Can anyone travel at twice the speed of light?

Sam Baron is an Associate Professor at the Australian Catholic University. This expert has published an article in The Conversation where a question is posed: what would happen if someone could travel at twice the speed of light?

“As far as we know, it is not possible for a person to move at twice the speed of light. In fact, it is not possible for any object with the kind of mass that you or I have to move faster than the speed of light.”Baron says. “However, for certain strange particles, it might be possible to travel at twice the speed of light, and could send those particles back in time», says the expert.

As Baron explains, “One of our best physical theories at the moment is the theory of relativity, developed by Albert Einstein. According to this theory, the speed of light operates as a universal speed limit for anything with dough».

“Specifically, relativity tells us that nothing with mass can accelerate beyond the speed of light. To accelerate an object with mass, we have to add energy. The faster we want the object to go, the more energy we need.”Baron continues.

“The equations of relativity tell us that anything with mass, no matter how massive it was, would require an infinite amount of energy to accelerate to the speed of light. But all energy sources we know are finite: are limited in some way”, says the author.

“In fact, it is plausible that the Universe only contains a finite amount of energy. That would mean that there is not enough energy in the universe to accelerate something with mass to the speed of light»Baron maintains.

Tachyons and the speed of light

“This universal speed limit applies to anything with what we might call ‘ordinary mass.’ However, there are hypothetical particles called tachyons with a special kind of dough called ‘imaginary dough’. There is no evidence that tachyons exist. But according to relativity, its possible existence cannot be ruled out.says the author.

“If they exist, tachyons must always travel faster than the speed of light. Just as something with ordinary mass cannot be accelerated beyond the speed of light, tachyons they cannot slow down below the speed of light”, continues Baron in his article.

Baron recalls that “Some physicists believe that if tachyons existed, they would be constantly traveling backwards in time. This is the reason why tachyons are associated with time travel in many science fiction books and movies».

A hypothetical time machine

“There are ideas that one day we could harness tachyons to build a time machine. But for now this is still a distant dream, as we don’t have the ability to detect potential tachyons.”Add.

“It’s disappointing that we can’t travel faster than the speed of light. The closest star to us, apart from the Sun, it is 4.35 light-years away. So, traveling at the speed of light, it would take more than four years to get there.”says the author. “The farthest star we have detected is 28 billion light years away. So we can give up mapping the entire Universe. That said, relativity allows for the existence of ‘wormholes’.reflects the author.

Wormholes

“A wormhole is a shortcut between two points in space. Although a star may be 4.5 light years away in normal terms, it may be only a few hours away through a wormhole”Baron continues.

“If there are real wormholes, they would allow us to travel great distances in a very short period of time, allowing us to reach the farthest reaches of the Universe in a single lifetime. Unfortunately, like tachyons, wormholes remain completely hypothetical”, adds the author.

“Even though we can’t really travel faster than light, we can still try to imagine what it would be like to do so. By thinking in this way, we engage in a ‘counterfactual thinking’. We are considering how things would be or could be if reality were different in some way.”says the expert.

“There are many different possibilities that we could consider, each with a different set of physical principles. So we can’t say for sure what would happen If we could travel faster than light. At best, we can guess what might happen. Would we start time travel, as some scientists think tachyons might?concludes the author.

Font: 20 minutes

Reference article: https://www.20minutos.es/noticia/5006862/0/que-ocurra-alguien-pudiera-moverse-doble-velocidad-luz/