Will the speed of light always be a barrier?

Air and Space Magaine. Vol # 1 March 1978 | March 1978 | Editorial Staff w/ Melvin B. Zistein

[vannrox]

Light Speed a Barrier?

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".

[Robert_Paulson2]

"WWJD?"

what would jack do?
pour a round, that's what....

[LeftCoastNeoCon]

Doesn't the information teleported with entangled pairs of photons already travel faster than the speed of light?

[Drammach]

Starting at mass > 0 once can see that the equation of the vehicle mass properties increased such that m was equal to one over the squareroot of one minus the ship velocity squared divided by the speed of light c squared.

Not gonna get into the math..

Just a simple question..

As mass increases, doesn't it's gravity increase as well?
This means that the vessel affects the curvature of space, doesn't it?

What is the effect on light near a black hole?
It disappears.. at least to us.. the light cannot "escape", and may very well be moving "faster than light"..

I would suggest that once a mass reaches a certain velocity, it warps space enough to change the characteristics of physical space.
Making FTL travel at least a possibility..

I am not a "mathematician" nor a physicist..
I just act like one on the internet..

[dread78645]

massive mass place mark

[Junior]

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle in which travel occurs at the speed of thought.

Nerve impulses (thought) travel between neurons at about 200 mph. It might take you a while to get anywhere you need to go.

[MitchellC]

ROFLMAO.

How many albums does Five For Fighting have left?

[prisoner6]

Good read, Thanks for posting. Bumpers.

prisoner6

[bwteim]

Moonman62 said same regarding relatively slow nerve impulse speed.

FYI, try Googling for words:
control "speed of thought" brain
and see how they are harnessing thought power.

[Conan the Librarian]

Actually in the future, scientist will re-define the speed of light up so high that we won't have to worry about it. Its just not time for them to do it.

[Eaker]

Ping for later.

[RadioAstronomer]

because the speed of light is variable.

Nope. The speed of light is a constant.

Here are two links you may enjoy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light

http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmolog.htm

[jwalsh07]

Nope. The speed of light is a constant.

Ah, so thats why it's not referred to as v.

[mikrofon]

It's ze Law!

[vannrox]

New theory on light weighs heavily on scientists

A brash young theoretical physicist claims Einstein was wrong

By Lori Valigra

At the heart of Einstein's elegant equation, E=mc2, is the constant speed of light. Indeed, the mind-warping special theory of relativity allows time and space to bend, but light, Einstein insisted, must remain traveling at 186,000 miles per second, throughout the universe, for all observers.

"Whoa!" cries João Magueijo, a young theoretical physicist. This iconoclastic professor at the Imperial College in London has the courage, or some may say the audacity, to challenge that key component of Einstein's deeply ingrained work.

In short, Magueijo claims that some of the most complex mysteries about the origin of the universe can be solved if we consider that light may have traveled much faster at the Big Bang than it does now. In other words, the speed of light is variable.

Many cosmologists today adhere to the idea of "inflation," which speculates that the young universe expanded "unimaginably faster than it does today." But inflation, proposed by MIT physicist Alan Guth in the late 1970s, was never widely adopted by the British theoretical physics community. And Magueijo claims that as an answer to various "cosmological problems ... inflation had won by default." This propelled him to think about another solution.

"I was into my second year as a fellow of St. John's College," he writes, "when one day the answer seemed to drop from the sky. It was a miserable rainy morning - typical English weather - and I was walking across the college's sports field ... when I suddenly realized that if you were to break one simple rule of the game, albeit a sacred one, you could solve these problems."

Challenging any popular or long-held theory in science is a risk, and can even end a promising career. That's especially true when the challenge is being made to the work of a great scientist like Albert Einstein. But Magueijo, with help along the way from a handful of other scientists who were open to discussing the variable speed of light (VSL), kept developing his idea.

Their first attempts to publish a technical paper on the subject, however, ran into what Magueijo characterizes as condescension and purely political opposition. Indeed, the childish, personal nature of these arguments will shock anyone who imagines disinterested scientists searching together for truth.

While Magueijo and his colleagues were battling their work into print, Magueijo discovered that John Moffat, a theoretical physicist at the University of Toronto, already had published a paper on VSL several years earlier. Soon, other papers followed, and the new theory slowly started gaining momentum in the scientific community - even as arguments about who thought of it first burned on.

Magueijo's quirky book is an effort to bring these new ideas to the general public, along with an illuminating peek at these internecine battles among competing scientists and their own stiff conceptions of what's right and what's crazy. After all, he warns, "That's science. Every new idea is gibberish until it survives ruthless challenge."

No one knows yet whether or not VSL is correct - a colleague told him it stood for "very silly" - but Magueijo claims that all the disdain from his detractors and the fight for publication was worth it. "I hope I have shown that science is above all a rewarding human experience," he writes, "perhaps the purest one on offer in a world too often less than perfect."

Strikingly candid, the book brings esoteric scientific concepts within reach of nonscientists. Magueijo proves to be a master at taking complex theories and explaining them in simple terms, such as illustrating the speed of light by describing how cows jump back from the shock of an electric fence.

