Relitivity, light speed and wormhole travel

[Danzi]

I have come to understand, that scientists reckon that even if we could travel at light speed, what would seem like a few years on a ship travelling that fast could be hundreds if not thousands of years back here on Earth, all stuff to do with the theory of relativity!

(please correct me if i am wrong, also when you reply, please explain a bit more about this relativity stuff)

If wormhole travel was possible, and we could harness the technology, and we used to to travel to the nearest solar system, would these effects on time still occur, e.g a short time pass for the traveller while years pass for the people not at this speed.
Also, seeming as its on the same topic, would these time effects also be felt if we invented a warp drive of Star trek, or a hyper drive like Stargate?

 

[origin]

Special relativity indicates that time slows down the higher your velocity is relative to an outside observer. It is not possible to go as fast as the speed of light. The closer to the speed of light that you get the slower time goes, the greater your mass becomes and the short your length (in the direction of travel) gets. Wikipedia has a pretty good write up on special relativity.

Say you take a space ship to Alpha Centuri, about 5 light years away, and you were somehow to trave at 99.99% the speed of light. You would arrive in alpha centuri after a couple of hours, and would think hey this is great I traveled faster than light because it only took a couple hours to fly 5 ly. But wen you land you will find that in fact you left 5 years before.

Worm hole travel, subspace and hyperdrives were invented by science fiction writters because it becomes very confusing and difficult to have space epics. Imagine if you fly to save the beautiful princess and when you get to the planet she has been married for 40 years and is a great grandmother!

So, since these are just made up things you can decide how time will be affected by the space flight. Most science fiction writters have essentially no time pass during flights which makes the stories flow better.

 

[Meric]

Say you take a space ship to Alpha Centuri, about 5 light years away, and you were somehow to trave at 99.99% the speed of light. You would arrive in alpha centuri after a couple of hours, and would think hey this is great I traveled faster than light because it only took a couple hours to fly 5 ly. But wen you land you will find that in fact you left 5 years before.

I'm a little confused from this statement. 99.99% is not faster then light, and if you traveled that fast to a system that was 5ly away, it would take you a little longer then 5 years to make it not a few hours, am I correct? Perhaps, I am just misreading what you meant to say?

 

[SpeedFreek]

At 99.99% of c relative to Earth, your gamma would be around 70, so for every 70 seconds that passed on Earth, only 1 second would pass on your spaceship. So the length of the journey would be reduced by a factor of 70 for the pilot of that spaceship, when compared to the length of the journey as seen from Earth. A journey of 5 light years at 99.99% of c would take a little over 5 years as calculated from the frame of reference of an observer on Earth, but from the frame of reference of an observer on that spaceship, their journey only took 26 days.

But that observer on the spaceship would not think they were travelling faster than light, as any photons they emit, or detect, would be moving 300,000 km/s faster than themselves, from their frame of reference. Their atomic clocks would have been ticking away the seconds the same as ever from their frame of reference too, so they would instead calculate that the distance to their destination had shrunk to only 26 light-days, due to Lorentz contraction.

To get a gamma where 5 light-years shrinks to only 2 light-hours, you would need a relative velocity of 99.9999999% of c!

 

[Dryden88]

Origin:

"Worm hole travel, subspace and hyperdrives were invented by science fiction writters because it becomes very confusing and difficult to have space epics. Imagine if you fly to save the beautiful princess and when you get to the planet she has been married for 40 years and is a great grandmother!

So, since these are just made up things you can decide how time will be affected by the space flight. Most science fiction writters have essentially no time pass during flights which makes the stories flow better."

I agree on the subspace and hyperspace issue. No question that there is not even 1 theory from any current physicist that thos are possible.

However, There are plenty of theories by repsected physicists that not only are wormholes possible, but they might even be plentiful and naturally occuring? Now these are just theories, but they are a little more thought out and plausible then the previous two FTL methods.

Secondly, we are new born babies when it comes to physics my friends. Lets not give ourselves too much credit. I bet you if that we met E.T.'s today they would laugh out how little we know about physics. I believe there are so many things out there that we dont know that will blow our mind.

You are correct that the speed of light cannot be broken by what we currently know. Okay lets take that as face value. That doesn't mean the rules cant be circumvented or bent. Warp drive and Wormholes are possibilities. maybe not within the next 100-200 years but in the future it may be.

Just please dont be like most scientists and say my word is law and there can be no other. Then they are not a true scientist. Right now everything is just theory since we can not go out there and prove all this stuff. hopefully in 50 years we wil be able to go up and space and start proving or disproving all these ideas.

 

[drwayne]

"Just please dont be like most scientists and say my word is law"

"Most scientists"?

I think you want to think about that - it looks like you said something
you didn't mean.

