GRAVITY WAVES FASTER THAN LIGHT FULL
Like our room full of air molecules, space in our theory of physics has a complex structure with many component parts that act in seemingly (but not actually) random ways. But the point is that the limit on the speed of the molecule is less a question of what’s physically possible, and more a question of what’s “engineerable”.Īnd so, I suspect, it is with space, and motion through space. Of course this requires more knowledge and more computation than we currently imagine something like a molecule can muster (though it’s not clear this is true when we start thinking about explicitly constructing molecule-scale computers). Then that special molecule can travel much faster than diffusion-and effectively make a beeline from one side of the room to the other. But imagine that the special molecule somehow knows enough about the motion of the air molecules that it can compute exactly where to go to avoid being buffeted. Normally the special molecule will be buffeted by the molecules in the air, and will move in some kind of random walk, gradually diffusing across the room. Now imagine there’s a special molecule-or even a tiny speck of dust or a virus particle-somewhere in the room. Imagine you’ve got molecules of gas in a room, all bouncing around and colliding with each other. To give a preview of why doing this might devolve into an “engineering problem”, let’s consider a loose (but, in the end, not quite so loose) analogy.
But the most dramatic possibility is that even if one’s going where “no one has gone before”, it might still be possible to traverse space faster than light to get there. Or even if no space tunnel already exists, do we allow the possibility of building one-that we can then travel through? I’ll discuss these possibilities later. Do we allow an existing “space tunnel” (like the wormholes of general relativity)? Perhaps a space tunnel that has been there since the beginning of the universe. It’s a little tricky even to define what it means to “go faster than light”. And that in fact there is a way to “move through space” faster than light. But it’s also conceivable that there may be some clever “engineering solution”, as there have been to so many seemingly insuperable engineering problems in the past. And one that can’t be solved with the computational resources available to us in our universe. But it may well be an irreducibly hard engineering problem. And I’ll say at the outset that it’s a subtle and complicated question, and I don’t know the full answer yet.īut I increasingly suspect that going faster than light is not a physical impossibility instead, in a sense, doing it is “just” an engineering problem. But is this actually true? We’re now in a position to analyze this in the context of our model for fundamental physics. Well, then tell us if warp drive is possible!” Despite the hopes and assumptions of science fiction, real physics has for at least a century almost universally assumed that no genuine effect can ever propagate through physical space any faster than light. “So you think you have a fundamental theory of physics. When the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Program asked me to keynote their annual conference I thought it would be a good excuse to spend some time on a question I’ve always wanted to explore…
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