Extending Einstein’s theory beyond light speed
October 11, 2012
Einstein’s relativity (credit: Johnstone/Wikimedia Commons)
University of Adelaide applied mathematicians have extended Einstein’s theory of special relativity to work beyond the speed of light.
Einstein’s theory holds that nothing could move faster than the speed of light, but Professor Jim Hill and Dr Barry Cox in the University’s School of Mathematical Sciences have developed new formulas that allow for travel beyond this limit.
Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity explains how motion and speed is always relative to the observer’s frame of reference. The theory connects measurements of the same physical incident viewed from these different points in a way that depends on the relative velocity of the two observers.
“Our approach is a natural and logical extension of the Einstein Theory of Special Relativity, and produces anticipated formulae without the need for imaginary numbers or complicated physics.”
The research has been published in the prestigious Proceedings of the Royal Society A in a paper, ‘Einstein’s special relativity beyond the speed of light’. Their formulas extend special relativity to a situation where the relative velocity can be infinite, and can be used to describe motion at speeds faster than light.
“We are mathematicians, not physicists, so we’ve approached this problem from a theoretical mathematical perspective,” said Dr Cox. “Should it, however, be proven that motion faster than light is possible, then that would be game changing.
“Our paper doesn’t try and explain how this could be achieved, just how equations of motion might operate in such regimes.”
Comments (34)
by John
Not the “theory of special relativity” but “special theory of relativity”. It’s not the relativity that is special, it’s the theory (as opposed to general theory of relativity).
by Jim Mooney
We all love Einstein but we all hate that C-limit. It makes for lousy sci-fi ;’)
by Ralph Dratman
Unless there are unexplained experimental observations in this realm – and I don’t think there are — how could a modified Special Theory be made to fit with the rest of physics? Or maybe the new theory might predict unanticipated experimental results.
by Sno
Actually, if you follow the links, they explain that the speed of light is like a barrier or singularity, and they can’t predict anything there (for particles with a mass that is), but what they did basically is they kept applying einstein’s formulas to speeds above the speed of light, and the thing is, previous work on the subject said that anything with a mass going faster than light is a tachyon, and it’s mass has to be imaginary. Here, they apparently found a way to remove the “imaginary” part of the mass.
If i understand this correctly that is.
by NoOneEagle
When you start to “understand” that frequency has no limits, then you can soon see what dark energy is. Let me explain…
Gyroscopic tuning is a force that is ignored time and time again in favor of gravity, a force proportional to mass. People will state over and over again that an object as far out as Uranus in our solar system has very little effect on Earth even to the point that many scholars have stated that the gravitational pull is so minimal at that distance that if Uranus disappeared that the gravitational force would have no effect on Earth but this is a misnomer. In a gyroscopically tuned system, if has all kinds of effects, just like throwing a weight off a tire on your car. This small mass has little to do with the rest of the wheel while “at rest” but when the gyroscopic nature of the tire is spinning, the loss of this small mass causes and imbalance in which you can feel a wobble and you get noted wear on the tread of your tire. Even in the gyroscopic nature of an atom, if you add but one electron to the element of hydrogen and gyroscopically tune it to another frequency, you produce a new element and will produce helium with different properties yet all is done through frequency and tuning a gyroscopic system.
A gyroscopically tuned system on the scale of a galaxy has energies that are thought to be dark energy but in fact are just misunderstood and can be explained by very simple concepts.
If you have a system of frequency that moves faster than the speed of light, it will produce energies that can’t be seen or understood but will produce forces that are yet not understood because of the lack of realization of such a stance of faster than the speed of light concepts that most people are taught.
by Sno
I think you’re saying a lot of nonsense. High frequencies are limited in wavelengths by the planck length. And frequency has nothing to do with speed. Two particles moving towards each other, at 0.99c each relatively to an observer, won’t be traveling at 1.98c relatively to each other. Just a bit closer to C (the same speed as if one particle was not moving and the other was given twice the energy required to reach 0.99c). Relativity is often non-intuitive, but it works experimentally. Also, have you ever heard of photons ? Light doesn’t disperse “fractally”, there are simply less and less photons per area as you move farther, until you only receive one photon once in a while. The intensity is related to the flux of photons, not to the frequency, and redshift has nothing to do with it. If you’re interested in science, i urge you to read a couple books before sharing your grandiose theories that make no sense to anyone with basic knowledge.
