Interstellar Travel and the Future of Physics by Stephen Lee

You say, "Combining matter and antimatter would produce lots of energy in the form of gamma rays" Nucleus anti-nucleus annihilation outputs some 50% of its energy as neutrinos. Neutrinos do not steer well. None of this mess is necessary.

Conquer the entire universe with a ship's drive that goes backward in time as it goes foreward in space. One can then travel at 30 kph and be anywhere else, Mars or Andromeda, essentially instantaneously. Rationalizing the four vector is left as an excercise for the alert reader. 30 kph is not an unreasonable speed, is it?

Dear Stephen Lee,

It is impossible to obtain exotic matter; consequently we can't create wormholes and Alcubierre warp drive. However, there is another FTL transportation method as Hole teleportation which don't requires any kind of exotic matter. For FTL teleportation of matter we must create holes in space-time only, but not exotic matter. For teleportation we must send a body outside of universe by enveloping a body with a closed surface consisting of holes in space-time. Since a body is not able to exist outside of universe, one reappears at random in the real universe at the same time. If the start and finish places do not coincides, such displacement of matter can be called teleportation. We are able to create holes in space-time using simple nuclear processes as inelastic scattering, decays, and annihilations. More information about holes in space-time you can find here.

Sincerely, Leshan

I'm sorry but the speed of light isn't even a velocity but just a number which says how many meters correspond to how many seconds, so you can never travel a greater spacedistance than the time-distance it corresponds to. Like some rulers which show lengths in centimeter at one side and in inches on the other, their ratio being 2.54, spacetime uses a ruler with a length scale at one side and a time scale at the other, the ratio between meters and seconds being c. Spacetime is not a space where it is everywhere the same time: the idea of a universal clock, which comes down to a clock outside the universe directing the pace of all events inside is a truly religious notion. As it isn't everywhere the same time but clock readings depend on the observer and the observed process, as there's no point in the universe from which unambiguously can be determined where it is earlier or later, a photon cannot even know in which direction it moves. Only an object which interacts with the environment it travels through can have a velocity with respect to the things it interacts with: as the photon cannot express its existence in interactions with the environment it is supposed to travel through, the part "with respect to" doesn't even apply, so the speed of light is not a velocity. As it took me years to accept this state of affairs and only now am beginning to understand this dichotomy, its need in nature for engineering reasons, I suspect this to be hard to fathom for the reader: that Newton was right in thinking light to be transmitted instantaneously, and Einstein being right in equating a spacedistance with a timedistance, but, unfortunately, confusing a timedistance with a duration. As to a photon the world it travels through doesn't exist as it cannot interact (which anyway would require influences propagating even faster), to the photon there is no space- nor timedistance between its emission and absorption (see Mechanics of a Self-Creating Universe), its transmission is instantaneous, notwithstanding the fact that an observer measures a time proportional to the distance between the points it is transmitted as to him they have different spacetime coordinates.

i agree with Leshan's comments that the processes mentioned by the author can't permit space travel as envisaged by him. To me it has always been puzzling why such a huge universe should exist with human beings presently existing on a sattelite of our Sun, called Earth. The speed limit of c looks rediculously negligible for our life spansto engage in any worthwhile endevour. How on Earth should the creator have thought of satifying the curiousity of his own people on the noble earth!

i may have foolish suggestion to offer as follows:-

The limit of c exists only for homogeneous space. If somehow we can have a space vehicle that can contract and expand space in front and behind itself, the vehicle will meet an inhomogeneous space always to move faster than c. The more inhomogeneity is there the higher will be the speed in relation to the limiting speed of c for homogeneous space.

i am keen to hear comments from the community on this forum towards the posssibilty of such an idea. My starting guess is that the secrets already lie in the early universe when such conditions may well have prevailed because of extraordinary physical parameters at the birth of the Universe. The physics of the day could not be valid then on this acccunt. Indirectly such an idea gets strength from the isolated measurements already made using large aperture radio-telescopes opearting in Australia with reports of light coming from distant galaxies over 12 billion years away showing a distinctly higher velocity than c for those specific light signals!

Stephen, what was the topic of your dissertation in Mathematical Quantum Theory?

Thanks for your info.

Hi Andreas,

Well it was a long time ago - 1983 actually - but it was on quantum scattering from singular potentials, proving various bounds on scattering operators.