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in the beginning, there was darkness... and then... bang!... giving birth to an endlessexpanding existence... of time, space, and matter. now, see further thanwe've ever imagined... beyond the limits of our existence... in a place we call "the universe." streaking through space... light is the fastestthing in the universe.
it could circle the earthseven times in one second. as it reaches usacross vast distances... it reveals the history of the cosmos. we're able to look back in time. light travels at186,000 miles per second. its speed is an ultimate barrier. nothing can go faster. we have never everbroken the speed limit. but is the answer final?
will spaceships everspeed faster than light? is it even worth trying? to give up withouttrying is just giving up. it can neither be touched nor felt. it is an abstract quantityof immense impact... the rate of motion at thevery heart of all existence. the fundamental lynchpinof the universe... that we call light speed. on planet earth, wherespeed is in demand...
the fastest people,vehicles, and technologies... seem to crawl in a cosmoswhere light speed is king. more than king, the speed oflight is the cornerstone... on which the universe is built. there's a famous saying in physics... which is that the speed of light isnot just a good idea, it's the law. the speed of light is one of themost important speed limits... in the entire universe. the speed of light,186,000 miles per second...
is just incredible. i mean, if light traveled ina circle around the earth... it could circle the earthseven times in one second. that's an incredible speed. that incredible speed is thefirst thing we encounter... when confronting thephenomenon of light. to say it is fast is acolossal understatement. it's amazing to me that wheni talk on my cell phone... i can talk to somebodyclear across the country...
and i'm not reallyaware of any time lag... and that signal is goingfrom my phone to a tower... up to a satellite, back down,and it seems instantaneous. so we really take for granted... the speed of light couldpractically be infinite to us. physics professorclifford johnson of usc... is an avid bike rider. circling a track, heconsiders trying to cover... the same 186,000 miles thatlight does in one second.
he'll find, however, that hiswork will be cut out for him. to travel the distance thatlight moves in just one second... it would take me 22 months on a bike... moving at 12 miles an hour,cycling 24 hours a day. but the speed of light, inrelation to the speed of life... makes our world work in justthe way we've come to expect. one of the beneficialeffects for humanity... of having the speed oflight be as fast as it is... is that what you see is what you get.
light speed makes everydayexperience virtually instantaneous. when the light bulb goeson, you see it right away. anything that happens aroundyou registers immediately. and certain experiencesmake it crystal clear... that light travels faster thananything else, including sound. one interesting consequenceof the great speed... with which light travels is thatyou see a flash of lightning... essentially instantaneously... but you hear the thunder only later on.
but light speed has its limits... when stacked up to a placeas large as the universe. we think that the speed of light... is unimaginably fast on a human scale. however, in astronomical terms,it's actually kind of pokey. and so it's ironic that when theapollo spacecraft blasted into space... traveling at what seemed anamazing 25,000 miles per hour... the speed of light provedfrustratingly slow... when it came time totalk to astronauts...
236,000 miles away on the lunar surface. so when the astronautswere on the moon... and people asked neil armstrong... "hey, neil, what's it like up there?" several seconds went bybetween the question... and neil armstrong's answer. neil, this is houston.radio check, over. aye, roger, houston, loud and clear. - roger out.- loud and clear, houston.
roger, buzz. and those several seconds... were not because he wasthinking about the answer... but rather becauseit took 1.3 seconds... for the signal travelingat the speed of light... to reach neil from mission control... and another 1.3 seconds for his reply... using radio waves to come back... and that's 2.6 secondswithout even thinking.
okay. the 1.3 seconds it takes light totravel from the earth to the moon... is pocket change comparedto other celestial bodies. light from the sun, for instance... takes more than eightminutes to get to the earth. if the sun were todisappear right now... if the sun were to suddenly vanish... it would take eight minutes... before we would evenfeel the shockwave...
and see the effectsof a disappearing sun. the limits of light speed... also make communicating withearth's far-flung spacecraft... a special challenge. it takes up to 44 minutes forsignals to travel back and forth... to the probes exploring mars... more than three hoursto cassini at saturn... and over 29 hours to voyager1, the most distant of all... now heading out of the solar system.
still, these distances aretrivial on a cosmic scale. we can almost understandthe 10 billion miles... separating earth from voyager... but what's next? the nearest star is a reddwarf named proxima centauri... nearly 25 trillion miles away. that's 25 followed by 12 zeroes. i am often asked a question,"how can you, as an astronomer... "really comprehendthese vast distances...
