15 ms·

Faster Than the Speed of Light?

182 points by zzzeek 13y ago

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
pitiburi 13y ago
link to the article without paywall?
- mike-cardwell 13y ago
  I use a Firefox addon called RefControl so you can customise the referer that is sent on a per site basis. I have it configured to send the referer "http://www.google.com/" http://www.google.com/" to nytimes.com which gets rid of the paywall.
- justanother 13y ago
  Chrome: Right-click, Open Link in Incognito Window
  - psbp 13y ago
    or clear your cookies. It's probably a good idea to delete your cookies on a daily basis.
- dkl 13y ago
  If you use Chome, just visit the link in a new incognito window.
- 01Michael10 13y ago
  In Firefox --> Right "click" on the link and choose "Open Link in New Private Window".
ChuckMcM 13y ago
Kind of curious what other effects you might get if you localized a change in space-time. Given that the planet and the solar system are in motion would it deflect in the direction opposite that motion? If so could you put better numbers on how much inflation occurred post big bang?
acjohnson55 13y ago
I read about this months ago, and it's an interesting idea. I'm not a physicist, but I spent some time trying to puzzle out how this fits in with my understanding of relativity. So please, correct any misunderstandings. It's important to realize that the craft is never traveling faster than the speed of light through the space in front of it. But there's nothing in relativity that prevents objects from apparently traveling faster than the speed of light "after the fact". The farthest apart objects that we can see are significantly further apart in light-years than the estimated age of the universe, which is generally thought to be possible because of the expansion of space itself as objects were traveling apart at subluminal speed. I don't think that apparent FTL travel violates causality because it doesn't allow you to actually reach anything outside of your light cone. It took me a while to understand this, but you can't really view the light cone as something that is statically determined at a given point in time, because it depends on the geometry of space as over time. So a craft capable of distorting space just ends up with a really funky-shaped light cone that's warped wider than normal out in its direction of travel and narrower in the opposite direction as it moves (if you had a way of externally viewing the curvature of spacetime, which you don't). But one thing I could not really figure out is whether this so-called FTL travel has the potential to violate causality, because I don't fully understand how causality and FTL are related.
- btilly 13y ago
  But one thing I could not really figure out is whether this so-called FTL travel has the potential to violate causality, because I don't fully understand how causality and FTL are related. The relationship is that FTL in one reference frame is travel backwards in time in another. If you're able to travel FTL in 2 different inertial reference frames, then you should be able to travel backwards in time and violate causality. Note that the "should" here is important - I can think of lots of possibilities for how that should could be prevented. That said, I'd be much more optimistic about the plausibility of a proposed warp technology that only lets you go FTL relative to the implicit reference frame of the distant stars. Because that avoids any possibility of causality violation.
  - shardling 13y ago
Arnor 13y ago
I can only assume death greets anyone inside this hypothetical device.
- venomsnake 13y ago
  And sometimes it is worth it. If someone shows plausible way to get to Pluto right now on a one way trip passing by Jupiter and Uranus - you will have no shortage of volunteers. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but sent the humanity to the moon.
  - Arnor 13y ago
    Yeah, it would be worth it if you actually got to experience anything besides instantaneous death. Also, what makes you think there would be no danger to the surrounding system? Bending space and time within our own solar system sounds like a good way to mess up a pretty intricate balance. Of course, everyone else on HN can read the source code of the universe so they know how impossible any of that is...
- wikiburner 13y ago
  "I can only assume death greets anyone inside this hypothetical device." Ned Ludd, IV Kittyhawk - 1903
  - Arnor 13y ago
    Yes, I must be a real luddite... That's why I'm on HN. because I think technology is really awful. Also, thanks for letting me know when the first aircraft was invented. Since I consider the concept of bending time and space dangerous, I must not know anything about mechanized flight.
    - ionwake 13y ago
      a tad on the defensive there dude
- freehunter 13y ago
wikiburner 13y ago
This fascinates the hell out of me. It's simultaneously infuriating and awe-inspiring that something that's visible to the naked eye - stars - could be so completely out of reach for us. However, with the recent work of Drs Alcubierre and White, it's clear that cracks are forming in the Impossibility of FTL travel. That leads me to believe the FTL is inevitable, because in the history of science, whenever we begin to see how maybe something could kinda, sorta, maybe exist, it's usually just a matter of time (perhaps centuries) until we crack it.
- VLM 13y ago
  "because in the history of science, whenever we begin to see how maybe something could kinda, sorta, maybe exist, it's usually just a matter of time (perhaps centuries) until we crack it." Like mermaids, magic, the halting problem, ESP, and religion?
  - foobarbazqux 13y ago
    To be fair, religion and the halting problem exist.
    - VLM 13y ago
      LOL you got me. More specifically, proof of any example in the general category of one, and a solution to the other. Mix and match with the above how you'd like.
      - foobarbazqux 13y ago
        Whether we can prove or disprove the existence of God before the heat death of the universe is undecidable?
        VLM 13y ago
