Thread: just a thought

hi there,

i`ve just had a thought. What if an object in space travels toward us at twice the speed of light. We will never see it, right?
That made me thinking of the light barrier. We all know the sound barrier and what is beyond it. But whats the story with light?

I think that (our) time equals the speed of light. Like a bottle falls to the ground. It takes a certain amount of time because we see it happening at the speed that light travels from the bottle to our eyes. (hope you get the idea)

But if something goes faster than light will it travel or "see" in the past??

Now i`m new here and not really deep into these things. So perhaps this is silly or discussed before, but i would like to know if i`m on to something. Perhaps for a new type of propulsion for space travel or so.

please let me know.

best regards, Vincent

ps. I`m not english by nature so it might look silly what i wrote

The thing is Vincent that nothing can travel faster than light. We are reasonably confident this is true. Lots of theory and observation confirm it. It would take somethign really exceptional to change our minds about this and that seems unlikely to happen.

It is not impossible that something unknown might travel faster than light speed but go through our detectors untouched. We have trouble trying to catch neutrinos which are so common that they travel through all of us by the billions.

Looking up into space, we see into the past since light takes a noticeable amount of time to travel cosmic distances. However to see Earth's past that way, it would be necessary to travel faster than light and the further you get away from Earth, the less photons you will have to collect, so any image will become ever poorer and of less quality.

We are basically using the same propulsion we used sixty years ago and have come up with nothing new so far. For some time now, NASA has been willing to look at any private ideas on propulsion in the hopes of even travelling around the solar system in a reasonable amount of time instead of years or decades. But one never knows and a new method of space travel discovered next year for instance could mean that by 2020 we could reach the nearby stars. Who knows what the future holds?

Your post looks OK to me.

The theoretical thing here is generally called a tachyon. Just like normal matter can't reach the speed of light, a tachyon can't fall below the speed of light. Of course, while some theories predict its existence, there is no observational evidence that it actually does exist.

well anything travelling t the speed of light would result in a backwards sort of movement so travelling faster than the speed of light.nahhh