Matt Peckham begins his article at Time.com with a scene from the movie Contact and quickly reminds us that faster-than-light travel--what Star Trek...
Category: relativity
Matt Peckham begins his article at Time.com with a scene from the movie Contact and quickly reminds us that faster-than-light travel--what Star Trek called warp drive--is impossible. "Nothing can travel faster than light, right? To do so would violate the special theory of relativity, which stipulates that you’d need an infinite amount of energy to accelerate a particle with mass to light speed."
As Peckham points out, that's almost true. Eighteen years ago, the physicist Miguel Alcubierre came up with the idea that a "warp bubble" could be created by bending spacetime, moving space around the spacecraft so that it actually gets where it's going at a speed faster than that of light. There was one tiny detail: You would need to convert all the mass of Jupiter to energy...
Reports a few weeks ago that CERN researchers had measured neutrinos traveling...
Reports a few weeks ago that CERN researchers had measured neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light have been exaggerated in many outlets. One columnist in the small-town daily where I live even stated it as fact that the old light-speed limit had been debunked. She was arguing how you shouldn't believe everything scientists say is true, especially global warming.
As responsible articles made clear back then, even the CERN researchers were doubtful of their finding and were not prepared to believe they had made no errors.
Interestingly at least two college dailies have interviewed their local scientists on the speedy neutrino matter.
The MIT student paper, The Tech, has a piece by ...
©2010 Knight Science Journalism at MIT. All Rights Reserved.