        To throw some fun fuel on the fire, which God, including conceptualizations that may not exist in our time yet. If a missionary religion is the correct true religion, and FTL exists anywhere in the galaxy, then by definition we should have already been contacted by missionaries and "civilized". Yet we're clearly not civilized, so at minimum at least one must not exist. So its not looking good for the FTL hopefuls. There is another fun one in that if an all powerful being exists, it seems a bit presumptuous for a mere moral to limit "it" to sublight. Therefore if the concept of FTL exists and an all powerful being exists, then FTL must exist in practice unless we're placing irrational limitations on an inherently unlimited being. Therefore if FTL can be imagined, but not implemented, that proves scientifically most conceptions of "god" do not exist; Or at least "it" is not all powerful. Unclear what impact that logic puzzler would have; probably just about none. That would make a much more fun rabble rousing article than "yet another star trek communicator / iphone analogy"
fragsworth 13y ago
> Harold G. White, a NASA physicist, gets ideas for his warp field from a Star Trek starship concept. It is ridiculous to think that physicists get any ideas from science fiction. It happens the other way around. All he did was use it in a presentation. I'm nerd raging like hell here.
- zethraeus 13y ago
  Why? SciFi is great fodder for the imagination. Sure his technical details are unrelated, but for SciFi to trigger the thinking that lead to them is awesome!
  - angersock 13y ago
    Hell, look what influence cyberpunk had on early internet work and culture. I'm curious what sorts of things the current twenty-somethings consumed while working on twitterscapes.
  - VLM 13y ago
    I would provide the counterexample of tech coexisting with scifi, that crude hang gliders were well within the technological reach of the ancients... however centuries of daydreaming about mechanical flapping bird wings kept them solidly on the ground. Its entirely possible "something" going FTL will eventually happen. For some peculiar value of "something" and some peculiar value of FTL. However, it will probably resemble stereotypical deus ex machina sci fi reimaginings of classic WWII battleship and aircraft carrier movies about as closely as a modern helicopter resembles a really big hummingbird. Unfortunately, much like flight, preconceived notions will probably hold back R+D in FTL until long past its possible start. Possibly if we'd just focus on "something else" then in 2013 we'd already be 50 years into practical FTL deployment.
    - moocowduckquack 13y ago
      All FTL is is the wish to travel to other worlds that we think exist in the sky. This inspiration pre-dates not just science fiction, but also science and probably writing.
DanielBMarkham 13y ago
I'd love to see some big-league X-Prize money around this. You don't even need working tech. Just demonstrate that it's possible. It would change everything. Especially if Kepler announces a boatload of stars with perhaps-habitable worlds around them.
- wikiburner 13y ago
  Yeah, that's been my billionaire fantasy for a while now. The goal line could be just a design that a panel of esteemed physicists and engineers deems workable.
ams6110 13y ago
I found the comparison of the iPhone to a "Star Trek" communicator a bit off topic. Even 40 years ago, I don't think anyone would have argued that something like an iPhone would be possible in the future. The idea didn't violate any known physics. Hand-held two-way radios were already commonplace. The fact that we achieved sufficient advances in circuit miniaturization and battery technology to build a hand-held smartphone does not in any way imply that we'll be able to build a warp drive for a spacecraft.
- dclowd9901 13y ago
  How about 60 years ago? 80? 100? At some point, if I explained to someone that I would be able to pick up a small black plate filled with electrical signals (ha!) flying around it many million times per second and use it to learn the answer to any question, talk to (AND SEE) any person in the world, in real time, how far back would you have to go to hear "that's impossible," because I guarantee you, at some point, someone thought that it was, even if not 40 years ago. Hell, I remember explaining to my dad when I was a kid that someday there would be a way to watch whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted, simply because that's what people wanted to exist. In my mind, it was an inevitability, and he felt it would never happen. This was only a scant 20 or so years ago.
  - bitwize 13y ago
    * How about 60 years ago? 80? 100? At some point, if I explained to someone that I would be able to pick up a small black plate filled with electrical signals (ha!) flying around it many million times per second and use it to learn the answer to any question, talk to (AND SEE) any person in the world, in real time, how far back would you have to go to hear "that's impossible," because I guarantee you, at some point, someone thought that it was, even if not 40 years ago.* Pretty far back. Even Dick Tracy had a similar thing. I think you would have to go back before Marconi and Tesla.
  - lmm 13y ago
    >At some point, if I explained to someone that I would be able to pick up a small black plate filled with electrical signals (ha!) flying around it many million times per second and use it to learn the answer to any question, talk to (AND SEE) any person in the world, in real time, how far back would you have to go to hear "that's impossible," because I guarantee you, at some point, someone thought that it was, even if not 40 years ago. As soon as we have real science (i.e. post-Descartes) anything mechanistic seems possible. There was probably a point at which we had insufficient knowledge to say one way or another, but this isn't the kind of thing that's ruled out by physical law in the way that FTL travel is. >Hell, I remember explaining to my dad when I was a kid that someday there would be a way to watch whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted, simply because that's what people wanted to exist. In my mind, it was an inevitability, and he felt it would never happen. This was only a scant 20 or so years ago. You were lucky that time, but it's not a reliable heuristic. Plenty of people want to be immortal, but it hasn't happened yet. (OTOH, human immortality seems a lot more plausible than FTL travel - we can't see how it would work yet, but there's no law that rules it out - which puts it in the same category I think a phone would have seemed like in Newton's day).
ufmace 13y ago
This is like 50 steps ahead of anything that's actually happening, but I have to wonder what the potential destructive power of a warp-drive style FTL drive is. If you can create a spacetime distortion strong enough to move a ship around at FTL speeds, what happens when that distortion gets anywhere near the Earth? Will it cause some sort of total destruction to an enormous area? Change the orbit of the moon, the earth, asteroids? It would have a big effect on how any ships with such a drive are used. It could be sort of like SSBNs, where only major governments have them, and they only allow extremely senior and trusted people to operate them.