" these huge numbers?" and the answer is, i can't. the human brain really doesn'twrap itself around numbers that big. occasionally, i actually write out... how many zeroes there are inkilometers from here to a galaxy... just to see how huge that number is. but in reality, ofcourse, as astronomers... we would be spendingall day writing zeroes... unless we came up witha better unit to use...
and that's what a light-year is. a light-year is approximately6 trillion miles. it's the distance thatlight travels in one year. using light-years todescribe distances... opens up another dimensionof light speed's character. think of it. sirius, thebrightest star in the sky... is 8.6 light-years away. that means we see it,not as it is today... but as it was 8.6 years ago.
we see the bright star vegaas it was 25 years ago... and the red super giantbetelgeuse as it was 500 years ago. it's a wonderful gift of nature... that because it takes time to travel,we're able to look back in time. the further out we look in distance,the further back in time we look. we would have no idea whatour cosmic history was... if the speed of lighttraveled instantaneously. laura danly is curator... of the historic griffithobservatory in los angeles.
with light's ability totake us into the past... she's assembled a stack of photos... that tell light speed's storyof the universe in snapshots... looking back in time to its beginning... more than 13 billion yearsago to the present day. i'm putting together a scrapbook... of the history of ourfamily of galaxies... and i chose all the galaxies thatwe can see with our telescopes... as far back as we cansee with our telescopes.
each photo in this album, then,shows something in the universe... with a look-back time equivalentto its distance in light-years. the famous crab nebula,6,500 years ago... the galactic core,center of the milky way... 26,000 years ago... and the andromeda galaxy,our next-door neighbor... 2.5 million years ago... but practically yesterdayon a cosmic scale. i love this cluster.
for almost 90 percentof the look-back time... the album is filledwith common galaxies. common, yes, but intriguingly diverse. and these two are colliding. you can see one going... what appears to be rightthrough the other... and there's a lot of dramain the way galaxies evolve... and the way theyinteract with one another. so this one would be...
oh, well, it's only about500 million light-years away. as danly places eachshot in the album... a bigger picture begins to emerge. adult galaxies have beenthe main characters... evolving in all their varietyfor the past 12 billion years. but the cosmos also hasits childhood photos... showing galaxies when theuniverse was a mere toddler. these are actually veryinteresting galaxies... at about 11 billion light-years away.
these compact galaxies are- represent what might be a2 or 2 1/2-year-old child... you know, just reallylearning how to walk. but even these galaxies havetheir younger brothers and sisters. this spectacular shotshows a gravity lens... a cluster of galaxies 2.2billion light-years away... that bends light, allowing us tosee much further in space and time. the lens reveals a tiny speck... identified as one of theearliest galaxies we can see...
as it was 13 billion light-years ago... still an infant inthe evolving universe. galaxies, when they were babies... really don't have a lot ofdistinguishable features. they're kind of blobs. they don't really havea lot of structure. the universe, as a whole,was something of a blob... at the beginning of its life, too. what we see of that time are thefirst light waves in history...
reaching us only now... 13.7 billion years afterthey flashed into existence. we see them in the picture ofan afterglow from the big bang... and they are known today... as the cosmic microwavebackground radiation. the cosmic microwavebackground radiation... is the most distant thing we can see. it is, in a sense, the pictureof the baby upon delivery. nasa's all-sky picturereveals a glow...
that is uniform everywhere we can see... the universe as it was in acosmic moment after its birth. but here, our viewcomes to a sudden halt. what we can see of theuniverse is limited... not by the size or powerof our instruments... but by the barrierof light speed itself. how can the fastestthing in the universe... make us blind to the infinity of space? knowing that light speed is6 trillion miles per year...
