What Travels Faster Than the Speed of Light ??
Many people wants to know that ,can anything travel faster than speed of light..?? or simply What Travels Faster Than the Speed of Light ??If you have the same question than here is the answer :
Most textbooks say that nothing can go faster than light, but that
statement actually should be qualified: The answer is yes, you can break
the light barrier, but not in the way we see in the movies. There are,
in fact, several ways to travel faster than light:
1. The Big Bang itself expanded much faster than the
speed of light. But this only means that "nothing can go faster than
light." Since nothing is just empty space or vacuum, it can expand
faster than light speed since no material object is breaking the light
barrier. Therefore, empty space can certainly expand faster than light.
2. If you wave a flashlight across the night sky,
then, in principle, its image can travel faster than light speed (since
the beam of light is going from one part of the Universe to another part
on the opposite side, which is, in principle, many light years away).
The problem here is that no material object is actually moving faster
than light. (Imagine that you are surrounded by a giant sphere one light
year across. The image from the light beam will eventually hit the
sphere one year later. This image that hits the sphere then races across
the entire sphere within a matter of seconds, although the sphere is
one light year across.) Just the image of the beam as it races across
the night sky is moving faster than light, but there is no message, no
net information, no material object that actually moves along this
image.
3. Quantum entanglement moves faster than light. If I
have two electrons close together, they can vibrate in unison,
according to the quantum theory. If I then separate them, an invisible
umbilical cord emerges which connects the two electrons, even though
they may be separated by many light years. If I jiggle one electron, the
other electron "senses" this vibration instantly, faster than the speed
of light. Einstein thought that this therefore disproved the quantum
theory, since nothing can go faster than light.
But actually this experiment (the EPR experiment) has been done many
times, and each time Einstein was wrong. Information does go faster than
light, but Einstein has the last laugh. This is because the information
that breaks the light barrier is random, and hence useless. (For
example, let's say a friend always wears one red sock and one green
sock. You don't know which leg wears which sock. If you suddenly see
that one foot has a red sock, then you know instantly, faster than the
speed of light, that the other sock is green. But this information is
useless. You cannot send Morse code or usable information via red and
green socks.)
4. The most credible way of sending signals faster than light is via negative matter. You can do this either by:
a) compressing the space in front of your and
expanding the space behind you, so that you surf on a tidal wave of
warped space. You can calculate that this tidal wave travels faster than
light if driven by negative matter (an exotic form of matter which has
never been seen.) b) using a wormhole, which is a portal or shortcut
through space-time, like the Looking Glass of Alice.
In summary, the only viable way of breaking the light barrier may be
through General Relativity and the warping of space time. However, it is
not known if negative matter exists, and whether the wormhole will be
stable. To solve the question of stability, you need a fully quantum
theory of gravity, and the only such theory which can unite gravity with
the quantum theory is string theory (which is what I do for a living).
Sadly, the theory is so complex that no has been able to fully solve it
and give a definitive anwer to all these questions. Maybe someone
reading this blog will be inspired to sovle string theory and answer the
question whether we can truly break the light barrier.