- Udo 13y ago
  Yes, it would likely be very destructive - however, once you have massive, fast ships moving around the solar system the Earth will be in danger anyway, warp-tech or no. I think it's too early to speculate meaningfully about safe distances and danger levels when it comes to this technology, which as you correctly presumed doesn't exist yet. The press is hugely missing the point when they steam ahead using nonsense StarTrek analogies without an apparent clue of what's (im)possible with today's technology, but neither are the people in here getting it who are stuck lecturing each other about causality violations. This is not about speed or acceleration, or even the transmission of information. It's about bending space time. Let's not forget the enormity of that concept, but let's also admire this potentially useful shortcut that might open up for us in the far future. Current models are purely theoretical and work on a basis that is pretty similar to carrying a black hole around. Needless to say, in an age where we don't even have the energy to reach Earth orbit economically, the power requirements of such a technology are nothing but prohibitive. But even if we had enough power (and hence mass) to warp space by brute force, it would be a huge event that needs to happen far away from planets. While the general principle is interesting, I think what we lack is a more sophisticated method of modifying the properties of space time, something that works on a smaller scale and can be more easily contained. "FTL" neutrinos were interesting for this exact reason (before they sadly turned out to be a measurement error) because they would have opened a door for us to access and manipulate space itself without having to resort to enormous and ultimately wasteful energies. I sure hope we'll discover how to do that in time.
VLM 13y ago
Lets have some fun with implications of FTL other than the usual cookie cutter "scifi" narrative. There's not much new in the article, lets cook up something really new here. First of all FTL travel involving information transfer would have some interesting implications for the existing automated market high freq trading systems. Your proximity to the central clearing house no longer limits your profits. In fact the whole concept of HFT and a central clearing house and "A" individual market price might no longer have much meaning in that kind of economy. And that might be good, or bad, or not matter much. Another aspect given ridiculous paranoid military industrial complex would be anything capable in theory of eventually delivering an a-bomb would be classified and hidden until an area defense exists. In fact a rational participant in MAD would immediately nuke any MAD member who got "close" to inventing actual FTL because they would insta-win any MAD scenario, therefore bomb them before they FTL bomb us. Aside from any direct weaponization of FTL "things" materializing in .mil owned reactor cores or .mil strategic targets. Shields materializing at FTL speeds in front of the laser beam headed toward the target. FTL drones to spy on people so quickly they're out of range before the target sees they were there. Yeah I think the first country to develop FTL will probably get nuked by everyone else, unless the discoverer is legendarily neutral (the swiss?) or ... Which would suck if the USA "wins" because it means I'd be getting toasty unless every other nation is suicidal and refuses to strike. Bummer for me and the rest of the usa. So I sincerely hope this dude fails. Another interesting aspect vaguely hinted at in Ian Banks culture series is a FTL-ish universe culture by its very geography/technology inherently ends up much more libertarian than our own rapid descent into "1984". So there's interesting political issues where any group of modern "pilgrims" can at will escape the clutches of the evil empire. On the other hand small festering groups of true believers like to fanatically drink the koolaid, so I donno whats worse, one evil empire or a billion little clans of crazies all disconnected from each other. Patent something and transmit the patent FTL such that you can deliver a cease and desist at FTL speeds before a non-FTL player even gets to see they've been checkmated?
VLM 13y ago
An interesting tech startup idea. If you can transfer things/information faster than light, then link-state routing protocols no longer would have a meaning in a network containing at least some FTL links. Therefore some startup should create an internet scale distance-vector routing protocol. OSPF is dead, long live RIPv4 or whatever. Cisco would be an obvious candidate to purchase the startup. Obviously demand would depend on FTL deployment rates. I'm only half kidding, I think...
lisper 13y ago
The right way to think of this: the speed of light is not a speed limit, it's a speed reference. Everything is always moving at the speed of light through spacetime. When you "move" through space, you're not changing the magnitude of your velocity vector, only its direction. So the more you move through space, the less you move through time. If you could move through space at the speed of light your velocity through time would be zero and you would appear (to yourself) to be moving infinitely fast, or equivalently, to be everywhere at once, or (again equivalently) that the universe had no spatial extent in your direction of travel due to an infinitely large Lorenz contraction.
- TomGullen 13y ago
  I really really want to understand this, but I can't get past your third sentence. No fault of your own, just me. But if you have anything I can read that explains it better I would be grateful!
  - cgs1019 13y ago
    If you were heading due north at 100m/s, then changed your bearing to head slightly east without changing your overall speed, then you'd now be heading a bit less than 100m/s north and a bit more than 0m/s east. This is the same kind of thing, except that when "at rest" in space (relative to some fixed point) you're moving at the speed of light in a pure time direction. When you move in space, you divert some of that speed from the time direction into the space direction you're moving in. Overall you're still doing the speed of light, just in a different "direction".
  - ramidarigaz 13y ago
