#Faster-than- LIGHT travels #Admit it — if youve ever watched Han Solo and Chewie take the Millennium Falcon to light speed, or stared in awe the first time you saw the Starship Enterprise jump to maximum warp, youve wanted to see faster-than-light (FTL) travel. Surprising all of us, last year it almost seemed possible. The Oscillation Project with Emulsion-Racking Apparatus (OPERA), another experimental instrument operating at Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, is in part looking at whether or not particles called neutrinos may be able to break this cosmic speed limit. This highly sophisticated instrument has given results leading some to believe that they have caught neutrinos moving faster than light. A set of neutrinos was sent from CERNs lab in Geneva through the Earth and then observed at the OPERA lab under Sasso Mountain. The entire trip was recorded to have taken under 3 milliseconds, 60 nanoseconds faster than light would have taken. Needless to say, there are many who have their doubts. Proving faster-than-light travel exists would undermine Albert Einsteins 1905 theory of special relativity, which states that the speed of light (186,282 miles per second, or 671 million miles per hour) is a cosmic constant and that nothing can travel faster than this limit — a cornerstone of our understanding of the universe. If FTL travel is in fact possible, it opens the door to the possibility of time travel as well. Dont get too excited — there wont be any quick hops to the future in your DeLorean to pick up the next lotto numbers or buy a Grays Sports Almanac from a local thrift shop. If neutrinos are traveling faster than light, though, they could theoretically arrive somewhere before they departed, so communication to the past may be a possibility. If we could somehow take advantage of this, you could make your alternate past self wealthy by sending a message encoded in neutrinos to invest heavily, for example, in Google stock at the time the company first went public. But then again, if one can send a message to the past, we must also say goodbye to relativity and causality as we know them. Since cause would no longer need to procede effect, before and after would cease to have meaning. People would retire before graduating from grade school, and eventually, the universe as we know it would cease to be. Speaking of which...
Posted on: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 19:26:27 +0000
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