He also provides a thoroughly engaging, if breezy, portrait of Einstein. Despite the fact that Magueijo hopes to overturn the master's most famous equation, he obviously resonates with the iconoclastic example that this "daydreamer" set for scientific inquiry.

And he shows the human side of building a scientific theory, the side behind the black and white formulas, where red-blooded, passionate humans argue to defend their ideas and their life's work. Indeed, he doesn't hesitate to share his frustration with those who maintain the status quo or who disagree with him, as well as for the red tape that sometimes strangles the willpower out of otherwise aspiring researchers.

"Faster Than the Speed of Light" is part science, part biography, and part adventure, a book that takes us behind the closed doors of the intellectual elite and sheds light on the pettiness and brilliance of speculations and theories that ultimately may change our lives and our beliefs.

[vannrox]

(NEW SCIENTIST) The speed of light, one of the most sacrosanct of the universal physical constants, may have been lower as recently as two billion years ago - and not in some far corner of the universe, but right here on Earth.

The controversial finding is turning up the heat on an already simmering debate, especially since it is based on re-analysis of old data that has long been used to argue for exactly the opposite: the constancy of the speed of light and other constants.

A varying speed of light contradicts Einstein's theory of relativity, and would undermine much of traditional physics. But some physicists believe it would elegantly explain puzzling cosmological phenomena such as the nearly uniform temperature of the universe. It might also support string theories that predict extra spatial dimensions.

The threat to the idea of an invariable speed of light comes from measurements of another parameter called the fine structure constant, or alpha, which dictates the strength of the electromagnetic force. The speed of light is inversely proportional to alpha, and though alpha also depends on two other constants (see graphic), many physicists tend to interpret a change in alpha as a change in the speed of light. It is a valid simplification, says Victor Flambaum of the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

It was Flambaum, along with John Webb and colleagues, who first seriously challenged alpha's status as a constant in 1998. Then, after exhaustively analysing how the light from distant quasars was absorbed by intervening gas clouds, they claimed in 2001 that alpha had increased by a few parts in 105 in the past 12 billion years. ...

The controversial finding is turning up the heat on an already simmering debate, especially since it is based on re-analysis of old data that has long been used to argue for exactly the opposite: the constancy of the speed of light and other constants.

A varying speed of light contradicts Einstein's theory of relativity, and would undermine much of traditional physics. But some physicists believe it would elegantly explain puzzling cosmological phenomena such as the nearly uniform temperature of the universe. It might also support string theories that predict extra spatial dimensions.

The threat to the idea of an invariable speed of light comes from measurements of another parameter called the fine structure constant, or alpha, which dictates the strength of the electromagnetic force. The speed of light is inversely proportional to alpha, and though alpha also depends on two other constants (see graphic), many physicists tend to interpret a change in alpha as a change in the speed of light. It is a valid simplification, says Victor Flambaum of the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

It was Flambaum, along with John Webb and colleagues, who first seriously challenged alpha's status as a constant in 1998. Then, after exhaustively analysing how the light from distant quasars was absorbed by intervening gas clouds, they claimed in 2001 that alpha had increased by a few parts in 105 in the past 12 billion years. ...

[vannrox]

There is a great paper whereas the four-dimensional universe on the TeV brane of the Randall-Sundrum scenario takes the bimetric structure of Clayton and Moffat, with gravitons traveling faster than photons instead, while the radion varies with time.

!!!!!!!!!!!!

The paper shows that such brane world bimetric model can thereby solve the flatness and the cosmological constant problems, provided the speed of a graviton decreases to the present day value rapidly enough. The resolution of other cosmological problems such as the horizon problem and the monopole problem requires supplementation by inflation, which may be achieved by the radion field provided the radion potential satisfies the slow-roll approximation.

A variable gravitational constant would inherently indicate a variable light constant.

[mikrofon]

The speed of light is inversely proportional to alpha, and though alpha also depends on two other constants (sic), many physicists tend to interpret a change in alpha as a change in the speed of light.

I think I'll wait for more evidence...

[dread78645]

It was Flambaum, along with John Webb and colleagues, who first seriously challenged alpha's status as a constant in 1998. Then, after exhaustively analysing how the light from distant quasars was absorbed by intervening gas clouds, they claimed in 2001 that alpha had increased by a few parts in 105 in the past 12 billion years. ...

Detecting or constraining the possible time variations of fundamental physical constants is an important step toward a complete understanding of basic physics and hence the world in which we live. A step in which astrophysics proves most useful.

Previous astronomical measurements of the fine structure constant - the dimensionless number that determines the strength of interactions between charged particles and electromagnetic fields - suggested that this particular constant is increasing very slightly with time. If confirmed, this would have very profound implications for our understanding of fundamental physics.

New studies, conducted using the UVES spectrograph on Kueyen, one of the 8.2-m telescopes of ESO's Very Large Telescope array at Paranal (Chile), secured new data with unprecedented quality. These data, combined with a very careful analysis, have provided the strongest astronomical constraints to date on the possible variation of the fine structure constant. They show that, contrary to previous claims, no evidence exist for assuming a time variation of this fundamental constant.

