Hi Hasbeen

It is possible that I could win the powerball lottery not once, not twice, but three times in a row.

It is highly improbable of course. But it is not impossible.

With that out of the way let me answer your question. I've taken the liberty of reformulating it slightly.

Will it ever be possible to accelerate a material particle to beyond light speed?

Here is the answer:

Give what we believe we know about the laws of physics today the answer is "no." It is only possible if there is some physics we don't know about that provides some sort of loophole to special relativity.

So your question is tantamount to asking whether we shall one day discover some new physics that enables us to evade the strictures of special relativity.

I cannot foresee the future. If I could get a glimpse of the physics of the year 2100 I'd be able to collect Nobel prizes by the bucket load.

So the best I can do is to make a judgement call.

I think that finding some physics that enables us to bypass special relativity is less likely than me winning the powerball lottery three weeks in a row.

A related question is:

Might there be some sort of hidden dimensions or wormholes that enable us to take a sort of "shortcut" to, say, Alpha Centauri?

In other words we never exceed the speed of light, we simply find a better, shorter, route.

Again the best I can do is make a judgement call

I think the probability is about the same as my winning the powerball lottery not three times in a row but twice in a row.

Hope that helps.

Steven I hope you are right.

The universe will be a much better place if we & any other life forms, don't have access to each other. Our world would be a better place if transport for people & goods was much more difficult & expensive. Roll on peak oil, if only it were true.

I watched the folk of the Solomon Islands try to get into a major fight among each other, only to be saved by the lack of transport between their islands. Lucky them.

Yes I don't fancy a "Star Wars" future for us one little bit.

We are an irrational life form. To have picked an arbitrary distance like a mile, traveled in an arbitrary time period like 1/24Th of a day as being impossible to exceed, & live, is rather like having picked a level of CO2 as a reason for us all to burn in the fires of hell.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if some crazy idea like life after death is true, & we can sit back, like a theater audience, & watch what we fool creatures do, & learn, in the next 100 years or so.

Hi Steven,

I can understand people like Bonmot being certain about the impossibility of superluminal velocity.
He was apparently born with omniscience (and probably omnipotence & omnipresence as well).
But low born doubting Thomas’s like myself need a bit more convincing.

I agree with nine-tenths of what you say. But when you start offering odds –you lose me.
<< I think that finding some physics that enables us to bypass special relativity is less likely than me winning the powerball lottery three weeks in a row.>>

If we are already seeing this:
<<New evidence supports the idea that we live in an area of the universe that is "just right" for our existence. The controversial finding comes from an observation that one of the constants of nature appears to be different in different parts of the cosmos.>>
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19429-laws-of-physics-may-change-across-the-universe.html

How can you with any degree of seriousness offer odds about what will/wont happen in the vastness of time?

I envisage than had we asked a Fourth Century BC (Greek) Stevenlmeyer about the prospects of manned flight he would have scoffed , offered us similar odds, and pointed to what happened to his friend Icarus.

In the following passage try substituting the words superluminal velocity for atheism!

<<Science had taught him to be skeptical of cosmic certainties, [Eagleman] told me. From the unfathomed complexity of brain tissue—"essentially an alien computational material"—to the mystery of dark matter, we know too little about our own minds and the universe around us to insist on strict atheism, he said. "And we know far too much to commit to a particular religious story." Why not revel in the alternatives? Why not imagine ourselves, as he did in Sum, as bits of networked hardware in a cosmic program, or as particles of some celestial organism, or any of a thousand other possibilities, and then test those ideas against the available evidence? "Part of the scientific temperament is this tolerance for holding multiple hypotheses in mind at the same time," he said. "As Voltaire said, uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one.>>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possibilianism
http://www.eagleman.com/

Oh dear Hasbeen

I have never heard any theory that you would die if you exceeded 60 miles per hour. Maybe it was an "old wives tale" from Victorian times. I doubt many serious scientists ever believed it.

The so-called "sound barrier" is a different question. It has to do with turbulence as you approach the speed of sound. There were real questions as to whether aircraft might shake themselves apart.

But this was viewed as an engineering problem. By the end of the 19th century scientists already knew that bullets or the tip of a whip travelled at supersonic speeds. No serious scientist thought about the speed of sound as an absolute speed limit in the 19th century.

In fact 19th century scientists did not even think of the speed of light as an absolute barrier. That came later with the publication of Einstein's theory of special relativity.

You mentioned CO2 levels.

I realise that it is an article of faith among many OLO posters that climate scientists are a gang of unspeakable scoundrels who have somehow managed to fool all the world's peak scientific bodies into believing their con. Only a few brave, persecuted souls (like Ian Plimer) have the courage to speak the truth. The scientists who warn of global warming are all money-grubbing maggots. Their opponents are all Persil pure and the fact that many of them make a great deal of money out of being "contrarian" is simple coincidence.

I also realise I have no hope of changing anyone's mind over this.

However, just for the record:

Climate science is not a "theory in trouble." It is not "unravelling." Unfortunately the evidence is getting stronger by the day.

However I am not going to go over all that ground again. I've posted extensively on the topic. I've given ample resources for people who want to gain an understanding of the actual science and I'm going to leave it at that.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend Hasbeen

SPQR wrote:

>>How can you with any degree of seriousness offer odds about what will/wont happen in the vastness of time?>>

I can't.

And if you looked at the tone as well as the text of what I wrote you will see that I was being semi-jocular. I was simply trying to say that I thought it was unlikely.

Not impossible because, as you point out, I cannot know "what will/wont happen in the vastness of time?"

But unlikely. That's my personal judgement.

One reason for my scepticism about the possibility of super-luminal travel is the question of where is E-T? Why haven't alien life forms visited us in their super-luminal space ships?

I suppose it's possible that we are the only intelligent life form in the universe or that we're the most advanced life form. But that also seems unlikely to me.

But who knows?

There is no problem with traveling faster than the speed of light.
The problem is with OBSERVING an object traveling faster than light.