• Question: Do you feel that we will ever travel faster than light, if so then do you have a prediction?

    Asked by falak to Ben, Jony, Katharine, Mark, Peter on 16 Nov 2011. This question was also asked by bobsta1998.
    • Photo: Katharine Schofield

      Katharine Schofield answered on 16 Nov 2011:

      Nope, I don’t think we will ever travel faster than light. Even though there have been some results recently that suggested that neutrinos might have gone faster than the speed of light, it will have to have a pretty good explanation to throw out all the physics experiments that have measured the speed of light to be a universal constant.

      If by ‘we’ you mean humans, well that’s even trickier… As you speed up to near the speed of light, what I would see (sitting in my office chair) is you getting heavier and heavier, so it takes more and more energy to get faster, and you never quite get there. Only things that have zero mass (like photons) can travel at the speed of light, or so the theory goes….

    • Photo: Ben Still

      Ben Still answered on 16 Nov 2011:

      As Katherine says, faster than light travel is not on the cards I am afraid, in the sense of accelerating past the light barrier. But there might be the possibility of travelling through to a different region of space quicker than light if wormholes exist, but then there is the issue of gravity possibly tearing you apart…this is all still very much theory.

    • Photo: Mark Basham

      Mark Basham answered on 16 Nov 2011:

      I’d like to think it might be possible one day, but there is defiantly nothing that suggests it would be possible right now. Would be amazing though to be able to explore the stars and see different suns rising over different planets. Truly science fiction for now though 🙁

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