Posted on 06/12/2005 6:00:55 PM PDT by vannrox
| To go, the children of tomorrow may have had to discover what is believed impossible today -- how to travel faster than light. Mel Zisfein, deputy director of the national Air and Space Museum, and an aerosynamicist amoung other things, has noted a similarity between the way most people today regard "C," the speed of light, and the way many people a generation or so ago regarded "a", the speed of sound. For this publication, he sketched the illustrations which appear on the following page, and drafted the following... "Some people used to look at the so-called compressibility effect curves and said that we'll never fly a winged aircraft faster than the speed of sound. As we increase speed from ero, the forces associated with air pressure, like drag, will rise ever faster and tend toward infinity as we approach the speed of sound, which is a barrier we can't pass. "However, people knew that artillery shells - although not winged aircraft - went faster than the speed of sound, so perhaps there was a chance for airplanes. Subsequently, on October 14 1947, the Bell X-1 flew supersonically, and today, supersonic flight is an everyday occurrence. "Earlier, people working with the flow of gases through nozzles had run into a similar manifestation of a 'sound barrier'. When a gas, like air, was put through a simple nozzle ...the speed of sound "a", looked like the highest achievable velocity. The more pressure that was applied across the nozzle, the more energy was dissipated in shocks int eh nozzle, leaving the exit velocity no higher than the speed of sound. However the De Laval nozzle was invented... in which the exit speed could be supersonic. "Now, some people look at the equations and curves of einstein's special theory of Relativity like the one form mass 'm' (formula to the right). They notice the similarity in form to the earlier aerodynamic pressure equation and its curve . Some people say we;ll never move faster than "c:, the speed of light. As we increase speed from zero, the mass of any body will rise ever faster and tend toward infinity, as we approach the speed of light, which is a barrier we can't pass. 'There is much evidence to support this position. From where we stand today (1978), exceeding the speed of light appears to be a vstly more difficult endeavor than exceeding the speed of sound. Maybe however, that it is only because we haven't figured out how to do it. "The basic physical principles are vastly different. But I remain fascinated with the mathematical similarities between the pressure equation and the curve of the sound barrier, and the mass equation and the curve of the light barrier.I just wonder if there is some wa which we will find some day to enable us to drive particles, and perhaps space vehicles, to speeds faster than "c". |
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle in which travel occurs at the speed of thought. That'd be fast.
Until then, we have seventeen more bad Coldplay albums to suffer through.
You told us about that next year already.
Perfect post. LMAO.
Care to post some stock market tables?
The speed of light has been broken many times. Look how fast Democrats went from complaining "GW did nothing to prevent 911" at the 911 hearings, to complaining "GW is trying to prevent 911" at Gitmo.
I heard you can make a flux capacitor out of a cell phone, a DVD player, and a few miscellaneous parts from Radio Shack.
Good Luck.
I would but I flunked out of history...and economics.
"the speed of thought. That'd be fast."
Not for me it wouldn't!
Thank you. I`m glad I`m not the only person who can`t stand that idiot band.
On a lighter note, the galactic congress has raised the light speed limit of light in Metroplanetarian areas to C+5 MPH and has eliminated it altogether in galactic backwaters (like Space Montana) during daylight hours.
LOL. I "thought" you might say that ;)
Proof positive that travel at the speed of light is not only possible, but inevitable.
If you take into account the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and quantum mechanics, wouldn't it almost guarantee that C is not a constant?
If you consider every possible path for a photon to travel from point A to B, some paths will naturally be longer than others. If it takes the same amount of time to get from A to B along every path then the photon must be traveling at different speeds.
The probability of the photon taking a very long round-about path would be miniscule, but it would still be > 0. So at least theoretically the speed of light in a vacuum is not constant.
"What is the speed of dark?"
"I put instant coffee into my microwave oven and almost went back in time."
- Stephen Wright
Actually something does travel at the speed of light. Photons. We need to build a ship entirely of photons, then we could have photon torpedoes and destroy the Kingons.
I pretty much stopped taking this article serious when I reached the about statement.
c is actually a ratio between two other constants, one for electricity and one for magnetism.
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