by NoOneEagle
In an “expanding Universe” as perceived today through the Hubble Constant, if you plugged in all the data of the speed of expansion and the location of every object in the cosmos, you will soon find out that nothing would be in our vicinity of the cosmos because of this expansion after 14 billion years, the night sky would be blank. We wouldn’t have galaxies crashing into each other but instead, ALL galaxies would be so far from our sight that we wouldn’t be able to see them and the galaxies themselves wouldn’t be congealing together in the way they do in an expanding universe.
by NoOneEagle
I also “challenge” the Hubble Constant! Here’s why…
In the Hubble constant, the ‘value’ of light is said to never diminish so the red shift in the Hubble Constant is said to be the result of light speeding away from us and at some point the increasing speed is faster than c… If one joule of light is flashed in a perfect vacuum of space with ‘nothing’ in said universe and you only measure but one point out away from the flash, you will not measure one joule but just a tiny portion of the energy used in the initial flash. Say you move out away from the initial flash one lightyear and measure every point surrounding the initial flash and add up all the energy, then you will measure one joule but just one point of energy measured from the flash will only be a small fraction of the original energy and if you move further out away from the initial flash, oh say, 14 billion light years, then every point 14 billion light years away can be added up to equal the initial one joule of energy used but at just one point 14 billion years away, the energy will be spread out so thin that it will show a red shift even if you are NOT moving away from the flash but are at a stationary point exactly 14 billion light years away from the initial flash. This tells us that light fractalizes into smaller and smaller points as the ‘wave’ moves out away from the source and at any point 14 billion light-years away, the light can still be seen but will show a loss in energy due to it’s fractorlization or stretching of the wave as it moves out in every direction. So when the Hubble Constant takes into account that light does NOT loose energy, it is based on the concept that the light source keeps emitting new energy and ignores the light expanding into the universe… So in reason of lights ‘expanding’ quality versus an expanding universe, through the Hubble Constant it is said that the Red Shift shows an expanding universe while in fact all it is, is light “expanding” into the universe, not that the universe is expanding.
by NoOneEagle
If something is moving faster than the speed of light, you will not be able to physically observe it, so it seems to disappear. Imagine if you are riding on a particle in a particle accelerator that was going near the speed of light and looking back at a particle that was going in the opposite direction at near the speed of light, that other particle would be traveling almost at twice the speed of light ‘away from you’ and you would never receive the light from that particle and would never see it because in this continuum, the light frequency would not allow the light to travel any faster than c so the particle would seem to not exist because the particle would be traveling twice the speed of light away from you. It’s said that information cannot be transferred in this fashion but if these two particles travel in a circle, as with a particle accelerator, then information is transferred and the resulting crash of these two particles will produce frequencies at or around twice the speed of light but we can only imagine what these frequencies do because we will never be able to see or detect them because they will be moving faster than what we can see or measure.
by NoOneEagle
Send one particle in one direction in a particle accelerator and another in the opposite direction and crash them into each other at 2c and they see the result of speeds of almost twice the speed of light… I’ve been saying this for some time now. One can imagine the speed of light as being a frequency without such experimentation, there is no limit to frequency just as there is no limit to the math when you add yet another number to a sequence.
by A Raelain View
Send one particle in one direction in a particle accelerator and another in the opposite direction and crash them into each other at 2c and they see the result of speeds of almost twice the speed of light… I’ve been saying this for some time now. One can imagine the speed of light as being a frequency without such experimentation, there is no limit to frequency just as there is no limit to the math when you add yet another number to a sequence.
If something is moving faster than the speed of light, you will not be able to physically observe it, so it seems to disappear. Imagine if you are riding on a particle in a particle accelerator that was going near the speed of light and looking back at a particle that was going in the opposite direction at near the speed of light, that other particle would be traveling almost at twice the speed of light ‘away from you’ and you would never receive the light from that particle and would never see it because in this continuum, the light frequency would not allow the light to travel any faster than c so the particle would seem to not exist because the particle would be traveling twice the speed of light away from you. It’s said that information cannot be transferred in this fashion but if these two particles travel in a circle, as with a particle accelerator, then information is transferred and the resulting crash of these two particles will produce frequencies at or around twice the speed of light but we can only imagine what these frequencies do because we will never be able to see or detect them because they will be moving faster than what we can see or measure.
by eldras
Important for me to realize a scientific law is the best approximation we can make @ the time and is not absolute ‘VERITAS’ (the ambitious maxim of Harvard Law).
