Traveling at Near Light Speed. What Would it Look Like?

How many times have we seen the light speed effect in the movies or on TV?  You know, the cool streaming stars of Star Trek and Star Wars.  But honestly, what would it look like if you were say, looking out a front view port.  

Well what I think is that the closer you get to C the narrower your point of view.  By this I mean is an effect like going from a wide angle lens to a telephoto at full extension.  One gives you a very wide view field and the other very narrow.  At a significant percentage of C your complete view of the universe would be a narrow point of light straight ahead.  But then that's what I have been able to garner from reading.  I came across the very same question in a recent Dvice article. 

Physics students at the University of Leicester decided to take on the task and do the math and this is what they came up with as you approach light speed and look out a view port:

Humm, not so far off!  But exactly what are we looking at.   Well in a nutshell the Doppler Effect.  Matter of fact this shows that light DOES have properties that are wave like.  But I digress  as you travel, light waves ahead of you are compressed, this would "narrow" the field of view  (and moves the frequency into the blue spectrum and then think about light behind you....and how we know the universe is expanding...hummm) of course as you get within a few thousands of a percentage the doppler would compress the light well past what the human eye can detect so there is a point where everything is completely dark. 

IO9 article

    

Relativistic Baseball!

Randall "XKCD" Munroe has started a new blog in the "what if" venue which I really find entertaining. He is taking what if questions and treating them as reasonable questions. The first question was, what would a pitch be like if the pitcher could throw at or near C.

Here is a short piece of the response I found in Boing Boing:

• The ball is going so fast that everything else is practically stationary. Even the molecules in the air are stationary. Air molecules vibrate back and forth at a few hundred miles per hour, but the ball is moving through them at 600 million miles per hour. This means that as far as the ball is concerned, they’re just hanging there, frozen.
• The ideas of aerodynamics don’t apply here. Normally, air would flow around anything moving through it. But the air molecules in front of this ball don’t have time to be jostled out of the way. The ball smacks into them hard that the atoms in the air molecules actually fuse with the atoms in the ball’s surface. Each collision releases a burst of gamma rays and scattered particles. fusion illustration fusion zone of baseball
• These gamma rays and debris expand outward in a bubble centered on the pitcher’s mound. They start to tear apart the molecules in the air, ripping the electrons from the nuclei and turning the air in the stadium into an expanding bubble of incandescent plasma. The wall of this bubble approaches the batter at about the speed of light—only slightly ahead of the ball itself.

Boy does that sound like the most frightening game you ever heard of?  First pitch, top of the first...one pitch and the whole stadium is reduced to slag from the fusion blast!  SWEET!

Warp Drive Would Destroy Its Destination

  

            

                                                     Alcubierre drive

Wow, this could lead to someone having a very bad day. I was reading on the Dvice blog that well say we actually built an FTL drive that really could take a craft trans-light - it seems that anything at your destination would gamma ray and high energy particle blasted into oblivion. Ouch.

A team at the University of Sydney in Australia looked at a warp drive concept proposed by theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre. As you might remember this is the system where the ship would be enclosed in a "bubble" of negative energy that would warp space ahead and behind the ship. Ahead, space/time would be compressed allowing the ship to "skip" across the tops of the "folds", and stretched out behind the ship. In theory, once activated the drive would require little energy because space/time itself would "push" against the ship, moving it forward.

However as we have seen with items in the universe that are moving away, there is a red shift. The opposite is true as well, objects moving towards us will blue shift. At trans-light speeds the blue shift would be incredible. The blue shift would come from particles that were pushed along in front of the ship. These high energy particles would emit massive amounts of gamma radiation. Plus there seems to be no limit to how much energy would be built up, the farther you travel the more energy from high energy particles would be released. The result would be very much like a huge GRB very near by. Everything at the destination would be blasted into oblivion.

Here is the link to the Universe Today article
Click picture for the WIKI on the

Alcubierre drive

Universal Speed Limit Broken?

186,282 miles per second isn't just a good idea....it's the law!

European physicists are saying that the universally accepted speed limit of the cosmos, the speed of a photo in vacuum, better known as the speed of light - may in fact not be the fastest speed possible. A European team of physicists have stated that they had measured neutrinos particles which test results show that they traveled around 3.75 miles per second faster than the velocity of light.

The neutrinos had been measured along a 454-mile trajectory between CERN labs in Switzerland and a laboratory in Italy. Under extreme peer pressure the scientists altered the experiment in a way to cancel out structures in the beam that could have affected the out come. This way the scientists could identify individual particles when they were fired and when they arrived at their destination. But once again the results were confirmed.

Of course the results still needed to pass peer review if for no other reason than the experiment appears to negate a speed that literally thousands of other scientists have tested and accept as the universal constant of speed meaning the speed of light.


Speed of light Wiki

Daily Galaxy Article

Slow Light - is it possible? What are the uses?