gives us the light-year,a convenient shorthand... for talking about the hugedistances in the universe. but it's just asimportant to understand... that light speed at 6trillion miles per year... is an ironclad constant. the speed of light is so constant... that the universe actuallychanges everything... so that you never seeit going any other speed. so the speed of light reallyis the measuring stick...
of the entire universe. in fact, the constancy of light speed... results in an amazing toolfor measuring distance... in the vastness of space. the tool is called red shift. it happens as light betweengalaxies travels at a fixed speed. when the space betweenthe galaxies expands... the light racing betweenthem gets stretched... turning red in color.
as light goes from onegalaxy to another... from a distant galaxy toour own, for example... that light gets stretched alongwith the stretching of space... and that causes intrinsicallyshort-wavelength light... like blue light... to gradually becomelong-wavelength or redder light. that fundamentally is the causeof the red shift that we see... in the spectra of galaxies. how does the red shift turninto a way to measure distance?
it's all because of an astonishingdiscovery made in 1926... at the mount wilsonobservatory outside los angeles. being up here on mount wilsonis always a thrill for me... because it was actuallyright here at this location... that our view of theuniverse entirely changed. it was here that edwin hubble foundout the universe is expanding... and that was an amazing thing. he wasn't expecting it. nobody thought that was thecase, and it changed everything.
seeing red shifts everywhere... hubble found that all ofthe universe's galaxies... were moving away from each other... which we now know is caused bythe expansion of space itself. as seen from the earth... a galaxy doesn't looklike it's moving away... but we know that it is becauseits light is red-shifted. a galaxy moving away at lowspeed has a slight red shift. a galaxy moving fasterhas a larger red shift.
but hubble found that thosefaster-moving galaxies... are also farther away. that meant the greater the red shift... the more distant the galaxy. by seeing how fast space is expanding... and working the math backwards... cosmologists have been able toestimate the age of the universe. combine that with light speed... and you have a major brain twister.
the universe is such a huge place... that the light travel timereally becomes important to us. we believe the universe beganabout 13 1/2 billion years ago. that means the farthest inany direction we can look... is 13 1/2 billion light-years. there hasn't been enough time forlight to travel more than that. it's called our light horizon... a sphere 13 1/2 billionlight-years in all directions... containing everything we can see.
but that's where thebrain twister comes in. does space end there? we have no reason to believethat the distance we can see... is the entire size of the universe. in fact, it might bemuch bigger than that. it's just that, withlight travel time... that's all we can see.that's our horizon. so, consider this conundrum. astronomers in a galaxy atone edge of our horizon...
can't possibly see any galaxieson the other edge of our horizon... but they can see galaxies... 13 1/2 billion light-yearsin the other direction... and so can astronomers atthe edge of their horizon... and on and on, perhaps to infinity. as for astronomers on earth,light speed has them trapped. if we ask what is happeningbeyond our light horizon... we have to face the fact... that the speed of lightreally is a barrier.
we've never seen anythingbeyond our light horizon. can we take comfort in the fact... that there is so much tosee inside our horizon? this breathtaking shot is the hubblespace telescope's ultra deep field. it's a massively detailedphoto of an area of the sky... a hundred times smallerthan the full moon... yet containing 10,000 galaxies... some whose light has been speedingtoward us for 13 billion years. beyond that is the cosmicbackground radiation...
from just 400,000 yearsafter the big bang. in nasa's color-coded picture... the radiation's glow is pure green... representing a distributionof matter so uniform... its temperature varies no morethan 1/50,000th of a degree. nothing in human experience... is even close to thiskind of uniformity. in fact, astronomers believe... the universe shouldreally be very different.
by rights, the universe should be lumpy. if you look in this directionand you look in that direction... you should see two entirelydifferent concentrations of matter... different temperatures... but it's extremely uniform. therefore, we have a puzzle. the puzzle has its roots... at the universe's birth in the big bang. if everything flew apartfrom the beginning...
why shouldn't it be uniform? no kind of explosionthat we know about... leads to that kind of uniformity. if you imagine an ordinary explosion- an atomic bomb, a piece of tnt- it's not really uniform at all. there's a piece ofshrapnel going off there... piece of paper going off there, anextra piece of iron going off there. it's really very non-uniform.
