Faster-Than-Light Travel May Be Possible After All

Posted by Alcyone _Featured_, Sci-Tech Sunday, October 14th, 2012

According to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, light traveling in a vacuum is the universal speed limit. But scientists love to try and break rules—and now a tweaked version of Einstein’s equations suggests that faster-than-light travel might just be possible.

Out with the old…

Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity was first published way back in 1905. It’s a theory built on Galileo’s suggestion that all uniform motion is relative—essentially that there can never be an absolute state of rest, because it’s always possible to view a problem from a different frame of reference and see a stationary object as moving.

Einstein extended the theory well beyond Galileo’s, and one crucial upshot was that the speed of light is the same for all inertial observers, regardless of where they are or how they’re moving. In other words, the speed of light can’t be broken.

… in with the new?

Now, a team of scientists from the University of Adelaide has published a host of formulae that extend Einstein’s work—and suggest that modified versions of his old equations predict that traveling beyond the speed of light is a theoretical possibility. The new work is based on all the same old principles used by Einstein, but they’re extended to include a hypothetical infinite velocity.

Importantly, they’ve manged to extend the theory without recourse to exotic physics or imaginary masses, which is a favored trick among physicists trying to sneak through a faster-than-light argument. Instead, they’ve approached the problem as mathematicians. James Hill, one of the researchers, explained to Cosmos:

“Essentially it sort of breaks the world up into two parts, we’ve got our Universe and then there is this place where everything is going faster than the speed of light and it could well be the key to understanding things like black holes and colliding galaxies.”

In other words, the theory isn’t suddenly going to see a host of Earth-bound experimentsrevealing particles that zip through the air faster than light, nor will it produce a warp drive (at any rate, NASA is already working on that). It could, however, begin to explain some of the complex physical phenomena we’re yet to get a proper grip on—such as dark energy and black holes—because conventional laws of physics begin to break down there anyway.