I remember reading Bob Shaw's 1968 short story "Light of Other Days many years ago about Slow Light. In this story all the windows in the house were made of slow glass. This glass was made of a material that slowed light to a crawl. The light that entered it on one side took years to pass through. The thought being that you would set out a sheet of slow glass in a picturesque local for a number of years and then install them in frames that would act as windows. The idea just blew me away.

Is it possible? Very likely... Lets look at light. the posted speed limit for light is 300,000km a second. But that is only in a complete vacuum. In real life light travels MUCH slower. What slows light down? Well any ole atom will do the trick. An atom will absorb a photon and re-emit it, imparting a delay. This is called the absorption/re-emission cycle. Now I hear the screams "photon HAVE to travel at C!" and in truth the "slowing" is just an illusion because once emitted, the photon travels again at C until it hits another atom. But the delay...that is not an illusion.

What really gets weird is when the "stop" light. Check out this mind bending statement from the IO9 article

• When scientists stop light, they aren't actually halting a photon – they're embedding its quantum state into the nearby atoms. Later, they use another laser pulse to activate those atoms and make them emit an identical photon.

Other than Slow Glass what could be a use for "stopped light"? Well the ability to slow, stop and generate photons is a major step towards developing quantum computers. Of course as with any tech a criminal will find a way to co-opt it say by replacing windows with slow glass so that surveillance would be none the wiser or surveillance itself...You could be watching someone that would see nothing but a seascape say...for years....

For the complete article and reference links, check out the IO9 article HERE
Slow Light in Wikipedia HERE

New research shows Warp Drives would suck!

hey here is an interesting article sent in by Tim Sayell from Discovery online.

• According to new calculations by Italian physicists, a warp drive could easily create a black hole that would incinerate any passengers on a space craft and then suck Earth into the same black hole!

As we all know...normal physics shows that FTL is impossible. As speed increases so does mass and therefore the more energy you need to move even a small amount faster. As you approach light speed your mass becomes infinite and therefore the amount of energy you need to move faster also becomes infinity. I have said (tongue firmly in cheek) that the stars themselves prove ftl is impossible. Why? Because if you go an infinite speed you need infinite energy, which means all the power in the universe plus a little bit more. Since the stars are still burning..... but anyway..

The first exception to the ftl rule is a wormhole. If a ship were to cross the wormhole threshold, it would still be going sub light, but it would still arrive at the other end before any light that had to travel the distance outside the wormhole.

The second itself is the idea of a warp engine that physicist Michael Alcubierre envisioned.

• Alcubierre warp drive would create a bubble of energy behind the ship and a lack of energy in front of the ship, like a giant cosmic wave a space ship could surf. That particular section of space can travel faster than the speed of light in the surrounding space, and anything on or in that bubble will accelerate with it. (here is the original article BMU ran on the Alcubierre drive)

The problems start when you consider the amount of energy it would take to create the "bubble" that would contain the ftl. Plus you would need even more energy to "push" the bubble along. The problems really start when the energy to hold everything in check runs out. Just like antimatter, when the dark matter needed comes into contact with normal matter the ship inside is destroyed by temperatures well in excess of that near the core of a supernova. Plus as the bubble collapses it could very well create a black hole that would not bode well for ships or planets nearby.

Read complete article here

Comment: Light Speed or How I Lost My Mind Thanks to the History Channel

Did anyone catch the program Light-speed on the History channel recently? Fascinating program, managed to burn more than a few of my synapses.

One of the most mind bending concepts in the program was that the speed of light was a limit to how far we can literally see in the universe. Since the big bang, light has traveled outwards for some 13.5 billion years. So we can not see any further because light hasn't had time to get there yet. That's disturbing enough, but consider.

In my world view or universe view there shouldn't BE anything past that point, but this is where it got strange. From our Milky Way we can see another galaxy at the limit of the 13 billion year limit. So, consider this a spoke in a wheel.

We are at the center of this wheel and the rim is 13 billion LYs away. Remember the light limit is 13 billion LY. So we can see the galaxies and they can see us. If we spin 180 degrees we can see 13 billion LY in that direction as well, but no further, and that's the rub. If we can see a galaxy 13 billion LY away at the edge of the visible universe, it's fair to say that they could see the Milky Way at the edge of their observable universe.

The twist comes when we realize that 180 degrees from observing them we KNOW that there is 13 Billion light years of space behind us that they CAN'T see. Which leads me to conclude that there must be at least 13 billion light years of space beyond what we can see because we have already demonstrated that there is an equal amount behind us that the other galaxy can not see. And if the universe is 13 Billion LYs old how is it we can see better than 26 billion LYs in space (if you can see 13 in one direction and 13 in the opposite that twice as much as the history of the universe even though light only traveled 13 billion ly to cover the distance) And how far does this reach.

Does that mean light speed does not apply to space/time? Did the big bang happen everywhere at the same time? If so, what does that mean to the mono-bloc before the big bang? Now do you see why I might be ready for the rubber room?