• Question: Do you think humans will ever create technology that can travel at the speed of light?

    Asked by buddingscientist to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 15 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Adam Stevens

      Adam Stevens answered on 13 Mar 2012:

      To be able to do that we would have to break physics as we know it. So doing it would mean a massive step forward in our understanding of physics.

      But it may not even be possible.

    • Photo: Leila Battison

      Leila Battison answered on 15 Mar 2012:

      I don’t think so, because physics as we know it wouldn’t allow anything but the smallest of particles to travel at the speed of light.

      But I wonder if in the future, we will be able to understand the shape of the universe better, so that we may be able to travel between stars not at light speed, but by travelling through things like ‘wormholes’!

    • Photo: Karen Masters

      Karen Masters answered on 15 Mar 2012:

      I don’t think so – unless we find some way to get around the basic physics.

      The problem is special relativity says that when things go faster they appear to get more massive – so eventually you need an infinite amount of energy to reach light speed.

      Also practically, even microscopic particles of dust colliding with something going close to light speed would have so much energy they would cause the space craft to explode.

      It’s a pity, because the distances to the stars are so large, there’s no hope of travelling to them without travelling at or faster than light speed – but that’s physics (for now anyway!).

    • Photo: Nazim Bharmal

      Nazim Bharmal answered on 18 Mar 2012:

      To travel at the speed of light has other problems; relativity means that the quicker anything travels, the slower they appear to age to someone left behind or, the other way around, everyone left behind will age more quickly. So if you travel at very near the speed of light, you will quickly loose your friends as they get old faster than you. If you travel at exactly the speed of light, you will see the entire universe flash before your eyes.

      That is just one problem. The way around this is to image going between two point in space directly, and then this means things like wormholes. But this is just a wild guess, we have no idea how to do it or even if it can be done. I would guess, no, we won’t be able to go fast ourselves.

      But, we might well be able to send space probes at near the speed of light.

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