    Here's an illustration, if it helps: http://imgur.com/YrlKW4Z http://imgur.com/YrlKW4Z The length of the red arrow is always the same. When your velocity is zero, your "time speed" is 1.0. As you begin to move faster, the arrow tilts towards the X axis, decreasing your "time speed".
    - ars 13y ago
ColinWright 13y ago
Single page: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/23/science/faster-than-the-speed-of-light.html?_r=0&hp&pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/23/science/faster-than-the-sp...
- strathmeyer 13y ago
  Still get "YOU’VE REACHED THE LIMIT OF 10 FREE ARTICLES A MONTH."
  - ColinWright 13y ago
    Did you try following the suggestions in reply to this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6086017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6086017
lnanek2 13y ago
Article seems a little misinformed. It claims you couldn't sent a signal to the front of the ship to turn the drive off, but the whole point of the drive is that, within the bubble, nothing is going faster than the speed of light. It is the stretching and compression of space time outside the bubble that moves the ship.
s_q_b 13y ago
How does one generate the negative mass necessary to warp space-time?
russell 13y ago
I would dearly love to see FTL, but to paraphrase Fermi, where are the aliens? The first civilization that gets FTL would colonize the galaxy before any other developed. It's harder for me to accept that we are the first technological civilization than it is to believe that FTL is possible.
- kamaal 13y ago
  The universe is far too big. I mean its really really big. Even if we acquire FTL, lets say in the next decade(for assumption's sake) and start traveling. Its possible given our resources, time and required focus to achieve anything meaningful we may not even step out of milky way for several thousands of years from now. The milky way has around 100 billion stars. Searching 100 billion stars for some meaningful results is not a Joke. Even if we do divide and conquer or do the equivalent of map-reduce approach to exploring space. There is no way we can get to meaningful results even in several thousands of years from now. There fore the biggest challenge after the invention of FTL will be how quickly we can multiply spread and explore. Trust me once we get FTL technology, the biggest challenge will be the dealing with overwhelming size of universe. In fact just within a few years we may even think FTL was an easy problem to solve. Our problems will be exploring the universe within human life timescales, multiplying fast enough to occupy and explore it. So an alien civilization in some really far galaxies even with FTL technology possibly cannot search for us in the size the universe is.
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  Even given FTL, terraforming is a matter of applied planetary-scale ecology that's at least a century or two away from our current understanding. It could well be that, for instance, aliens looked at the Earth at some point, decided it was just never going to develop life as they knew it, and buggered off somewhere else.
Steuard 13y ago
I hate to put a damper on the enthusiasm about this awesome topic, but this article doesn't even contain a hint of any reason to believe that the NASA scientist in question is making progress on any sort of FTL technology. Alcubierre's work on "warp bubbles" has been known for years, but as even this article points out, there are enormous roadblocks to making it practical. For example, it requires matter with properties that have never been observed in the universe (namely, violations of the positive energy condition). If this NASA scientist thinks that he has a way to produce such matter, that would already be a bigger deal than any scientific finding in (conservatively) the past thirty years. Why hasn't he announced that? Also, Alcubierre himself is quoted in the article pointing out that no signal from inside the warp bubble can ever reach the front of the bubble to "turn it on" in the first place. (As I recall, Alcubierre's equations describe an "eternal" warp bubble, moving forever with no beginning or end.) Has the NASA team found a way around that? The article doesn't give any hint that they have. (Nor that they haven't, but as a theoretical physicist myself I'd like to think that I'd have heard of a breakthrough like that.) So what I want to know is, first, why did the NY Times decide this was worth reporting on (while leaving out any evidence that this NASA team is capable of making meaningful progress)? And second, why is NASA devoting multiple salary lines to this particular project? (There might be good answers, but they aren't evident here.)
- kamaal 13y ago
  >>For example, it requires matter with properties that have never been observed in the universe (namely, violations of the positive energy condition). At first I thought about this, but then its for us to really ponder on a simple fact. You can achieve a X goal by doing Y, but to say you can achieve only by doing Y is wrong. Scientific history is standing testimony to that. People have expressed skepticism about anything and everything, stuff like airplanes, nuclear energy, mobile phones, internet anything you name it. 50 years before they were all invented and put to use, they would have all seemed pointless directions of pursuit- yet all of it makes perfect sense today. Yet some tangential line of thinking causes a major technology break through every now and then we are left wondering what we where thinking all along.
  - 13y ago
aufreak3 13y ago
For those looking to grasp relativistic physics, checkout the game "A slower speed of light" [1] and "spacetimetravel" [2] [1] http://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of-light/ http://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of-light/ [2] http://www.spacetimetravel.org/ueberblick/ueberblick1.html http://www.spacetimetravel.org/ueberblick/ueberblick1.html
geuis 13y ago
The question that occurs to me much later is what are the naturally occurring phenomena that hint toward these physics? As far as I know, as an interested layman, is that all experiments can be equated to events happening somewhere in the universe. Everything from black holes to supernovas act like massive particle accelerators. Are their any hypothetical situations that are similar?
eli_gottlieb 13y ago
There is precisely one thing in this article that was scientifically interesting: pointing out that Nature has inflated space at apparently-superluminal speeds before.

