What if we traveled at twice the speed of light?

As far as we know, a person cannot travel at twice the speed of light. In fact, no object of mass that you or I possess can travel faster than the speed of light in any direction. Einstein's theory of relativity seems to say that's not possible, but what if it could? Some unusual particles can travel at twice the speed of light - and could this allow them to travel back in time?

General speed limit

Albert Einstein's theory of relativity is one of the most useful theories of physics we have at the moment. According to this theory, the speed of light serves as the general speed limit for anything with mass. The theory of relativity says that nothing with mass can travel faster than the speed of light.

A mass object must be given extra energy to accelerate. Therefore, the speed of an object is directly proportional to the energy supplied to it. Einstein's equation of relativity states that it takes an infinite amount of energy to accelerate anything with the speed of light, no matter how massive it is.

The speed of light traveling through a vacuum is 299,792,458 meters/second, denoted by c. This is an important fundamental physical constant in many areas of physics. So, how was the speed of light discovered, and is there anything, in fact, that could be faster? In fact, according to Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity, light travels so fast in a vacuum that nothing in the universe can travel faster.

However, all the energies that we are aware of are limited in some way. Indeed, it is conceivable that the universe had a finite amount of energy to begin with. That means the universe lacks the energy needed to accelerate anything with the speed of light. As long as we have mass, we won't be able to travel at twice the speed of light.

Tachyon

Anything with 'normal mass' is subject to this general speed limit. However, a hypothetical subatomic tachyon could travel faster than the speed of light. Even though it is just a hypothetical particle, we cannot prove that it does not exist, and relativity cannot rule out the possibility of such a thing.

German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld is said to be the first to describe the tachyon particle. However, it was George Sudarshan, Olexa-Myron Bilaniuk, Vijay Deshpande and Gerald Feinberg (who first named the particle in the 1960s) who founded the theoretical foundation for tachyon particle research. The tachyon field appears in many theoretical fields, such as Boson string theory.

In 1676, by studying the motion of Jupiter's Moon, the Danish astronomer Ole Romer calculated that light travels at a finite speed. According to the American Museum of Natural History, New York City, by 1678, based on data from Ole Romer, Dutch mathematician and scientist Christiaan Huygens became the first person to attempt to determine the real speed. economy of light.

If tachyons exist, they must always travel at speeds greater than the speed of light. Tachyons cannot decelerate below the speed of light, just as objects of normal mass cannot accelerate beyond the speed of light. Some physicists theorize that if tachyons existed, they would continuously travel back in time. Therefore, tachyon is often used to describe time travel in science fiction.

There is speculation that we might one day be able to create time machines using tachyons. However, since we have not been able to determine a possible tachyon, this is still a distant dream for the time being.

Shortcut?

The fact that we cannot travel faster than the speed of light is a disappointment. 4.35 light years is the distance between us and the star closest to the Sun. It will take more than four years to get there if you go at the speed of light. The most distant star we've ever found is located 28 billion light-years from Earth. So, even if you spend your life traveling, you will never reach that star.

However, relativity allows 'wormholes' to exist. A wormhole is a shortcut between any two places in space. Under normal conditions, a star can be 4.5 light-years away, but when it passes through a wormhole, it can be only a few hours away.

But in 1905, Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity forever changed the way physicists looked at the universe, by tying mass and energy into a simple but crucial equation E= mc^2. In essence, this equation predicts that nothing with mass can reach the speed of light, let alone faster. Humanity's most successful attempt at approaching the speed of light lies in super-powerful particle accelerators such as CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) or America's Tevatron. These giant machines (the LHC even has a circumference spanning the Alps, located in both France and Switzerland) capable of speeding subatomic particles up to 99.99% the speed of light, though However, as explained by Nobel Prize-winning physicist David Gross, these particles will never reach the cosmic speed threshold.

For all we know, it is possible to reach the farthest reaches of the universe in one lifetime if there are actual wormholes somewhere in our universe. However, wormholes, like tachyons, are only theoretical at this point.

We can try to imagine what it would be like to travel faster than light, despite the fact that we cannot actually do so.