Do you believe faster-than-light travel is possible?

Yes but not in our likfe time.

*shrugs*

I think it may be possible to get from point A to point B faster than light does, while it may not be possible to exceed the velocity of light.

Ah, you must be talking about transdimensional vortices.

bill- I thought I saw your penis in that wormhole!

ewwwww!

I don't think so, but even if it was, what about possible nasty side effects?

Yes. I think it's called the E.P.R effect.(with a twist of lime)

micah - I thought EPR gave faster than light communication (between things with synchronized quantum states), not travel

Probably not given what we know today, but who knows what we may learn tomorrow.

Furthermore, romkey and micah, my understanding is that that so far no effects had been discovered which actually allowed faster than light communication, even though faster than light effects have certainly been observed.

I don't believe it is possible. I suspect that it might be, but I don't have enough knowledge of the topic to substantiate a full-blown belief.

Not for any meaningful definition of the word 'travel'.

EPR is not FTL communication. And Cerenkov's FTL effects have to do with exceeding the local (ie, through a medium) speed of light, not the 300,000 km/s speed of light in a vacuum.

"If 300,000 km/s is the speed of light in a vacuum, what's the speed of light in a DustBuster?" (forgot who said that, I'd guess Steven Wright)

Not of physical objects.

doesn't sound travel faster than light? I actually have no idea if it does or not, but I guess I'll find out

i have an uncle that can hitchhike faster than light...

pandora - nope. sound's a lot slower than light. the thought since Einstein is that the speed of light is the fastest speed anything can travel at in the universe, and that if something has mass (light doesn't) then it can approach the speed of light but never quite reach or exceed it.

check out when you see a plane flying overhead... usually the sound will be coming from way back on the plane's path

and hey, welcome back!

romkey - If you subject two particles to the EPR effect, though the waveform will collapse in the same instant no matter how far the particles are apart, the particles still can't travel faster than the speed of light so FTL communication doesn't happen (since you can't actually influence the waveform's collapse).

romkey: If you can set up 2 machines, several
light years apart, that each have one of two
subatomic particles that have been linked,
instantanious communication between those machines
could take place. If you have that, I'm sure,
given time for some farmer to dream it up, matter
could be manipulated in such a way that might
permit instantanious teleportation. In the 18
hundreds, there was a famous astronomer that said
that mankind would never be able to analyze the
chemical composition of distant stars, and only a
few years later, he was doing just that. I think
there's something just around the corner. With
what we're doing to our poor planet, I certainly
hope we figure something out quick.

pandora, another good example (besides romkey's plane example) is when you experience a thunderstorm. You see the flash of lightning, but the boom of the thunder often arrives after the flash. The flash arrives at your eyes at the speed of light, the boom arrives at the speed of sound (slower).

it really pains me to see people misunderstand quantum mechanics so severely.

phi: care to enlighten us?

micah - I think the others are right, while locality is violated you don't actually get information transfer, let alone teleportation

Maybe if you went around the world super fast, faster than the world turns in the opposite direction you could go back in time? Nah.

mary, watch superman much?

I started to write an explanation but this one is better.

Not yet, I'd say.

What about tachyons?

phi: That explanation didn't help me much in
understanding the discrepancy, 'cause most of the
terms are proprietary to physics, and I'm totally
unfamiliar with them.

OK, the summary is that classical and quantum physics are different in how they view information. This leads to a situation in which certain observed events appear, if you follow the classical information model, to involve transmitting information faster than the speed of light -- but the quantum view is that no information is being transmitted and so no faster-than-light communication occurs.

The experiment is supposed to prove that quantum mechanics is correct, not to be a way of getting around the speed of light limit. Especially since the particular information that's being transmitted (or not) is random numbers generated by the experiment, and not anything input at one side and read out on the other, so it's not at all useful for actual communication.

Thank you very much. I think I need to read more books about it then. I've only read 'Taking the Quantum leap' and a few others, and obviously haven't quite fully understood it.

Probably one of the most obvious examples of the low speed of sound is baseball (or golf, or somebody hammering at a work site a block away). You can watch the bat hit the ball and clearly hear the sound occur a fraction of a second later.

Lightning!!

Superman!

only if you are a monkey

Of course I don't know. If there's convincing evidence either way, it's not common knowledge.

If you mean passenger travel, no way.

Yes but not yet

Why else would you want to do it?