182 points by zzzeek 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

pitiburi 13y ago

link to the article without paywall?

mike-cardwell 13y ago
I use a Firefox addon called RefControl so you can customise the referer that is sent on a per site basis. I have it configured to send the referer "http://www.google.com/" http://www.google.com/" to nytimes.com which gets rid of the paywall.
justanother 13y ago
Chrome: Right-click, Open Link in Incognito Window
- psbp 13y ago
  or clear your cookies. It's probably a good idea to delete your cookies on a daily basis.
dkl 13y ago
If you use Chome, just visit the link in a new incognito window.
01Michael10 13y ago
In Firefox --> Right "click" on the link and choose "Open Link in New Private Window".

ChuckMcM 13y ago

Kind of curious what other effects you might get if you localized a change in space-time. Given that the planet and the solar system are in motion would it deflect in the direction opposite that motion? If so could you put better numbers on how much inflation occurred post big bang?

acjohnson55 13y ago

I read about this months ago, and it's an interesting idea. I'm not a physicist, but I spent some time trying to puzzle out how this fits in with my understanding of relativity. So please, correct any misunderstandings. It's important to realize that the craft is never traveling faster than the speed of light through the space in front of it. But there's nothing in relativity that prevents objects from apparently traveling faster than the speed of light "after the fact". The farthest apart objects that we can see are significantly further apart in light-years than the estimated age of the universe, which is generally thought to be possible because of the expansion of space itself as objects were traveling apart at subluminal speed. I don't think that apparent FTL travel violates causality because it doesn't allow you to actually reach anything outside of your light cone. It took me a while to understand this, but you can't really view the light cone as something that is statically determined at a given point in time, because it depends on the geometry of space as over time. So a craft capable of distorting space just ends up with a really funky-shaped light cone that's warped wider than normal out in its direction of travel and narrower in the opposite direction as it moves (if you had a way of externally viewing the curvature of spacetime, which you don't). But one thing I could not really figure out is whether this so-called FTL travel has the potential to violate causality, because I don't fully understand how causality and FTL are related.

btilly 13y ago
But one thing I could not really figure out is whether this so-called FTL travel has the potential to violate causality, because I don't fully understand how causality and FTL are related. The relationship is that FTL in one reference frame is travel backwards in time in another. If you're able to travel FTL in 2 different inertial reference frames, then you should be able to travel backwards in time and violate causality. Note that the "should" here is important - I can think of lots of possibilities for how that should could be prevented. That said, I'd be much more optimistic about the plausibility of a proposed warp technology that only lets you go FTL relative to the implicit reference frame of the distant stars. Because that avoids any possibility of causality violation.
- shardling 13y ago

Arnor 13y ago

I can only assume death greets anyone inside this hypothetical device.

venomsnake 13y ago
And sometimes it is worth it. If someone shows plausible way to get to Pluto right now on a one way trip passing by Jupiter and Uranus - you will have no shortage of volunteers. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but sent the humanity to the moon.
- Arnor 13y ago
  Yeah, it would be worth it if you actually got to experience anything besides instantaneous death. Also, what makes you think there would be no danger to the surrounding system? Bending space and time within our own solar system sounds like a good way to mess up a pretty intricate balance. Of course, everyone else on HN can read the source code of the universe so they know how impossible any of that is...
wikiburner 13y ago
"I can only assume death greets anyone inside this hypothetical device." Ned Ludd, IV Kittyhawk - 1903
- Arnor 13y ago
  Yes, I must be a real luddite... That's why I'm on HN. because I think technology is really awful. Also, thanks for letting me know when the first aircraft was invented. Since I consider the concept of bending time and space dangerous, I must not know anything about mechanized flight.
  - ionwake 13y ago
    a tad on the defensive there dude
freehunter 13y ago

wikiburner 13y ago

This fascinates the hell out of me. It's simultaneously infuriating and awe-inspiring that something that's visible to the naked eye - stars - could be so completely out of reach for us. However, with the recent work of Drs Alcubierre and White, it's clear that cracks are forming in the Impossibility of FTL travel. That leads me to believe the FTL is inevitable, because in the history of science, whenever we begin to see how maybe something could kinda, sorta, maybe exist, it's usually just a matter of time (perhaps centuries) until we crack it.

VLM 13y ago
"because in the history of science, whenever we begin to see how maybe something could kinda, sorta, maybe exist, it's usually just a matter of time (perhaps centuries) until we crack it." Like mermaids, magic, the halting problem, ESP, and religion?
- foobarbazqux 13y ago
  To be fair, religion and the halting problem exist.
  - VLM 13y ago
    LOL you got me. More specifically, proof of any example in the general category of one, and a solution to the other. Mix and match with the above how you'd like.
    - foobarbazqux 13y ago
      Whether we can prove or disprove the existence of God before the heat death of the universe is undecidable?
      - VLM 13y ago
        To throw some fun fuel on the fire, which God, including conceptualizations that may not exist in our time yet. If a missionary religion is the correct true religion, and FTL exists anywhere in the galaxy, then by definition we should have already been contacted by missionaries and "civilized". Yet we're clearly not civilized, so at minimum at least one must not exist. So its not looking good for the FTL hopefuls. There is another fun one in that if an all powerful being exists, it seems a bit presumptuous for a mere moral to limit "it" to sublight. Therefore if the concept of FTL exists and an all powerful being exists, then FTL must exist in practice unless we're placing irrational limitations on an inherently unlimited being. Therefore if FTL can be imagined, but not implemented, that proves scientifically most conceptions of "god" do not exist; Or at least "it" is not all powerful. Unclear what impact that logic puzzler would have; probably just about none. That would make a much more fun rabble rousing article than "yet another star trek communicator / iphone analogy"

