• Question: DO YOU THINK THAT IT WILL BE POSSIBLE TO TRAVEL FASTER THAN LIGHT

    Asked by 439brna35 to Ciarán on 20 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Ciarán O'Brien

      Ciarán O'Brien answered on 20 Nov 2014:

      Physicists are pretty sure nothing can travel faster than light, it’s what they call a universal constant.

      However, it might be possible to cheat 🙂

      Scientists are working on something called “quantum entanglement”, where two particles are created that can affect each other without touching. If you affect one particle, then you can see the change in the other, no matter where they are! I don’t understand the physics of it, but it all sounds terribly clever.

      What this means is that if we were to make telephone based on entangled particles, the messages from one side of the phone would travel instantly to the other side, no matter where they were. So while nothing actually moves faster than light, messages could be sent that travel faster than if they were beamed from A to B using radio waves (which are just a colour of light we can’t see without equipment).

      There might be some way to let people travel those distances faster than light, but they’d be cheating as well, probably by warping space so that two places that are far apart could be brought close together. That’s kind of what the warp drives in Star Trek do, so technically they’re not travelling faster than light (but they can still get from one side of the galaxy to another in a jiffy) But if that’s possible, it’s at least a hundred years into the future 🙂

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