kcarroll (08/03/82)
Poul Anderson had a nice-sounding method of faster-then-light travel in (I believe) his Polesotechnic League stories. It involved installing a device on a ship that causes the entire ship to make a microscopic "quantum jump", the way that an electron does in a tunnel diode--moving from one location to another without occupying the intervening space, and presumably in zero time. Each jump is quite small, but the device triggers at a high frequency, so that the ship ends up moving a large distance in a given time--faster than light, in Anderson's universe. One interesting feature of the drive is that when it is turned off, the ship need not have any intrinsic velocity. It could be sitting dead in space between jumps. Of course, it need not sit still between jumps; you could go a bit faster by accelerating in the direction of the jumps, using a normal reaction-drive. HOWEVER...if you have no intrinsic velocity, there's no time- dilation, and no Doppler-shifting of the starlight as seen by the ship, making for easier astrogation. I'm not suggesting this as a realistic form of FTL travel, but then, if we limit ourselves to realistic forms of FTL travel, the discussion won't last for very long... Kieran A. Carroll ...decvax!utzoo!kcarroll
VaughanW.REFLECS@HI-Multics@sri-unix (08/05/82)
Since when is quantum tunneling instantaneous? I see no reason why it should not take finite time... everything else does.
Physics:els (08/09/82)
I have heard some serious scientific talk about FTL. I am currently
trying to track down something definite, as so far all I've heard has been
just enough to whet my appetite. Someone mentioned an article in Science
Digest. That article was written by Alan Holt, who if memory serves, recently
left NASA's Johnson Space Center to run his own consulting firm.
When I find something, I'll post it. I'd like to see *serious* discussion
about FTL, not things that should be on sf-lovers, and also I'd like these
to see some restraint used by the supposedly educated people who have been
treating the whole idea of FTL with the same attitude as the Inquisition
treated Galileo. The one thing education (esp. physics) should teach is that
cherished, time-honored ideas fall by the wayside as our understanding of the
Universe expands. There is no way of telling where the new ideas will come
from. If all that comes of the study of FTL is that it is proved conclusively
that it can't be done, then something valuable has still come of it. Along
the way, perhaps we'll learn something valuable about the laws of physics.
Perhaps we should move the truly serious discussion of FTL to net.physics.
els[Eric Strobel]
pur-ee!pur-phy!elsCSD.MCGRATH@SU-SCORE@sri-unix (08/12/82)
From: Jim McGrath <CSD.MCGRATH at SU-SCORE> Right. People who do not know much about realitivity really should not act like they do. We would not stand anything similar if it were computer related. Jim PS if people really want to divide things into "fact" and "speculation" (although I am not sure the distinction is very meaningful), then people may want to send the speculation to SF-LOVERS@SRI-CSL. -------