Faster than light speed?

 PSI Blog 20210906 Faster than light speed?

 

This week’s book prize goes to Joe Lennon, who asks:

 

“Glenn, I was thinking about something concerning faster travel thru “Outer-space”.  What holds everything up out there, and what also slows objects traveling via that medium is baryonic matter.  So, isn’t the key to increasing travel velocity having an electromagnetic emission
unit.  Electro-magnetic, and “weak nuclear" matter (whatever that is) severs or unravels atomic bonds.  Wouldn’t a unit that emits either of these properties break apart the baryonic matter that slows a vehicle's speed.  It makes sense that light travels so fast if it is an electromagnetic wave. Such a wave would sunder all of the baryonic matter that it encounters. The same should work for a vehicle equipped with machines that emits Electromagnetic matter, right?

 

Also, wouldn’t g-force on a crew piloting such a vehicle also be lessened this way? This should apply to achieving high Mach speed in a planet’s atmosphere as well.”

 

[GB: Thanks for the question Joe. Many readers probably wonder why I haven’t answered the old faster than light question before. Mostly, it is because the velocity of wave motion is determined by the medium. The question itself appears to descend from Einstein’s ad hoc considering light to be a particle. A particle is a microcosm, an XYZ portion of the universe, so the obvious conclusion would be that any microcosm, no matter how large, also would be limited to the speed of light. That is, if you believed, Einstein’s misuse of the Lorentz Correction Factor (see Infinite Universe Theory, p. 315) and that light is a massless particle with perpetual motion through perfectly empty space.

 

You are correct in implying outer space contains baryonic matter (space junk, asteroids, hydrogen atoms, etc.) that would tend to slow travel and might even destroy the rocket (or flying saucer). The resulting resistance would increase as a function of velocity. It would take over 80 years to reach the nearest star via today’s tech. It would take 4 years even at the speed of light.

 

So far, throughout our examinations of 4.5 billion years of geological formations, we have not found one footprint or one piece of exotic metal from anyone from Alpha Centauri. Looks like we won’t be returning the hypothesized favor imagined by UFO buffs any time soon.]