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 traveled 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. If a different beam of light was sent from earth to the North Star and did go through the worm hole with you, there is no way you could outrun it. As another example, there are some distant stars in the universe that are moving away from each other at a speed faster than light. At that speed, astronauts could reach other star systems in just a few years, allowing humanity to colonise faraway planets.
Current rocket technology would take roughly 6, years to reach Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our Sun. Dr Lentz said he cooked up his theory after analysing existing research and discovered gaps in previous warp drive studies.
The astrophysicist said he would now focus his efforts on cooking up a workable version of the technology. Then we can talk about building the first prototypes. It was based on the assumption that, in this fictional world, the Colonials had merged theories of electromagnetism and gravity, such that if you could create a very intense electromagnetic field, it would be functionally equivalent to an intense gravitational field capable of warping spacetime.
Turning that ingenious fiction into a viable reality is another matter altogether. If we really want to get speculative, Olum suggests FTL travel would be possible if exotic concepts, like those that emerge from superstring theory, prove to be correct.
Olum explains that, hypothetically, one could take a shortcut through the bulk, thereby arriving at your destination sooner than if you had travelled along your four-dimensional surface, or brane short for membrane as it is known. Even then, there is a catch.
So one would need to invent a machine that could scan an object and transmit the information in the form of gravitons to a second machine on the other end which would then reconstruct that object — shades of teleportation, only with gravitons.
Considering we have yet to observe gravitons in our most powerful accelerators, and the current record for teleporting small clouds of atoms is the relatively non-Cylon-troubling distance of kilometres 88 miles , this scenario must also remain firmly in the realm of science fiction, at least for now. Science advances, but it does so slowly, at a pace nowhere near the speed of light. If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on Future, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.
Will We Ever? Will we ever… travel faster than the speed of light? Share using Email.
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