand by my statement: What they are doing is building a device to research how to alter the trajectory of photons in certain ways...
Ahh, yes. The paradox concerning the speed of light. If you are traveling in a bus at 50 MPH and you throw a baseball from the back of the bus to the front of the bus at 50 MPH, how fast was the baseball traveling? It depends on where you made the observation from.
Why doesn't this apply to the speed of light?
We are on a planet that is in motion revolving around a star that is also in motion in a galaxy that is in motion. We observe light that is emanating from stars that are in motion likely in directions not synonymous with ours. What have we really used to measure the speed of light and how can we be sure that is constant. Consider that we are measuring distances using the constant that we have established here in our solar system from one point to another where all variables are known. Then we have applied that which we have called a constant to everything from the size of the universe and our galaxy to how close the nearest star outside our solar system is.
I believe the best constant we may presume is how fast photons move from the source. I speculate the speed of a photon through a vacuum might change relative to the motion of its source depending on where the observation is made. Theoretically, if a star were moving at the speed of light in one direction, light would never be seen by any object traveling in a direction opposite the source. Light would not "travel" at all.
How much do we really know? Have we really found the edge of our Universe, or just the end of observable light?
As you approach the speed of light, time (as we know it on earth) slows down. The GPS satellites actually prove that speed and time are relative. Some think that time stops (as we know it as observed from outside the travel) at the speed of light. A person traveling through space at the speed of light would arrive back to his starting spot at the same time (or however long it took for light to travel to and fro). But, depending on how far the traveler went, years or decades could have passed between the two events for those observing the event at the starting and finishing points.
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