CompuServe Messages

Well, I'll agree with Tom that superluminal is a very different kettle of cheese than supersonic. If speeds beyond that of light are in any way achievable, I'd bet anything but my RKM that they won't be achieved by bolting more thrusters on the butt of a spaceship – we probably both trust Albert _that_ far. That leaves worm holes, space warps and similar standbys from SF space-time geometrical musing as the current alternatives, but the technology to exploit those phenomena is not quite ready to market (unless, of course, CBM has developed a warp drive but hasn't got around to advertising it yet). So if the proposition is "faster than light travel will never be achieved by any means now available", I'd agree readily and live with the guano under my desk. I'd be less comfortable denying the possibility that some way around the ultimate speed limit will never be discovered… an enlargement or reformulation of relativity theory could conceivably lead to some way of bending the rules. I don't think your phase-shifted laser beam idea really offers a ray of hope (witty, huh?). Somehow accelerating light beyond the speed of light doesn't sound quite right, though I don't have enough physics to say exactly why not (as you may have divined by now). How about a modulated gravitational field? Does Einstein have anything to say about the time it would take for the gravity from a newly created mass to be felt at a given distance? Or what about those experiments in which altering the spin on one sub-atomic particle _instanteously_ alters the spin of a fellow particle some distance away? That would seem to offer a possibility of FTL signal transmission – hell, with a little R&D, maybe even FTL computers. Let's see how the Sieve runs on one of _those_ babies. 🙂 Nick