Einstein is quoted saying he is trying to capture reality in a wildly speculativeive way’.
That doesn’t mean our laws are useless , just better approximation to reality often follow.
We deal with only 4% of our universe and think by M Theory/Multiverse Theory our universe is one of infinite bubbles on infinitely long branes.
As we measure quantum scales more accurately speed and position may become amenable (Einstein brought hitherto unmeasurable chaos of Br9ownian motion into measurement in his famous 1905 paper.
But we need SOME reference to reality in maths when applied to physics.
I think it impossible to ever know a significant fraction of the universe.
eldras
-an unabashed Einsteinist!
by Nyk
Information cannot move faster than light, otherwise it would lead to logical paradoxes. Einstein’s Relativity is fine the way it is.
by Lord Penguin
Information traveling faster than the speed of light doesn’t create logical paradoxes, only ones relating to general relativity. If relativity can be changed so that objects can travel at relative speeds faster than the speed of light, the paradoxes no longer apply. It’s not like the invention of the telegram created logical paradoxes, when before information could only practically travel at the speed of sound between humans. Like every scientific discovery, relativity is open to change.
by Sno
I feel like this is very relevant to anyone who wants to build warp drives, because a FTL warp bubble is basically a tachyon, and this math could be critical in understanding how to make one without ending up with imaginary mass.
by Mark
I wonder how the warp drive experiments at NASA are working out.
by snake0
The whole ‘nothing can travel faster than the speed of light’ paradigm always seemed arbitrary to me anyway. If the gravitational pull of a black hole is enough to warp the conventional dimensions of space, its only a matter of time until humans figure out a way to do it too.
by Turk
The body’s internal speed constant can be represented by the time it takes a Taco Bell meal to be “inhaled” and “exhaled”. Once someone figures out how to move faster than my digestive system when eating a Chalupa I think we will be in business for interstellar travel.
by Marcos Marin
you’d certainly stink that bad.
by melajara
I trust your thrust ;-)
by GAUSS
Gnarly
by Bri
Don’t stand behind him when they step on the gas!
by Marcos Marin
Mwahaha!! Astrophysicists already have trouble admitting they can only possibly know a couple % of the universe (if that much). Good luck making them admit even those scraps are mostly completely wrong.
by clains
Feels more like a delicious strawberry pastille to me.
by Bri
Now your really making me hungry! Where’s the beef!!!
by melajara
You have some more details including a nice graph of relative velocities from the point of view of 2 observers of a moving particle here http://phys.org/news/2012-10-physicists-special-relativity.html
Note that the proposed extensions to the Lorentz transformation break down at c making c a true singularity, then how can we accelerate beyond c without reaching c before? Puzzling
by Marcos Marin
The alternative is to have everything else “slow down”, which is a stupid suggestion and doesn’t even solve the problem. It is enough for discovery channel pseudo-intellectuals though hahahaha
by Bob Vasquez
Yeah, me too. I feel like I just ate some sorta food at McDonald’s.
by Marcos Marin
If in Paris you can get a lot more detail… in your face.
by Bri
Either way, it’s still a rip off.
by Marcos Marin
Yes, you’d be ripped off too =) specially if your glassed are attached to your skull, and if not, they would be afterwards…
by Marcos Marin
correction: “Glasses”
LOL, Bri, as soon as I try to reply to you, my posts are pended for approval. How do you feel being babysited?
by Bri
Why do you think Amaras a Blue Meanie ! She means well, it’s just us boys will be boys, and will wrestle in the school yard. I think my name should be ” Awaiting Aproval”. That would mess with their heads. By the way, the other day you mentioned being in sync. I checked out a recent comment and you weren’t on the list. When I finished my response and went back to the list, you were remarking how we were in sync. Hey we should check out the Vulcan mind meld. You know the deal, with the funky hand gestures on the face. Here we go, I’m reaching out my hands and you do the same…………. Our minds……. Are one …… Our …… Thoughts…., are one……………………. Nice place you got here. Check out the foxy frauline!!!!!….. Woooooow!!! What a video collection!!!! Let’s see what cha got….. Hmmmmm…… You whatch this stuff??? …. What tunes you got in here…… Jammmin!!!!! Nice techno beat!!!! Oooops gotta go. Of course you know, feel free to take a swing whenever. Just keeps me on my toes!
by Bri
A little more detail would be nice. I feel like I just ate some sorta food at Taco bell.