so scientists believe thecosmic background radiation... just shouldn't be assmooth a green as it is. we can find out why inan ordinary paint store. let's consider a universe... that consists of differentcolored cans of paint. in our hypothetical paint universe... we have a can of yellow paintand a can of blue paint... and at the instant of thebig bang in this universe... the two cans of paint startexpanding apart from each other.
in our hypothetical paint universe,one side of it would look yellow... and the other side would look blue. but as we've learned,the cosmos looks green... whether it's the paintuniverse or the real thing. the two colors of paint representthe different particles... in the infant universe. to end up a uniform green... like the cosmic background radiation... they had to be touching.
but when scientists first calculatedthe speed of the big bang... they concluded that itblew everything apart... faster than the speed of light... meaning blue and yellowwere too far apart... even at the instant of creation,for any mixing to take place. seeing a universe that'sso uniformly green... would be very strange. it would be like takingour can of yellow paint... pouring it out, and having it be green.
then taking a can of bluepaint, pouring it out... and having it be green as well. it's impossible. this horizon problem can be solved... by a theory that i'veworked on called inflation... which is a twist on the big bang. inflation is now thewidely accepted variation... that makes the big bang work... without the limit imposedby the speed of light.
another way this could've happenedis that our paint universe... might have expanded only this far. the two cans of painthave enough time to mix... and become uniformly green... before the universe undergoesa sudden period of expansion... that occurs fasterthan the speed of light. this would spread greenpaint all over the universe. if this theory is right... the period of inflation is really"the" big bang that we observe.
the other bang, thathappened before that... becomes really a little bang. it's just a precursorto the real big bang. even today, the universe isexpanding at high velocity... galaxies speeding awayfrom each other so fast... that they seem to violate light speed... as the ultimate speed limit. the faster-than-lightexpansion of space... sets yet another limit onwhat we can see from earth...
where the galaxies of the universecontinue to rush away from us. the galaxies that arerelatively near to us... those that you can see easily... are moving away pretty fast... and, indeed, the more distantones are moving away faster. but the ones that arereally far away, in fact... are moving away fasterthan the speed of light. and then there are the galaxiesthat you will never see... because they started out so far away...
that the light from themwill never reach you... because the space is expandingfaster than the speed of light. space itself then is theexception to the rule. it can expand fasterthan the speed of light. but everything insideit remains bound... by albert einstein andhis theory of relativity. albert einstein is the cop on the block. you cannot break the light barrier. we physicists canaccelerate particles...
to 99.9999 percent the speed of light... but we have never, everbroken the speed limit. but we don't need to break the limit... to experience the strangeprovince of light speed. if the universe bends and stretchesaround the speed of light... what happens when wehit the accelerator... and start to get close? for most of us, light seemssimple and uncomplicated... a quality of nature bywhich we see the universe.
under the scrutinyof science, however... it becomes strange and bizarre. light is such a common thingin our everyday experience... and yet we have very littleunderstanding of it really. it's very weird. the speed of light is something... that the entire universebends around to accommodate. we can begin to understand... why the universe bendsitself around light speed...
by joining physicist cliffordjohnson at a bicycle track... where a tennis ball willcompete against a beam of light. if i throw an ordinaryobject like a tennis ball... i can throw it at a given speed,it will go a certain distance. this is the path of the tennis ball... as johnson throws itwhile he's standing still. it lands roughly halfway down the track. next, he'll throw the ball again... but this time from a moving bike...
with different results. if i throw the tennisball at that same speed... while riding the bike,it'll go faster... because it's the speedof the tennis ball... plus the speed of the bike,and so it'll go further. compare the two tosses,and the difference is clear. the ball goes faster and fartherwhen thrown from the moving bike. it makes perfect sense. but now we put light to the same test...
using the bike's headlightinstead of a tennis ball. if i'm standing stationary... and i switch on theheadlight of the bike... that beam of light thatcomes out of the headlight... comes out at the speed of light... no other speed but the speed of light. suppose the beam was slow enough... for us to actually seeits motion down the track. we mark its positionjust a brief moment later.