fragsworth 13y ago

> Harold G. White, a NASA physicist, gets ideas for his warp field from a Star Trek starship concept. It is ridiculous to think that physicists get any ideas from science fiction. It happens the other way around. All he did was use it in a presentation. I'm nerd raging like hell here.

zethraeus 13y ago
Why? SciFi is great fodder for the imagination. Sure his technical details are unrelated, but for SciFi to trigger the thinking that lead to them is awesome!
- angersock 13y ago
  Hell, look what influence cyberpunk had on early internet work and culture. I'm curious what sorts of things the current twenty-somethings consumed while working on twitterscapes.
- VLM 13y ago
  I would provide the counterexample of tech coexisting with scifi, that crude hang gliders were well within the technological reach of the ancients... however centuries of daydreaming about mechanical flapping bird wings kept them solidly on the ground. Its entirely possible "something" going FTL will eventually happen. For some peculiar value of "something" and some peculiar value of FTL. However, it will probably resemble stereotypical deus ex machina sci fi reimaginings of classic WWII battleship and aircraft carrier movies about as closely as a modern helicopter resembles a really big hummingbird. Unfortunately, much like flight, preconceived notions will probably hold back R+D in FTL until long past its possible start. Possibly if we'd just focus on "something else" then in 2013 we'd already be 50 years into practical FTL deployment.
  - moocowduckquack 13y ago
    All FTL is is the wish to travel to other worlds that we think exist in the sky. This inspiration pre-dates not just science fiction, but also science and probably writing.

DanielBMarkham 13y ago

I'd love to see some big-league X-Prize money around this. You don't even need working tech. Just demonstrate that it's possible. It would change everything. Especially if Kepler announces a boatload of stars with perhaps-habitable worlds around them.

wikiburner 13y ago
Yeah, that's been my billionaire fantasy for a while now. The goal line could be just a design that a panel of esteemed physicists and engineers deems workable.

ams6110 13y ago

I found the comparison of the iPhone to a "Star Trek" communicator a bit off topic. Even 40 years ago, I don't think anyone would have argued that something like an iPhone would be possible in the future. The idea didn't violate any known physics. Hand-held two-way radios were already commonplace. The fact that we achieved sufficient advances in circuit miniaturization and battery technology to build a hand-held smartphone does not in any way imply that we'll be able to build a warp drive for a spacecraft.

dclowd9901 13y ago
How about 60 years ago? 80? 100? At some point, if I explained to someone that I would be able to pick up a small black plate filled with electrical signals (ha!) flying around it many million times per second and use it to learn the answer to any question, talk to (AND SEE) any person in the world, in real time, how far back would you have to go to hear "that's impossible," because I guarantee you, at some point, someone thought that it was, even if not 40 years ago. Hell, I remember explaining to my dad when I was a kid that someday there would be a way to watch whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted, simply because that's what people wanted to exist. In my mind, it was an inevitability, and he felt it would never happen. This was only a scant 20 or so years ago.
- bitwize 13y ago
  * How about 60 years ago? 80? 100? At some point, if I explained to someone that I would be able to pick up a small black plate filled with electrical signals (ha!) flying around it many million times per second and use it to learn the answer to any question, talk to (AND SEE) any person in the world, in real time, how far back would you have to go to hear "that's impossible," because I guarantee you, at some point, someone thought that it was, even if not 40 years ago.* Pretty far back. Even Dick Tracy had a similar thing. I think you would have to go back before Marconi and Tesla.
- lmm 13y ago
  >At some point, if I explained to someone that I would be able to pick up a small black plate filled with electrical signals (ha!) flying around it many million times per second and use it to learn the answer to any question, talk to (AND SEE) any person in the world, in real time, how far back would you have to go to hear "that's impossible," because I guarantee you, at some point, someone thought that it was, even if not 40 years ago. As soon as we have real science (i.e. post-Descartes) anything mechanistic seems possible. There was probably a point at which we had insufficient knowledge to say one way or another, but this isn't the kind of thing that's ruled out by physical law in the way that FTL travel is. >Hell, I remember explaining to my dad when I was a kid that someday there would be a way to watch whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted, simply because that's what people wanted to exist. In my mind, it was an inevitability, and he felt it would never happen. This was only a scant 20 or so years ago. You were lucky that time, but it's not a reliable heuristic. Plenty of people want to be immortal, but it hasn't happened yet. (OTOH, human immortality seems a lot more plausible than FTL travel - we can't see how it would work yet, but there's no law that rules it out - which puts it in the same category I think a phone would have seemed like in Newton's day).

ufmace 13y ago

This is like 50 steps ahead of anything that's actually happening, but I have to wonder what the potential destructive power of a warp-drive style FTL drive is. If you can create a spacetime distortion strong enough to move a ship around at FTL speeds, what happens when that distortion gets anywhere near the Earth? Will it cause some sort of total destruction to an enormous area? Change the orbit of the moon, the earth, asteroids? It would have a big effect on how any ships with such a drive are used. It could be sort of like SSBNs, where only major governments have them, and they only allow extremely senior and trusted people to operate them.

