Quote:
Originally Posted by Jenae LaTorque
Maybe, maybe not. As we all know, Einstein's theories are starting to show a few cracks, and what about inter-dimensional travel, worm holes, etc.? You know at one time, a fast horse was considered the maximum speed attainable.
|
A fast horse may have been thought of as the fastest people could travel on, but we knew of speed limits that were faster. This isn't like breaking the sound barrier, which was an engineering problem. The speed of light is a physical limit. If you go faster your mass will be imaginary (as in square root of negative one kind of imaginary). It's just not mathematically possible.
Yes, they could use a worm hole which would theoretically completely bypass space between here and there. But there aren't any wormholes that open up around here. It would look like either a black hole (detectable) or a theoretical white hole (very detectable). One could be constructed, but they would have to either construct one, and bring one end here (again at a speed not greater than light) or come here (again at a speed not greater than light) and somehow cause one end to open up here.
If the cracks you're talking about in general relativity are about it being incompatible with quantum mechanics, that comes into play at subatomic distances or around the time of the big bang. If there's other cracks you know of I'd be interested to know about it.