next, johnson switches on theheadlight at riding speed... and the unexpected happens. in that same moment of time... the light travels exactlythe same distance as before. unlike for the tennis ball... you don't add the speed of the bike... to the speed of the light. the speed of lightremains the speed of light. the two light beamstravel the same distance...
because light speed is constant... and independent of the source's motion. it may fly against intuition,but it is a fact of nature. every beam of light in the universe... travels at the samespeed in empty space... no matter how fast thestar or comet or galaxy... that emits it is moving. after scientists discovered thisfact at the end of the 19th century... albert einstein did themath for the rest of us...
and developed his specialtheory of relativity... with constant light speed as its center. understanding the speed oflight gave us a window... into understanding thenature of space and time... as we understand it now. we do not live in a rigid world... where meter sticks and a clockticking at regular intervals. we live in a flexible,stretchy einstein's world... a relativistic world of space and time.
in common experience... the universe doesn't seemvery stretchy to us... because compared to lightspeed, we are moving very slowly. but when we crank up thevelocity, things begin to change. as you get closer and closerto the speed of light... all sorts of strange andmarvelous distortions take place. when we say that the universekind of bends itself... so that the speed oflight is always constant... it's amazing how literallythat's really true.
as you move closer and closerto the speed of light... your time appears to slow down... to an observer that's justsort of watching you go by. that's amazing. when clifford johnsonbikes around the track... he needs to be going about56 million times faster... than his current 12 miles per hour... to get close to light speed. but suppose he could.
imagine i were riding my bikeclose to the speed of light. never mind whetherthat's possible or not. just imagine that this was happening. my clock's running slow... compared to the cameraman onthe ground who's filming me. if i do that for a while... i'm going to age much more slowly... than the cameraman who's on the ground. so that when i comeback from the trip...
and come back and talkto the cameraman... he's actually much olderthan when i left him. if this sounds like magicinstead of science... there is proof in something thatmany of us experience every day. a great example of einstein'sspecial theory of relativity... and the fact that clocks... that are moving relativeto you run more slowly... than your own clock, whichis at rest, is the gps system. the global positioning system...
lets us drive our carswithout getting lost. turn right. gps begins with a networkof 24 satellites... orbiting the earth 12,500miles above the surface. at any one time, thedevice in your car... receives signals from atleast four satellites... and compares their lightspeed travel times... to calculate an accuratelocation on the ground. drive 500 feet, then turn right.
the whole thing dependson super accurate clocks. and when the engineersdesigned the system... they knew the satelliteswould be orbiting... at nearly 7,000 miles an hour. the speed is enough toslow down their clocks... by a tiny fraction of a second. the engineers have factored allthe relativistic time differences... into the system, which givesit impressive precision. if the clocks in the satellitesare running at a different rate...
than the clocks down here on earth... and you don't take that into account... you will get the wronganswer for where your car is. drive .1 mile to destination on left. the distortion of time is onlyone of the strange results... of traveling closeto the speed of light. on the bike track... clifford johnson continuesto push the envelope... as space begins doing oddthings to him and his bicycle.
imagine i'm on my bike again,going close to the speed of light. an observer looking at me wouldactually see, for example... that the length of my bike in thedirection of motion i'm moving... is getting shrunk. actually, the bike is getting shorter. the effect is calledlength contraction... and together with time dilation... it is seen by a stationary observer... while looking at someonetraveling close to light speed.
but professor johnsondoes get his own chance... to witness light speed's weird effects. as his velocity closesin on light speed... his view of the worldchanges drastically. what i'm seeing as i move close... to the speed of light straight ahead... is that the shapes in front of me... are getting quite distortedas compared to everyday life. everything is being twistedinto a sort of tunnel shape...
and the colors are gettingdistorted in various ways. the color changes comefrom the doppler effect... and the shape distortions... from a phenomenon known as aberration. the distortion is somewhatsimilar to what you would see... if you were driving through a rainstorm. if you were stationary... you would just see therain coming straight down... if you looked out ofthe side of the window.
whereas, if you weremoving through the storm... you would see that the rain appearsto be slanting towards you... as a result of your motion. and that's at the basis of thatwarping effect that you get... as you're moving nearthe speed of light... towards objects in front of you. in reality, we don't have totravel near the speed of light... to experience the distortions... caused by motion through time and space.
