On Nov 4, 2009, at 5:10 AM, OrionWorks - Steven Vincent Johnson wrote:
From Abd
...
FTL travel would have to involve something different than ordinary
acceleration; therefore, why bother with acceleration at all?
Is this premise seriously being discussed?
I confess that I haven't been following all the technical specifics
in this
thread line-by-line but... let me get this straight. Have there
actually
been Vort individuals who have been speculating that FTL velocities
could
eventually be achieved simply by applying constant acceleration to a
space-ship such as from a device like from a supped-up reactionless
drive?
If so, how quaint. I guess Neutron would be proud! Einstein might
sigh,
however. ;-)
Granted, I myself am a firm believer that FTL travel may eventually be
achieved through clever physics trickery, but I seriously doubt such
cheating will be achieved by brute force acceleration technology
techniques.
For my money, the often discussed worm-hole theory seems to be the
best
candidate. Others have speculated that warping the immediate
surroundings of
the fabric of space might be another viable candidate, but again,
acceleration by itself would not be responsible for achieving FTL
speeds, as
I understand it.
That is only true if reaction mass is required, or equivalently, a
lot of energy is required for each increment of momentum, as in the
photon thrust rocket, which requires 2.94x10^9 watts per kgf of
thrust, and fuel must be carried to produce that energy. If either
(1) vacuum energy can be tapped for a large thrust photon rocket, or
(2) vacuum fluctuation particles can be pushed on as a reaction mass,
then the limitations to which you refer are gone. You can accelerate
continuously at g or multiples of g, from the passenger perspective,
with the appropriate technology.
As a passenger in a 1 g ship, it would appear you can effectively go
faster than c because the distances appear to shrink. If you could
ride on a photon how long would it take you to travel a light year?
Zero seconds. From the viewpoint of the folks at home, you never go
faster than c. That is because the information about you, your
messages, your telescope image, arrive back on earth at c. Further,
as you approach c, the quality of the information about you degrades
as you depart, it drops in frequency. If instant quantum
communication can be sustained through acceleration, then it is a
whole new ball game. Relativity is out the window. The folks at
home can watch the whole journey from your perspective. More
importantly, you don't even have to go. You can just send robots and
stay home and watch.
If you can go across the galaxy at what appear to you to be multiples
of c, or compress the distance by a comparably large fraction, and
actually arrive somewhere, it shouldn't matter what the folks at home
think they know about your progress. That doesn't change the fact
you arrived.
Best regards,
Horace Heffner
http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/
