Wookiepedia wrote:Tachyons were particles that built up on a ship in hyperspace, and were released in a distinctive flash when it reverted to realspace.

Hypermatter was composed of tachyonic particles and when these charged particles were exposed to the constraints of the lower dimensions of realspace produced near-limitless energy

Unlimited power? Sushi move away slowly.

Good News everyone! From what I've heard, The speed of light is no longer the universal speed limit. Something to do with neutrinos going faster than the speed of light. Though the experiment may have been faulty, hey, at least it opens up that possibility.

Venator97 wrote:Good News everyone! From what I've heard, The speed of light is no longer the universal speed limit. Something to do with neutrinos going faster than the speed of light. Though the experiment may have been faulty, hey, at least it opens up that possibility.

lol. Actually those results were proven to be wrong. The speedlimit is still the speedlimit. The change in neutrino speed was actually do to loose wiring on the detectors.

I always wanted my Tachyon weapons in Freelancer to hit the target before I fired them.

Ah intelligence...

So refreshing.

Well when you spit out your window it's not in a vacuum. Wind and air resistance will stop that spit one way or another. If you spit out your car window in space the spit would not hit you in the face as long as you maintained the same exact speed and heading as when you spit. the spit would continue to travel at the same speed and not slow down if unaffected by any further forces like gravity.

The thing about traveling faster than light, the theory is that mass increases the higher speed something travels. Mass creates gravity, gravity and the two forces would not allow an object to exceed that supposed arbitrary speed.

Just going fast isn't enough, but the massive forces displayed at a physical object at near light speed wouldn't even be reasonable to exist in. It would truly deform the reality of the object traveling that fast. Even a car sized object traveling at light speed on Earth's surface would be catastrophic for both the Earth and the Car.

*raises right hand*

I promise, I will never learn.

I was going to say something about how kinetic energy increases with speed and thus more energy is exponentially required to add speed, but others already covered that portion. However I once read one illustration in a book I read years ago.

Consider that everything is moving at the speed of light, however things that are stationary are moving at the speed of light through time. If it moves through space, some of that speed is diverted from the dimension of time into the dimensions of space (up/down, left/right, back/forward). If you use all your speed to travel through spacial dimensions, there is simply no way to travel through time.

Special and general relativity have both been scientifically observed and tested for almost a century and it's not failed once. In fact GPS uses equations from general relativity because if it used Newtonian physics on it's own it would slowly be off more and more due to gravity's affect on time. The first experiment that comes to mind is when tracking star positions during a solar eclipse in 1919 but that was just General Relativity.

I found a good article on special relativity:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_s ... relativity

Loken wrote:I always wanted my Tachyon weapons in Freelancer to hit the target before I fired them.

I see what you did there

(On a similar note, using quantum entanglement to send messages across several LY could cause you to receive the message before it was sent!)

If I understand it correctly (no guarantee), the reason you can't go faster than the speed of light is something like this:

In order to accelerate faster than light you must use a lot of energy, and that energy is added to your mass (E=mc2.) Since your mass increases with your energy you need to use yet more energy to increase your speed. So it is impossible to reach that speed. Also, since your mass is increased the warping of space-time (gravity) around you increases, slowing down time in relation to the flow of time outside your vehicle. This is all relative though, if you looked out the window time outside would seem to be moving faster, yet anyone looking in the window from outside would think that time inside the vehicle was moving slower. This warping of space-time with mass is always just enough that if you moved forwards in the already moving vehicle you still could never reach light-speed. The same goes with your theoretical ball, if you threw out the window it would also have a high amount of energy, increasing its mass (and warping space-time) enough to never reach light-speed.