Faster than light?

It is always fascinating to look at impossibilities. Faster than light travel is such an impossibility – we all think. But is it? All inspired by wiki and others.

With Einstein’s E = mc2 in hand, we can deduce quite a lot. Here is a quote from https://wtamu.edu/ “Scientists have found that the faster you go, the more your spatial dimension in the forward direction shrinks and the slower your clock runs when viewed by an external observer. If you look at the equations which are at the core of Einstein’s theories of relativity, you find that as you approach the speed of light, your spatial dimension in the forward direction shrinks down to nothing and your clock slows to a stop. A reference frame with zero width and with no progression in time is really a reference frame that does not exist. Therefore, this tells us that nothing can ever go faster than the speed of light, for the simple reason that space and time do not actually exist beyond this point. Because the concept of “speed” requires measuring a certain amount of distance traveled in space during a certain period of time, the concept of speed does not even physically exist beyond the speed of light. In fact, the phrase “faster than light”

That is the best explanation I have ever seen!

But of course we can argue things anyway. What now if Einstein was wrong?

“The restriction that nothing can travel faster than light is not as limiting as it seems. A more accurate statement of the principle would be, “nothing can locally travel faster than light.”

For instance, if wormholes exist, you could use one to take a shortcut from earth to the North Star. Compared to a bit of light that travelled from earth to the North Star and did not go through the wormhole, you would have been traveling faster.

In other words, you would have reached the North Star first. This is allowed because you never locally exceeded the speed of light. As another example, there are some distant stars in the universe that are moving away from each other at a speed faster than light. This is allowed because it is not a local speed.

We are now into heavy theory.

Some scientists one late afternoon, after tea I believe, came to imagine a new particle, the Tachyon. This one travels faster than light and has an imaginary mass, they speculated.

However, the same physics that govern our ‘slower’ particles (you and I), must also apply to those tachyons.

A Lorentz transformation (look it up) shows that if the speed is greater than speed of light, the denominator in the equation for the energy is imaginary, as the value under the radical (1-speed/c) is negative. Because the total energy must be real, the numerator must also be imag-

Wiki: One curious effect is that, unlike ordinary particles, the speed of a tachyon increases as its energy decreases. In particular, E approaches zero when c approaches infinity. Therefore, just as normal particles are forbidden to break the light-speed barrier, so too are tachyons forbidden from slowing down to below c, because infinite energy is required to reach the barrier from either above or below.

The problem is of course that we talk imaginary mass. So it may not even exist.

As we are now doing virtual meetings all the time, we could also look at ‘virtual particle’ in this context.

Wiki: “The term (virtual particle) is somewhat loose and vaguely defined, in that it refers to the view that the world is made up of “real particles”. It is not. “Real particles” are better understood to be excitations of the underlying quantum fields. Virtual particles are also excitations of the underlying fields, but are “temporary” in the sense that they appear in calculations of interactions.

The accuracy and use of virtual particles in calculations is firmly established, but as they cannot be detected in experiments, deciding how to precisely describe them is a topic of debate.

The trick is that such things can have negative mass and energy. (what?). That can then make them interact via virtual photons. Faster than speed of light is then possible.

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