-- New Quasar Studies Keep Fundamental Physical Constant Constant

[RadioAstronomer]

Check this out:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/04/050418204410.htm

[vannrox]

Einstein In Need Of Update? Calculations Show The Speed Of Light Might Change

In 1905, Einstein made major changes to laws of physics when he established his theory of relativity. Now Einstein's laws might also undergo significant changes.

Dimitri Nanopoulos, who holds the rank of Distinguished Professor of Physics at Texas A&M University and heads the Houston Advanced Research Center's Group for Astroparticle Physics, established, along with other physicists, that the speed of light, instead of being the constant value of 186,282 miles per second, might change.

In 1905, Einstein established that light was the only object to have a constant speed in all reference frames. This idea was the cornerstone to his theory of relativity, and later to laws of physics.

"If the speed of light proves not to be constant any more, even by a very small changeable amount, laws of physics - the theory of relativity included - will have to undergo significant changes," says Nanopoulos. Nanopoulos, who chairs the Theoretical Physics Division of the Academy of Athens, is among the many physicists who are trying to establish the basis of quantum gravity, a theory that has been dreamed of by physicists since the 1920s.

While they were doing mathematical calculations, Nanopoulos and physicists Nikolaos Mavromatos of King's College in London and John Ellis of the European Center for Particle Physics (CERN) in Geneva, discovered a new expression for the speed of light, which depends on its frequency.

"Through our calculations, we found that the speed of light is frequency-dependent," says Nanopoulos. "But a change in the usual speed of light value of 186,282 miles per second is noticeable only for light coming from astronomical objects situated very far from Earth, which is why this frequency dependence has not been noticed so far."

Physicists are setting up the theory of quantum gravity to put together two major discoveries of physics in the 20th century: the theory of relativity and quantum physics.

The theory of relativity explains both how space and time are related to each other and how gravitation works. Quantum physics describes the workings of the microscopic world, where laws of probability replace the deterministic view used to describe our everyday world.

Until now, physicists have been considering many scenarios for quantum gravity, but these scenarios have never been experimentally confirmed.

The hypotheses put forward by Nanopoulos and his collaborators has been under experimental scrutiny, and the results obtained during the last few months are encouraging.

"One way to experimentally test our hypothesis is to consider galaxies or other objects in the sky that are very far from us," says Nanopoulos. "Then we collect the photons (particles of light) simultaneously emitted by these sources, and we look at differences of arrival times in a detector on earth between photons of different frequencies. The photons of higher frequencies should come later."

The frequency-dependent expression of the speed of light depends on the gravitational constant, a quantity that is known since Newton established his law of gravitation.

By using the differences in photon arrival times of six astronomical sources, Nanopoulos and his collaborators estimated an upper bound of the value of the gravitational constant from the data, and compared their results with the expected value.

"We were amazed to see that if we use all these astronomical data, we find very reasonable values for the gravitational constant," says Nanopoulos. "That was our first surprise: the fact that, put together, a bunch of data that had nothing to do with the gravitational constant, gave us values so close to what we would expect to find."

A second experimental encouraging result about the frequency-dependence of the speed of light was provided by the HEGRA (High Energy Gamma Ray Astronomy) experiment, which is detecting photons from outer space, and is situated in La Palma, Canary Islands.

The frequency-dependent expression of the speed of light was used to solve a problem faced by three physicists: Tadashi Kifune, from the University of Tokyo in Japan, Ray Protheroe, from the University of Adelaide in Australia, and Hinrich Meyer, from the University of Wuppertal in Germany.

The problem occurred when HEGRA physicists detected very energetic photons emitted by the galaxy Markarian 501.

"The most energetic of these photons were expected to interact with other very low-energy photons from the infrared background radiation, which is a radiation present since the early universe," says Nanopoulos. "When a very energetic photon interacts with a low-energy photon, they have just the right quantity of energy to create an electron-antielectron pair. But physicists at HEGRA did not see any of the expected electron-antielectron pairs, but did observe very energetic photons instead.

"By using the frequency-dependent expression of the speed of light, Kifune, Protheroe and Meyer found that the combined energy of each type of photon was not enough to create an electron-antielectron pair," adds Nanopoulos. "That is why no electron-antielectron pair has been observed."

If by looking at more energetic photons, HEGRA never detects the expected electron-antielectron pairs, this would provide further support of the new hypothesis put forward by Nanopoulos and his collaborators.

"This frequency-dependence of the speed of light changes drastically our view of the theory of relativity," Nanopoulos says. "It is also the first time that we have a window of opportunity to study quantum gravity, and thus scientifically study the origin of the Universe. It is a fantastic thing that we can experimentally magnify such a tiny effect."

Nanopoulos says that if the frequency-dependence of the speed of light is further confirmed by other experiments, the theory of relativity would still be valid under certain circumstances.

"There is nothing wrong with Einstein's theory of relativity. If the energy of an object is much smaller than 1019 proton masses or if the distance between two objects is smaller than millions of light-years, Einstein's equations are still valid," he says.