Udo 13y ago
Yes, it would likely be very destructive - however, once you have massive, fast ships moving around the solar system the Earth will be in danger anyway, warp-tech or no. I think it's too early to speculate meaningfully about safe distances and danger levels when it comes to this technology, which as you correctly presumed doesn't exist yet. The press is hugely missing the point when they steam ahead using nonsense StarTrek analogies without an apparent clue of what's (im)possible with today's technology, but neither are the people in here getting it who are stuck lecturing each other about causality violations. This is not about speed or acceleration, or even the transmission of information. It's about bending space time. Let's not forget the enormity of that concept, but let's also admire this potentially useful shortcut that might open up for us in the far future. Current models are purely theoretical and work on a basis that is pretty similar to carrying a black hole around. Needless to say, in an age where we don't even have the energy to reach Earth orbit economically, the power requirements of such a technology are nothing but prohibitive. But even if we had enough power (and hence mass) to warp space by brute force, it would be a huge event that needs to happen far away from planets. While the general principle is interesting, I think what we lack is a more sophisticated method of modifying the properties of space time, something that works on a smaller scale and can be more easily contained. "FTL" neutrinos were interesting for this exact reason (before they sadly turned out to be a measurement error) because they would have opened a door for us to access and manipulate space itself without having to resort to enormous and ultimately wasteful energies. I sure hope we'll discover how to do that in time.

VLM 13y ago

Lets have some fun with implications of FTL other than the usual cookie cutter "scifi" narrative. There's not much new in the article, lets cook up something really new here. First of all FTL travel involving information transfer would have some interesting implications for the existing automated market high freq trading systems. Your proximity to the central clearing house no longer limits your profits. In fact the whole concept of HFT and a central clearing house and "A" individual market price might no longer have much meaning in that kind of economy. And that might be good, or bad, or not matter much. Another aspect given ridiculous paranoid military industrial complex would be anything capable in theory of eventually delivering an a-bomb would be classified and hidden until an area defense exists. In fact a rational participant in MAD would immediately nuke any MAD member who got "close" to inventing actual FTL because they would insta-win any MAD scenario, therefore bomb them before they FTL bomb us. Aside from any direct weaponization of FTL "things" materializing in .mil owned reactor cores or .mil strategic targets. Shields materializing at FTL speeds in front of the laser beam headed toward the target. FTL drones to spy on people so quickly they're out of range before the target sees they were there. Yeah I think the first country to develop FTL will probably get nuked by everyone else, unless the discoverer is legendarily neutral (the swiss?) or ... Which would suck if the USA "wins" because it means I'd be getting toasty unless every other nation is suicidal and refuses to strike. Bummer for me and the rest of the usa. So I sincerely hope this dude fails. Another interesting aspect vaguely hinted at in Ian Banks culture series is a FTL-ish universe culture by its very geography/technology inherently ends up much more libertarian than our own rapid descent into "1984". So there's interesting political issues where any group of modern "pilgrims" can at will escape the clutches of the evil empire. On the other hand small festering groups of true believers like to fanatically drink the koolaid, so I donno whats worse, one evil empire or a billion little clans of crazies all disconnected from each other. Patent something and transmit the patent FTL such that you can deliver a cease and desist at FTL speeds before a non-FTL player even gets to see they've been checkmated?

VLM 13y ago

An interesting tech startup idea. If you can transfer things/information faster than light, then link-state routing protocols no longer would have a meaning in a network containing at least some FTL links. Therefore some startup should create an internet scale distance-vector routing protocol. OSPF is dead, long live RIPv4 or whatever. Cisco would be an obvious candidate to purchase the startup. Obviously demand would depend on FTL deployment rates. I'm only half kidding, I think...

lisper 13y ago

The right way to think of this: the speed of light is not a speed limit, it's a speed reference. Everything is always moving at the speed of light through spacetime. When you "move" through space, you're not changing the magnitude of your velocity vector, only its direction. So the more you move through space, the less you move through time. If you could move through space at the speed of light your velocity through time would be zero and you would appear (to yourself) to be moving infinitely fast, or equivalently, to be everywhere at once, or (again equivalently) that the universe had no spatial extent in your direction of travel due to an infinitely large Lorenz contraction.

