• Question: By when will humans discover a machine which will travel at the speed of light?

    Asked by anon-267491 on 9 Nov 2020.
    • Photo: Sam Geen

      Sam Geen answered on 9 Nov 2020:

      So far we don’t think it’s possible to travel at exactly the speed of light – each time you get closer, it takes more energy, so you can get closer and closer but not exactly there. But there are ideas for “cheating” – warping space, using black holes as gateways to distant places, or just new physics entirely. I don’t think we’ll get there soon, but who knows what will be discovered by new scientists in the years to come!

    • Photo: Daisy Shearer

      Daisy Shearer answered on 9 Nov 2020:

      I think this is something that won’t happen until the far future, if at all. According to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, you can’t actually travel that fast (unless you’re a photon). You would need an incredible amount of energy (nearly infinite) to travel that fast! But this is according to our current understanding and theories of physics. One of the amazing things about science is that it is constantly updating as we make more observations and improve our theories.

    • Photo: Andreas Korn

      Andreas Korn answered on 9 Nov 2020:

      As far as we know only massless objects can travel at the speed of light.
      The machine that gets closest to traveling at light speed is the Large Hadron Collider. It accelerates Hydrogen nuclei to 99.9999991 % of the speed of light! If you wonder, as I sometimes do, how we might travel to far stars, there is another possibility. We might simply try to travel a shorter distance.
      Think of two far corners of a piece of paper. You can travel the long way along the paper or fold the two corners on top of each other! We don’t quite know how to do that with space just yet, but Einsteins General Theory of Relativity provides some hints.

    • Photo: Liza Sazonova

      Liza Sazonova answered on 9 Nov 2020:

      To add a bit of wonder, there are still some physicists that work on this! There’s some really cool and exotic stuff that may let us travel at the speed of light or even faster. But even if it’s possible, the technology is still ways away!
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      One of the professors in the university where I did my Bachelor’s works on something called the “Alcubierre warp drive” – an engine that allows faster-than-light travel. The idea is a bit tricky: the speed of light is a limit for things like particles and people, but not for space itself. For example, a black hole curves space so much that things fall into it faster than light beyond the event horizon.
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      Well, if you curve the space around your ship, it could also travel faster than light!
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      But of course, figuring out how to do this is a tricky bit. And if we figure it out, we’ll have lots of other questions. For example, physicists showed that two spaceships capable of faster-than-light travel are basically a time machine, so what does it mean for us if we can build one?

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