they are with us everyminute of the day. all of the distortions that happen... as a result of afinite speed of light... still happen on an everyday basis... even in our everyday life... but the effects are so tinythat we can't perceive them. still, light speedhas its other quirks... in the slow-moving world... quirks we perceive very well.
the speed of light may be a constant... but only in the vacuum of space. when light moves throughthings like glass or fluids... it slows down appreciably. if it didn't, things like telescopes... and human vision would be impossible. but what would happen iflight slowed down much more... if the speed of light were zero? light speed is 186,000 miles per second.
it is a universal constant,but a constant with a catch. it travels at thatspeed only in a vacuum. light changes its speed... when it travels through different media. it travels more slowly through water. that's why you seerefraction and bending... and rippling of lightwhen you're underwater. life as we know it wouldbe very different... if light didn't propagateat different speeds...
through different materials. for example, we wouldn't be able to see. our eyes wouldn't work the same way. in a universe where lightmoved at the same speed... through all materials... we would know little ofthe world around us... seeing only vagueblobs of dark and light. that's because our eyesdepend on biological lenses... to focus images on our retinas.
just like lenses made of glass... they work because light slowsdown as it passes through them. now why is that? because light is absorbedby the atoms of glass... and then they re-radiate itlater, so there's a delay factor. light hits an atom, the atom vibrates... and then sends a light package off. so there's a delay factor. the delay factor alsocauses light to bend...
when it hits glass shaped into a lens. bent in just the right way... light can be focused,collected, and magnified. for astronomers studying the universe... nothing could be more important. thank goodness light slows downwhen it goes through glass... because that's the reasonwhy we have telescopes. the reason why we have telescopes... is because light bendsgoing through glass...
and we can concentrate largeamounts of light to a single point... and then that gives us the ability... to see the marvels inthe universe itself. light travels through theglass lenses of telescopes... at about 124,000 miles per second... two-thirds of itsspeed through a vacuum. but some scientists are lookingat making use of light... at far slower speeds. at her lab on the campusof harvard university...
dr. lene hau has taken slow light... to the extreme by reducinglight speed to zero. the speed of light, ofcourse, is incredibly high. i mean, nothing goesfaster than light... and, you know, the usual186,000 miles per second. and we kind of thought,gee, that's awfully high. let's try to do something about it. can we have the detector right there? hau and her team conductedtheir experiments...
in a complex laboratoryfilled with lasers, mirrors... prisms, and other exotic gear. it is a branch of physicswhere few have dared to tread. if you can start to changethings so dramatically... as taking this enormous light speed... and then bring it downto bicycle speed... then you're in a completelynew regime of nature. you're able to nowstart to probe areas... regions of nature where nobodyhas ever been there before.
the brakes are put on lightspeed inside hau's lab... by focusing lasers on twomicroscopic clouds of sodium gas... chilled to a few billionths ofa degree above absolute zero. a control laser hittingthe two clouds... sets them up for action. then a quick light pulseshoots into the first cloud... where it is squeezed into the gas... and slowed to just a few miles per hour. the light pulse goes from being aboutone kilometer long in free space.
it compresses like a concertinaas it enters the atom cloud... and ends up being only0.02 millimeter in size. that's less than halfthe thickness of a hair... so really small. and it's so smallthat the light pulse... actually ends up fittingtotally inside the atom cloud. hau says the atomic imprintof light in the sodium cloud... is a perfect copy embedded in atoms... of the original light pulse.
it can then be stopped in free space... between the two clouds before moving on. when it enters the second cloud... another shot of the control laser... expands it to itsoriginal size, shape... and speed of 186,000 miles per second. it is comparable in some ways toa science fiction transporter... that sends people orobjects through space. so in these experimentswhat we really do is...
we stop and extinguish a lightpulse in one part of space... and revive it in a completelydifferent part of space... and send it back on its way. since light can carry information... this super-advancedtechnology points the way... to futuristic light-based computers... that bypass wires and electronic chips. information read directly from light... may be faster, morecompact, and more secure...