TomGullen 13y ago
I really really want to understand this, but I can't get past your third sentence. No fault of your own, just me. But if you have anything I can read that explains it better I would be grateful!
- cgs1019 13y ago
  If you were heading due north at 100m/s, then changed your bearing to head slightly east without changing your overall speed, then you'd now be heading a bit less than 100m/s north and a bit more than 0m/s east. This is the same kind of thing, except that when "at rest" in space (relative to some fixed point) you're moving at the speed of light in a pure time direction. When you move in space, you divert some of that speed from the time direction into the space direction you're moving in. Overall you're still doing the speed of light, just in a different "direction".
- ramidarigaz 13y ago
  Here's an illustration, if it helps: http://imgur.com/YrlKW4Z http://imgur.com/YrlKW4Z The length of the red arrow is always the same. When your velocity is zero, your "time speed" is 1.0. As you begin to move faster, the arrow tilts towards the X axis, decreasing your "time speed".
  - ars 13y ago

ColinWright 13y ago

Single page: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/23/science/faster-than-the-speed-of-light.html?_r=0&hp&pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/23/science/faster-than-the-sp...

strathmeyer 13y ago
Still get "YOU’VE REACHED THE LIMIT OF 10 FREE ARTICLES A MONTH."
- ColinWright 13y ago
  Did you try following the suggestions in reply to this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6086017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6086017

lnanek2 13y ago

Article seems a little misinformed. It claims you couldn't sent a signal to the front of the ship to turn the drive off, but the whole point of the drive is that, within the bubble, nothing is going faster than the speed of light. It is the stretching and compression of space time outside the bubble that moves the ship.

s_q_b 13y ago

How does one generate the negative mass necessary to warp space-time?

russell 13y ago

I would dearly love to see FTL, but to paraphrase Fermi, where are the aliens? The first civilization that gets FTL would colonize the galaxy before any other developed. It's harder for me to accept that we are the first technological civilization than it is to believe that FTL is possible.

kamaal 13y ago
The universe is far too big. I mean its really really big. Even if we acquire FTL, lets say in the next decade(for assumption's sake) and start traveling. Its possible given our resources, time and required focus to achieve anything meaningful we may not even step out of milky way for several thousands of years from now. The milky way has around 100 billion stars. Searching 100 billion stars for some meaningful results is not a Joke. Even if we do divide and conquer or do the equivalent of map-reduce approach to exploring space. There is no way we can get to meaningful results even in several thousands of years from now. There fore the biggest challenge after the invention of FTL will be how quickly we can multiply spread and explore. Trust me once we get FTL technology, the biggest challenge will be the dealing with overwhelming size of universe. In fact just within a few years we may even think FTL was an easy problem to solve. Our problems will be exploring the universe within human life timescales, multiplying fast enough to occupy and explore it. So an alien civilization in some really far galaxies even with FTL technology possibly cannot search for us in the size the universe is.
eli_gottlieb 13y ago
Even given FTL, terraforming is a matter of applied planetary-scale ecology that's at least a century or two away from our current understanding. It could well be that, for instance, aliens looked at the Earth at some point, decided it was just never going to develop life as they knew it, and buggered off somewhere else.

Steuard 13y ago

I hate to put a damper on the enthusiasm about this awesome topic, but this article doesn't even contain a hint of any reason to believe that the NASA scientist in question is making progress on any sort of FTL technology. Alcubierre's work on "warp bubbles" has been known for years, but as even this article points out, there are enormous roadblocks to making it practical. For example, it requires matter with properties that have never been observed in the universe (namely, violations of the positive energy condition). If this NASA scientist thinks that he has a way to produce such matter, that would already be a bigger deal than any scientific finding in (conservatively) the past thirty years. Why hasn't he announced that? Also, Alcubierre himself is quoted in the article pointing out that no signal from inside the warp bubble can ever reach the front of the bubble to "turn it on" in the first place. (As I recall, Alcubierre's equations describe an "eternal" warp bubble, moving forever with no beginning or end.) Has the NASA team found a way around that? The article doesn't give any hint that they have. (Nor that they haven't, but as a theoretical physicist myself I'd like to think that I'd have heard of a breakthrough like that.) So what I want to know is, first, why did the NY Times decide this was worth reporting on (while leaving out any evidence that this NASA team is capable of making meaningful progress)? And second, why is NASA devoting multiple salary lines to this particular project? (There might be good answers, but they aren't evident here.)

kamaal 13y ago
>>For example, it requires matter with properties that have never been observed in the universe (namely, violations of the positive energy condition). At first I thought about this, but then its for us to really ponder on a simple fact. You can achieve a X goal by doing Y, but to say you can achieve only by doing Y is wrong. Scientific history is standing testimony to that. People have expressed skepticism about anything and everything, stuff like airplanes, nuclear energy, mobile phones, internet anything you name it. 50 years before they were all invented and put to use, they would have all seemed pointless directions of pursuit- yet all of it makes perfect sense today. Yet some tangential line of thinking causes a major technology break through every now and then we are left wondering what we where thinking all along.
- 13y ago

aufreak3 13y ago

For those looking to grasp relativistic physics, checkout the game "A slower speed of light" [1] and "spacetimetravel" [2] [1] http://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of-light/ http://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of-light/ [2] http://www.spacetimetravel.org/ueberblick/ueberblick1.html http://www.spacetimetravel.org/ueberblick/ueberblick1.html

geuis 13y ago

The question that occurs to me much later is what are the naturally occurring phenomena that hint toward these physics? As far as I know, as an interested layman, is that all experiments can be equated to events happening somewhere in the universe. Everything from black holes to supernovas act like massive particle accelerators. Are their any hypothetical situations that are similar?

eli_gottlieb 13y ago

There is precisely one thing in this article that was scientifically interesting: pointing out that Nature has inflated space at apparently-superluminal speeds before.