Wayne

 

[drwayne]

Or you made a sweeping generalization about a group of people with insufficient data.

Wayne

 

[origin]

Origin:

"Worm hole travel, subspace and hyperdrives were invented by science fiction writters because it becomes very confusing and difficult to have space epics. Imagine if you fly to save the beautiful princess and when you get to the planet she has been married for 40 years and is a great grandmother!

So, since these are just made up things you can decide how time will be affected by the space flight. Most science fiction writters have essentially no time pass during flights which makes the stories flow better."

I agree on the subspace and hyperspace issue. No question that there is not even 1 theory from any current physicist that thos are possible.

However, There are plenty of theories by repsected physicists that not only are wormholes possible, but they might even be plentiful and naturally occuring? Now these are just theories, but they are a little more thought out and plausible then the previous two FTL methods.

Like I said traveling through a worm hole is science fiction.

I also knew that since I didn't take the time to calculate the exact time dialation I would get called on it - I even figured it woud be you speedfreak!

 

[dryson]

I think Einsteins theories need rethinking, I would first sit down with a thesaurus and determine what each word means.

Secondly, traveling at a velocity faster then the speed of light would not make you younger or older in the terms of linear time. If you traveled at five times the speed of light for five years away from Earth and then back to Earth at the same velocity, only ten years would have passed. The reason being is traveling faster then the speed of light does increase time, only in the frame of reference as time relates to a distance traveled.

Time is a measured distance that it take an atom to travel through a medium where the atoms energetic properties exert a force on the medium traveled through as well as the medium's energetic properties exerting a force back upon the atom.
This force of influence can create either a push or pull effect on the atom.

When the atom starts at point A (which will be our ship with Earth being A1) and accelerates to five times the speed of light and heads towards a point five years away from Earth, the time as I have stated above, creates a push and pull on the ship, which then translates into fives years of traveled distance based on properties of the ships engines exerting a force of influence on its surrounding medium and the medium forcing an opposite reaction back upon the ship, thus creating the distance traveled.

Now if there was not any gravity which is the main medium through which the ship would be navigating, the force of influence exerted from the ship would not have any force of influence to exert back upon it. This would actually allow the ship traveling at five times the speed of light to reach the same point five times as fast. This is because there would not be any gravity to exert an opposite reaction on the ship which would place a drag upon the ship.

Instead of taking ten years to make the round trip, it may only take ten minutes.

Wormholes are real, I speculatively believe that ever black hole has a conduit attached to it and leads to somewhere else in the Universe. The only reason that we can't see it is because we don't have the equipment to measure matter operating at the extreme wavelengths that the conduit would need to be real.

 

[SpeedFreek]

I think Einsteins theories need rethinking, I would first sit down with a thesaurus and determine what each word means.

Why do you think his theories need rethinking, when they have been tested in many different ways and so far have been found to be accurate to within the limits of our measurements? A thesaurus won't help you understand them any better.

Secondly, traveling at a velocity faster then the speed of light would not make you younger or older in the terms of linear time. If you traveled at five times the speed of light for five years away from Earth and then back to Earth at the same velocity, only ten years would have passed. The reason being is traveling faster then the speed of light does increase time, only in the frame of reference as time relates to a distance traveled.

Travelling at a velocity faster than the speed of light is impossible, so any questions about how time passes for an object with a velocity faster than light are irrelevant.

Time is a measured distance that it take an atom to travel through a medium where the atoms energetic properties exert a force on the medium traveled through as well as the medium's energetic properties exerting a force back upon the atom.
This force of influence can create either a push or pull effect on the atom.

When the atom starts at point A (which will be our ship with Earth being A1) and accelerates to five times the speed of light and heads towards a point five years away from Earth, the time as I have stated above, creates a push and pull on the ship, which then translates into fives years of traveled distance based on properties of the ships engines exerting a force of influence on its surrounding medium and the medium forcing an opposite reaction back upon the ship, thus creating the distance traveled.

Now if there was not any gravity which is the main medium through which the ship would be navigating, the force of influence exerted from the ship would not have any force of influence to exert back upon it. This would actually allow the ship traveling at five times the speed of light to reach the same point five times as fast. This is because there would not be any gravity to exert an opposite reaction on the ship which would place a drag upon the ship.

Instead of taking ten years to make the round trip, it may only take ten minutes.

Wormholes are real, I speculatively believe that ever black hole has a conduit attached to it and leads to somewhere else in the Universe. The only reason that we can't see it is because we don't have the equipment to measure matter operating at the extreme wavelengths that the conduit would need to be real.

Why are you making up stuff that doesn't even conform to what we already know? It has already been shown that nothing can accelerate to a velocity faster than light, so what is the point of talking about travelling five times faster?