than anything we have today. but the greatest vision ofscientists and dreamers... is to be found at the otherend of the light speed spectrum. we still face the speed oflight as an impenetrable wall... a speed that dr. einstein toldus could never be exceeded. yet history is packed withimpossibles that have become realities. will we ever, for instance,be able to reach the stars... in ships that go fasterthan the speed of light? if so, when?
in april 2008, world-famousphysicist stephen hawking... called on the humanrace to colonize space... and make interstellartravel a long-term aim. spreading out into space... will completely change thefuture of the human race... and maybe determine whetherwe have any future at all. the stars are so far away thatinterstellar travel is impractical... unless we can go fasterthan light speed... but that's an obstacle.
einstein's theory of relativity... tells us that a spaceship's mass... approaches infinity as itnears the speed of light. so as you try to go to fasterand faster and faster... you actually get to a point... where it takes more and more energy... until it's an infiniteamount of energy... to go to speed of light. that's impossible.
it means that travel at lightspeed is also impossible. or is it? marc millis is one of ahandful of scientists... who isn't ready to throwin the towel on the subject. a nasa propulsionphysicist by profession... he likes to build models ofstarships in his spare time... and is well aware ofthe giggle factor... in any talk outside sciencefiction of star travel. the giggle factor isactually a healthy response.
it helps provide skepticism tothe topic to ask deep questions... to make sure that we'reproceeding correctly. once head of nasa's mothballedbreakthrough propulsion project... millis is editor of a book... that has collected the seriouscurrent research on the subject. when it comes just tothe light speed issue... there's about three dozen physicists... who've written articles,some skeptical... some suggesting newmethods on the topic.
no one is saying that anytime soon... we'll be able to havewarp drive to the stars. but on a scale ofcenturies to millennia... it can't be ruled out. virtually all physicists agree... it's impossible totravel through space... at faster than light speed. but there may be a way to cheat... by altering space insteadof traveling through it.
believe it or not, even nasa scientistsare studying the possibility... that perhaps we can foldspace, punch a hole in space... make a subway systemthrough space and time. that's the basic ideabehind using wormholes... to actually twist spacearound on itself... and take a shortcutthrough the universe. what would a wormhole machine look like? probably huge in scalewith equipment staged... perhaps on a massivenumber of asteroids...
arranged in a gigantic sphere. it would require an enormousbattery of laser beams... that concentrate tremendousenergy to a single point. you have to attainfantastic temperatures... the highest energyattainable in our universe... in order to open up a hole, a bubble... a gateway perhaps to another universe. another way of tricking space... into letting us travel fasterthan light is the warp drive.
miguel alcubierre was the first one... to write about the warp drive in 1994. alcubierre, a mexican physicist,worked out the math for a starship... propelled by warping space-time itself. behind the ship,space-time is expanded. in front of the ship,space-time contracts. in between, the shiprides like a surfer. the ship itself sits inside a bubble... and the space around itpushes it faster than light.
a successful warp drive,if it is possible at all... is probably centuries away. but in switzerland, physicistsat the large hadron collider... may be headed in theright direction right now. now, the large hadroncollider is an atom smasher. it's a particle collider. but it's going to get tohigh enough energies... that space and time willactually warp and bend. we're actually practicing howto bend space in the laboratory.
it's the first babystep toward a warp drive. with the physics we now know... we won't travel fasterthan light speed... in the foreseeable future. that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. even though light speed travelmight turn out to be impossible... to give up withouttrying is just giving up. outside his work at nasa... millis has founded thenonprofit tau zero foundation...
to encourage seriousresearch on star travel. although few scientists arepursuing the idea actively... many agree it's worthat least the effort. understanding our universe... is one of the most basicneeds human beings have... as an intelligent species. so should we pursuetechnologies or physics... that might allow us somedayto travel faster than light? absolutely.
because we never knowwhere this might take us. even though we mightnever discover a way... to travel faster than light... we might discover a whole bunchof other very useful things. and what if science ultimately proves... the light speed barrieris unbreakable... and star travel is impossible? it would put a whole newperspective on spaceship earth... forcing us to use ourtechnology to treat it well...
as we remain its passengers... on our continuing journeythrough the universe.
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